#613 Rivers- John Keene
This is a great idea for a story, and very executed. If written by somebody else about a more modern topic, I suppose this would fall under the genre of “Fan Fiction” but I wouldn’t dare call this that. Seeing as Keene is a professional, maybe it’s “Peer Fiction.” In any case, this is a story about a famous fictional character, Mr. James Alton Rivers, aka Jim Watson, or the “slave” that was on the raft with Huckleberry Finn.
He is a freed man now, and runs into Huck and Tom Sawyer in the street. They are now in their early 20’s. Tom is a proper southern gentleman and a lawyer, Huck is still a bit of a troublemaker and an adventurer. They start talking about their lives and it becomes clear right off that Tom has no interest in seeing Jim as anything but an inferior person. Jim sees this and decides not to tell him about his life, his travels to Chicago, St. Louis, becoming a shrewd businessman, etc.
The country is on the brink of the civil war and race tensions are high and Tom has certainly taken a side on the matter. Jim is probably smart not to talk about his family escaping north, or the reality of living in the shadow of the Dred Scott case for instance.
“Though I’ve always made sure to have an escape route and a safe house on the other side of the river ready to flee given the trials the courts are putting Mr. Dred and Mrs. Lizzie Scott through.”
Tom and Huck are the ones to bring up the name of Abolitionist heroes:
“Well sounds to me like Jim is keeping himself out of trouble, and the worst thing for anybody these days is getting caught up in all that trouble, getting involved with people like Lovejoy or Torrey or that new agitator writer Mrs. Stowe what likes to stir up a whole heap of trouble too.”
Before parting we see the two youths as something different, and Keene I think writes them as two white archetypes in the struggle for racial equality. This is illustrated by the warnings Tom and Huck each give Jim as they say goodbye. Tom’s warning is straight out “know your place:”
“You’d better watch yourself, Jim, you hear me? Good thing we know you but you walking these streets like they belong to you, and they don’t to no nigger, no matter what some of you might think these days, so you watch it, cause the time’ll come when even the good people like me and Huck here have had enough.”
Huck’s warning is softer, and if not coming from a friend necessarily, it’s at least from a fond acquaintance; one that doesn’t want to see harm come but also doesn’t want to get involved:
“You take care of yourself, Jim, and keep out of all that trouble, please, cause this world is about ready to break wide open, and I sure don’t want to see you swallowed up.”
Overall I think this story is brilliant. The allegory wrapped-up in characters we are acquainted with is a great idea. Keene fills-in a perspective to the Mark Twain story that historians and critics have complained are missing in the original tales. I’m not sure if this story works as well without the original, but I think it would be great if this story was read side by side in schools (or like I’ve said earlier teaching Henry Dumas side by side with Twain to show two different perspectives on classic Americana).
No comments:
Post a Comment