reviewed by Matthew Teutsch, PhD, Director of the Lillian E. Smith Center, Piedmont College
David F. Walker and
Marcus Kwame Anderson. Big Jim and the White Boy: An American Classic
Reimagined. New York: Penguin Random House, 2024. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/621145/big-jim-and-the-white-boy-by-david-f-walker-and-marcus-kwame-anderson/
Multiple
thoughts come to mind when I think about Mark Twain’s Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1884). I think about the ways that Twain, through the
novel, interrogates language. I think about the ways that the novel falls short
of condemning white supremacy. I think about the ways that the novel, through
Huck, shows the transmission of white supremacy from generation to generation.
I think about the ways that the novel obscures Jim and his family, even though
Jim is an integral part of the novel. I think about E.W. Kemble’s racist
illustrations throughout the novel which subvert any progressive elements that
Twain placed within the narrative. I think about the ways that Twain’s Pudd’nhead
Wilson (1894), published ten years after Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
is, even with its problems, a better exploration of the social constructions of
race and white supremacy.
This
year, two critically acclaimed books that reimagine Twain’s novel have debuted:
Percival Everett’s James and David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson’s
Big Jim and the White Boy, a graphic reimaging of Twain’s classic. Each
of these works provides a new representation and depiction of Jim, giving him
his dignity and humanity. They correct Twain’s portrayal of Jim which, as Ralph
Ellison writes in “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” (1963), stems from “a
time when the blackfaced minstrel was still popular, and shortly after a which
left even the abolitionists weary of those problems associated with the Negro.”
Ellison continues by stating that Twain placed Jim in “the outlines of the
minstrel tradition, and it is from behind this stereotype mask that we see
Jim’s dignity and humanity emerge,” but that mask also presents Jim with a
“‘boyish’ naїveté,” placing Huck as the adult.
Big
Jim and the White Boy removes the minstrel mask that Jim wears
in Twain’s novel, and, as Walker puts it, “centers the character of Jim and
attempts to offer him the dignity he deserves while emphasizing his humanity.”
Walker and Anderson move back and forth in time, from Jim and Huck’s
experiences in the 1850s and 1860s to Jim and Huck telling their story to a
group of kids in the summer of 1932 to Jim’s great- great-great-great
granddaughter, Almena Burnett, teaching about her ancestor and Twain’s novel at
Howard University in 2020. As well, they use the facts that Twain modeled Jim
partly on Daniel Quarles, a man whom Twain’s uncle enslaved, and that he drew
inspiration from reading about Glasock’s Ben, an enslaved man who ran away and
murdered a family, during his time at the Missouri Courier as a way to
foreground the narrative within Twain’s construction of the novel and the
finished product. Through these interconnecting narratives, Big Jim and the
White Boy drives home, as Almena’s grandmother tells her after showing her
pictures and telling her about Jim and Huck, the importance of stories, the
importance of generational stories, and how those stories counter the fictions
of movements such as the Lost Cause.
In
an author talk at the end of the book, Almena stresses the importance of
telling Jim and Huck’s story as a counter to the ways that media and historians
perpetuated the Lost Cause and “effectively shaped public perception of the
Confederacy, the Civil War, and slavery.” She tells the audience that even as
Twain sought “to portray Jim with some degree of humanity, he did not tell
Jim’s story.” Instead, he perpetuated, through Jim’s minstrel mask, the Lost
Cause narrative that had started to take shape during the latter part of the
nineteenth century. Almena continues,
narrating above panels that depict Jim and Huck on the Mississippi River,
riding through Missouri and Kansas, during the Civil War, and in 1932, by
saying that she needed to share the story with the world because the story of
her ancestor “is more than a runaway slave traveling down the Mississippi River
with a young white boy named Huckleberry Finn.” Jim’s story is one of a man who
fought for others to be free and a “story of a man who loved his family.”
While
the narrative moves back and forth in time, the decision to end the book with a
metanarrative of Almena writing her great-great-great-great grandfather’s story
and then having a book signing drives home the ways that culture creates
stories and myths to acquire or maintain power and the importance of
narratives, based in reality, that counter the mythological constructions of
the past. This framing, juxtaposed with the begging which focuses on Twain’s
creation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn points out the importance of
sharing one’s stories with the world. Big Jim and the White Boy ends
with Almena passing along encouragement to an audience member who tells Almena
about her family being from Vietnam and her grandfather’s and grandmother’s
experiences during the Vietnam War. Annie Nguyen, introducing her grandfather
to Almena, says that Jim reminds her of her grandfather and that she wishes
“someone would tell his story.” Almena simply responds, “Maybe you could write
the book?” Our stories are important, and the ways we tell those stories are
important. Walker and Anderson allow Jim to tell his story, to counter the
narratives of his life that Twain tells in the novel. They give him a voice.
Dignity. Humanity.
I
do not have enough space to tackle everything that Big Jim and the White Boy
provides readers. That would take a review or essay much longer than this one.
I do want to conclude, though, by sharing a few thoughts that I had as I read
the graphic novel. As I read it, I kept getting the narrative conflated with
Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and even Everett’s James,
asking myself, “Did this happen in one or both of those novels?” This
uncertainty, at times, added to the ways that Big Jim and the White Boy works
in conversation with Twain and Everett, commenting and expounding on those
works. It’s a weird sensation to think about this as I read a book, but I find
it extremely engaging because, again, it works into the focus of stories and
the ways we tell and remember the past.
Along
with this feeling, I constantly thought about Quentin Tarantino’s Django
Unchained and the graphic novel adaptation by Reginald Hudlin, Denys Cowan,
R.M Guéra, and Danijel Zezelj. Specifically, as Jim searched for his family and
him and Huck encountered and killed slave traders and Confederate soldiers, I
thought about the thematic connections but also the Blaxploitation connections
through some of the action. Anderson’s artwork is in no way akin to the violent
illustrations of something like Django Unchained, but some of the
panels, where Jim stabs individuals or other violence occurs, even when Pap
whips Jim, carry the same weight. Jim’s journey to find his family grants him
his humanity and serves, in a lot of ways, as the connective thread that links
him with Almena as well as Huck.
The
final aspect that stands out to me is, again, something that Everett does in a
similar manner in James. In Big Jim and the White Boy, Huck is
legally “Black” because his mother was Jim’s sister, Hennie. She gets pregnant
after Pap rapes her. Jim keeps this knowledge from Huck, and Almena’s
grandmother asks Jim, after Huck’s death, why he chose to keep the secret from
Huck. Sitting in a wheelchair next to Huck’s grave, Jim tells her, “I didn’t
tell him none of that ‘cause life wis easier for white folks.” In this panel,
and in other panels, Anderson shows the anguish and hurt in Jim’s face. After
the funeral, Anderson has a nine-panel page. Jim’s face appears in each panel,
moving from expressions of gratitude and respect to sadness, as he wipes tears
from his eyes. Jim concludes this section by saying he regretted not telling
Huck his true identity because he was family.
While
Walker and Anderson’s The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History
(2021) provides a strictly historical narrative and framework, Big Jim and
the White Boy uses fiction to teach history, highlighting Bloody Kansas,
John Brown, Nat Turner, the Civil War, the horrors of enslavement, and much
more. As well, it examines the ways that culture perpetuates white supremacy
through the products it produces and the stories it tells itself and future
generations. Walker and Anderson’s work counters these narratives by creating,
as Joel Christian Gill puts it in his blurb for the book, a “beautifully and
superbly written” graphic novel that truly “expands and American classic by
adding rich and important cultural nuances.” Walker and Anderson achieve what
that set out to do, providing readers with a work that strips away the minstrel
mask that Twain placed on Jim and reveals reality.
Comics Sans Frontières: 
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