Summary
Having fled from the Virginia Minstrels, Jim runs deep into the forest, eats bread he stole, and falls asleep. He wakes to a rustling in the leaves. It is Norman, who explains that he is exhausted by passing for white, so he ran too. Norman says Emmett sounded just like a slaver when he found out Jim had run. Jim says he knew Emmett had that in him. Jim schemes a plan for Norman to pose as his white owner and sell him, just so Jim can escape. With the money from this scam, they’ll both earn enough to buy their wives. For three days they walk south. In the village of Bluebird Hole, a woman angrily demands answers from Norman when she overhears Jim speaking. Jim wonders if Norman might be an insane white man who believes himself to be black.
Constable Frank McHart introduces himself in a friendly manner to Norman, who suggests McHart could use Jim to help tend his 37 egg-laying hens. McHart considers it, but the suggested price of five hundred is too much for him. He recommends speaking to Old Man Henderson, a sawmill owner. As they walk away, Jim is unnerved and suspicious of Norman, who quickly overcame his fear and is a natural at sounding like a slave owner.
They stop to buy a potato from a giant white woman who frightens them both. They cook it on a fire, then continue on to the sawmill. Nine slaves are at work. The place smells more like animal and human excrement than sawdust from the Cypress trees being processed into lumber for docks along the Mississippi River. Norman tells Henderson he is going through hard times and would like to sell his slave, calling Jim February instead of Jim. The men negotiate, landing on $350 for Jim. Henderson decides he’ll put Jim to work right away on the pit saw, after he has some water. Jim glances back at Norman to see he looks more afraid than Jim feels.
A slave named Luke brings Jim to drink water from a barrel. Luke says Henderson doesn’t let them properly sharpen their tools, but adds that he is a good master, even if he is fond of using the bully whip. Jim realizes Luke has been beaten deep into submission. Jim works the pit saw, which means he has to stand in a muddy pit while pushing a long saw up and down to work through a log laid across the top of the pit. Another man, Sammy, who is small and weak, barely helps the saw while standing atop the log. After a day of working the saw, Jim is made to get out of the pit and receive lashings from Henderson. Jim says nothing as the whip rips open his bare back. Jim passes out. When he wakes, fifteen-year-old Sammy reassures him that Henderson will only beat him for the first two days. When Sammy lifts his shirt to show his scars, Jim sees Sammy has breasts and realizes she is a woman. Jim assumes Henderson not only beats her, but sexually assaults her. He invites her to escape with him that night. They tiptoe over Luke and out of the shed into the drizzle. In the dark Jim finds his way to the clearing where he and Norman ate the potato over the fire.
Norman isn’t there, but he soon returns having bought hardtack biscuits and dried meat with some of the money. Norman is alarmed that Jim has stolen Sammy, who doesn’t trust that Norman is really black. The trio runs for a while, eventually stopping to treat Jim’s wounds with a poultice of mud with bee balm roots and plantain leaves that Sammy smashes together with a rock. They sleep.
When Jim wakes up, the trio eats some hardtack and meat. Sammy asks why Norman stays “colored” if he can pass. He says it’s for his wife, and because he doesn’t want to be a white man. They journey until they reach the Mississippi River, which they want to cross. They begin building a raft from sticks. While Norman goes off to buy twine, Sammy confides to Jim that Henderson has raped her almost daily since she was little. Jim promises that won't rape her. Norman returns with the twine, but he is shouting that Henderson is coming. They push their partially built raft into the river and it falls apart. They grab onto logs and Jim holds the three together as Henderson and his men fire pistols. They move swiftly downstream and to safety; however, Sammy dies from a gunshot wound. Norman says she was better off being left a slave at the sawmill; at least she would have been alive. Jim says she died free. They agree to bury her in case she believed in God.
The men devise a plan to steal a boat. They find one near a trotline and take the four catfish off it. They eat the catfish over a fire a good way away from the trotline and boat. That evening, Norman and Jim watch a man and boy collect the replenished supply of fish off their line. They row back to shore and take the paddles with them, so Jim and Norman make their own paddles out of sticks and twine. They set out on the river, paddling hard to get in front of a paddle-wheel steamboat. Jim pulls himself and Norman onto the ship just before their boat gets sucked into the paddle wheel and is destroyed.
Norman and Jim hide out in the dark engine room. A wiry slave named Brock asks what they’re doing down there. Jim pretends Norman is his master and that he is tying him up down there. Norman goes along with passing for white, scolding the slave for having the gall to tell him he can’t be there. When they’re alone, Jim says they can’t be sure they can trust the man because apparently some slaves, like Luke, don’t mind being slaves. They open the steamer trunks until Norman finds an outfit he can use to replace his disheveled clothes.
Norman goes up to the deck, leaving Jim to help Brock shovel coal into the engine furnace. Jim questions Brock, who says he never leaves the engine room. He is complacent and vague when asked about his “Massa Corey.” Brock sings a song about being the slave that makes the boat go down the river. Norman returns to say that Emmett is on board and that the trombone player might have seen him. He gives Jim bread and says the boat is packed with people who are headed north to escape the war. Jim is surprised to hear about the war. Norman says he heard the slave states are trying to leave the union, but he’s not certain what that means.
Jim tells Norman he suspects Brock, who is happy to be a slave, probably doesn’t even have a living master. Norman watches Brock shovel coal crazily fast into the furnace; Norman agrees that something is wrong. Pipes rattle in the engine room as whistles sound. Brock keeps shoveling like a madman. Eventually, a piston seizes. Jim sees the look of terror on Brock’s face just before the engine explodes. Jim is knocked out, and then comes to in the freezing river water surrounded by detritus from the blown-up ship and dead bodies of passengers. He hears Norman and Huck both calling out to him, equally far away from Jim, as they bob in the water.
Analysis
Part Two of James begins with an instance of situational irony: Jim discovers that Norman, the white-passing former slave, has taken inspiration from Jim and also run away from the troupe. Exhausted by the effort and anxiety of living a dual identity, Norman has decided to give up passing as a white man in the group. However, Norman is not entirely free of that dual identity: he and Jim quickly realize that the simplest way for them to make enough money to buy their wives (and, in Jim’s case, his daughter) out of slavery is to enact the scheme the King and the Duke came up with: selling Jim to slave masters just so Jim can escape and they can repeat the con in another town.
However simple the plan, to put it into action looks different than either man anticipated. Upon being sold to a sawmill owner, Jim is confronted with the perplexing case of Luke, a slave who has been brainwashed and beaten into believing his dehumanization is part of the natural order of things, and that it is right for him to be a slave. Henderson’s violent treatment of his slaves prompts Jim to try to escape on his first night; however, his escape plan is complicated by the sympathy he feels for Sammy, a teenage girl who has been routinely raped by Henderson and has evidently had her spirit broken by the dehumanizing conditions at the sawmill. Seeing his own daughter’s face in Sammy’s, Jim knows he must free Sammy as well.
While escaping, however, Sammy is shot by Henderson or one of his slave hunters. Though Jim and Norman escape, innocent Sammy loses her life, prompting the men to argue over whether she is better off being dead than being repeatedly victimized on Henderson’s property. The grim scene—one of several that show what Jim endures while separated from Huck—establishes how Twain’s original narrative, by focusing on the “adventures” Huck experienced, omitted the unpleasant reality of what life was actually like for enslaved people in the antebellum South, particularly for slaves who risked their lives to find freedom elsewhere.
The theme of dehumanization arises again when Jim and Norman sneak into the engine room of the paddleboat to meet another slave whom Jim suspects cannot be trusted. Weary of other slaves like Luke who don’t mind being slaves, Jim lies to Brock about his relationship to Norman, who they pretend is Jim’s master. By questioning Brock, Jim realizes that Brock lacks the dual identity of other black people Jim has met: ostensibly living with only the imagined authority of “Massa Corey,” Brock shovels coal into the ship’s furnace of his own volition, having no identity other than that of an engine-room slave.
When Norman returns, Jim implies that Brock is mentally ill. But before they know it, Brock has loaded so much coal into the furnace that the steam pressure becomes too great for the pipes to handle. In the ensuing explosion, Jim is separated from Norman, who calls out to him in the water. But in an instance of situational irony, Huck too calls out to Jim for help, having been a passenger alongside the King and the Duke on the same paddleboat. Part Two ends on the cliffhanger of Jim having to decide whether he will save Huck or Norman.
