She and Jim are reunited and parted several times, but there are few happy endings for blacks (whether slave or free) in the 19th century. Passed along like a poker chip from master to master, Sadie lives through the Civil War, gains her freedom, becomes a refugee, and makes and re-makes several lives for herself down the years. But Sadie’s history is just as engaging, if rather less adventurous. Jim’s story we already know, of course, since he hooked up with a boy named Huck Finn and rafted his way up the Mississippi. Jim is a gentle soul not given to rebellion, but he runs away to make his own fate, promising Sadie that he’ll come back to her and the children when he can buy their freedom.

He doesn’t think twice about selling Jim downriver to raise some cash when his crops do badly, despite the fact that Jim and Sadie are married and have two children. As masters go, Watson is better than most, but he’s still a long way from what anyone would call kindly. Growing up on the Watson plantation, Sadie met and fell in love with one of the field hands, a big, dapper slave named Jim. Her narrator is one Sadie Watkins, an elderly sharecropper who was born a slave in Missouri.

It’s always risky to build a narrative around someone else’s characters, but second-novelist Rawles ( Crawfish Dreams, 2003) handles Twain’s creations so deftly that it would be hard to imagine him objecting. A tale of slave life in the Old South imagines the hidden life of Huck Finn’s sidekick, the runaway slave Jim.

My jim by nancy rawles