I still vividly remember reading Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in my American Studies English class junior year of high school. Not because of the book itself, but because of what happened on the first day we were supposed to talk about it in class. The entire room erupted into a heated debate around a particular slur—you know the one—frequently used in reference to the character of Jim. Did the presence of the word render the whole book racist? Was it an intentional choice? Was Jim actually the true heart and hero of the story?
The conversation was unreconcilable. Ms. Nitkin threw up her hands and said fine, we'll just drop the book entirely then. She scrambled to reconfigure the next two weeks of the curriculum (which were also supposed to be coordinated with the units in our AP US History class). Then she announced her retirement.
This anecdote was on my mind as I opened up the first pages of Big Jim and the White Boy: An American Classic Reimagined, a new graphic novel from David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson that reframes the story of Huck Finn from Jim's perspective. In the book's introduction, Walker makes an explicit case for his decision to keep that word intact in this new text—not just for the historical accuracy, but because of its ugly power. "This single word, which makes up less than a quarter of one percent of the entire book (0.1962 percent, to be exact), has led to Huckleberry Finn being banned countless times, as well as editions being published that have replaced
the word with something less problematic," he writes. "Erasing an offensive word from a book does not bring an end to intolerance or oppression… but it does make it easier for intolerance and oppression to hide themselves."
This is not to say that Big Jim and the White Boy is otherwise a, erm, slavish adaptation of the American classic. Walker and Anderson take quite a few liberties with the text—in a way that in fact enriches its historicity. There are changes that deepen the relationship en Huck and Jim, and heartbreakingly re-contextualize the moments when Huck himself uses the slur. It expands upon the story of Jim's family—a subtle, seemingly throwaway detail in the book that implies a much richer inner life for the newly re-centered protagonist.
Big Jim and White Boy also vividly embraces some of the more complex historical details of the setting. Between John Brown and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Missouri in the 1850s was a boiling point in the struggle for Black rights and abolition, and that tension a much more present and active part of this story. The result is not only a more enriching historical experience—but a much more visceral, thrilling, and heartbreaking tale.
Walker and Anderson also add some clever layers of nested framing mechanisms that allow them to expand that historicity beyond the life of original author Mark Twain, too. The story of Huck Finn as presented in the book is actually being told by an elderly Jim and Huck, some 80 years after the events. They're talking to a group of kids, hoping to correct Twain's inaccurate but famous version—while also adorably bickering between themselves like Statler and Waldorf. The timeline expands out further from there as well, as the book occasionally checks in with one of the children in that audience—one of Jim's own granddaughters, who grows up to be an author and academic, driven by a desire to correct the historical record. This meta-layer serves as a rich commentary about the way that so much of American history has been written from a white perspective—and how even a well-intentioned white perspective can still miss out on some of the details of the other lives that helped to build this country.
It also helps anchor the expansive story in character, transforming what could have been a pedantic history lesson into the rich and beautiful story of a multigenerational Black family—Jim's family, the same one that was barely relegated to a footnote in the original book.
Which is all to say, this book made me cry more than once. Oof it's good. Much of this emotional heft comes from the thoughtful visuals of artist Marcus Kwame Anderson. At first glance, his thick linework has a simple, almost cartoonish quality. It seems approachable, like a Saturday Morning Cartoon. But as the book goes on—as secrets are revealed!, as it were—you truly begin to appreciate Anderson's thoughtful attention to detail. He makes subtle but deliberate choices in the shape and structure of character faces, for example, that really resonate once it clicks. That accessible cartooning also serves as a deliberate juxtaposition to the violence that appears later on in the book. It's a cleverly disarming visual choice. Slavery was brutal, and Big Jim and the White Boy does not shy away from that brutality. The cherubic faces we meet in the early pages of the book are sadly not immune to those horrors.
My honest takeaway of this book is that Big Jim and the White Boy should be a part of every American high school English curriculum, slurs and all.
Big Jim and the White Boy: An American Classic Reimagined [David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson / Ten Speed Graphic]
Previously:
• Video reimagines the Brady Bunch opening as a Lovecraftian horror show
• Artist reimagines classic horror films as vintage Disney children's books
• Fan-film reimagines 'Predator' as a Crusades action film in the Dark Ages
