Nancy Rawles’s My Jim: Reclaiming African American Herstory from Mark Twain’s Legacy

Abstract

In the wake of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which brilliantly exposed the colonial unconscious that had been locked up in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a number of literary works have retold the famous stories of literary classics. Most of these novels recount the original stories from a different perspective and foreground some parts of the story that were either untold or suppressed in the famous, canonized works, thereby critically pointing out what is left out or marginalized. Nancy Rawles’s recent fiction My Jim (2006) is one such re-writing. Though inspired and motivated by Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), it shifts the focus from Huck to Jim the runaway slave and artfully unfolds the story that Twain did not tell. Rawles’s My Jim is an attempt to extricate African American subjectivity from the network of material proprietorship and bodily exchange, and to re-position African American subjects in another set of human relations that are fundamentally different from what made slavery possible in the first place. The narrator Sadie’s continuous act of claiming Jim as “hers” is a desperate attempt to negate his status as “Miss Watson’s” property. By resituating Jim and herself in a binding relationship based on mutual recognition of each other’s worth that cannot be translated into mere price, Sadie creates an affective space wherein they can transcend the dehumanizing forces of slavery. The novel is Rawles’s attempt to reclaim the entire history of African Americans from the canonized white author’s imagination and recount it in a new narrative of the African American heritage. Through a successful negotiation between Mark Twain’s legacy and her own critical imagination, Rawles turns a white male author’s history of a slave into an African American author’s herstory of her people.