SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" has been praised, popular, banned and assailed since it was published in 1884. It's been called bold, lyrical and anti-racist and also a profane book that promotes racial stereotypes. Huck, Jim and their travels have been reimagined in a new graphic novel, "Big Jim And The White Boy." David Walker has written the story, and Marcus Kwame Anderson, the illustrator, join us now. Gentlemen, thank you both for being with us.
DAVID WALKER: Thanks for having us.
MARCUS KWAME ANDERSON: Yeah, thank you.
SIMON: Let me ask you both, beginning with you, Mr. Walker, and then Marcus Kwame Anderson. Why was it vital to you to reimagine the story of Huck Finn and Jim?
WALKER: You know, I mean, I read "Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn" when I was probably 10 or 11 years old and saw at least one or two of the movies. And while I enjoyed them, you know, for myself, as a young Black kid, Jim felt sort of one-dimensional. He didn't feel like a fully formed character. And it just sort of stuck with me. And then, as I grew as a creator, as a writer, it was just an idea. I was like, I'd like to tell the story of Jim in a way that I would love to see it or love to read it as opposed to what I was given when I was a child.
ANDERSON: You know, it was important for a lot of the same reasons - just adding to the completeness of the history that we're telling, adding pieces that weren't necessarily present in the original story.
SIMON: Have you turned "Huckleberry Finn" into an action - an adventure story?
WALKER: I think so, yeah. I mean, part of it is, I just love to see the way Marcus draws action and adventure in, you know, the comic form. And, you know, you want to see some fight sequences and fun things like that. And so I wanted to make sure that this book would not be boring to people.
ANDERSON: Yeah, absolutely. I had a lot of, you know, fun portraying the action and adventure, and it adds a certain dynamic element to the story that keeps it interesting, along with all of the history. It also conveys the danger of the world that Jim is operating and moving through. You know, so, to us, it just felt natural for that action to be there.
SIMON: I was going to ask you, Mr. Anderson, Jim's a superhero in this telling, isn't he?
ANDERSON: He's a superhero, but he is a mortal man. And, you know, one of the things that I speak about when I speak about, you know, the history of enslaved people and Black people in this country - every individual was making impossible choices and decisions every day. And so with that, there was a certain level of resourcefulness that everybody had to have. It's, like, the perfect opportunity to take this character of Jim, who was so underutilized, and to also add these other dimensions and, yeah, make him a folk hero. It was a fun challenge.
SIMON: He's searching for his family, too, isn't he?
ANDERSON: Yeah. The core mission for their adventure is to find his family.
SIMON: Yeah. David Walker, I was, among many lines, struck by one in which Jim says - and I'll quote your words - "hell, you can't be a Negro in this country and not know how to put on a show, especially back then. So that's what I did. I put on a show."
WALKER: Yeah, that was - you know, not that I would ever compare myself to James Baldwin, but I think that that was me channeling my - all the influences that James Baldwin had. And when you just study the history of enslaved Africans and their descendants in this country, they had to present themselves in a way to white people that made the people who owned them and who were oppressing them feel comfortable and safe. These are some of the things that my grandfather or my grandmother would talk to me about, the things that they had to do growing up in the Jim Crow South.
SIMON: I want to approach this carefully, but ask you both. You use the N-word in this book, and I won't give away how, but you say it is important that that word not be banned or scrubbed from our language. Why?
WALKER: Well, you know, we had some very serious conversations about this early on in the production of the book, and part of it is that that word was so commonly used for a long time. And when you're talking about something that's set within the context of slavery and the Civil War, I think it's important that we get into some of the more harsh, darker realities of that time and not try to change it, not trying to sugarcoat it. And when we're telling narratives that are dealing with the enslaved, I think the last thing we should be doing is trying to do the Margaret Mitchell effect.
We shouldn't be trying to do what she did with "Gone With The Wind," which is to make it seem like every slave was complacent and happy with their scenario and that slave owners were really, truly great people who loved their property. That's how the enslaved were treated. They were property. They were treated as less than human. And I think that anything that we do as creators that tries to lessen that impact really becomes a disservice to the real-life people who went through terrible things.
SIMON: Let me ask you both, are Huck and Jim truly friends, or is there just too much that separates them from that?
ANDERSON: That's an interesting question because Mark Twain, at the time when he was writing his story - many of his characters were based on real people, one of them being Daniel Quarles, who was an enslaved man who was owned by Mark Twain's uncle. You know, as much as Mark Twain considered him to be a friend, there is a barrier. When we think about our friendships, it's very much based on agency and choice. You know, that's one of the central problems with slavery, is a lack of agency. So in our story, I would say that they are friends.
WALKER: Yeah, I agree with Marcus. That was a decision that I had to make as a writer and that I had to make sure that Marcus was able to convey visually. And it was a question that I asked myself going into it - not only, you know, the question of in Twain's book, were they truly friends? They refer to each other as friends, but then I had to ask myself, well, what - in my mind, what would that friendship look like? What is their - the true nature of their relationship? And I do believe that they have a complex relationship that I think comes through the art, through the visuals, just through the body language and the facial expressions that we see as they're regarding each other.
But I think there's so much complexity to the human experience and to so many things tied around slavery. But at the end of the day, these are two people that are willing to die for each other. They've been through the worst experiences that anyone can go through, and they've survived it. And that's what I think makes them compelling characters, but also characters that truly love and care about each other.
SIMON: "Big Jim And The White Boy" is the new graphic novel written by David Walker, illustrated by Marcus Kwame Anderson. Thank you both so much for being with us.
WALKER: Thank you.
ANDERSON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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