Word: rawlesã
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...year of Huckleberry Finn’s publication, Rawles?? book relates the life of Jim’s remarkably resilient wife, Sadie Watson, a slave who works as a healer and a cook, among other things, as she passes between owners in the antebellum South. It is framed, plausibly, if not very originally, as a story Sadie tells to her granddaughter Marianne Libre, while, in the grand tradition of Penelope, Scheherazade and, more recently, Winona Ryder’s Finn Dodd, they make a kind of memory quilt...
...Rawles?? characters have many heartbreaking moments—particularly, it seems, where their author is least self-conscious about breaking our hearts. Sadie’s interactions with the pitiless Mas Stevens, whom she is first called upon to cure and to whom she is later sold, are far more effective than any of her more explicit sermonizing (e.g., “Whites always telling us don’t steal don’t lie don’t cheat. And here they come stealing us and lying to us and cheating us out our freedom...
Early in Twain’s novel Huck laments “how dismal regular and decent” his life with Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas has become. His complaint could serve as a harsh but not wholly inaccurate description of Rawles?? book. Rawles??—or perhaps those marketing her—seem to have failed to recognize that the moral complexities My Jim purports to expose are already present in Huck’s own narrative. While Rawles has provided a reasonably interesting supplement to Twain’s book...
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