Mark Twain Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Book review: Big Jim and the White Boy

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn reimagined

Even before illustrator Marcus Kwame Anderson gave a talk at the Albany Public Library on June 9, I was inclined to purchase his book Big Jim and the White Boy, written by David F. Walker. The 270+ page graphic novel is “an American classic reimagined.” Radically reimagined, to be sure. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is the book in question.

After the introductory page about Samuel Clemens, there are four pages that would lead one to believe they were illustrations from the Twain book. That is, until an old black man from 1932 Kansas says that that wasn’t the way it happened.

The story mostly bounces between the 1850s/1860s and the 1930s. Jim is searching for his kidnapped wife and children, accompanied by Huck. Their travels send them to the South and Midwest. The protagonists become multidimensional characters. Occasionally, the narrative detours into the 1980s and a professor/descendent of Jim fills in some of the connective tissue.

a marvel

Women Write About Comics notes: “Big Jim and the White Boy is a marvel of the graphic novel format. Not only does the creative team expertly wrangle four different timelines, but they’ve given the book several narrators who use the power of oral storytelling to share stories through the generations until it reaches us, the reader.”

Further: “In the original book, Jim was known only in relation to Huck. But in this book, through the eyes of Jim and his descendants, we see him as a strong man with a great deal of love for his mother, sister, wife, and children. We also see him as a man who opposes the subjugation to which he and his loved ones have been forced to live. This is a politically charged retelling that doesn’t hold back from the horrors of slavery—be it the physical violence, sexual abuse, lynchings, or family separations. The parts of slavery that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn glossed over drive much of the story here.

In 2024, Walker and Anderson were interviewed by NPR’s Scott Simon. They discuss the novel, including “how they turned Jim into a multidimensional character… and whether Huck and Jim were ever really friends.”

The N-word appears, though it is struck through in every case except one, but it is still readable. The author’s note describes this more: “I do not like the word, but it is important to the authenticity of the historical period in question, not to avoid it, offensive though it may be.”

I know Marcus through his work at the Underground Railroad Education Center.

The Mark Twain House – Hartford, CT

a/k/a Samuel Clemens

When we had to make a trip to Hartford, CT, my wife asked if we wanted to go to the Mark Twain House. I did not know there was a Twain house in Hartford, so naturally, I said yes.

From the website: “In 1873, Sam and Olivia Clemens engaged New York architect Edward Tuckerman Potter to design their Hartford Home… Their home measures 11,500 square feet and has 25 rooms distributed across three floors. It displayed the latest in modern innovations when it was built in 1874. The couple spent $40‚000 to $45‚000 building their new home‚ so once they moved in, they kept the interior simple. Mark Twain and his family enjoyed what the author would later call the happiest and most productive years of his life.”

Productive indeed, as this placard indicates, but also ultimately sad. I have to admit I haven’t read any of the major works written there, either Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. I did see the 1949 movie adaptation of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court years ago.

Coincidentally, though, a couple of weeks earlier, I saw Marcus Kwame Anderson do an illustrator talk at a Friends of the Albany Public Library, discussing his latest graphic novel, the Eisner-nominated Big Jim and the White Boy, scripted by David F. Walker. Marcus made the case for a class featuring Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, James by Percival Everett (2024), and the Walker/Anderson work. My wife has read James, and I purchased Big Jim.

I am a Twain fan. Particularly, I was taken by him taking on the imperialist tendencies of Teddy Roosevelt. I wrote about The War Prayer about a decade ago, and I sweear I bought a Twain collection at the time, but I cannot locate it currently.

The tour

There were a couple different tours of the house. The one we went on was the Living History Tour, led by a costumed actor who played one of the actual maids, played by a wonderful young woman named Lauryn.

The construct was that she only “knew” what had taken place in 1882 or earlier. So when she was asked about his international travel, she noted that he would “like” to go abroad in the future.

The one challenge was that there were about 40 steps up, and another 40 down. They weren’t too bad except the spiral steps heading down near the end of the tour.

The museum

There were lots of quotes built into the building. The one I remember most is, “”Always do right; this will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” My wife used this in her high school yearbook, to the dismay of one of her teachers.

Other creatives, notably Lee Krassner, were also represented. Most of the rooms were named for corporate sponsors. But one was named after actor Hal Holbrook, who portrayed Mark Twain for longer than Samuel Clemens did, who I had watched embody Twain on TV.

At the end, we watched a 23-minute about Twain, a summary of the four-hour PBS piece by Ken Burns from 2001.

Recommended.

My wife’s “summer off” – HA!

It’s her birthday!

My wife took the summer off from her job in a local tutoring program. You would not necessarily know it. When we were in Connecticut the last week of June, she received a call from a parent over an issue. This is not a singular event. When we were out at a concert at Albany’s Palace Theatre a couple of months ago, the same thing. We’ve gone out to dinner at restaurants at least twice in 2026, and she has to take a call.

Am I jealous? Nah, it’s important work. Okay, maybe a little bit jealous.

Her primary non-work task is taking care of her mom, which is surely a part-time job in its own right. She’s my MIL’s primary health care and fiscal proxy. All of MIL’s mail now comes to our house; just sorting it can be a task. In the spring, my MIL had to go to the hospital for a couple of days, then to a rehab center for nearly two months. Should MIL move to another facility? (That’s a whole ‘nother conversation.)

My wife also has had some personal financial decisions that got shoved to the last minute.

Define “fun”

Someone asked us what we’re doing for fun this summer. Other than going to the annual family reunion we just got back from, and seeing one concert, I’m not feeling it.

We ought to tackle the storage units we got for MIL’s stuff a couple of years ago. The house needs deep cleaning. These do NOT feel like “fun” tasks.

My wife has about a month remaining on her “vacation.” Maybe something will pop up. The picture of Mark Twain FLIRTING with my wife – or maybe it’s the other way around! – happened because we were going to the celebration of life of the ex-husband of a good friend, so we left for Hartford, CT, a couple of hours early. (I’ll have to write about it.)

Anyway, it’s my wife’s birthday today. I THINK we’ll do something fun today. Last week, she had an appointment every weekday. No, we’ll do SOMETHING; after all, it’s also our lunaversary.

Q is for a Famous Quotation

My late father used to say, fairly frequently as I recall, this quotation: “It is better to remain silent and be thought of as a a fool than to speak up and remove any doubt.”

But who was he quoting? I couldn’t find anything in Bartelby or Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, the latter, in print form, a constant source of my entertainment growing up.

Finally, I found a similar quotation at Quote Investigator. Was it attributed to Abraham Lincoln? Mark Twain? A Biblical Proverb?

“There is a biblical proverb that expresses a similar idea, namely Proverbs 17:28. Here is the New International Version followed by the King James Version of this verse:

“‘Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent, and discerning if he holds his tongue.’

“‘Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.'”

After dismissing Lincoln and Twain because the attributions to them were so much after their time, and noting the Proverbs have not quite the same sentiment, QI favors Maurice Switzer, from a “book titled ‘Mrs. Goose, Her Book’… The publication date was 1907 and the copyright notice was 1906. The book was primarily filled with clever nonsense verse, and the phrasing in this early version was slightly different:

“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”

This all begs the question, Is it true? Do people actually think you’re smart if you retain a mysterious silence? Perhaps; this does not appear to be a period in history when a lot goes unsaid. That apparent need to always say SOMETHING is often to the detriment of the speaker, and, quite often, of us all.

Rather off topic, but LISTEN to the Tremeloes sing Silence is Golden.

For ABC Wednesday

Mark Twain on war, patriotism and religion

We may not understand fully our prayers of war.

Reading Jesus for President, by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw, I found a quote, noted by a soldier named Logan, who returned from Iraq, with a date for another deployment set.

“After six years in the military, he felt the collision of the cross and the sword and felt like he was trying to ‘serve two masters’…. Logan decided to file for conscientious status.” Because the military thought he was crazy, he got out of the service.

In a subsequent letter to the book authors, writing about his “redemptive work of reconciliation,” Logan included a quote from Mark Twain called The War Prayer, described as “a short story or prose poem… a scathing indictment of war, and particularly of blind patriotic and religious fervor as motivations for war… The piece was left unpublished by Mark Twain at his death in April 1910, largely due to pressure from his family, who feared that the story would be considered sacrilegious.” It was finally published in 1923, nearly twenty years after it was written.

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and sputtering;… a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun… in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country and invoked the God of Battles, beseeching His aid in our good cause…

Then The Stranger speaks:

“I come from the Throne — bearing a message from Almighty God!” The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. “He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import — that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of — except he pause and think.

We may not understand fully our prayers for war.

You can read the whole thing HERE.

See an animated rendition HERE or HERE.

A film reenactment an epilogue to the Public Television 1981 production: A Private History of A Campaign That Failed, with Edward Herrmann as the stranger, you can view HERE. Yet another iteration can be found HERE.

One more quote from Twain, in a speech from October 1907: “We build a fire in a powder magazine, then double the fire department to put it out. We inflame wild beasts with the smell of blood, and then innocently wonder at the wave of brutal appetite that sweeps the land as a consequence.”

Armed Forces Day is Saturday, May 16.