718 Jim - The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade (with Shelley Fisher Fishkin) | Mark Twain's Dreams

Summary

The History of Literature Podcast: Episode 718 Summary

Episode Title:
The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade (with Shelley Fisher Fishkin) | Mark Twain's Dreams

Host:
Jacke Wilson, The Podglomerate

Guest:
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Professor at Stanford University and author of Writing Literary Landmarks, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices, and The Life and After Lives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade.

Release Date:
July 21, 2025

---

1. Introduction and Mark Twain's Prevalent Theme of Dreams [00:00 – 14:00]

Jack Wilson opens the episode by highlighting the current resurgence of interest in Mark Twain, particularly focusing on the theme of dreams. He introduces Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a leading Twain scholar, to discuss her new book that explores Jim, Huck Finn's companion, and his significance both in Twain's time and subsequent interpretations.

Notable Quote:

“It would have been a powerful book to write.”
—Jack Wilson [14:00]

2. Mark Twain's Precognitive Dream and Its Impact [14:00 – 42:00]

Jack delves into a fascinating aspect of Mark Twain’s life—a precognitive dream about his brother Henry's death. He references an article by Robert Moss, explaining how Twain dreamed of Henry’s demise in precise detail before it tragically occurred. This event deeply affected Twain, instilling in him a sense of fate and possibly influencing his literary themes.

Notable Quote:

“His handsome face was untouched, and the kindly lady volunteers were so moved by his beauty and innocence that they gave him the best casket, a metal box.”
—Narrative on Twain’s shadowed dream [28:45]

Jack reflects on the mystery of such dreams and their connection to reality, pondering over time, fate, and the human psyche. He also touches upon Twain’s association with the Society for Psychical Research, hinting at his evolving beliefs post-tragedy.

3. Contemporary Reverberations: Conan O’Brien's Mark Twain Prize Speech [42:00 – 72:00]

Jack shifts focus to modern-day acknowledgments of Twain’s legacy, specifically Conan O’Brien receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. He recounts parts of Conan’s speech, emphasizing Twain’s enduring principles—especially his empathy, disdain for hypocrisy, and championing of the underprivileged.

Notable Quote:

“Twain was allergic to hypocrisy and he loathed racism.”
—Conan O’Brien in his Mark Twain Prize Speech [60:25]

Conan’s speech underscores Twain’s relevance today, highlighting his commitment to social justice and his belief that humor can be a vessel for profound societal critique.

4. In-Depth Discussion with Shelley Fisher Fishkin: Jim's Legacy in "Huckleberry Finn" [72:00 – 96:17]

After a brief interlude with advertisements, Shelley Fisher Fishkin joins the conversation to discuss her book and the character of Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She explores how Twain created Jim as a multidimensional character, challenging contemporary racial prejudices and providing a powerful representation of African American voices.

Key Points:

• Sociable Jimmy: An early influence on Twain, a child whose storytelling inspired the vernacular voice of Huck Finn.
• Narrative Voice: Jim’s dialect is a deliberate choice by Twain to portray authenticity and depth, contrasting with minstrel stereotypes.
• Post-Civil War Racism: The novel addresses lingering racism and the failed promises of Reconstruction, reflecting Twain’s critique of American society.

Notable Quotes:

“Twain is turning that judgment, that ruler on its head and showing us that education and book learning are no indicators of what kind of a person you are.”
—Shelley Fisher Fishkin on character portrayal [65:06]

“Jim has been hiding in plain sight.”
—Shelley Fisher Fishkin on Jim’s enduring presence [74:10]

Fishkin emphasizes the evolving interpretations of Jim’s character across different cultures and eras, noting how translations and adaptations reflect societal changes and persistent racial issues.

5. Jim's Afterlives: Cultural Interpretations and Modern Relevance [96:17 – End]

Shelley discusses the various "afterlives" of Jim, exploring how different societies have reinterpreted his character in literature, film, and education. She highlights Soviet adaptations that used Jim to symbolize interracial solidarity and modern translations that strive to respect his dignity without resorting to demeaning stereotypes.

Notable Quote:

“Jim speaks 67 languages. You know, we can read him in 67 languages.”
—Shelley Fisher Fishkin on Jim’s global influence [86:05]

She also draws parallels between Jim’s struggles in the novel and ongoing racial tensions today, advocating for a continued critical engagement with Twain’s work to address current societal issues.

6. Conclusion: The Enduring Power of Twain's Message [96:17 – End]

Jack wraps up the episode by reflecting on the profound impact of Twain’s work and the continued relevance of his themes in contemporary society. He expresses gratitude to Shelley for her insightful contributions and teases the next episode focused on F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Notable Quote:

“It's going to be as engaging as he found this 10 year old black child in Paris, Illinois.”
—Jack Wilson on the significance of Jim’s character [49:04]

Jack also invites listeners to join the upcoming History of Literature podcast tour in England and previews the next episode on Fitzgerald’s lesser-known works.

---

Additional Highlights:

• Twain’s Evolution on Race: Shelley details how Twain transitioned from holding segregationist views in his youth to becoming a staunch advocate for interracial brotherhood, influenced by his marriage into an abolitionist family and friendships with figures like Frederick Douglass.

• Satire and Morality: The discussion underscores Twain’s use of satire in Huckleberry Finn to critique moral hypocrisy, portraying the societal norms through Huck’s innocent yet critical perspective.

• Modern Interpretations: Shelley addresses contemporary critiques of Jim’s character, debunking misconceptions that Twain intended to demean African Americans, and emphasizes that Jim remains a deeply human and admirable figure.

---

Final Thoughts:

Episode 718 of The History of Literature offers a rich exploration of Mark Twain’s enduring legacy through the lens of Huckleberry Finn. With expert analysis from Shelley Fisher Fishkin, listeners gain a deeper understanding of Jim’s character, Twain’s social critiques, and the novel’s lasting influence on American literature and society.

For more insights and to support the show, visit historyofliterature.com.

Transcript

[Jack Wilson]

The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hey folks, it's Jack. Here to promote something that's a little special. Not a thing and not a service, an opportunity for you to have an experience. The History of Literature Podcast is going on the road and you can join us. Our first stop is literary England, the land of Dr. Johnson and Jane Austen and Tolkien and C.S. lewis. Oh, and Dickens. Oh, and Shakespeare. Perhaps you've heard of him. This isn't a trip where you march from site to site checking off boxes. Seen it, seen it, seen it, seen it. This is a week plus a little more traveling with me and Emma and a group of other fans of literature. All of us enjoying our conversations, our chance to learn and grow and be inspired by these writers and their works that we love so much. With special visits along the way from past guests of the show, your favorites who will deepen our appreciation for what we're seeing. So please consider it. We would love to have you. You can learn more by going to John Shores Travel that's S H O R S and look for the upcoming trip to England with Jack Wilson. Or reach out to [e-mail] and we will tell you all the details. It's going to be in May of 2026, but act now to secure your spot. Space is limited and let's all spend some quality time together enjoying literature and enjoying life on WhatsApp. No one can see or hear your personal messages. Whether it's a voice call message or sending a password to WhatsApp, it's all just this. So whether you're sharing the streaming password in the family chat, we're trading those late night voice messages that could basically become a podcast. Your personal messages stay between you, your friends and your family. No one else, not even us. WhatsApp message privately with everyone hello. It seems that the celebrated, even iconic American author Mark Twain is having a moment. We'll discuss some of the Mark Twainia that's been piling up, including the theme of dreams. And then we'll talk to one of America's leading Twain experts, scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin, whose 1990s era essay and book Was Huck Black, introduced a generation of young scholars, including yours truly, to the figure whom Twain called sociable, Jimmy, a young black raconteur who helped change Twain and helped Twain change American literature. Fishkin's new book takes a look at Huck Finn's traveling companion, the black man escaping from slavery. Jim including how Twain dreamed him up, what he means to the novel, what he meant for American literature, and the way he's been received ever since. That's all coming up today on the history of literature Foreign. Here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. So much Mark Twain lately in the news. I've got three things to share with you before we get to our very special guest. She's one of the key contributors to this current Mark Twain boomlet, if we call it that. Three things to share. All mess. All mess, mess or lore. All more or less organized around dreams. And we start with something almost a parenthetical that I ran across when doing some background research. This comes from an article by Robert Moss posted on beliefnet, which calls itself the most comprehensive online resource for inspiration and spirituality. Headline, the Shadow of Mark Twain's Precognitive Dream. According to Moss, the humorist, Mark Twain maintained his sense of humor in spite of great tragedy. Or as Moss puts it, great humor often sparkles on the surface of a dark tide of challenge or tragedy. End quote. In Twain's case, this was the loss of a beloved brother and later the loss of his favorite daughter and then the loss of all of his money. Personal tragedies that did not destroy him. He somehow managed to maintain his high spirits and put those tragedies into his work or to work in spite of them, laughing and causing us to laugh with that famed humor of his. But that's not to say that Twain was numb to tragedy. And in fact, there was one detail in particular, one event that haunted him all of his life. Here's what happened. He dreamed the death of of his younger brother Henry before it took place in exact detail. He was Samuel Clemens at the time, but I'll call him Twain to keep things easier. He and his younger brother Henry were about to sail on the riverboat Pennsylvania. This was when they were young. Twain was an apprentice pilot and Henry was what was called a mud clerk, which essentially meant that he helped out when the river didn't have a good landing spot. I'm picturing him jumping down into the mud, literally, to help with the boat. I'm not sure if that's what happened, but if so, clerk would be a nice way to say it. A mud clerk. But I guess. I guess the deal was that you got to live and eat on the riverboat for free and you could learn things and work your way up into positions like apprentice pilot and pilot. And eventually Captain Moss says that the night before Twain and Henry set sail or set steam as the Case may be that Twain dreamed he saw Henry as a corpse laid out in a metal casket, dressed in one of his older brother's suits, with a huge bouquet of white roses on his chest and a single red rose at the center. End quote. Twain woke up in shock, stricken by grief. He thought he had seen something that was real. It had felt so real to him. He went out for a walk to try to gather his thoughts and persuade himself that the dream had not been a real event. It took him a whole block, he said, before he accepted that he had merely been dreaming. He told his family members about the dream and they urged him to forget it. It's only a dream after all. And then he and Henry boarded this. This river ship and Twain couldn't get along with the pilot. It turned out the pilot was an autocrat with a violent temper. And the captain sided with Twain and said, don't worry. When we get to New Orleans, we're going to dump this guy. We'll get somebody new to be the pilot, but you stay on. That was the hope. But then when they got to New Orleans, they couldn't find an adequate pilot. And so instead of. Instead of dumping the pilot, they had to dump Twain. They transferred him, the assistant, onto another boat. Well, Henry, the brother remained on the Pennsylvania, which then had a boiler explosion. Tragically, Henry was badly burned. He survived only for a few days and then died in Memphis. Back to the article. Quote. His handsome face was untouched, and the kindly lady volunteers were so moved by his beauty and innocence that they gave him the best casket, a metal box. End quote. You remember the detail in Twain's dream. He was Henry. His brother was in a metal casket. And here's where things get truly shocking. When Sam or Twain entered the dead room of the Memphis Exchange on June 21, 1858, he was horrified to see the enactment of his dream. His dead brother laid out in a metal casket in a borrowed suit. Only one element was the floral bouquet. As Twain watched and mourned, a lady came in with a bouquet of white roses with a single red one at the center and laid it on Henry's chest. End quote. Now I've got goose flesh. A shock. A shock. A shock from Mark Twain. The kind of shock that not only makes you remember the tragedy as Twain would do all of his life, but one where you tell and retell the circumstances that you've dreamed it before it happened and then it happened because it makes you wonder what is going on in the universe. How did I imagine that? What are dreams? How do they connect to reality? And not just reality, but to the future? What does that say about time and fate? Who's making this happen? And of course, the sense of guilt. Twain never got over the idea that his dream had been some kind of a warning. And the dream might have made it possible for Twain to prevent Henry's death. Just before he and his younger brother had split ways in New Orleans. In fact, they discussed what they would do if there was a boiler accident. It was a common occurrence on these ships. Could Duane have done something differently that would have saved his brother? He could have maybe tried to bring him along on his new ship or remain behind with him in New Orleans or something else. When some people founded the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1882, Duane was one of the first to join. And we can kind of see why, after having had a dream like that, the dream changed him. We all change based on circumstances, life experiences. A skeptic becomes a believer, or sometimes the reverse happens. We don't often give biographies of people enough credit for the changes they make. We kind of, we should probably look more at the change instead of just the years where they held fast to some belief. Maybe that would be more fair. Other times it seems like, well, who cares if you change with a. A year left in your life? What does that tell us when you believe something as strongly as you did for as long as you did? I guess that's another topic. But in this case, Twain changed after having had that dream. And he changed in other ways too. Throughout his life. He grew up in the slave holding south and he took the world for granted, as children often do. It takes a while just to learn how to navigate the world, and sometimes seeing the hypocrisy in it takes longer. Twain changed over the course of his life in this respect. Which brings me to the list of four things going on in the world of Mark Twain these days. Four recent developments. There's a new biography by Ron Chernow, whose name on the COVID practically guarantees bestsellerdom and definitely guarantees a lot of attention, reviews and so on. Chernow being the biographer of a lot of other American men, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. morgan, and George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Alexander Hamilton, which served as the source for the musical Hamilton. Chernow has won Pulitzers and other prizes and has served as the head of various committees and is very distinguished. And perhaps it's this monumental achievement that has made John Jeremiah Sullivan the reviewer, the critic, the essayist. Writing in Harper's Magazine so agitated in his review, Twain dreams the Enigma of Samuel Clemens. So there's dreams again, the enigma. Sullivan is an old Twain head which he inherited from his father. And he becomes so exasperated with Chernow for so many different things, some major, some very, that Sullivan eventually confesses, maybe I should just confess, I think I should have written this book. Is that what's going on here? He kind of asks the question rhetorically, is it that I think I should have written this book instead of Ron Chernow? It's a compelling review. Sullivan also talks about another book which just came out last year, all so much lauded and praised and prized. Percival Everett's book the novel James, which reimagines the novel Huckleberry Finn and the events in Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, who is secretly an intellectual who's only pretending to be as aw shucks and down country down home as the Jim that we see in the pages of Mark Twain's novel. In Everett's novel, Jim does this in order to survive. He puts on this act in order to survive and to accomplish his goal of self emancipation. He's a highly literate and systemic thinker, the kind of guy who has the voices of John Locke and Voltaire in his head. James says Sullivan is a good novel and not just a clever idea. Sullivan also discusses the book we're going to talk about today with Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Her book Jim and Sullivan suggests that Mark Twain is having a moment. He himself goes into Twain's belief in mental telegraphy. Similar to my previous anecdote that I just passed along about the Depression dream precognitive dream. Mental telegraphy is the idea that two people can think the same thing at the same time across distance. And I've had this or something like it happen enough to me that although I don't believe it deeply, I can understand why others are fascinated by it. I like to think that this can be coincidence, that we just are following paths. The flapping of the butterfly wings in one location sets things in motion and we end up coincidentally thinking the same thought at the same time as someone else. And it happens often when you're close to someone and. And, well, if you're sitting in the same room, for example, that's interesting, right? Something comes up, you're both quiet, a moment passes, another moment, another moment, and then you start talking about the same thing and you realize that your train of thought has probably raced down tracks parallel to theirs. But it can also happen with people you haven't seen for a while, maybe years. They're living far away and you Happen to dream about something that they're dreaming about, too. Or they contact you and say, by the way, I was just thinking about you. And you think, I was just thinking about you. Something is happening. You're on the same wavelength. Who knows how or why? My belief in that isn't strong enough to change my life. I'm not joining any societies about it. But I haven't had a dream combined with a tragedy like trains. Twain's dream about his brother Henry either. But here's the thing. I was doing the research for this Mark Twain time, and I turn on the television and there's Conan o' Brien winning the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor and talking about Mark Twain. A bit of parallel track running, maybe serving to remind me about the guy who believed in exactly such things, Mark Twain himself. I found Conan's speech funny, of course, and the whole night was pretty funny. It's a good episode, full of Conan o' Brien's general good nature and generosity when he's not obsessing about himself. I think, setting that aside, I think he's a genuinely decent guy. Seems to be. Although I also believed that about Woody Allen and Bill Cosby and Tiger woods and Michael Jordan and Kevin Spacey and all my other heroes. So what do I know, Really? I can't judge. These celebrities can always surprise. Their images are put in place and we get little glimpses. But that doesn't mean that's who they really are. Anyway, let's hope Conan is as decent as he seems to be. In any case, the part of the speech where he talks about Mark Twain is wonderful. This is at the Kennedy center, which had recently been taken over by the new administration, and that fact had been discussed all night. What do comedians do? Do they not show up in protest? Or do they show up and take it on directly? And in this case, they opted for the latter. And Conan alludes to this in his remarks, too. That's to give you a bit of context for what you're going to hear. So I'm going to read the last five paragraphs of his speech after he's thanked the people in attendance, his friends and family, David Letterman, and all the other people who have helped him or inspired him. And then he says, quote, any award, or in this case, prize, which technically is three notches down from an award. I got a prize. It came in cereal. Let's be honest, it can seem trivial. This honor feels very different to me. I think accepting an award named after Mark Twain is a responsibility one cannot invoke. Twain without understanding who he was and what he stood for. Now, don't be distracted by the white suit and the cigar and the riverboat. Twain is alive, vibrant and vitally relevant today. Yes, he is America's greatest humorist, but his enduring power springs from his core principles, principles that shaped his comedy and made him one of our greatest Americans. First and foremost. Twain hated bullies. He populated his works with abusers such as Huck Finn's alcoholic father and Tom Driscoll in Pudd' nhead Wilson. And he made his readers passionately hate those characters he punched up, not down. And he deeply, deeply empathized with the weak. Twain was allergic to hypocrisy and he loathed racism. Twain wrote, there are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages. Twain empathized with the powerless in America, former slaves struggling under reconstruction, immigrant Chinese laborers in California, and European Jews fleeing antisemitism. Twain's remedy for ignorance about the world around us was to travel at a time when travel was very long and very difficult. Twain circled the globe and he wrote, travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely. On these accounts, Twain was suspicious of populism, jingoism, imperialism, the money obsessed mania of the Gilded Age, and any expression of mindless American might or self importance. Above all, Twain was a patriot in the best sense of the word. He loved America, but knew it was deeply flawed. Twain wrote, patriotism is supporting your country all of the time and your government when it deserves it. Some of you might be thinking, what does this have to do with comedy? It has everything to do with comedy. Everything. The comedy I have loved all of my life is comedy that is self critical, deflating and dedicated to the proposition that we are all flawed, absurd and wallowing in the mud together. Twain is funny and important today because his comedy is a hilarious celebration of our fears, our ineptitude and the glorious mess of being human. When we celebrate Twain truly see him for who he was, we acknowledge our commonality and we move just a little closer together. So I accept this award in the spirit of humility, stupidity and envy, irrelevance, fear, self doubt and profound unceasing silliness. I thank you. It's the honor of a lifetime. Okay, that was Conan o', Brien, end quote. I should have said end quote earlier. I started to get a little caught up in that, as if I were accepting an award. Not to worry, dear listeners. I've never won a prize or an award, and I don't see any in my future. I'll just keep plugging away. But it is nice if I do ever win an award, it doesn't have to be named after Mark Twain. I'll talk about literature in it. It was nice that Conan spent a little time talking about Mark Twain and didn't just talk about his show or some of the comedians who came before him and so on. So we are now working toward the last dream, people, and this is Twain's and Sullivan's dream. A lot has been said about the style of Huck Finn, how that unleashed American fiction, unleashed something new. Hemingway famously said that all modern. Sorry. Hemingway famously said it. It was famous because he actually said it correctly, so I better do the same. Hemingway famously said that, quote, all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since. End quote. There's more to the quote, and there's more to unpack there. I might need to do an episode on this, I think, because the quote is often more ambiguous than people think. It's not exactly clear what Hemingway meant, and people state it as if they know, but there's room there. There's room to interpret. So let's say there are two possible things that Hemingway might mean. One is what Twain talked about, and the other is how he does it. The style that Twain seized upon, helped along by this person he met, whom he called sociable Jimmy, was a style of seeming artlessness coming from the vernacular. This was not the language of a scholar or intellectual, but the language of a boy, a poorly educated boy, an American boy who can nevertheless deliver truths about America in an unassuming way, who has insights almost like a jester or fool in Shakespeare or like the out of the mouths of babes kind of innocence. And that leads straight into what Twain was talking about. What did he want to take on now that he had this tool, this device, this. This voice that could deliver truths? He took on slavery in America and race in America. He was taking that straight on. But not as an abolitionist novel or essay or some kind of sermon or polemic, but as fiction, as a novel, as a boy's way of looking at the world when things handed down by the grownups do not always make sense. That's Huck's dilemma. I'm supposed to be one thing. I'm supposed to be good. But, boy, this part of being good doesn't feel so good. So I'M a little bit confused here. And doing that, acting that out through a voice that lets you be free as an American voice, you're not mimicking the Europeans or the Brits, not trying to outdo them at their own sophisticated, highly educated, highly polished game. But letting the voice be as hard Scrabble and earthy as the new continent was some combination of all of this. The voice plus the topic is what Hemingway meant, I think, and doing it where the stakes are highest. This isn't just light entertainment, although it can feel that way. It's very entertaining, but it's deeply moral. Now, Duane has been criticized by some along the lines of, oh, great, here's a guy who attacked slavery 20 years after the Civil War. Golf clap. Bravo. But Dwayne knew that the issue, the issues of slavery didn't just go away. They were still there in the hearts and minds of all, or nearly all of the white people who lost the war. They were still alive. This was not just recent generations. This was them. This was their generation. It was still in the minds of all the white people who lost the war and many of those who won. Slavery in its most official capacity was over. But white supremacy was alive and well. And from the perspective of a century and a half that we have, it seems impossibly naive to think that only 20 years after the Civil War, the issue was over, done and dusted, and that Twain was beating a dead horse. Twain himself knew this, that the horse wasn't dead because he knew those people and because he had been one of them himself. Here's Sullivan again in Harper's. Of everything I have ever read about Sam Clemens, the pages that did most to clarify my sense of the relationship that existed between the man and his art are to be found in the introduction to a book titled Mark Twain in the south by the late American historian Arthur G. Pettit. Having learned about the man's protean personality, Pettit writes, we find that his feelings on race and region move in an intelligible direction. There is a clearly traceable movement away from the white south and toward the black race. End quote. Then there's this remarkable paragraph. Unlike most Missourians or other Americans, the Clemenses sometimes owned a few slaves, and Clemens himself accepted the South's peculiar institution well into his 20s. His early notebooks and journals are liberally sprinkled with jokes about black body odor, fried and word steaks, black sexual promiscuity and the evils of miscegenation. Yet he eventually married into an abolitionist family, befriended Frederick Douglass financed a black artist apprenticeship in Paris and supported several black students through Yale Law School. As Mark Twain, he lectured in all black churches, championed the cause of Booker T. Washington, wrote blistering essays about atrocities committed against blacks, and gave large doses of dignity and power to three of the outstanding black characters in 19th century literature. He began his career as a segregationist, turned himself into a champion of interracial brotherhood, and ended his life as a prophet of racial war. Can there be any doubt that therein hunkers the secret of the enduring power of the moment? Huck's redemption was Mark Twain's, or so Clemens hoped. And we seem to have always wished that this redemption might be ours someday as a nation. The real end of the novel as old Papa had it, though to read Everett's James is to wonder if it wasn't a beginning. Instead, so generative has it proved, Everett has climbed into Twain's dream and dreamed it with him, dreamed the same dream differently, and now the dream is altered. Is that what a real myth is, A dream that runs along beneath the dreamers like a river? Some voice goes on insisting that we are on this raft together, end quote. America is full of ebbs and flows. We seem perpetually doomed to set up others. Why is that? What is behind that? Someone will surely say that it's a deep, evolutionarily driven part of the human spirit. Tribalism, caution to the point of. Of maybe warranted fear, a desire to cast out. It's ingrained in us at a personal and not just a national or group level. Maybe it's part of being alive. Being suspicious has helped organisms survive and that grows into something like group judgment and it comes from self preservation purposes. But that doesn't mean it's always appropriate. When I was living in Taiwan, my older cousin stood up for Tonya Harding once. Here we were. This was back in the 90s. Here we all were marveling at what had just happened back there in America. America's princess, Nancy Kerrigan, the figure skater, had been attacked by Tanya Harding's boyfriend, who hit Nancy Kerrigan on the knee with a pipe. Ending, or maybe ending her Olympic dreams, attempting to take down a princess. What a story. What a villain. Take down a princess on behalf of the wicked onlooker, the rival. And my cousin defended Tonya Harding. And later there was a roommate in this group house where we all were and nobody could stand him. He was selfish and priggish and irritating. He used to join conversations where he wasn't welcome and listen in on phone calls and say Things that nobody wanted to hear. And it got to the point where he became part of the conversation. People would say, I hate Jeffrey even when Jeffrey wasn't around. And my cousin defended Jeffrey, too, even though I knew that my cousin didn't like Jeffrey any more than the rest of us did. And finally one day I asked him about it. I said, why are you defending Tonya Harding and Jeffrey? You're kind of siding with the villains here. And he said, you know what? Every time I've ever been part of a group anywhere in the world, the group ends up finding someone to pick on and they gang up on that person. And I'm sick of it. My cousin didn't say he was afraid of it, the mob mentality, although he probably could have or should have, because he's right. The mob mentality is something. Not something to celebrate, something to fear. He just said he was sick of it. He was sick of the ugliness, the piling on, the ganging up. And incidentally, my cousin raised pigeons on the roof of his house. And sometimes I'd go up there with him. He was hooked on these pigeons. They comforted him and relaxed him in what was basically an urban wasteland. The kind of Blade Runner life we lived on that paved over island with so much pollution and smog and traffic, you couldn't see the mountains that were not that far away. You only saw them a couple of days a year. From my window, anyway. The sky was a brown haze most of the time. We were all riding around on motorcycles with pollution masks, hoping for the best, for our lungs. And there, up there on the roof, where you could see the sun rise and set the beauty that even that wasteland still had available to it, my cousin showed me a pigeon that he had to keep in a separate cooperation, built its own little cage for this pigeon, own little home. And he said, every time I put it in with the other birds, they peck the shit out of this one. Why? Why? I wanted to know. Does he. Does he try to steal their food or does he. Does he make too much noise or what, does he. No, no, my cousin said, they just do it. I'll never forget my cousin saying that. He says it doesn't matter what he does or where I put them or where I put him, or the time of day or if they're hungry or nothing. It doesn't matter. No matter what, as soon as I put him in there with him, they start pecking the shit out of him. That's what he'd seen. The others needed it for some reason, and society needs it, too. In my cousin's view, there was always one, always a person to peck. It never made any sense to him. Well, we see that even now. Maybe it's a person, maybe a type of person, maybe a foreign enemy, maybe domestic. We organize ourselves around hatred, feeling a kind of superiority, making ourselves feel good with that requires all that, requires someone else to be inferior. It's an animal instinct. If you see it in pigeons, see it in humans still. Is that who we want to be? And being told to do otherwise, when there's a group going on pecking at someone else, we're often told that to do otherwise is to not be American or to not be Christian or not be patriotic, or that we're all headed to hell. And in Huck Finn's famous formulation, he says, all right, then, I'll go to hell. Sullivan calls out this sentence, emphasizing, I really appreciate this about Sullivan's article and analysis, that he emphasizes that Twain, who was so careful about language, the man who gave us the famous quip, of course a single word is important. It's the difference between lightning and lightning bug in this famous passage, probably the most famous passage in all of Mark Twain's works. It's the difference in the single word in that sentence that Twain chose to italicize. Sullivan nails this. We're talking about the famous passage where Huck is thinking about turning Jim in. He thinks, what have I been doing? Why have I been helping Jim? I'm supposed to turn him in. He's a runaway slave. I know the rules. And he reflects on his life and he thinks, well, one of the problems is I'm wicked. Clearly I'm wicked. I skipped Sunday school. I had a lousy father. I've been brought up to be wicked, and I am. So maybe I should change. Of course I should change, because this isn't my decision to make about Jim. It's the decision of the woman who owns Jim. What did this woman ever do to me? Nothing. So how can I do this to her? Jim is her property, and I've been helping to steal him away. Now, we as readers, of course, are on Jim's side. We like the Huck that Huck thinks is wicked. The wicked Huck, wicked in quotes. We see clearly that Huck is doing absolutely nothing wrong. The villain here is slavery and the people who promote it. But Twain's angle is to make us feel the kind of warped morality playing out in Huck's mind, the distorted system that makes a kid like Huck think that the wicked thing to do is to protect Jim, to give Jim his freedom. When we see clearly that doing all of that is the opposite of being wicked. It's kindness, it's compassion, it's charitable, it's decent, it's the right thing to do. And yet Huck, living within the system, says, I've been to church enough to know that someone like me, someone who's protecting a slave, stealing property, in effect, I've been to enough church to know that I'm headed for everlasting fire for doing it. Imagine that. Imagine that. That helping out a fellow human being condemns you to hell. And Huck writes a note in this scene telling the woman, hey, your slave Jim is down here. Send down the reward and this guy who's holding him will give him back up. And he writes the note and he feels better, thinking, finally, I'm free of sin. That's what it's like to live in this warped world. My sin is gone. And then he. He thinks about Jim and how he was, about how he was, had been Jim's best friend. Jim had said this to him and all the things that Jim has done for him and what it would mean for Jim to be returned to that world. And he trembles with the momentousness of the decision. And finally he says, alright then, I'll go to hell. The italics there are on the word go, not all right, I'll go to hell or not, I'll go to hell. In those formulations with that emphasis, those would be heroic or self aggrandizing. I'll go to hell. That would make it about Huck, right? I'm brave, I'm better than everyone else. I know exactly what I'm doing and I'm willing to do it. I'll go to hell. If he emphasized hell, it would be defiant. I'm ready for you, Hell. I'll go to hell. Yeah, I'm not afraid of you, Hell. I'm going to do it. But to emphasize the go, I'll go to hell. It's the thing he's got to do. It's resigned, it's determined. He's still aware of the power of hell, still humble, not having any illusions about it, but telling us that at some point that's where he's going to have to go. And we cheer for him. If we have any heart, if we have any soul, if we believe in the world of better angels in our nature that Lincoln promised, we cheer for Hawk making the decision, finally at last overcoming that weird warped world, because that's the dream. That's the dream of what America has always dreamed. The great experiment. A multiracial and multi ethnic society, a true democracy. The tired and poor and weak, all flowing into one land and one nation and one people united by principles and not blood or caste, strengthened by ideals and opportunity. That's the dream. The willingness to face critics and say, I reject your hypocrisy. I reject your hate filled vision, your attempts to make me pinched and cramped and small and worse than I am. I'm here. I'm human. I'm huge. This is who I want to be. You say that will send me to hell. All right, then, I'll go to hell. Now all that is great. I'd love to stop there. Pat Twain on the shoulder. Give Huck a little, a little punch in the shoulder. A little pat on the back too. But that's a problem, isn't it? It begs a question, because there were two people on that raft. And although the book is called the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Huck's Dilemma and Indecision provide what's a kind of heart of the book. Jim is there too. Jim is there too, and he's more than just a prop or a tool, a device. He's a person. Without Jim, this book doesn't work. And as we've evolved as readers, we ask questions. What's going on with Jim? What's going on in his head? We get a book like Percival Everett's book James, which gives us a new point of view, essentially a new novel with the the ring of the familiar, but a complete reinvention, seeing everything from Jim's or James's eyes. And then there's a book like Shelley Fisher Fishkin's, which gives Jim his due in a different way by looking at who he is in the novel, how Twain created him, and how he's been treated by subsequent generations of readers. She will be here to tell us all about it after this. This is an ad by BetterHelp. Hey, it's Summer. But that can come with a lot of stress, especially for those of us who work. Workplace stress is one of the top causes of declining mental health, and holidays and vacations can help, but those aren't long term solutions. Sometimes talking to a professional can help you navigate the challenges of the workday or any day, so you can be the best version of yourself. BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, Having served over 5 million people around the world. You can join a session with a click of a button which allows you to fit your session into your busy life. And you can switch therapists at any time. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. So unwind from work. With BetterHelp, our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com literature that's betterhelp.com literature Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Lohan are back in Disney's Freakier Friday.

[Jack Wilson]

Yes, twin.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Yes. On August 8th, we switched bodies. I didn't want to be a part of this family, and now I'm part of some dodgy family curse.

[Jack Wilson]

And I'm the eldest.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

The ultimate movie event of the summer arrives.

[Jack Wilson]

I think I just peed a little.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Disney's Freakier Frank Friday, in theaters August 8th. Get tickets now. Oh, this is cool.

[Jack Wilson]

Let's do it.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Rated pg. Parental guidance suggested. This episode is brought to you by JCPenney. And if you've been to JCPenney recently, yes, JCPenney, you'll know it's becoming the way to find good clothes for prices that still make sense. They've got hidden gems for everyone and every budget, with deals and rewards that actually make a dent. If you already shop JCPenney, you feel like you know a secret. But if not, it's time to ask. Wait, am I sleeping on JCPenney? Shopjcpenney.com Yes. JCPenney.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay. Joining me now is Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who is a professor at Stanford University and the author of many books, including Writing Literary Landmarks From Walden Pond to Wounded Knee and Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices. She joins us today for a discussion of her new book, the Life and After Lives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade, part of Yale University Press's Black Lives series. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, welcome to the History of Literature.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Thank you so much for inviting me.

[Jack Wilson]

So I thought we could spend a minute or two talking about was Hawk Black, which I think will be familiar to most literary scholars and Twain fans, but some of our listeners might not have heard of it. I myself have carried Sociable Jimmy with me for a couple of decades now, especially the letter you cite in which Twain said, I think I could swing my legs over the arms of a chair and that boy's spirit would descend upon me and enter into me. So and I think this will all kind of tie together with our discussion of Jim as well. So who was Sociable Jimmy and what did he mean to Mark Twain?

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Well, Sociable Jimmy was a child, probably about 10 years old that Twain met in Paris, Illinois, a few years before he began writing Huck Ferry Finn. And the child brought Twain his dinner in his room in a hotel, as was often what happened when he's on the road and he just sat down in a chair and started talking. And that's when Twain began listening intently. And he said, I listened. He didn't tell me a single remarkable thing, but I listened as one who receives a revelation. And I think that the revelation was that, wow, a child talker can be really engaging. And I think that he listened to Jimmy, and that's his revelation was child. Maybe I should try that. He didn't think of it necessarily that moment, but when he went back to the idea of Huckleberry Finn, or when he began it two years later, he revisited his childhood writing in the voice of a child. And I think that Jimmy was the spark that helped him realize that that could be a successful way to write a book. And no one had ever done that before. I mean, the child narrator in Huck Finn doesn't speak proper grammar. He is ebullient, but rather ignorant of what's going on around him. And Jimmy was all those things. There were many things that Huck and Jimmy had in common, which suggests. But at least on a subliminal level, Jimmy figured into Twain's creation of Huck's voice.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, and let's talk about how important that narrative voice became to American literature. I mean, Borges said Huckleberry Finn taught the whole American novel to talk. And Hemingway said all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. But it was more than just that. It was a child. Right. I mean, we're not just saying he subsequent literature all had children narrators, but it was something about the way the voice worked and, I guess, the use of the vernacular. So what exactly was it about the voice that struck such a chord with Twain's readers and then with subsequent writers?

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Well, you're exactly right. It's not just that it was a child. It was a child speaking American common speech. He was speaking the language that ordinary people used as opposed to people in bound volumes of novels. And so, in a sense, this was the first book that sounded like American sounded. You know, it couldn't have been written by a British writer. It couldn't have been written by his predecessors. While they would occasionally have bits of dialect in their books, they never gave over the narrative power of the book, the narrative control of the book, to someone who sounded like ordinary Americans. And this is what I think Hemingway found so appealing. It's what so many other later writers found appealing. And I think the reason Hemingway said that all modern American literature begins with Huck Finn is because this opened up the way for a host of later writers, 20th century, 21st century writers, to have people like that, or if not exactly like Huck, people who spoke idiomatically, colloquially as ordinary people speak and gave them the power to narrate stories that became the body of American literature that we value today. And it's still inspiring writers today to write in voices that we haven't heard before.

[Jack Wilson]

And if you think of a writer like maybe a Henry James who could sort of say, well, we can write with in prose that's just as good as any of our British colleagues or peers, or just because we're American doesn't mean we're unwashed, so to speak. And Twain is way down a different path in saying yes. And we can also have a voice that's endemic to our democratic experiment and our particular way of looking at the world.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Absolutely. And he chooses that voice unapologetically and brashly and confidently. And that's part of what's fresh too. He's not apologizing for the narrator's lack of proper grammar. He just jumps right in. He knows that he will keep you on that ride because it's going to be as engaging as he found this 10 year old black child in Paris, Illinois.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. And what do we make of it that the narrative voice had these elements of black speech in particular, or that that was at least their source? I mean, I guess, I mean, was it, it seems so poetically perfect in a way that it would include that because that's often an overlooked part of America and American speech and American sound. But I don't want to make too much of it if Twain is kind of putting it through his own filter and he's not making his character black. But do you see the elements of black speech that make their way into Twain's Huck Finn?

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Well, I mean, you do. If you look at what was considered black speech at the time, for example, the phrase light out for. And if I had a node, the last line of the book was, if I had trouble it was to write a book, I wouldn't have done it. I'm going to light out for the territory. Well, both of those phrases were idioms that were in a list of black idioms at the time. But I think that that the larger issue that's more important is that it requires us to recognize the. The interpenetration of black and white speech, rhetorical traditions in America from the start. So, I mean, you know, the English that Twain heard growing up was inflected by black and white voices he heard all around him. And I think that the fact that it happened to be a black child who gave him the. The idea of having a child narrator just tells us that his imagination was able to pull in material from wherever he found material that appealed to him, and he was not editing out things if they didn't seem to fit. You know, we had this literary history before, you know, pretty much before the 90s that said that white writers come from white literary ancestors and black writers come from black literary ancestors. And I think Twain's experience shows that it's all mixed up from the start and have a segregated literary history, that black writers and speakers shaped white writers and white writers, in turn shaped black writers. I mean, that's what I learned, you know, when I interviewed Ralph Ellison and he noted the importance of Twain for him. He had a portrait of him over his desk that, you know, he said that he helped many of us find our own voices.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. It seems. It seems like there's a real parallel with music here, with the way that musicians, white and black, drew upon early black musicians for the blues or jazz or rock and roll or gospel. That it's all just part of the. It's like the background music to America.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Yes. I mean, and it becomes America's music. But that doesn't mean that we should forget its origins, because I think that, you know, if we didn't have a history of racist redlining of black contributions to mainstream culture, it might not be as important. But because we do, I think we have to acknowledge the sources.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Okay. So let's talk about Twain and the world he grew up in. And this will, I think, take us into his portrayal of Jim. So to what extent did white supremacy surround his childhood? And. And that was kind of the air that he breathed, so to speak. And when did he start to question or reject some of those views?

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Well, yes, in his childhood, white supremacy ruled. The local churches served as bulletin boards for slave traders and slave sellers. The church said that God endorsed slavery. Enslaved people were forbidden to learn to read. They could get 39 lashes for directing insulting language to a white person. Free blacks were not allowed to enter Missouri. You know, the movements and the behavior of black people were very, very constrained in this world. And it was very clear that the society did not view them as human, that they had the same Rights as cattle. Jim had the same rights as his mistress's cows and chickens. And his humanity was not acknowledged. The slaves might have been invited into religious services, but the only verses of the Bible they were exposed to were servants, obey thy masters and things of that ilk. And since they couldn't read for them, they weren't allowed to learn to read. They couldn't really find. Find out that there was more in the Bible than that. So it was an extremely constrained world. And people viewed abolitionists as, you know, totally evil and deserving the worst punishment there was. And actually, you know, it was very. It might look like Illinois is just on the other side of the river and it's easy to escape, but it wasn't because slave catchers lurked on the other side. Illinois had laws that said, you know, black person comes here, they can be enslaved for a certain amount of time. And it was a really an atmosphere which was extremely dangerous. Every black person knew every, every enslaved person knew that they could be separated from the people they loved on a whim. You know, if a master wanted to buy something for the house or if he fell into debt, you know, an enslaved person with their child could be sold. And it did happen. And Twain was exposed to this kind of callousness even within his own family. His father at one point took a nine year old little girl to settle a debt, and he, you know, he couldn't part with a slave that he had taken with him on a trip south to collect a debt, and he couldn't bring himself to demand that the man who owed him the debt actually pay it because he felt sorry for him. But he didn't feel sorry enough for a slave to avoid selling him miles away from everyone he knew. So Twain was very exposed to this world. He doesn't necessarily question the legitimacy of the status quo when he's a child, but then when he's an adult and he's a journalist in San Francisco, he is distanced from the world of his youth. But he's exposed to racial bigotry in a new context. He's exposed to the treatment of the Chinese in San Francisco in which they are treated as less than human and not deserving of the rights that, that other people have. The police not only look the other way when they're abused, but they participate in abusing themselves themselves. And Twain is appalled by the double standard of justice. They're not allowed to testify in court. That made them the scapegoat for any white person who committed a crime. And he began to Write up, you know, incidents that he saw and then he found that he couldn't get published. His publisher censored them because they shared the prejudices of the police in the community. So he turned to satire to get his article about the treatment of the Chinese in San Francisco published in his old newspaper in Nevada. Because satire was the only way to get a, you know, a story about contemporary San Francisco, you know, interesting Nevada readers. But that was his first experience with writing about racism and racial oppression. And the same techniques that he used to write about the treatment of the Chinese were ones that he would return to a few years later when he returned to the subject of the treatment of black people. People he also married into an abolitionist family, and their views were diametrically opposed to those of his own family. While his father was sending abolitionists to the state penitentiary, his father in law was paying for their activities. So he entered a very different world when he married in, in upstate New York, in Buffalo, New York and Elmira, New York. But he began to explore how to write about this topic after that change in his life.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, and in chapter two of your book, you give some models for Jim and I want to save Marianne Cord for, give her kind of her own special paragraph here. But who were some of the other individuals in Twain's life who prompted him to reject the racial myths that had been part of his world since childhood?

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Well, so take the myth for example, and we can, you know, lay this on Jefferson, although I'm sure he wasn't the first to articulate it, but he was the one who gets the most credit for spreading, for spreading it, the idea that blacks were unintelligent. So when Twain goes on his first trip to Europe, all of the guides are impossible. They keep wanting to get you to buy things. They, they can't speak English, they are offensive, they're rude. They're constantly trying to get you to, to get the meals or to, you know, go into stores where they'll get cuts for whatever you buy. There's only one guide in the entire trip who is not completely obnoxious and ignorant and, and that is a black guide he meets in Venice who's the child of two South Carolina slaves who really run circles around all the other guys. He's an authority on art history, on architecture, on the history of Venice. He loves Venice. He loves art. He educates the, the group, including Twain. And he speaks five languages and he is, you know, brilliant. Twain has a very dry note at the end of his description of him saying, you know, that that black people were treated as well as white people in Venice. And, you know, he didn't think it was so in his home country, so he decided to stay. But. So that's one case where pretty early on, this is just before he gets married, he meets this man that's, you know, an example of that. But then he also became friends with Frederick Douglass through his in laws. And Douglass, of course, was a brilliant orator and thinker and writer. And Twain admired him very much, and they became friends. And he also was surrounded by other really smart black people who taught him that the idea that black people are not smart is ridiculous. His butler at Hartford, George Griffin, was extremely astute. Twain appreciated how smart he was. So there was no shortage of models to teach him that the myth of stupidity was that just that, a complete myth. And then there was the. The myth that black people were uncreative. Well, you know, during his childhood, he was exposed to two enslaved men who were absolutely consummate storytellers. One was Daniel Quarles, who told stories every night during the summers when he would spend his time at his uncle's farm. And Twain really admired him enormously and in fact, made him the centerpiece of a piece he'd write later called how to Tell a Story. And then there was an enslaved man named Jerry who told satirical sermons that he made up from the top of his master's wood pile with Twain for the sole audience. And Twain wrote 50 years later that he had thought he was the greatest order in the country. And actually, that was when he published the essay. When he first wrote it, he wrote he thought he was the greatest man in the country. So, you know, he was exposed to these two brilliant storytellers, and they taught him early on that black people can be incredibly creative. In fact, they were the best he could imagine at a field that he would go into himself. And the myth that, you know, black people were insensible to pain, well, this was something that he learned by listening to Marianne Cord, but also from his reading, that he knew from reading slave narratives that that was baloney, that they were extremely sensitive to the pain, both physical and emotional, that was inflicted on them. So he really had occasion to reject all of those myths and have a very different perspective on black people in America.

[Jack Wilson]

And so when we're thinking about the composition and his plan for Huckleberry Finn, the novel, we can kind of see some of the things we've been talking about coming together here. And we're, you know, for example, Twain's got something he wants to say, right, he's got a point that he wants to make. And what he's. He's used to using satire as a way to make the point to come at things a little bit indirectly in order to kind of sneak up on people. And maybe people who otherwise would reject an argument if they read it in the form of an argument might find that they're agreeing with Twain even in spite of themselves. And we're familiar with the idea that a child might unwittingly convey truths and. And that readers might need to read between the lines to understand a moral message. But this was kind of new, to use the vernacular to. To convey it, to put Hawk, this uneducated kid, and to have the truths be coming from a narrative that he's making. And then to add Jim in there, where the. The common reader, especially the common white reader at the time, might have thought, well, what am I going to learn from this uneducated kid and his black friend or his black companion? You know? But Twain is smuggling it in there, too. And because Twain knows that the black individual can be just as intelligent and just as creative as the white individual, he knows that this is a vehicle that he can use in order to advance these themes that he wants to advance.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

No, I think that that's right. Although the one thing I'd say is, I don't know that Twain had that all figured out when he started the book.

[Jack Wilson]

No. Right.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

So I think that he thought he was writing a sequel to Tom Sawyer, and he thought it would be another voice book.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Only he decided it would be more interesting to tell it in a different voice, to tell it from Huck's perspective.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

But as soon as Jim shows up, it takes a very different cast.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

I don't know that he actually planned that, but once it happens, he runs with it.

[Jack Wilson]

That's interesting. Yeah.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

He had experimented with satire, but he had never really experimented with the narrator like this before. And Huck basically is extremely reliable in some senses. We trust him. We trust him to tell us what he sees, but what we have to learn is we can't trust him to understand or interpret what he sees. And so Twain is showing us the society that is completely morally bankrupt, but through the eyes of a child who doesn't judge it. Now, actually, he had experimented once before with an innocent narrator who happened to be an adult. He experimented with having a Chinese man who believes. Who comes to America and believes that the Declaration of Independence is the law of the land, and it's what everybody follows. And he refuses to believe that people violate it, and he just must assume that he's getting things wrong. So he has experimented with somebody who narrates a story without understanding it at all. But in Huck's case, Huck manages to convey a lot more than he realizes. And in the process, Twain conveys a lot more than the reader is getting in for. So, for example, before the reader condemns, you know, this child who doesn't speak proper grammar, we have to realize that the most articulate and erudited educated speakers in the book, the people who speak the best grammar in the book, are the king and the duke, who are the most morally reprehensible characters in the book.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, Right.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

So Twain is turning that judgment, that ruler on its head and, you know, showing us that education and book learning are no indicators of what kind of a person you are. Whereas Jim, who will turn out to be by far the most admirable person in the book, some would say the only really admirable person in the book, is viewed as less than human by those around him. And so that is the ultimate irony. The ultimate irony is really Twain's ability to show us a society that is indefensible through the eyes of somebody who doesn't see anything wrong.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. So let's talk about the context when he was writing it, because a lot of people have noted that he was writing Huckleberry Finn in the 1870s. He started writing it then after slavery had ended. And I think there's always been kind of a tendency to want to criticize Twain, to say, well, he's a little late to the party here, or he's criticizing something that's an easy target now that it's been ended. But as you've noted, he wasn't exactly addressing slavery, but the lingering racism of the post Civil War period. So maybe we should talk now about Marianne Cord and the connection she has to Twain. And maybe it'll help listeners understand exactly why Twain thought this was. This could be a powerful book to write.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Yeah. So Marianne Cord is a formerly enslaved woman who works as a cook at the farm of Twain's sister in law, where he spends summers with his family in Elmira, New York. And one day they're sitting on the steps of the farm and he turns to her and says. He calls her Aunt Rachel in the piece. He says, aunt Rachel, you know, you're always laughing, you're always saying, how is it that you've never had any trouble in your life? And she stops what she's doing, looks at him Firmly and says, you don't think I've ever had any trouble? And then she tells him a story. And what he's fallen for is the trap that Frederick Douglass warned people about in his narrative, which is that, you know, people assume if they hear slaves singing, it's because they're happy. No, it's because that's the only outlet that they have for everything that they're feeling because they're not allowed to express their feelings at any rate. Then Cord tells him the really wrenching story of being separated from her children on the auction block, from her last child, and she had seven children, and how wrenching, now painful it was. She wants to kill the people who've done it. She's completely powerless. And then she tells the miraculous story of how she was reunited with him during the war. Her son came to where she was living in New Bern, North Carolina, with. With colored infantry, and she recognized him and they were reunited. Then she eventually went north with him. And Twain actually knew the young man because he had been Twain's barber for many years before Twain knew his story. You know, it had a great deal of meaning for Twain personally. But what really, again, meant so much to him was hearing the story in her words that she spoke a black vernacular not unlike the one that Jim would speak. She spoke in dialect. And Twain decided to write her story down in as close to her dialect as he could manage. And he sent it into the Atlantic Monthly, and that was his first contribution to the most prestigious literary magazine of the day. And what was remarkable was that when black dialect had appeared in the magazine before then, it was always in a comic context that people saw black dialect that they assumed, well, this must be a clown like figure. Yeah. And there was no humor in the story. There was just, you know, wrenching pain and sincerity and joy. And this was something that the editor of the Atlantic, William Dean Howells, absolutely loved. He told Twain that, you know, I wish you had a dozen stories like that. And so I think that listening to her story and having his most important audience, the editor of the Atlantic was his most important reader. He became a really good friend as well. Having him really be this enthusiastic about it, I think helped Twain realize that black vernacular is as capable as any other dialect, as any other kind of speech to convey strong emotions and serious thoughts and serious ideas. And that language leads directly into the voice that he will give Jim in Huckleberry Finn. So I think that she helped him appreciate both the pain that so many of the formerly enslaved people had gone through and Also the power of hearing their stories and their words. Now, the 1870s, when she's telling Twain this story, is a time when the rights that had been granted to the former slaves after the war are being pulled back. During the period Twain's writing this book, in the 1870s and the early 1880s, the Supreme Court strikes down civil rights acts that had guaranteed them a number of rights. And the election of 1876 involves, in effect, the restoration of Confederate forces in the South. So while there had been a number of black voters in the south before the election of 1876, you know, after the Reconstruction Amendments made it possible for black people to vote, after 1876, they start disappearing from the voting rolls. The former Confederates begin to come back into power, and they begin to. Well, they don't begin to. I mean, they've continued to harass the former slaves and to try to make their lives miserable and exploit them as much as possible. But in a sense, there's a green light given to them because the federal troops that have been preserving their rights are withdrawn after that election and they're reassigned. And so what you see is things like the convict lease system, in which it's this diabolically clever way to get manpower for the plantations. The former slaves are arrested on for all, but, you know, for no reason. If they're in front of a store for loitering or intent to steal, and then they are leased out to their former masters for almost no pay by the jailers. So the convict lease system, lynchings, and a host of other ways, you know, black codes, laws that really make it very difficult to pursue their lives. So Twain's subject in this novel really is racism. The racism that persists after the war and also the botched way that America freed the. Supposedly freed the slaves. I think Du Bois said it best. He said the slave went free, stood a few brief moments in the sun, and then went back again to slavery. And that's kind of what happens in the novel. And that's where Twain's head is when he's writing it. What the heck is going on? How could we have botched this the way we did?

[Jack Wilson]

Right, let's take a quick break and then return with more from Shelley Fisher Fishkin.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Okay.

[Jack Wilson]

This episode is brought to you by Liquid iv. In heart pumping moments, you need hydration.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

That can keep up.

[Jack Wilson]

That's where Liquid IV comes in.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Scientifically formulated to quickly replenish electrolytes and.

[Jack Wilson]

Fluids lost from your well earned sweat session.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Hydrate your favorite mode of movement with.

[Jack Wilson]

Liquid IV made with triple the electrolytes.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

The leading sports drink plus eight vitamins.

[Jack Wilson]

And nutrients also available and sugar free tear pour live more. Visit liquidiv.com to learn more.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

This episode is brought to you by Greenlight.

[Jack Wilson]

Get this Adults with financial literacy skills.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Have 82% more wealth than those who don't.

[Jack Wilson]

From swimming lessons to piano classes.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Us parents invest in so many things to enrich our kids lives but are.

[Jack Wilson]

We investing in their future financial success?

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

With Greenlight you can teach your kids.

[Jack Wilson]

Financial literacy skills like earning, saving and investing and this investment costs less than that.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

After school treat start prioritizing their financial education and future today with a risk.

[Jack Wilson]

Free [e-mail] Spotify greenlight.com Spotify foreign okay, we're back. So Shelley, let's turn to Jim. And as we've discussed so far, we can see Twain kind of putting some trust in the intelligence of his readers to understand that Jim was uneducated but worth listening to. And we've heard some of the models for Jim and some of the reasons why Twain was in that frame of mind in order to undertake this project. I was intrigued by a sentence you wrote that Jim has been hiding in plain sight. What do you mean by that?

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Well, Twain's text hasn't changed since he wrote it, but we've changed. And what's happened is that Starting around the 1950s, Americans began legitimately to recognize that minstrel shows were demeaning and that they were offensive. And this was something that the NAACP and other organizations noted and that they were pushing. And a number of critics were observing that as well. And it was a good thing to note, but it was not relevant to Jim the way people thought it was. The argument was that Twain liked minstrel shows and therefore he fit Jim into the form of a minstrel show. And minstrel shows demeaned black people. Therefore Twain was demeaning Jim. And that argument has had amazing lasting power. But it's a canard. It doesn't have any legitimacy to it because it assumes that there was a connection between minstrel shows and Jim. Twain viewed minstrel shows as counterfeit, artificial concoctions designed to entertain. And there's no reason why he would have used these artificial concoctions as a model for a character in his novel when he had real life exposure to people who in fact would be very credible models. He said at one point he didn't think anyone who wrote a minstrel show would ever see the plantation. He knew they were phony, but critics somehow assumed that he was drawing on that now, not all critics, I have to say. Sterling Brown, who many view as kind of the dean of African American letters and criticism in 1937, he recognized that Twain was really doing something very different. He said that, you know, far from being simple minded, Jim had clear goals and desires involving his wife and children and a poignant sense of guilt about his treatment of his daughter. And he called Jim the best example in 19th century Fiction of the average Negro slave. And he's completely believable. So Brown recognized that. And also, I have to say, one newspaper at the year the book came out recognized that the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle referred to the book as containing a thoroughgoing satire of the antebellum estimate of the slave. So it wasn't universal to view Jim as, you know, a demeaning figure who Twain was denigrating and making fun of. But for reasons that I've just really begun to understand recently, a lot of critics who should have known better bought into the idea that this character was being presented solely for comedy, that he was being presented to be ridiculed, to be made fun of, and that Twain viewed him that way and we should, too. And I don't think Twain viewed him that way, and I don't think we're meant to view him that way. So the words on the page have stayed the same, but our understanding has changed. And I think that, you know, we need to give Twain credit and give Jim credit that they deserve.

[Jack Wilson]

Do you think Twain overestimated his readers? Do you think he thought they would get the difference between a dialect used for kind of buffoonery and a dialect that's used for a character who's not being portrayed that way? And people just couldn't get beyond the language that would let them see that difference.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Well, I think to some extent that's true, although Twain went to great pains to differentiate Jim's language from language that you'd hear at a minstrel show, and wrote little notes to the copy editor, occasionally in the margin, saying, do not change this, because he was afraid the copy editor would lapse into what was more familiar. But he may have overestimated the ability of readers to read the dialect and not see humor or to not see denigration, to not see him as treating this character as less intelligent, less valuable than he was. And this is a problem. You know, today as well, there have been many studies that have shown that sometimes, you know, speaking black English can disadvantage someone in a job search or can lead to negative connotations when someone is applying for something. But Twain viewed black English as extremely rich and as powerful as any other form of English to convey information as well as emotion. One point just, I think he was having fun. But just to show that he could do this, he wrote a letter to his publisher explaining, with detailed instructions about what to do with the manuscript and how to publish it and how to copy edit it. And he wrote the entire letter in black English or, you know, in dialect to show that he could. He was just having fun, I think. But, you know, he also wanted to make the point that this can be used to say many different things in many different registers. But he may have misjudged his reader. And, you know, and I have to say I was one of those readers who didn't get how fully Twain was trying to differentiate Jim from the voices of minstrel shows and some of my early work. I also noted that I thought Jim's voice was a diminished voice and reject that now. So one of the critics, or actually the only critic who comes in for unqualified condemnation in my book is myself, because I really reject the line that I wrote in the 90s in which his voice was diminished. I don't think it was at all. I think that was my failing.

[Jack Wilson]

It kind of reminds me to take a slightly different context of an essay that was popular a few years ago by a man who had said, I have sized up the women comedians, and I'm sad to say that they are not funny. There's not a single one who's funny. And critics quickly pointed out that you're kind of telling us more about yourself than you are about the women, because the rest of us are out here laughing at what they're. At what they're saying. And it's his own inability to get beyond his prejudice or his bias that, well, here I'm listening to a woman, so I'm not going to find it very humorous. And then he didn't. And it's almost like we are so programmed to see the white treatment of black voices as one of kind of either deliberate racism or casual racism or. Well, if we're reading it this way, there must be something. He must be kind of signaling or winking at us that this is a character who's not as intelligent or isn't as educated. And that must be part of the point. I'm glad that you were able to do the research that lets you come to a different conclusion. And I think you're probably not alone in having made that journey over the last couple of decades.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Well, thank you. I really appreciate that, and I think that some of the comments and some of the understandings of the book that have made Jim hide in plain sight or hidden in plain sight in our society are really precisely for the reason that you mentioned that it may be more of the failings of critics than of the author. Because I think that Twain kind of got it right. He made him the most admirable figure in the book, and not just despite his language, but in part because of his language. That Twain values his language. He values his insights. He values the intelligence that shines through the heart that shines through. And it's our limitations that have prevented us from seeing that. And I think it's, you know, it's really the challenge. He had a lot of faith in us, maybe more faith in us than he should have. I mean, it's taken me really a lifetime to really figure out how to read this book.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

And I still, you know, I'm still learning all the time. And I'm also really, you know, learning to pick up resonances of it in the culture. I just finished a book in which the narrator has a voice that's a lot like Hucks. The narrator is a young black man. The book is called the Confessions of Copeland Cain by Keenan Norris. And it has a really, you know, bulliant, engaging, interesting vernacular narrator. And this narrator is also misjudged by his society. Not exactly the way Jim is, but in. In other ways.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. And to give. Let's talk a little bit about Jim, the character, and some of the ways that we see that Twain is giving, turning him into an admirable figure. I didn't realize that this was the first white male writer to portray a black slave determined to be a father. And then you point out he's a surrogate father even to a white child. So it seems like, I mean, that's something that we may be intuit, but maybe we don't recognize so directly in order to credit Jim with that.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Yeah, I mean, I think that. And, you know, and we should credit. Credit Twain with that as well for seeing that. I mean, I think it helped that several of the models who shaped Jim were fathers. Daniel Qualls was a father. Frederick Douglass was a father. John Lewis, another figure who shaped Jim, was a father. That Twain knew a number of black fathers. He didn't have to just imagine them. He knew how much they loved their children. He knew how much they cared about their families. And similarly, you know, Jim is someone who has been, you know, brutalized by his society, who's threatened with being sold away from his family, who knows that he will have pain inflicted on him for doing stepping out of line in the slightest way. Yet he still hasn't given up his ability to love and his ability to love across the color line, to love a white child who we know needs a father who never had one. I mean, Huck's father is an abusive alcoholic, and Jim knows that he takes on the role of protecting him and of educating him. When Jim rebukes Huck on the raft after the fog scene for playing with his emotions and just fooling with him when, you know, when Jim is so relieved and so joyous to have him back, he ends up having to teach Huck that, you know, what you did is wrong. And he does that by calling him trash. And he could suffer 39 lashes for treating a white person that way. Now, it's true, no one is there to hear it besides Huck. Huck. But still, it shows that he recognizes that if he doesn't teach Huck how to behave the right way, nobody will, that he's the closest thing to a caring parent Huck will ever have. And so he assumes that role, despite the fact that everything in his world tells him that he shouldn't. And his caring for even a child who has toyed with him as callously as Tom Sawyer has is another remarkable dimension of Jim's character. That his altruistic decision to give up his freedom rather than let this little boy die, even though the little boy has been very happy to give up Jim's freedom without even telling him he's free. I mean, Jim is a mensch. He's a remarkably admirable human being, and we have to see him at that.

[Jack Wilson]

Right? Okay, so getting back to your book. The subtitle here tells us about the afterlives, and maybe you could just. I mean, I've got a list of them here. We. We see where Jim appears and what he represents in different societies and eras. And you look at Hollywood and the Soviet Union and translations, which is kind of interesting to think about what they would do with Jim's speech and how they would come at this question, and acting performances and high school classrooms. But based on what we've talked about now, what do you think is the. The most interesting afterlife that we can tell our listeners about?

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Huh? Well, that's. That's a really, really interesting question. Well, I think that, you know, one thing that's fascinating is that that Jim, I believe, is the only. Only enslaved fa. Well, actually, maybe Uncle Tom's Cabin rivals The number of languages. But Jim speaks 67 languages. Okay. You know, we can read him in 67 languages. And so, you know, it's fascinating to see the way which different countries translated him, given the limitations and potential of the language into which they were translating him, and also the ways in which they represented him on film and different eras. And so both of those topics may teach us more about the cultures that are doing the translating and the filmmaking than about Twain's original. But I think they also can give us insight into, you know, into Twain's original, you know, in the film productions in the Soviet Union, for example, and also in the translations in the Soviet Union, Jim became a stand in for American race relations. And indeed, in the earliest translation of the book, they changed the title to call it Adventures of Huck and the Runaway Slave Jim. So they gave Jim equal billing, and they recognized his centrality to the book. And in the Soviet films that were made of the book, Jim and Huck came to represent the potential for interracial solidarity that the Soviets like to think their society represented. Whereas, you know, American society was embodied by greedy capitalists or greedy characters who stood in for the capitalists. So greedy characters like the King and the Duke or Ms. Watson who couldn't resist the $800 like that. But, you know, you also see, it's fun to look at the changes that happen over time.

[Jack Wilson]

And.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

And so after the 1960s, for example, after the civil rights movement in a number of countries that had previously used the same kinds of stereotypes that we were talking about earlier in their translations and sometimes underline them, they began to try to move away from them and get closer to Twain's original and come up with ways of translating his dialect that were more respectful as opposed to making fun of him. So, for example, the poet laureate of San Tobay, that Afro Portuguese poet who translated the novel into Portuguese, used Cape Verde dialect for Jim and the other black characters. And some other translators have tried to come up with parallel ways of having Jim sound different but not deficient. In other words, come up with language that shows that he's using a dialect and using a different kind of speech than, say, the King and the Duke, but not one that makes fun of him. And similarly, in the film, after the civil rights movement and also after the election of Obama, you begin to see some changes in the film representation. So, for example, a German film made in 2012 has a black rapper play Jim Jackie Ito, who's formerly best known as a French rapper, and he plays the most assertive Jim we've seen he's physically assertive even when he's shackled. He uses his body weight to take down pap fitting by throwing himself against him. And he is fierce. When there's a scene that's added to the beginning of the book of a slave, Kafil, arriving at Hannibal and Jim, who's a house servant to the home in which Huck lives, goes to fetch Huck from the docks, and he happens to see his wife in the coffle, and he attacks the slave traders with a big beam that he. The adrenaline allows him to pick up and push at them. And of course, he's recaptured. But then when he clearly belongs to Huck and Ms. Watson, that they let him go. But he is physically fierce, assertive, angry. And this is not a vision of him that appeared in earlier books. But one of the things that's interesting is that there's another stereotype that the German director wanted to avoid, which is there's this stereotype of the black savage beast. And to make sure that even though her jib is really fierce, she didn't want him to appear uncivilized. And so she actually has him when he takes dinner in his little cabin. He puts out a little white napkin on the table and he drinks a glass of wine out of a crystal decanter. And somehow he takes the crystal wine glass with him when he goes to Jackson's Island. So I mean, you know, she's trying to make sure that we don't view him as uncivilized. But I know what Twain would have said about all of this. I mean, one of my favorite lines from him comes from following the equator is there are many humorous things in the world. Among them the white man's view that he's less savage than the other savages.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, Right. Okay. So when we read Huck Finn today, do you view our project as limited to reading Huck Finn in order to understand race relations in the post war 19th century? Or can we find insight in their relationship and attitudes toward one another that bear on the. On the present day?

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Oh, I think there are absolutely insights that bear on the present day because sadly, the same dynamics obtain in our society that Twain was recognizing. My favorite essay by Twain is a piece called My First Lie and How I Got out of It. And in it he refers to what he calls the lie of silent assertion. The silent assertion that nothing's going on, that fair and intelligent people need to be concerned about or do anything about. This was something that obtained during slavery. That and in Hawk's world that everybody sees people enslaved all around them. They're denied humanity, treated like pigs and chickens. Well, the silent assertion is that that's okay and you don't think about it and that, you know, you can see this as a human being, but you don't do anything about the fact that he's not treated as one. And the lies of silent assertion related to race abound in our society today. You just have to look at the litany of names that are recited when people say, say the names of all of the black men and women who have been killed by police, that there's the silent assertion. If we don't say the names, if we don't keep that story at the forefront of our minds, there's a silent assertion that, well, you know, that's just the way things are. Well, Twain would say that that's an obscene silent assertion. A silent assertion that people don't need to do anything about this, that there are patterns that require. Require that we ask what's going on? Why do we treat people this way? Why does this keep happening? And that's what he saw happening in his day and it's still happening in ours.

[Jack Wilson]

How do you think Twain would. Would feel about that? I mean, do you think he would be kind of resigned and say, well, yes, it's 150 years later, you're still dealing with the same thing, but that's because I was describing human nature at its core and this is part of the problem of humanity. Or do you think he would be kind of disappointed and say, I thought that the work that I and others were doing to point these things out would have had a little more resonance and you would have been able to get over some of these things.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Wow, that's quite a question. I guess my feeling is he'd assumed that, yes, he was writing about humanity and he and human beings are going to make the same mistakes over and over and over again. But if he didn't think that his writing could intervene in some way and change us and make us think, he wouldn't have been writing.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, right.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

And so I think he does hope that by calling out the lie of silent assertion as a phenomenon and getting us to think about what lies of silent assertion are around us today, he would get us to think. I mean, I think that he's all about getting us to be critical thinkers, look at our world, look at our society, and say, what's wrong with this picture? What are people fooling themselves about? You know, where are we falling short of ideals that we pay lip service to and ways in which we like to think about ourselves. So I think that, you know, the answer is yes and no. He would not be surprised to see that people are still behaving this badly. But he also would have been optimistic that occasionally you can break through by being a truth teller or by satirist and getting people to ask questions of themselves and of their world.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. And it's a struggle that continues. And we think about it in terms of, you know, when I say 150 years, we think about a whole society, but it's actually a struggle that goes on inside an individual's mind. And so it could be that the 20 year old who doesn't get it could be the 30 year old who does.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Yes, that's true. I mean, part of what makes the book so compelling, what makes Huck Finn so compelling, is that Twain was the child who didn't get it and became the adult who did. And they're both essential to the book being what it is. He actually introduces the book with a double frontispiece. He has a picture of a bust of himself, a marble bust labeled Mark Twain. And then he has a picture of this raggedy kid, Huck Finn, with his jeans and his torn hat and looking goofy. And his point with putting those two images there is to remind us that the kind of author who sits for marble bus is behind this enterprise. But the narrator is the kid who doesn't get a lot. And I think that because he is both, he can help us see it from both perspectives. And ideally, I think he'd want us to see some of our own limitations when we see what he conveyed.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Well, the book is called the Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade, Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, there we go. My thanks to Shelley Fisher Fishkin for joining me, people. We still have some spots. If you are free In May of 2026, we'd love to have you join us for the History of Literature podcast tour. Find out more about how to sign up for that in the show notes. We will be back. I've been avoiding this next episode, I'll confess, but I'm avoiding it no longer. The strangest story that F. F Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote. There, I said it. And it's not Benjamin Button, if that's what you're thinking. It's something else. We're going to listen to the whole story and be joined by Meg Palindrome for an analysis of it. We'll do that one in two parts. Maybe we'll release that Wednesday and Friday, so look for those. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. Hi, this is Zibby Owens, host of.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly Moms don't.

[Jack Wilson]

Have Time to Read Books in my.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest or underrated authors and story.

[Jack Wilson]

Creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

At everything that's coming out and spend.

[Jack Wilson]

My time curating the best books so.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

You don't have to stay in the know.

[Jack Wilson]

Get insider insights and connect with guests like Grammy Award winning singer Alicia Keys, critically acclaimed author Judy Blume, and Academy.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Award winning screenwriter John Irving every single day. With Totally Booked, you aren't just listening.

[Jack Wilson]

You'Re part of the story. So don't miss out.

[Shelley Fisher Fishkin]

Follow Totally Booked with Zibby on Apple.

[Jack Wilson]

Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you're listening now. I'm Courtney Act. Many of you may know me from RuPaul's Drag Race, celebrity Big Brother, Dancing with the Stars, or probably my hit album Kaleidoscope. Well, guess what? I have got a brand new show called R and R with Courtney act and I want you to check it out. You know I hate small talk. I want to go deep and I want to go quickly and on my show we do just that. In today's world it feels really polarised and we're more connected than ever, but really we can feel isolated and I don't like that. I want the story shared here on R and R to make us realize that our similarities are greater than our differences. So join me and my fabulous guest guests like Nicole Byer, Tom Daly, Margaret Cho, Katia Adore Delano, Jackie Beat, and many more. If you're looking for some rest and relaxation, you've come to the wrong place because we are peeling back the layers of superficiality and we're getting down to the real stuff. Follow RR with Courtney act on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you're listening now.