Favorite quote: "Take the bacon and get back in the canoe," (Page 44) It's such a small line, yet it's notable for being one of the first moments Jim accidentally slips up. It's a clue to Huck that Jim is not all he makes himself out to be and signifies how much the dead body shakes him.

Question: When, if at all, will Huck figure out how intelligent Jim truly is?

Themes:

Performance: Enslaved people in the book are in a constant performance with their masters, putting on silly voices and acting stupid in order to avoid incurring their wrath. Jim is a great actor, pretending to be a fool while hiding someone who could debate people considered geniuses. But the act slowly breaks in contact with Huck, who he occasionally lets the mask slip for.

Favorite Quote: "I had to make sure Huck didn't become the corpse they were looking for. More to the point, I had to make certain I didn't become the corpse they were looking for."

I think this quote does a good job at summarizing the serious predicament the two have gotten themselves in. It also does a good job at strengthening the relationship between the two. Jim thinking of Huck's health before thinking of himself makes him seem more of a father figure than just a good friend.

Question: Why is Jim still talking like a person with poor education? We know he can speak and write elegantly and he has no more reason to put up an act.

Themes: The themes in this section can be Man vs nature and racism. Racism was really prevalent during the early chapters and is the reason for Jim running away; Jim was a slave who was going to be sold. The two instances of Man vs nature in this section would be the time when Jim was bitten by a snake and when it began to rain heavily. The snake bite causes Jim intense fever and great fatigue. Jim was forced to cut the wound and suck out poisoned blood to avoid a more serious injury. The rain sweeps away a house and kills a white man while Huck and Jim survive through a canoe.

Favorite Quote: "Somehow that word seemed strange coming out of Huck's mouth. I think he heard it, too, because we shared an awkward silence." It's a key moment between the two characters where they still try to play the roles society has enforced upon them and made normal, with Huck demeaning Jim and Jim silently taking it. Yet in that moment, it's not normal. Huck doesn't feel good using such demeaning language to someone he considers a friend, while Jim feels strange hearing that word coming out of the boy he'd been helping for so long. Nothing immediately comes of it, but those two lines are very interesting for how it demonstrates how Huck and Jim do not feel right upholding the norms of society outside of its views, yet cannot truly break them despite the isolation.

Question:

Did the Duke and King know each other beforehand?

What will Jim's time with Easter look like?

Will the townsfolk catch up to the Duke and King?

Themes:

Performance: Huck and Jim are still playing with their roles, with Jim's slip-ups becoming a bit more common and Huck beginning to catch on. But now we have the Duke and King, two fraudsters who are deliberately always putting on a show to everyone, pulling cons and enacting deception for their own means. Rather than performing to satiate social norms, like Jim or Huck, they perform to exploit others, such as their attempt to act as a revivalist preacher to swindle the townsfolk out of their money.

Favorite Quote: "You were talkin'--I don't know--you didn't sound like no slave." (Page 99)

I think this quote will prove to be much more significant later on but it shows the first break in Jim's character that he puts on. He doesn't actually talk with an accent but only does so around white folks. But in a moment of rejoice, his character breaks and he talks to a white boy with formal English.

Question: Do you think Jim will fully ever break character and just start speaking to Huck with proper English?

Themes: For this section, a major theme could be reunions. Jim and Huck were separated after they were knocked into the water by a larger boat. This forced Him to go on a mini adventure which ended with him hearing Huck's voice calling for a girl named Sophia. Not only do the two end up finding each other again but they also recover their lost canoe by some miracle.

Favorite Quote: "It's never occurred to them that we might find them mockable." It's just a nice line that encapsulates how people like Jim, Norman, or other enslaved people have gone so long without their true intelligence being noticed. Racism is so strong and blinding that not even the most blatant mockeries could ever be noticed by white people.

Questions: How will Jim escape from Henderson? Will Jim and Henderson buy the freedoms of their families? Will Jim ever catch up to Huck? Will Emmett catch up to Jim and Norman?

Themes:

Performance and masquerade: The idea all comes to head with Emmet and the minstrel show. Jim and Norman, a black man and a black man passing for white respectively, are a part of a group pretending to be white people pretending to be black people in order to mock black people. It's the height of irony and absurdity.

Hypocrisy of the virtuous: Beyond the critiques of Voltaire and Locke, there's also Emmet, a seemingly amiable figure who is ostensibly anti-slavery. But despite his seeming opposition to the practice, he is just as racist as his fellows. He sings songs to mock black people and, when Jim runs away, screams with rage while revealing his view of Jim as his personal property.

Favorite Quote: Norman looked to see that Cassidy had wandered away. 'And you can drop the slave talk.'" This quote refers to when Norman, a black man disguised as a white man, sees through Jim's false diction. It's nice to see more talk about the slave talk Jim does and how he's getting pushed to drop it entirely.

Question: Do you think Jim will ever drop his slave talk? Even around white folks?

What do you think will happen to Huck?

Themes: A major theme I noticed is hypocrisy and it's most noticeable in Emmet. When introduced to Emmet, we learn that he "hates" slavery. However, we later get to see some of the songs he performs and most of the lyrics are just mocking black people. Furthermore, he has his group dress up for songs and they use blackface as a costume.

When Jim tells Huck that he is the boy's father, everything that has happened so far finally comes into focus. Jim is not only looking out for Huck because he's just a boy with a troubled family life who is looking for some direction in life. He is also the man's son, by birth if not by actual relation, and deep down, Jim was willing to protect Huck at the cost of a friend's life. Because if nothing else, Jim cares about his family. Beyond his own freedom, his journey was motivated by a burning desire to free his wife and child, and his putting-up with Huck was driven by a similar instinct.

Favorite Quote:

"'She was dead when I found her,' I said. 'She's just now died again, but this time she died free.'"

Though it may feel like an empty rationalization for what happened, those scant hours when Sammy had escaped were probably the best in her entire life. Born as chattel and treated worse than an animal, she had her entire life dictated for her and treated as an object. In a sense, she was denied life before the bullet broke her flesh and stopped her heart. Sammy's tale is a pointless tragedy. She is introduced, we are cursed with the knowledge of her past, and then she is killed before she can even enjoy a week of freedom. But that is the point. That's what slavery is. It's a pointless tragedy, generation after generation of atrocity and abuse all in the name of upholding a system of power and wealth. Millions died nameless to the abuses of slavers, their stories forever cut short. Their impact was reduced to but numbers in the profit charts or an old bill of sale.

Question:

How much of the original book's ending will they keep? Because in the original book, Jim was freed by Miss Watson's will. If it does happen, what will Jim feel about it? Will he be happy? Or will it be a hollow sort of joy as he is finally freed, but only by the dying will of the person who owned him, with his freedom still being dependent on the whims of white people and a slave-owning society?

Themes:

Pointless tragedy/Bookends: In the end, after all Jim has been through, he is once more traveling with Huck in an aimless journey, with the vague objectives of finding freedom for him and his family. For all of his escapes and his joining with Norman and Sammy, it was rendered moot. Norman and Sally died and he lived. It is a tragedy brought by the world they live in. Norman's death in particular is a prime example of a classic tragedy, one in which our hero's strongest trait is their downfall. Jim, if nothing else, loves his family. And Huck is his son. And he would and did let everyone else drown so he could save his son. Even his friend. And so he is back only a bit farther from where he started, fishing for catfish with Huck.

When James kills Hopkins, it is really his first outward and unabashed assault against the system of slavery. Rather than a subversion under guise or an attempt of escape, James is straight up murdering a slave overseer, a perpetrator of cruelty against slaves and one he had to personally witness violating someone. When Hopkins died, so too did the servile slave who cowered in fear of his oppressors. In other words, when he kills Hopkins, it is when Jim dies and James is born.

Favorite Quote:

"Jim?"

"James," I said.

It is four words, but those four words are the end of James' journey, the culmination of generations of abuse and atrocity that inspires the man to break the masquerade and seize his own freedom. In other words, it's a powerful moment that says more with less, showing how James has reclaimed his identity and refuses to play along with the performance of 'slave talk' anymore.

Question:

Who in the world is Cunegonde? I know that her conversation with James is meant to be a sort of nod to the reality of post-abolition (that of continued oppression through Jim Crow laws, sharecropping, redlining, and every other form of racism meant to keep black people as lesser), but what else?

Themes:

Rebellion: After all of his journeying and attempts, James realizes that he cannot subvert the system of slavery to get his family back. No amount of clever schemes of running around to earn money will work because the system does not work in his favor. It never did. So, he rejects it outright. He breaks one of the most cardinal taboos in the system of slavery: Talking like a white person to a white person. (It's noted that Thatcher cares about how James is talking more than how he is holding a gun to his head.) With the knowledge that it doesn't matter whether or not he abides by the rules, he breaks them brazenly in order to save his family. And so, in around 30 pages, James does what he couldn't in 270.

Ending thoughts:

James takes a lot of liberties in the ending, diverging from the original's events for the sake of a more powerful narrative. It makes a lot of sense thematically. For if James was freed by the will of Miss Watson, it would undercut literally everything the story had been setting up to that point. Having James free his own family through casting aside the mask that had been forced upon him by a racial caste system and using violence to break said system forged by violence is much more in line with the book's ideas of freedom.