My Jim

A spare and beautiful meditation on love and longing, My Jim holds an unrelenting gaze on the life and world of Sadie, the wife of Jim from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

“Rawles covers territory Twain did not. . . . As heart-wrenching a personal history as any recorded in American literature.”—The New York Times Book Review

Written in the great literary tradition of novels like Sula, My Jim considers the historically important question What happened to those enslaved persons who didn’t escape? by investigating the fictional world of Sadie Watson, a formerly enslaved woman. In her old age, she narrates a tale pieced together from her life born in slavery as a means to help her granddaughter decide on whether to marry her love and move away.

As Sadie tells her granddaughter her love story, she paints a beautiful and complex portrait of her Jim—a gifted seer, a man of wit and charisma. When faced with the prospect of being sold, Jim escapes down the Mississippi with a white boy named Huck Finn. Reviled as a witch, punished for Jim’s escape, and convinced he has died, Sadie must rely on her own will, the objects she has carried from her past, and her love for Jim to animate her life and see her through.

A nuanced critique of the great American novel that mirrors the true story of countless enslaved women, My Jim is a haunting and inspiring story about inheritance, longing, and the liberating power of Black love in a world that did everything to extinguish it.