Work Text:
I wasn’t plannin’ to ever talk about my life. My life’s done been talked about by more men than I rightly know what to do with. And ain’t it all been written down, from one end of the universe to th’other? I ain’t never been a man with much ambition. All I had in mind was keepin’ my head above water and out of a noose, keepin’ my family together so my babies didn’t grow up with no daddy, so’s my wife didn’t face the rest o’ her days without no one to look at her and see a person inside instead of a Negro slave. We was Negroes, and we was slaves, but we was people, too.
So how I got in a book that’s been read all over the country and been thrown out of schoolhouses and libraries and brought back in, time and again, is a mystery I ain’t never gonna solve. I blame it on that boy that was with me, Huck Finn, who did nothin’ he was supposed to, up to and includin’ turnin’ right around and takin’ me back to the place where I weren’t nothin’ but a Negro slave. It scared him some, I reckon, but he looked at me and seen a person. He told me one time, a long time after our adventures was finished, when he’d grown up into a young man, that he’d looked at me and thought, Jim, he may be a Negro on the outside, but on the inside, he’s white. I just knows it.
Now I ain’t sayin’ Huck’s right—as far as I know, I am black as the soil of the Mississippi Delta through and through—but I get what he was sayin’. He was sayin’ that he could see that we ain’t that different. That inside, I was a person, with as much personhood as a white fella.
I told my wife about it when I found her again, when I found I was a free man with nothin’ but the whole world to bind me. She snorted and said Jim, what good’s it do you to be white on the inside when it’s all that black on the outside that’s keepin’ us where we is?
I just smiled and told her, Well now, Sadie, it ain’t the outside that matters, the way I hear ’em tell it down in the old church house. Even white men say it. One o’ these days, they’s gonna believe it with they own ears, and we’s gonna be treated just as good as Widow Douglas.
She cuffed me on the ear like I was one of our babies misbehavin’, but she wasn’t meetin’ my eyes none. And finally, she turned around and said, Jim, them’s pretty dreams, but don’t go gettin’ my hopes up, and Lord ha’ mercy, don’t go tellin’ those cotton-headed dreams to the babies.
Sadie, I says, sometimes hope is all we got. An’ hope, it ain’t colored—it ain’t black or white or red or yellow. It’s just hope, and we got as much right to it as anybody else.
So I ain’t talkin’ about my life. Enough people’s already done that, and I ain’t got nothin’ more to add. I’m just thankful that I got my life, and I still got my family, and even if it is the fault of a boy who sees things the way they ain’t—and the way they really is.