Q: You are widely recognized as one of the foremost Twain scholars in the field, and the trajectory of your career is indelibly entangled with Mark Twain and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in particular. While this expertise is clear in the simultaneous precision and capaciousness of the references in Jim, the book doesn’t explicitly capture your own history with Twain. Could you expand about how you first encountered Twain and why you’ve continued to work on him and Jim since? 

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SFF: My mother bundled me into the car during a light snowstorm when I was eleven and told me we were going on a “mystery trip.” She kept driving as the snow got heavier and didn’t turn back. She was determined to get us to our destination, which was Mark Twain’s House in Hartford, which had recently opened as a museum. The house amazed me, with its incredibly ornate decorations—with design motifs from Morocco, Japan, India, China, and Turkey; its fireplace with a window over it and a divided flue that allowed snow to fall over a roaring fire; its telephone booth in the entry hall; and the wildly complicated contraption to set type in the basement that was supposed to make Twain’s fortune but that ate all his money instead. I read some short stories by Twain when I got home, and later Tom Sawyer. Junior year in high school my teacher passed out Huckleberry Finn; I saw the hero referred to as “Tom Sawyer’s comrade” on the title page, so I figured I knew what to expect. But then my teacher handed out the assignment: write a paper on how Mark Twain used irony to attack racism in Huckleberry Finn. It was the most interesting assignment I’d ever been given. Trying to figure out what Twain wanted us to see that Huck couldn’t see, made me decide to be an English major when I got to college. It turns out that Twain’s work wasn’t taught much to undergraduates at either Swarthmore, where I began college, or at Yale, where I finished.

I didn’t actually return to him until graduate school, where he became one of some half dozen writers who were the focus of my Yale American Studies dissertation (later published as From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America). I published an op-ed in the New York Times that came out of my book shortly before the book appeared, that focused on the fact that Twain had had to turn to satire in the first place to write about racism after being censored for writing about it directly; my op-ed commented on the irony of the fact that now, 100 years later, he was being censored by folks who misread his satire. The day it appeared I got a phone call from a woman who said she had a letter from Twain that nobody knew about, but that I’d know what to do with. The letter, which I authenticated and researched, contained the only non-ironic condemnation of racism that we have from Twain, and he wrote it the year Huck Finn was published.

The now-famous McGuinn letter detailed why Twain was embarking on his own private plan of affirmative action at the Yale law school—an act of philanthropy that supported Thurgood Marshall’s future mentor. Researching it made me determined to mine everything Twain had written about race, and all the Black individuals known to have touched his life. That journey led me to recognize the huge importance of Black voices, speakers, and rhetorical traditions to the development of Twain’s style, particularly in Huck Finn. It was after a talk I gave on my preliminary research on that topic at Princeton that Toni Morrison insisted that I had to make this topic the subject of a book. It became Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices. The success and impact of that book led Oxford to invite me to edit the twenty-nine volume on Mark Twain, which was a joy to do—as well as totally exhausting! Every time I think I’m moving away from issues of Mark Twain and race in my research, I find new and unexpected materials, insights, and resonances that pull me back. Writing Jim allowed me to bring a lot of that together.

Q: The chapter structure of this book intrigued me: the first three chapters are concerned with different kinds of contextualizations—the historical reality surrounding the text and the types of strictures placed on enslaved men like Jim; the discourses on race Twain would have been engaging with as he wrote Jim into being; and the scholarly war for Jim’s significance that immediately followed the text’s publication. The last three chapters consider Jim’s afterlives in adaptations, translations, and high school classrooms; and in between these two sections, you engage in an interpretative exercise narrating Huck Finn from Jim’s perspective and, as much as you are able, within the voice that Jim might have used if the story had been told solely from his perspective. How did you decide on this structure?

SFF: Structuring a book of this sort is more of an art than a science. Since I have long viewed Huck Finn as a book that deeply engages the history of the time in which it is set (as well as the time in which it was written), I knew I’d need to frame my discussion with some of that historical context. Since every work of fiction enters a cultural conversation that preceded it, I also knew I would need to lay out the cultural conversation about race—the dominant myths most Americans accepted as realities—that the book entered. And I knew that if I wanted to overturn the dominant critical verdict about Jim, I would have to tackle the critical tradition head-on. I also realized that readers’ understanding of Twain’s novel has been indelibly shaped by versions of it on the stage and on screen, by translations into the 67 languages in which it has been translated, and by how the book is encountered in secondary schools. These areas allowed me to tap into realms that had long interested me.

The middle chapter—the one that re-tells the narrative from Jim’s point of view in Jim’s voice (as Twain crafted it)—was an experiment that I undertook to explore whether it was possible. I had been arguing that the speech Twain gave Jim was perfectly adequate for conveying with respect who he was and why he did what he did—that it was the fact that we were getting Huck’s version of everything which prevented key dimensions of Jim’s character from shining through. I wanted to prove to myself that this was the case; hence the interpretive experiment that is Chapter Four.

Q: Throughout the book, you make the case that Jim is exceptional: the first Black father in a book written by a white male American author; one of the first Black heroes in American fiction; and someone whose complexity and personhood has been consistently overlooked since the novel’s publication. Why do you think Jim has been so consistently passed over?  

SFF: Three key factors are (1) Mark Twain’s decision to make Huck the narrator of the novel and to allow the reader to see only what Huck sees; (2) the persistence of racism in American society and culture; and (3) society’s prejudice against AAVE or African American Vernacular English.

(1) Since this is a book in which no character challenges the legitimacy of the status quo, some readers make the mistake of thinking the author didn’t challenge it either. But Twain purposely fails to allow any character to recognize the moral bankruptcy of the world he limns precisely to require the reader to make that leap. Throughout much of the book, Huck sees Jim as a stereotype; readers assume that Twain sees him that way as well, which is an error. Readers have been reluctant to give a white author credit for endeavoring to undermine American traditions of racism—particularly one raised in the Slave South who failed to challenge the racism of the world in which he lived for the first three decades of his life, but who did so later.

(2) American society in Twain’s time (and beyond) largely accepted myths about race inscribed by Thomas Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia in the 1780s which asserted that Black people were not as intelligent as white people, that they did not feel pain the way white people did, and that they were uncreative. But as I demonstrate in Chapter Two, Twain’s interactions with at least eight specific Black individuals blasted these myths out of the water. The racism that prevailed in Twain’s day made many readers (but not all) see Jim as a stereotype, as akin to the stage negro of the minstrel show. Twain didn’t see him that way. I demonstrate that every episode in the book in which Jim allegedly behaves like a figure in a minstrel shows Jim demonstrating his intelligence and agency despite the fact that Huck is unable to recognize it. Twain sees Jim as a mature, self-aware enslaved man operating in a world in which everything is rigged against him. Some readers—even when the book first came out—understood this, as I note below. 

(3)  When white writers used Black speech in Twain’s day it was virtually always in the service of humor; Twain recognized that it could operate in as many registers as so-called “standard” English. Indeed, his first contribution to The Atlantic Monthly, “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It,” a story dominated by a Black narrator telling the story of her separation from her children on the auction block in her own voice, puzzled readers of the magazine, who suspected humor lurking behind it and couldn’t find it. In the Atlantic, as well as other mass magazines, during this era, the pain African Americans suffered under slavery was displaced by tales of ex-slaves nostalgic for the old plantation. At a time when the reigning racial ideology of the day assumed that “negroes were relatively insensible to pain,” this narrator’s description of what she felt at her separation from her children on the auction block was moving proof of the myopic fallacy of this assumption. Cord’s speech, captured in Twain's Atlantic piece, shaped Jim’s speech in the novel. But readers often made the mistake of assuming that Jim’s role in the book was to provide humor, viewing him as a comic foil to the book’s young white protagonist. Twain, however, saw him as much more than that and so should we.

Q: Your book joins an incredibly long and contentious history of Twain scholarship that cuts across disciplinary boundaries, from scholarly contributions in Black studies to artistic contributions in film and novel adaptations. Who were some of your key interlocutors in this project? How did what others have said about Jim inform what you say about him?

SFF: My book builds on previous work by stellar scholars including Sterling Brown (who wrote insightfully about Jim as early as 1937), as well as later scholars such as David Lionel Smith, Jocelyn Chadwick, Robert Paul Lamb, Hilton Obenzinger, and Forrest Robinson, all of whom share my basic understanding of the character. But I learned as much from three writers (as opposed to scholars) who were central to my understanding of the book: Ralph Ellison, whom I interviewed about the novel shortly before his death; Toni Morrison, who had insisted that I drop whatever I was working on and write Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices, and whom I later commissioned to write the Foreword to the novel in the Oxford Mark Twain edition; and Ralph Wiley, who taught me a great deal when he asked me to help him get his screenplay, Spike Lee’s Huckleberry Finn, produced. Scholars with whom I took issue in my book include Leo Marx, Fredrick Woodard and Donnarae McCann, John Wallace, Elaine and Harry Mensh, Anthony J. Berret, Andrew Silver, Sharon Rush—and myself. Reserving my most unequivocal opprobrium for myself was a new adventure—and great fun: I roundly condemned comments I’d made about Jim in the 1990s that I now completely reject. 

Skip Gates (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.), who commissioned me to write this book for Yale’s “Black Lives” book series, and who is an old friend, also played an important role in encouraging me to be confident about my conclusions and their implications. Thirty years ago, he was my upstairs neighbor at Yale when I first authenticated and interpreted the McGuinn letter (which contained the only non-ironic condemnation of racism that we have from Twain, written the year Huck Finn was published). Skip completely agreed with my understanding of the significance of the letter and how it should shape the public’s understanding of Twain’s views on racism at the time he published Huck Finn. But he went further: he voiced his agreement on national television.

Q: What did research for this kind of project look like? How would you characterize the genre of this scholarship?

SFF: As soon as I was asked to write this book, I realized that I had been in training to do so all my adult life. I’d been thinking about issues of Twain and race and the risks and potential of satire for a very long time. But this book encouraged me to bring together scholarship in a range of adjacent fields, as well. One key one was history, a field that has engaged me since my graduate school training in American Studies. But in particular, co-teaching a course at Stanford on “Race and Reunion: Slavery and the Civil War in American Memory” with a wonderful historian, Allyson Hobbs, for many years helped me become more familiar with the chapters of history that intersected with this project and how historians have approached it. I also appreciated the brilliant work in history that David Blight has done (including the book that gave our course its name, Race and Reunion), as well as the work of Missouri historian Terrell Dempsey (knowing that Blight was one of the editors of the “Black Lives” book series was a bit daunting: I was determined to get my history right in this book!). I should add that the many years I taught at the University of Texas at Austin sharpened my awareness of Southern versions of slavery and Reconstruction, exposing me to perspectives that were unfamiliar to me when I was growing up in New York and Connecticut. These perspectives were key to understanding the longevity of the stereotypes that have dogged Twain’s most famous Black character. 

Q: I think one of contributions of this project are the radical narrative techniques you both employ in your criticism and the interpretative exercise chapter to quite literally show readers a more fully realized version of Jim—in his own voice. Could you say more about the radical potentialities of this kind of methodological work? Why does it matter, for example, that you read beneath the surface of Huck Finn to argue against what you call a “reductive” reading of the text as racist? Why does it matter that you narrate Jim in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), even while recognizing some of the inherent limitations of such an endeavor? 

SFF: I think in some ways, my experiment in interpretation in Chapter Four, the middle chapter of my book—“Jim’s Version”—can be understood as what Saidiya Hartman has called “critical fabulation,” a blend of archival research and storytelling designed to fill in gaps in the archives, especially for marginalized groups (I had engaged in “critical fabulation” many years ago, in the middle of a scholarly essay. On that occasion I had been suggesting what a well-known novel by a canonical male writer might have looked like if one of his feminist contemporaries had written the story). My experiment in Chapter Four in Jim imagined what Huck Finn would have looked like if Jim, rather than Huck, had been the narrator. Knowing that Jim could only share with Huck limited aspects of what he was thinking and feeling, I wanted to imagine what was going on in his head. In this sense my experiment and Percival Everett’s novel, James, which came out while my book was in press, are similar. Although Everett’s James and Twain’s Jim sound completely different, they are, indeed, kindred spirits: they do what they do for the same reasons in both books.

But while Everett makes James literate and erudite, I wanted my version of Jim to remain the astute but uneducated, unlettered enslaved man Twain created. I wanted him to speak to the reader with the candor that Huck did—but in his own voice—in the dialect Twain gave him. I wanted to see whether I could operationalize the premise that Twain respected both Jim and his manner of speaking.

Q: Even with your expertise providing a very convincing case for your reading of Twain and Jim, the fact remains that Huck Finn still largely has the reputation of being a racist novel. Aside from directing such critics to your book, I think this question of reception and textual meaning is a core one given that Jim’s existence is both mediated within a text and further materialized based on external perceptions of a text. How does your argument bridge these questions of representation? In terms of Jim’s lives and afterlives (intentionally pluralized), where is the line between Twain’s intention and public reception?

SFF: I think it’s important to recognize that just as Jim has plural lives and afterlives, Twain’s original novel elicited multiple varieties of public reception. Indeed, a perceptive reviewer in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1885, shortly after the novel appeared articulated the response that I argue for in my book: this reviewer wrote that “running all through the book is the sharpest satire on the ante-bellum estimate of the slave.” I have long been convinced that this was Twain’s intention and that he hoped readers would grasp it. Some did, like the great Black scholar and critic Sterling Brown, who in 1937 wrote that Jim was “the best example in nineteenth century fiction of the average Negro slave…. And he is completely believable.” This view of Jim would be reiterated in the decades that followed by T.S. Eliot (who referred to Jim as equal to Huck in dignity), and most notably by David Lionel Smith, Jocelyn Chadwick, and Ralph Wiley. I was intrigued by the range of ways in which screenwriters, directors, and playwrights handled the challenge of how to represent Jim on stage and screen, and by the choices made by the Black actors who portrayed him. The actors, as it turns out, had tremendous insight into who he was and why he did what he did. They were important guides for me as I wrote this book.

Twain recognized that readers had a tendency to read as literalists, missing the import of irony and satire, and he came up with a range of strategies to try to address that. (For example, to remind the reader of the fact that the sort of author who sat for marble busts was behind the narrative supposedly “written” by the book’s semi-literate narrator, he put two frontispieces at the start of the book – one of a marble bust of Mark Twain, the other of a raggedy, grinning Huck). Twain knew that he ran the risk that his satire might lead some readers to take the surface meaning of the text and miss what lay beneath it; but he also knew that when it worked, satire could be incredibly powerful. He decided it was worth the risk.

Q: What is the value of such a project now in this current moment? What do you think contemporary readers can still learn from Jim almost 150 years later?

A: The novel shines a light on a society that treats the most admirable man in it as disposable and unimportant—as someone who doesn’t matter—due to the color of his skin. The persistence of racism in American society today makes this book more relevant than ever. The “Black Lives Matter” movement reminds Americans that Black lives do matter. Why was this necessary? Because Black people are still treated as if they were disposable and unimportant by society and by the authorities charged with protecting them. As long as Black people are frequently killed by police in arbitrary and unnecessary police-initiated confrontations; as long as they are disproportionately likely to be incarcerated; as long as Black students receive much harsher discipline in elementary and secondary schools than white students; as long as the wage and employment gap between white and Black remains stark—Americans still need to be reminded that Black lives matter. The essence of Huckleberry Finn is American society’s failure to recognize this basic fact—our nation’s refusal to see how dramatically it is betraying, every day, the ideals of equality on which it was founded. A little over a decade after writing the book, Twain would name the concept that is at its core: he called it “the lie of silent assertion”—that is, the “silent assertion that there wasn’t anything going on in which humane and intelligent people are interested…and are engaged by their duty to try to stop.” The concept is as important today as it was in Twain’s day.

Jim can open our eyes to who we are as a nation, what we’ve been, and what we might become. Huckleberry Finn evokes—perhaps as only a work of art can—both the boldness of founding a nation on the ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the brazen hypocrisy that allowed those ideals to be violated so fully from the start. It is perhaps unsurprising that the persistence of racism in our world has fostered a myopia that has prevented many—including myself—from recognizing Jim’s full humanity until now. Grappling with who Jim is and why he is treated the way he is this novel can be an important first step towards moving beyond our myopia.