Summary
After entertaining Huck’s simple-minded questions about genies in lamps and slavery, Jim realizes he can read in front of Huck, since as far as Huck knows, he is just staring at the page attempting to read. He begins the Venture Smith book, excited to be transported by the narrative. Eventually, they find that their original canoe and raft have drifted ashore near them. They retrieve these vessels and continue down the river. When prompted, Jim says his surname, were he to choose one, would be Golightly—James Golightly.
When they happen upon a large riverboat with a party happening on its decks, Jim panics because he can’t see where Huck has gotten to. He spots Huck on the raft and is relieved. Huck tries to trick Jim into believing he dreamt the riverboat. Jim goes along with it, letting Huck feel the pleasure and guilt of believing he had fooled him. Soon Jim hears the Ohio River where it meets the Mississippi. Jim says he’s going to get a job, save money, and buy Sadie and Lizzie—then they’ll be free.
Jim wakes to the sound of Huck speaking with some men. He realizes Huck has hidden him with a tarp. Using racist epithets, the men ask if Huck has seen a runaway slave. Huck lies about who is under the tarp, saying it is his uncle, who has smallpox. The men don’t investigate. They give Huck ten dollars before leaving. That night, there’s an unusual amount of traffic on the river. They pass too close to a riverboat and capsize, swept into the water. Separated from Huck, Jim comes ashore in blackberry brambles. He sleeps in a little meadow, sick with worry over Huck but also relieved to be rid of him. Jim is surrounded by four men, who sit and observe him. They say he’s in Illinois, but white people around there call it Tennessee. They introduce themselves as Josiah, Old George, Young George, and Pierre. They are slaves. Jim asks them for a pencil.
Jim survives by foraging while he hides out in the woods. He reads voraciously. The idea that Venture Smith supposedly remembers what his life was like at five years old seems false to Jim. Eventually Young George visits to give him the nub of a pencil that he stole from his master. Young George encourages Jim to write his story, telling him cryptically to “use [his] ears.” That night, Jim hears dogs barking. He hides in a tree near a raccoon.
Jim writes the first lines of his autobiography, saying his mother’s mother was from Africa, as far as he knows. Unlike Venture Smith’s “self-related” story, Jim’s story will be “self-written” because Jim knows how to read and write. Jim continues to stay hidden out under his tree, catching fish and collecting berries. The enslaved men often stop by to bring him scraps, but he usually has more to eat than they do. They discuss what options Jim has, and Jim concludes that he has to go on the run again. The night he leaves, Jim witnesses an overseer whipping Young George for having stolen the pencil. Jim meets Young George’s eyes. Young George smiles, then mouths “run.”
Jim moves swiftly through the dark until, just before sunrise, he hears Huck intervening in an argument between the Shepherdsons and Grangerfords that erupts into gunshots. Huck shouts for a woman named Sophia to run. Jim pulls Huck into the bushes. When the shooting ends, Jim and Huck step out to see four dead men on the ground. They get to the river, where Huck miraculously has found and repaired their old raft. Jim speaks without affect, perplexing Huck, who comments that he doesn’t sound like a slave. Jim corrects his language to sound uneducated.
While traveling on the river, Jim entertains Huck’s boring story about the battle between the Shepherdsons and Grangerfords. They find another canoe and clean out the gunk and leaves in it. Jim reflects that Huck is rattled by witnessing the dead men, and comments in his narration that he himself has always lived with the threat of death but hasn’t seen much killing firsthand. Huck returns with two white men—one old, one young—who have shifty eyes. They presume Jim is Huck’s slave, but Huck says Jim is his friend. Jim doesn’t trust the men, but he is more afraid of the barking dogs he hears in the distance. The four move downriver on the raft. The younger man says he is the descendant of a duke who came to America, so he is technically the Duke of Bridgewater. Huck is gullible and believes the man. The older man says he is also of noble birth, a Dauphin who is the son of Louie the Sixteenth and Marie Antoinette and who snuck out of France in a cheese barrel.
When asked about their origin, Huck and Jim invent a story about traveling down the river with Huck’s father and little brother, both of whom were drowned. Jim comments that the con men are easy to fool, and both cry at the tragic tale when Huck does. When the fake royals get tired of eating Huck and Jim’s dried fish, they suggest going into town for real food. They say they’ll entertain people for money. Huck doesn’t like the sound of it when they suggest claiming to people that they own Jim. Huck suspects they will try to sell Jim.
At daybreak, the King and the Duke insist to Huck and Jim that they tie up the raft and make their way into a little town. They warn Jim not to try to escape, calling him “nigger” repeatedly as they force him to pretend to be their slave (as opposed to Huck’s). They find the town empty because about three hundred townspeople have gathered for a revival. They listen to a preacher’s entertaining talk of healing ailments with God’s help. Huck and Jim comment to each other that the preacher is taking advantage of the crowd’s gullibility. Jim becomes shaken when he sees that there are no black people present, and he fears the town is prone to lynching.
The Duke steals focus by telling the crowd he used to be a pirate until the intervention of another preacher, who led him to Jesus. The Duke asks for the crowd to donate to his missionary work, claiming that he had found Jim in Borneo gnawing on the bones of another missionary, but has since converted him to Christianity. The conmen’s act soon falls apart when the crowd starts asking questions. One of the townspeople says it’s been a week since their last hanging.
Analysis
Having left their hideout on Jackson Island, Jim and Huck travel down the Mississippi River with no clear plan. In a satirical allusion to the original novel, Everett depicts Huck grappling with a slowly dawning understanding that slavery is unjust. While the original novel sympathetically portrays the process of Huck shedding the racist ideas he was brought up with through his illuminating conversations with Jim, in Everett’s retelling, Jim simply humors the boy’s awakening, though in reality he finds Huck’s ignorance tedious.
However, one of Huck’s questions prompts real consideration on Jim’s part. When Huck brings up the subject of what Jim would call himself if he could choose another name, Jim decides he would identify himself by the more dignified-sounding version of Jim: James. This moment builds on the motif of Jim having the option to discard his slave master–given name upon attaining emancipation from slavery. As the book goes on, Everett will return to the motif to establish the significance of how much baggage a name accumulates and how freeing it can be to select a new one.
After their vessel capsizes, Jim and Huck become separated, with Jim washing up on the Illinois side of the river. Although Jim assumes he is in a “free state” where slavery has been abolished, in an instance of situational irony, the black men he meets there state with resignation that Illinois is “still America”; they are enslaved on a plantation regardless of the state law, with their masters claiming they are in Tennessee. With this grim revelation, Jim understands his idea of escaping Missouri to establish a new life in a free state may be illusory.
Everett builds on the theme of self-expression with Jim’s request to the enslaved men to find him a pencil, if they can, so that he may write on the paper he found. The fact of his literacy surprises and delights the men, who understand the importance of a slave being able to write his own story—an action the dehumanizing institution of slavery disallows. The pencil Young George steals from his master symbolizes the sacrifice Young George is willing to make for the sake of Jim’s self-expression. Although Young George is beaten as punishment (and, as we later learn from Easter, lynched), the story Jim will write also belongs to Young George, whose illiteracy prevents him from expressing himself in writing.
When Jim reunites with Huck, Huck is excited to tell him all about the adventure he has been on while separated. The scene is an allusion to Twain’s original narrative, in which Huck becomes wrapped up in a family feud thirty years in the making. When Sophia Grangerford secretly marries Harney Shepherdson, the ongoing violence reaches its inevitable conclusion with both families killing each other until everyone lies dead. However, because Jim stumbles across Huck just after having witnessed Young George being whipped because of the pencil in Jim’s pocket, Huck’s story about two white families murdering each other over nonsense lacks real meaning. Nonetheless, Jim’s paternal feeling for Huck arises again as he realizes Huck is probably traumatized by the violence of seeing so many bodies. For a slave, death and violence are a constant presence, but Huck’s sheltered existence has insulated him from the grim reality of death.
