Jim (Huckleberry Finn)

Jim
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn character
Jim standing on a raft alongside Huck
First appearance	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Last appearance	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Created by	Mark Twain
Information
Gender	Male
Family	wife Sadie, daughter Elizabeth, son Johnny
Nationality	African American

Jim is one of two major fictional characters in the classic novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. The book chronicles his and Huckleberry's raft journey down the Mississippi River in the antebellum Southern United States. Jim is an adult black slave who has fled; "Huck," a 13-year-old white boy, joins him in spite of his own conventional understanding and the law.

The character may have been modeled after one or more slaves, or on the "shrewd, wise, polite, always good-natured ..."formerly enslaved African-American George Griffin, whom Twain employed as a butler, starting around 1879, and treated as a confidant.

The author, Samuel Clemens, grew up in the presence of his parents' and other Hannibal, Missourians' slaves and listened to their stories; an uncle, too, was a slave owner.

Jim's is one of the several spoken dialects called deliberate in a prefatory note. Academic studies include Lisa Cohen Minnick's 2004 Dialect and Dichotomy: Literary Representations of African American Speech and Raphaell Berthele's 2000 "Translating African-American Vernacular English into German: The problem of 'Jim' in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.".

The character is introduced at the beginning of Chapter Two, seen at midnight by the two boys, Huck and Tom, standing silhouetted in the doorway of the outdoor detached kitchen. He hears them approach and inquires into the darkness; he states that he will wait to hear the sound repeated, and he sits at the doorway until he dozes, relieving the hidden narrator's tension indicated by an entire paragraph on an itch unscratched because of fear, of which Jim is unaware. He awakens from dreams of witches (see Richard Dorson's 1956 Negro Folktales in Michigan), and from a nickel left by the boys becomes a storyteller of regional fame, able to command pay for his tales, and in the concluding phrase, all but unfit to be a servant.