Shelley Fisher Fishkin copied me on her message to the Forum. I see that the message in the Forum got code-smacked, so I’m forwarding her message from my email to see if it gets through:
Thank you so much for these comments, Kevin — especially your concluding remark that “Jim was merely a good-hearted and smart man that had been deprived of an education, who knew what it took to survive in the white world of his day.”
A useful strategy for conveying this in the classroom is
(a) having students do a staged reading of the version of Chapter 2 of Huckleberry Finn that appears in Ralph Wiley’s screenplay, “Spike Lee’s ‘Huckleberry Finn.’” and
(b) ask them to reread the book starting from the premise—in every scene—that Jim is smart, even if Huck doesn’t know that.
I had a former Green Beret in my class last term. The strategy I just outlined prompted him to write me an email after class in which he said “I was (almost literally) knocked out of my chair today.”
Part (b) of the above plan is key. But since part (a) is also key, and since for some reason in the article I wrote about Wiley’s screenplay that was posted years ago on the website of the Mark Twain Circular [http://faculty.citadel.edu/leonard/od99wiley.htm], the link to the scenes from the screenplay no longer functions, I will try to paste the scene to which I refer below:
7, 7A, 8, 9]
From “Spike Lee’s Huckleberry Finn” by Ralph Wiley
© copyright 1997 Ralph Wiley, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Printed with permission of the author. May be reproduced for classroom use only. WGA-E Registered #107314-00
7. EXT. WIDOW DOUGLAS HOME. REAR. NIGHT. –Huck scrambles out of the window onto the roof of attached shed. He jumps down and crawls back among the trees and underbrush behind the house and there is Tom, grinning. They tiptoe along a path among the trees. Passing the back of the corral, where Jim sits, using an awl on what appears to be a doll’s head. Huck steps on a dry branch and it snaps. At this sound, Jim surreptitiously puts away the doll-object and picks up a rack of tallow candles; his head comes up as he begins to snap them off.
JIM
Who dah?
The boys bend over, stock-still, grimacing, then hide behind separate trees. We can see that Jim catches a glimpse of them. Jim walks back into the foliage with two candles, and stops in a space between the two trees. Only a fool would not have seen the boys. So Jim pretends to be one.
JIM
Say—who is you? Whar is you? Well, I knows what I’s gon’ do. I’s
gon’ set down heah…ahh!…and listen till I hears it agin.
Jim sits down on a natural seat under the tree. Huck is on the other side. Huck shuts his eyes tight. Jim settles into a comfortable position, puts his hat on the ground and sighs contentedly.
7a. EXT. MOON SHOT. SILVERY RIVER. NIGHT.
8. EXT. TREES. NIGHT. – Huck hears heavy breathing from the other side, begins to peer around the tree. We see Jim, eyes slitted open, obviously awake, feigning sleep, as he continues to make the sound of a man deep in slumber. Tom Sawyer’s cap begins to emerge from the other side of the opposite tree. Jim’s eyes close effortlessly. Tom makes a sign to Huck; he and Huck creep away on their hands and knees in opposite directions away from the trees.
9. EXT. MEDIUM SHOT. JIM UNDER TREE. NIGHT. –Through the foliage we can see Jim, Huck and Tom’s profiles enter from opposite sides of the shot, close-up. They look at each other, then back at Jim, then back to each other.
TOM
Let’s tie him to the tree.
HUCK
No, let’s don’t. S’pose he wakes up? It’s my bust, not yourn.
TOM
Go on ahead. I’ll happen to borrow some ’a them candles from Jim.
Huck slips off.
NARRATOR
Nothing would do Tom but he must crawl to where Jim was, and
play something on him. Tom didn’t borry the candles, he left
Jim a nickel for them…he also slipped Jim’s hat on a limb.
Tom creeps up to Jim and picks up the candles and leaves a nickel, turns to go, but is unable to resist a trick. He picks up Jim’s hat and places it on the limb of a tree, and then, with a look of glee, races off to catch Huck. As he goes, Jim smiles and opens his eyes, looks down and smiles at the nickel even more affectionately. He palms the nickel; then calmly looks up and takes his hat off the limb of the tree, puts it on his head, and walks away, all action as Narrator says…
NARRATOR
Afterwards, Jim said witches bewitched him, put him in a
trance and rode him all over the State, and then set him under
the tree again and hung his hat on a limb to show who done it.
Next time Jim told it, he said they rode him down to New Or-leans.
Next time it was all the way ‘round the world. Strange niggers came
From miles away to hear Jim talk about it. Jim, he was most ruined
For a servant, he got so stuck up, on account of having seen the
Devil…
10. EXT. HILLSIDE. NIGHT. – Seven boys, including Huck and Tom, run along the hillside, in the moonlight. Tom stops and howls like a wolf at the silvery moon.
NARRATOR
…and been rode by witches.
=====================
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities
Professor of English
Director of American Studies
Co-Director, Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project
Stanford University
[log in to unmask]
On Feb 13, 2018, at 10:17 AM, Kevin Mac Donnell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Somebody asked privately about what Booker T Washington had said about HF, so I’ve added another snippet from my essay. To read the entire essay I suggest getting your hands on a copy of Rasmussen’s book, HF Critical Insights:
Praise from prominent authors and public figures continued after Mark Twain's death in 1910. Contributing a letter to a tribute in the North American Review, the African American educator Booker T. Washington focused on the character Jim, saying that Mark Twain "succeeded in making his readers feel a genuine respect for Jim, in spite of the ignorance [Jim] displays" and in doing so that Mark Twain "exhibited his sympathy and interest in the masses of the negro people" (Washington 829).
Here endeth the snippets. That’s all I said in the essay, due to space constraints. I will add that I find it interesting that 20th century readers are often upset that Jim is portrayed the way he is, but that Booker T Washington was not. I suppose that as an educator, BTW fully understood the ignorance imposed on blacks during centuries of slavery, and understood, as did Twain, that Jim was not stupid. Jim was merely a good-hearted and smart man that had been deprived of an education, who knew what it took to survive in the white world of his day.
Kevin
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