The original objections to this 'veriest trash' focused on Huck's naughty behavior and speech: He lies, he steals, he says 'sweat' instead of 'perspiration.' But the debate shifted to more substantive ground in 1954 when the NAACP objected to the novel's racial slurs and demeaning stereotypes.

The Concord Library in Massachusetts immediately banned it, and it's been banned in some places - often in many places - ever since. That near disaster was expensively corrected, but all the cutting and pasting weren't enough to save the novel from condemnation. At the printer, somebody noticed that in one illustration, Silas Phelps is exposing himself to Huck. 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' started offending people even before it was released. She is sewing a quilt for her grand-daughter, and with each piece, with each button, with each artifact of a long life, Sadie takes us on a story-telling adventure, just as treacherous and just as exhilarating as Huck and Jim's float down the Mississippi. We also meet Sadie, the slave who will one day become his wife. While reading My Jim, the reader really sees his life, born a slave, worked as a slave, finally freed at the death of his owner, Miss Watson.

So he wrote the adventures of Huck and Jim, two side-by-side stories of vulnerable and brutalized people escaping a world of main-made violence and cruelty.' In an author interview at the back of the book, she says, 'I believe Mark Twain wanted to make his story primarily about Jim but didn't feel he could get away with it. But along the way, Jim's story turned into the story of his wife, Sadie, just as Rawles believes Jim's story turned into Hucks story under the pen of Mark Twain. You'd know that Jim overhears Miss Watson saying that she is going to sell Jim, and then Jim finishes his own story by telling Huck that he ran away so as not to be separated from his wife and children.īut what of those wife and children? Do we know their names? Do we know their stories? Do we really know Jim, or do we just see him through the eyes of Huck, a white boy?Īuthor Nancy Rawles set out to tell the full story of Jim. You'd know Jim belonged to Miss Watson, the niece of Widow Douglas who tries to civilize Huck (with little success). If all you knew of Jim was what Huck Finn said about him, you wouldn't know much. Who is the second main character in the classic adventure story along the Mississippi River? In Mark Twain's story, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, we meet Huckleberry Finn and another, main character.

My Jim by Nancy Rawles