Tookie and 84-year-old Miss Mary -- characters in a spooky short story with a long title: "Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters” -- sense something ominous troubling the Mississippi waters. They are floating on a salvaged barge amid the devastation Katrina wreaked in New Orleans in 2015.
When the water was still again, he turned back to see that Miss Mary had pulled a crooked steak knife from one of her many pockets. His heart leapt in irrational alarm, though he should've laughed; the little knife would be no use against whatever had jolted the barge.
’What you see?' she stage-whispered.
’Nothin',' he replied. 'Just water.
She scowled. 'You lyin'.
NK Jemison first published "Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters" in 2015 and included it in her 2018 short story collection "How Long 'Til Black Future Month?" It’s an all-Black retelling of Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."
Twain wrote with such authority, clarity and humor about the American character and geography that interrogating and reshaping him has become a U.S. literary tradition.
Tookie and Miss Mary are equals, though he respects her as his elder. His lie is an attempt at reassurance. In Twain's novel published in 1884 and set in the 1830s in Missouri, when it was a slave state, Huck's lies again and again to Jim, his elder, as they float along the Mississippi. Huck lies to assert the superiority he claims because he is white, to evade responsibility for harm done to a Black man fleeing slavery. Or just because he can. Until he can't.
When I got all wore out wid work, en wid de calling' for you, en I didn' k'yer no mo' what become of me en de raf'. En when I wake up en fine you back agin', all safe en soun', de tears come en I could a got down on my knees and kiss' yo' foot I's so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin' 'bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed.'
Then he got up slow, and walked to the wigwam, and went in there, without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed his foot to get him to take it back. It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger - but I done it, and I wasn't ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn't do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn't have done that one if I'd knowed it would make him feel that way."
Until Jim shames him, Huck's attitudes had been shaped by other white Americans depicted by Twain as opportunistic, grasping, violent, so credulous as to be more superstitious than religious, quick to anger and jealousy. In this dystopian tale, Twain’s characters include people such as Jim's enslaver Old Miss Watson, who are pious and consider themselves better than Huck’s Pap -- some may be too well-bred to say "nigger," but they are nonetheless racist.
A petulant outburst by Pap could have been written today, fueled as it is by resentment and fear that the advancement of others somehow robs white Americans. Here's just the beginning -- the rant goes on for an entire page:
Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there, from Ohio; a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain't a man in that town that's got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane -- the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? they said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could vote, when he was at home. It was 'lection day, and I was just about to go and vote, myself, if I wasn't too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote again.
While Jemison, who is Black, may have been inspired by "Huckleberry Finn," she sees no need to include a stand-in for Huck -- or any white characters -- in her story. Similarly, Louise Erdrich's "Future Home of the Living God," a dystopian novel published in 2017, could be read as a multicultural, feminist – and Huck-less -- "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
Perhaps it’s the plainspoken tone and comic moments. Or the mentions of the mighty Mississippi. Or that its main character Cedar Hawk Songmaker, who like Erdrich is Ojibwe, is a fugitive traveling on a kind of underground railroad for much of the book. The book takes the form of Cedar's so-long-a-letter to her unborn child. Cedar needs no Huck to save her, and has no patience for anyone who would question her or her child's right to be respected as fully human.
Huck's mother is dead and Pap abuses and abandons him before dying himself. Cedar is the opposite of orphaned. She is claimed, if anything, by too many parents. In one passage, Sera, the white Minneapolis liberal who adopted Cedar, arrives at the reservation where Cedar's birth mother Sweetie and her husband run a convenience shop and gas station.
I watch as without a word Sweetie picks up a pair of clean plastic tongs and uses them to pluck a wiener off the hot moving bars of the countertop grill. Carefully, she puts the dog into its bun, pumps a line of ketchup and a line of mustard along its oily flank, then nestles the finished thing in a fluted paper rectangle. Sweetie then presents this hot dog to my adoptive mom.
I freeze. I watch.
Sera has often held forth on the thirty-nine different deadly carcinogens contained in cheap hot dogs such as the one she is holding now. The nitrates are implicated in esophageal and stomach cancer. The red dyes in systemic foul-ups, the binding agents are as bad as warfarin, and among the preservatives there is formaldehyde. And then there is the meat itself. Animal scourings. Neural and spinal material likely to contain the prions that transmit Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Hog lips, snout, anus, penile sheaths, jowls, inner ears. I don’t know how to rescue her. For that hot dog is an innocent gesture of pride and conciliation. It says so much. Thank you for raising my daughter. Thank you for sending her back to me. I am grateful for this chance and want to be friends. That hot dog says all this and more. Yet it is a chilling object, a powerful nexus of poisons representative of dumb, brutish animal suffering.
Sera raises the thing to her lips. I see her take a bite.
One bite. Another.
She eats the whole thing, smiles, and says, 'Thank you. That was good.'
Child, if ever I poke fun at or even gently deride my adoptive mom's fierce virtues, if you ever see me roll my eyes at one of her tirades or groan yeah, yeah when she makes a point I've heard a thousand times before, just remind me of that gas-station hot dog. The day she ate it all. It was a magnificent thing she did. I saw her, at that moment, as a hero.
Erdrich's characters, especially the women, display more dramatic feats of heroism. But it's the gas station scene that most resonates with me. Here in our disquieting world that is a legacy of the divisions Twain lays out so realistically, we need reminders that basic decency matters and is possible.
At the end of "Huckleberry Finn," we discover that Tom Sawyer, who arrives late in Twain's plot to indulge in an elaborate adventure to "free" Jim, has known all along that Old Miss Watson died months ago and emancipated the Black man in her will. It's chilling to consider Tom's selfishness -- his use of Jim for his own amusement is as cruel as Old Miss Watson's decision to sell Jim down the river, away from his family. Yes, shame at that decision moved her to free him, but she put it off until after her death. Twain dispenses with the callousness in just a few sentences. Perhaps he was as incapable as many of his characters of envisioning Jim as fully human being.
Grace and compassion are rare in "Huckleberry Finn," reflecting Twain’s misanthropic streak. At least the scenery is lovely -- Twain is known for elegiac landscape paintings in prose.
Novelist Percival Everett, who is Black, also loves the natural world. In the 1990s, Everett owned a southern California ranch where grew roses and tended horses, donkeys, and mules. He's also been a tracker and a cowboy, and remains a passionate fly fisher. But even today Black hikers or birdwatchers have to brace to justify their presence if they encounter racists in the wild, and for an escaped slave, the frontier idylls Twain described were booby-trapped. Sycamores bore the scars of lynching ropes. Any white person Jim might have encountered in the woods could transform him or herself into a slavecatcher. In his 2024 novel "James," Everett reimagines “Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of Jim.
Deep in the night from deep in the forest, I heard the barking and howling of hounds. I pulled myself into an even tighter ball atop the tree roots that had become my bed. There was a mama raccoon that lived in the tree. She had taken to walking past me nonchalantly in the darkness. Tonight she stayed in the tree, high above me, listening to the dogs. We were both animals and we didn’t know which of us was the prey. We accepted that we both were. I considered running, leaving my raccoon friend, but in which direction does one run from lightning?
Everett’s main character has learned to read and write at a time when a Black man could be whipped for aspiring to literacy. Everett, repeat reader of the oft-banned “Huckleberry Finn,” understands the transgressive and transformative power of reading and writing.
I really wanted to read. Though Huck was asleep, I could not chance his waking and discovering me with my face in an open book. Then I though, How could he know that I was actually reading? I could simply claim to be staring dumbly at the letters and words, wondering what in the world they meant. How could he know? At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.
In preparation for creating his version, Everett reread "Huckleberry Finn" 15 times. The acknowledgments page at the end of “James” includes a nod to Twain. Everett says Twain’s “humor and humanity affected me long before I became a writer.” That gave me pause.
I dug out my childhood copy of "Huckleberry Finn" to read again – just once – in preparation for reading “James.” I found “Huckleberry Finn” to be a harsh and pessimistic depiction of America. Perhaps I made too much of Twain’s acid criticism of human faults. I’m grateful to Everett, Erdrich and Jemison for helping me see Twain anew, as a writer whose compassion for the downtrodden fueled his anger at those responsible for injustice. There’s something very American in that.