Graphic Novel Review: Big Jim and the White Boy, an Important and Insightful Reimaging of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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.