Summary
Jim, knowing he can only save one person, swims to rescue Huck and bring him to safety on the bank. Huck says he was on the boat because the King and the Duke were on their way back to Ohio, afraid of what might happen if war were to break out. When Huck asks why Jim saved him and let Norman drown, Jim tells Huck that he is his son. They reason that Pap must have known, because he hated Jim so much. Jim admits that Pap was the dead man in the house during the flood. Huck says he always hated Pap, who beat him. Huck says Tom always said his hair wouldn’t get wet and stay wet. That night, Huck tries talking to Jim in slave vernacular, and says he must be a slave because his father is, which annoys Jim. Jim says Huck can pass as white and be free if he wants to. Jim says he has to go north and then send someone to buy Sadie and Lizzie. Huck says the war might free them. Jim says the war won’t do anything for him. Jim insists that Huck not travel with him, encouraging him to be free. Huck gets angry and says he doesn’t believe a word Jim has told him. He says, “I ain’t your son. I ain’t no nigger.”
From their hiding place on the river bank, Jim sees his brown notebook on the beach. When he goes to get it, one of the survivors sees him and thinks he is stealing from a dead white woman. Emmett notices Jim has his notebook and cries out. Jim sprints back into the woods and to his hiding spot. Huck was with him the whole time. Huck realizes Jim could read the entire time. Jim wants Huck to go his own way, but Huck insists on staying with him, saying that he can just tell any white person they see that Jim is his slave. Jim is reluctant, but he knows Huck is right and that it will be easier to travel with a white face next to him.
When they can find no trotline to steal fish from, Jim and Huck decide to “dog” for catfish. The process involves Jim wiggling his fingers in the water to make them look like worms. He is frightened to think of what other creatures might be hiding under the muddy river water. Eventually, a gigantic 50-pound catfish bites his hand. He struggles, falling into the water as he tries to pull the fish from its hole. While submerged in the opaque water, he thinks of Sammy’s and Norman’s dead faces. Jim pulls the catfish onto land at last, and Huck beats the fish to death with a stick. They cook it and eat until they’re stuffed. They continue walking inland, with Jim hoping to find the underground railroad—the secretly organized route to freedom in the North for escaped slaves he has heard about. They hide in the bushes when a group of soldiers dressed in blue uniforms trudges past in the opposite direction. Huck is excited by the idea of following the soldiers into battle, though he doesn’t know which side they’re on. Jim insists they keep going north, saying he wants to return Huck to Miss Watson and take Sadie and Lizzie with him to a free state or maybe Canada. Huck is annoyed that Jim doesn’t want Huck to come with him. Jim says it’s better for Huck not to live as an escaped slave if he doesn’t have to.
Jim and Huck arrive at Miss Watson’s property at night and find Doris by the fire. A man named Cotton and a woman named Katie now live in Jim’s shack because Sadie and Lizzie were sold together. Jim crumples to his knees. Then he sends Huck to find out who they were sold to; he instructs Huck to make up a story about how he’s come back from the dead. The slaves are startled to see Jim giving a white person commands, even if Huck is a boy. Jim falls asleep next to the fireplace in Katie and Cotton’s shack. Katie wakes him eventually because Hopkins, the overseer, is coming. Jim hides and stays still as Hopkins rapes Katie. He imagines intervening to kill Hopkins, but he knows the consequences would be death for him and some of the other slaves too. Anger burns in Jim as he sees his own daughter’s face in Katie’s. Jim leaves and hides out in the cave on Jackson’s Island that he and Huck occupied earlier.
Jim waits on the island for news of his family’s whereabouts from Huck. Jim swims and writes to pass the time. Occasionally white men come to beaches on the island to drink and make fires. One day Hopkins, the overseer, is left behind on the beach after his companions leave. Jim realizes he has an opportunity. Quietly he takes Hopkins's pistol and builds up the fire until the heat wakes Hopkins from his drunken sleep. Jim threatens to shoot him if he moves. But instead of shooting him, Jim stands behind his head and slowly chokes Hopkins. Jim asks him to picture all the women he has raped. Once Hopkins dies, Jim puts his corpse in Hopkins’s canoe and smashes a hole in the hull before setting the boat adrift on the river and watching it go under.
Days pass as Jim reflects on the revenge he has gotten. He wonders if he did evil in killing a man, but the overwhelming feeling is one of apathy: he doesn’t care. On Sunday, Huck sneaks out of church and makes his way to Jim. He says they have kept a close eye on him since his return. Huck says that apparently Hopkins knew where Sadie and Lizzie were moved to—a place called the Graham farm. Huck says Hopkins likely drowned while drunk. Jim regrets not questioning Hopkins when he had the chance. Huck says he wants to join the war, fighting with the North against slavery. Jim thanks Huck and sends him back before a search party starts looking for him.
That night, Jim leaves Jackson Island with his rations, notebook, pencil, and pistol. He goes to the town of Hannibal and sneaks into Judge Thatcher’s house to steal supplies and look for the bill of sale for his wife and daughter. Thatcher wakes up and comes into the study. Jim points the pistol at him and demands to know where Sadie and Lizzie are. Thatcher shows Jim Edina, Missouri on a map. Jim speaks in his actual voice, frightening Thatcher, who could never imagine a slave being able to read and speak eloquently. Jim forces Thatcher to walk to the edge of town. They get in a skiff on the river. Jim points the gun at Thatcher and forces him to row a few miles up the river, calling Thatcher his slave. When they stop, Jim ties Thatcher to a sycamore tree and continues on his own.
Jim walks for three days and runs out of biscuits. He encounters a black man at the edge of a cornfield and says he is looking for the Graham farm. The man says Graham breeds slaves and sells them. He says it’s in the next town, across the valley. He asks Jim to wait while he gets food. Jim reads a narrative written by William Brown, an escaped slave, which he stole from Thatcher. Later, the man—April—returns with a woman named Holly. They give him chicken necks and gizzards, and rice. They think Jim is crazy for thinking he can walk onto a plantation and get his wife and child back.
Under the cover of darkness, Jim crosses the valley and arrives at the edge of the Graham breeding farm. He comes across four black men chained up around a central post. They say the women are in the next camp. Using the knife he stole from Thatcher’s kitchen, Jim undoes the men’s shackles and recruits them to come north to freedom with him. At the women’s camp, near the slave master’s big white house, Jim sets fire to a dry field as a distraction. One of the men he freed knocks out the overseer and takes his whip. Women leave their quarters and Jim is reunited with Sadie and Lizzie. When Graham exits the house and notices his slaves are running away from the fire rather than attempting to put it out, he cocks his shotgun. Jim shoots the man in the chest and then runs with everyone else.
In the short final chapter, Jim comments that the runaways scattered. Some would be caught, some killed, and some would crawl back. Jim makes it to a town in Iowa with Sadie and Lizzie. The locals don’t look happy to see them, but Jim figures most realize they have something to do with the war. The sheriff sees them and confirms they are runaways. He asks if any of them are named “Nigger Jim.” Jim identifies himself as James—“Just James.”
Analysis
Part Three of James begins with Jim choosing to save Huck over Norman. The decision confuses Huck, who wonders why Jim would save him over his friend. The theme of duality arises as Jim finally drops his “slave voice” to explain to Huck that he saved him because Huck is his son—a major departure from Twain’s original narrative. With this unexpected turn of events, Everett confirms that the strange connection people have perceived between Huck and Jim is in fact a father-son bond. Though he is perplexed both by the revelation that Jim has been speaking to him in an affected voice and by the revelation that Pap was not his biological father, Huck accepts the news and is quick to try to adopt his new identity by speaking in the slave dialect Jim has since dropped.
However, Huck finds that Jim pushes back against Huck’s naive eagerness to think of himself as a slave just because he is the son of a slave. Rather than encourage Huck to explore his newfound dual identity, Jim dismissively suggests that Huck has the privilege of getting to live his life as a white man, which will be a much safer and easier path to continue down. In this scene, Jim, despite having admitted to being Huck’s father, conveys that he does not see Huck as his family in the same way he does Sadie and Lizzie because Huck has lived with white privilege his entire life and couldn’t possibly relate to Jim on the same level Sadie and Lizzie do. Jim’s resistance prompts Huck to show his own resistance and attempt to deny the mixed messages he is getting from Jim.
Although Huck and Jim resent each other for their own reasons, for the sake of survival Jim agrees to stick with Huck to make it easier and safer for him to travel back to Hannibal. Along the way, they pass a group of soldiers wearing the blue uniforms of the Union—northern-state soldiers fighting the Confederates of the South. With this detail, Everett shows how, in the background of Jim’s narrative, the American Civil War is beginning to be fought over the issues of states’ rights and the Southern states’ insistence on continuing the practice of slavery.
Upon returning to Miss Watson’s property, Jim learns an unsettling fact: Sadie and Lizzie have been sold. In this instance of situational irony, Jim grapples with an eventuality he had never considered while on the run. While hiding out in his former shack, Jim also witnesses Hopkins, the slave overseer, rape Katie, the female slave now living in the shack with her husband, Cotton. Jim knows that to intervene and stop the rape will mean punishment for him and other slaves on the property, so he continues to hide, burning with anger and shame. However, Jim soon gets revenge on Hopkins by suffocating him while Hopkins is passed out drunk on Jackson Island. With Jim’s violent turn, Everett introduces the theme of vengeance and establishes that Jim has reached a moral breaking point, no longer fearful of consequences.
Hellbent on securing his family’s freedom at any cost, Jim risks his safety by breaking into Judge Thatcher’s home to find out who Sadie and Lizzie were sold to. No longer invested in feigning ignorance around white people, Jim uses his real voice when he holds Thatcher at gunpoint and coerces him to help Jim find his wife and daughter. In an instance of situational irony, Jim discovers that Thatcher is more frightened by Jim’s ability to speak eloquently than by the gun Jim points at him.
Jim continues to act brazenly and vengefully as he inverts his relationship with Thatcher, forcing Thatcher to act as the slave and row them up the river to Edina, Missouri. The theme of freedom arises when Jim arrives at the slave breeding farm where Sadie and Lizzie have been taken; upon encountering a group of enslaved men who are shackled like animals, Jim unshackles them and recruits them to help free the women and girls on the farm. With their help, Jim is able to rescue his wife and daughter. He also kills Graham, the slave breeder, completely unafraid of the consequences of murdering a white man since having crossed the moral line by killing Hopkins.
The novel closes with a short chapter in which Jim, Sadie, and Lizzie have reached the free state of Iowa. The local sheriff asks if anyone of them is named “Nigger Jim,” which suggests that Judge Thatcher got free from the sycamore he was tied to and notified law enforcement to be on the lookout for Jim. In this moment, Jim symbolically sheds his slave name and identifies himself as James, his chosen name now that he is free. However, it remains unclear to the reader whether Jim will get away with the crimes he committed while pursuing freedom, or if the cost of his emancipation will be incarceration or the death penalty. In this way, Everett presents a starkly contrasting conclusion to Twain’s original narrative, which ended with Jim learning that Miss Watson has freed him in her will. In Everett’s darker, and more realistic, version of events, Jim does not attain freedom through the benevolence of his white owner but through acts of extreme bravery and violence that mean he is still not free in the eyes of the law.
