Jim by Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade

Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Yale University Press 2025

Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s new book, Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade, out from Yale University Press as the newest entry in its “Black Lives” series, could not have come at a more opportune time. Mark Twain and his character Jim have been at the forefront of literary discourse since James, Percival Everett’s lauded reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, hit bookstore shelves in early 2024. Ron Chernow’s massive biography Mark Twain has recently added to the “Twainia,” staring down prospective readers from its perch atop what we hope are sturdy and leveled bookshelves. At a time when discussions of Jim and his position in American literature are inescapable, Fishkin’s new book offers a well-researched yet undaunting biography of the character for readers who wish to expand their understanding of one of America’s most contentious novels.

Fishkin is a renowned Twain scholar whose 1993 book Was Huck Black? is often considered an essential study of the influence of Black vernacular on Twain’s prose in Huck Finn. It should be no surprise, then, that she is intimately familiar with both the novel and its historical setting, which allows her to weave fascinating contexts into her study of Jim with the ease and subtlety of a magician’s sleight of hand. In the book’s first chapter, for example, she recontextualizes a key irony of Huck Finn’s conclusion—that Jim had already been freed by Miss Watson before Tom Sawyer’s narrative-disrupting antics to help him “escape” slavery—by citing Missouri’s slave laws. She writes:

If Jim could have somehow obtained legal evidence that he was free before he returned to Missouri… and if the law barring free Blacks from immigrating to the state were not invoked… [he] would have had to get a license from the state of Missouri if he wanted to remain there for any period of time. Getting a license would not have been easy… [Jim] would have had to ‘produce satisfactory evidence’ that he was ‘of good character and behavior’… [and] would have had to post a bond of up to a thousand dollars.

The risks Jim will presumably take after the end of the novel, returning to his wife and children in Missouri, are terrifying. “Free Black people who failed to have a license could face up to twenty lashes and fines up to one hundred dollars, as well as arrest, jail time, and expulsion from the state,” Fishkin tells us. Twain leaves this reality unstated, however, and any reader unfamiliar with such laws would remain ignorant of Jim’s continued struggle for freedom. If for no other reason, Jim is worth reading for details like this. Fishkin is a seasoned scholar—even the most knowledgeable readers are sure to learn something from her throughout the course of this book.

Indeed, most of Fishkin’s further examinations of Jim’s “life and afterlives” make for enticing reading, particularly her study of the Black people in Twain’s life who influenced his creation of Jim at a time when Black characters in American fiction were designed either to be laughed at or despised. In Twain’s early article “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It,” for example, he uses Black speech to recount an enslaved woman’s testimony of witnessing her children being sold to slaveholders. “When the piece appeared in November 1874,” Fishkin writes, “it was the first time Black dialect had been used for anything but comic effect in the pages of Atlantic Monthly.” “Twain,” she later explains, “did not stigmatize speakers of Black dialect as so many of his peers routinely did. Rather, he viewed Black dialect as a mode of communication different from standard English but not inferior to it.”

Additionally, chapters on Jim’s film and stage appearances and his representations in foreign-language editions of Huck Finn once again showcase Fishkin’s impressive breadth of research. In the film chapter, she provides an overview of thirteen actors’ portrayals of the character, finding that they each overcame Jim’s undeservedly poor reputation and embrace him for what he is: a fully-realized representation of an enslaved man. However, the translations chapter is less positive. Owing to “[t]ranslators’ lack of familiarity with and respect for African American Vernacular English, as well as their failure to recognize the racism underlying colonialism and their countries’ treatment of immigrants and minorities,” Fishkin writes, most translations are failures. Even so, the sheer number of them (over 90 in Chinese alone) attests to Jim’s lasting influence on the reading world.

For all its excellent research, Jim is not without its faults. Throughout the translations chapter, for example, Fishkin indicates that she cannot read the foreign languages she cites, forcing her to examine them thirdhand through other scholars’ English-language work. As a result, her voice gets lost in a whirlwind of extensive quotations. Likewise, the book’s final chapter, in which she focuses on contemporary high schoolers’ reactions to Jim, quoting from their essays and classroom discussions, may even strike readers as pointless. Although charming for its support of a new generation of readers, the chapter offers nothing of substance to non-teachers.

Finally, kudos are in order to Fishkin for a daring experiment that serves as an interlude between the book’s Life and Afterlives sections: replicating Twain’s spelling and syntax, she retells Huck Finn from Jim’s perspective. Although it may rest uneasily in a nonfiction study like Jim, the chapter is a virtuoso pastiche that highlights Fishkin’s appreciation and understanding of Twain’s use of Black English. In a post–School of Resentment climate, when a great number of readers (and even academics) would be quick to call a white woman writing in Black English “racist,” this decision is admirable. Fishkin doesn’t need to “read the room” when it comes to the intricacies of writing Black dialect, though—she has clearly read everything else.

Jesse Day is a publications editor living in Kentucky