Portland author David F. Walker and illustrator Marcus Kwame Anderson have worked together before — on a 2021 graphic novel about the Black Panther Party. This time they’ve teamed up on something a little different: an update of the classic American novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” In their version, “Big Jim and the White Boy,” the escaped slave Jim is more than just Huck’s companion; he’s a fully imagined character. Walker joined us on December 2, 2024 to talk about the work of updating an American classic.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Few books loom as large in American literary history as Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” It’s been turned into more than a dozen films and TV shows, into a Broadway musical and a Manga adaptation, into countless literary versions and offshoots. Almost all of these center on the plucky white boy of the title. But that’s not what the Portland writer David F. Walker did in his new graphic novel, which he created along with the artist and illustrator Marcus Kwame Anderson. “Big Jim and the White Boy” is not a retelling of the Twain novel, it’s a full reimagining, a whole new story from the perspective of Jim, a formerly enslaved Black man.
David F. Walker’s previous works include the graphic novel “History of the Black Panther Party;” the young adult novel, “The Second Chance of Darius Logan,” which came out this year; and the “Bitter Root Series.” David Walker, congratulations on this new book and it’s great to have you back on the show.
David F. Walker: Thanks. It’s great to be back.
Miller: Do you remember when you first encountered Huckleberry Finn?
Walker: I was young. I mean, I saw one of the movies before I read the book. I would say I must have seen one of the film versions at probably around 7 or 8 years old, like Wonderful World of Disney sort of shows that we would be on in the ‘70s. And then probably around seventh or eighth grade is when, I don’t say I was old enough to read the book, but that was when I would have read it. That was when I was just getting into my, “Oh, I want to read more books” phase, because I was a really nerdy kid.
Miller: Do you remember anything about how this story hit you then?
Walker: Yes, I do, because it’s what led me to write this book all these years later. There were a couple of questions that really stood out in my mind. One was really obvious. It was, OK, if Jim is running away, if he’s trying to find freedom, why is he going south? All you had to do was look at a map of the United States back then and go, “Yeah, the south was not the safest place to go if you were trying to escape slavery … ”
Miller: Go in any other direction.
Walker: Yeah. There’s three other directions to go. He could have gone in any of those three and he didn’t. So there was that, and then there was this burning question: why is he hanging out with this kid? Like, what was the connection between Huck and Jim? I do like the book. I do like Mark Twain’s original book, but I never felt that connection came through for me as a kid or as an adult. That just stuck in my head. I mean, there’s a lot of things that stuck in my head from my childhood that would influence later works that I created, but this one was, and still is, a burning question. I think that if you read Percival Everett’s book, “James,” that’s part of the burning question too.
Miller: There’s so much that you just mentioned that I want to get to in the course of this hour, but we have the luxury of an hour. And we jumped right in with your early introduction to the book. But my guess is that there are plenty of people who are listening to us right now who have read the book, but maybe a while ago – the Twain original – and I’m sure some people who have never read it. So, can you just give us a short version of the original text?
Walker: In the original book, Huck Finn is this poor kid growing up in Missouri, he’s the best friend of Tom Sawyer. He makes an appearance in Mark Twain’s earlier book, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” And then Jim is an enslaved man from the same town as Huck. And Jim escapes for one reason or another in the book. He’s on the run. It has something to do with, he’s heard that he’s going to be sold off. And then it’s just them going down the river.
Now, Huck’s father, Pap, is the town alcoholic, the town drunk. There’s a confrontation between Huck and his father and then Huck fakes his own death, trying to escape from the tyranny of Pap Finn. I guess there’s this fear that Jim thinks he’s going to be blamed for Huck’s death, but it’s just them going down this river. Again, this isn’t me knocking the original book … it was this groundbreaking book in the way Mark Twain uses vernacular and the linguistic styles in which he wrote, but it kind of reads like a book that was made up as he was just going along. It doesn’t feel like he was working off of an outline.
Miller: A series of adventures, improbable things happening – one after the next.
Walker: And Jim, he’s treated … Even as a kid, I never felt he was a fully realized character. And at the end of the day – spoiler alert for anyone who hasn’t read Mark Twain – Tom Sawyer shows up towards the end of “Huck Finn.” Tom and Huck play this very cruel joke on Jim, which is enough to make you not like the entire book or like the characters, if you’re so inclined to go that way. And that was it. It was just these adventures that they went on, but Jim was always just kind of “there.”
Miller: And am I right – and spoiler alert, but you had 140 years to read this – that [Jim] finds out in the end that he had been freed this whole time?
Walker: It might not be the whole time. This is where I get confused. My memory is not what it used to be. But, yeah, they’re playing this joke on him to make him think he’s still enslaved because it makes for a greater adventure …
Miller: It’s more fun for them.
Walker: Exactly. And that was a huge issue for me then; it continues to be a huge issue for me. As I was working on “Big Jim,” really, sort of thinking about how much of Twain’s original narrative and storytelling intentions do we keep in play, and how many do we jettison?
Miller: In the end, I mean, I think it’s fair to say that you jettisoned most of it. And for very understandable reasons, partly largely to answer those first questions that you said have been with you for decades, now. What’s their relationship and why is Jim going south? I don’t want to give away parts that are important to you, to keep as surprises for future readers. But I am curious, though, what your starting point was? You had those questions, but you have this seminal text. Where do you start?
Walker: Well, I really started with … I felt like Twain does very little to address the subject of slavery itself. The original book takes place before the Civil War, but it was published after the Civil War. So part of me felt like he was avoiding some sort of “elephant in the room,” even at the time. I guess my first step was to figure out, “OK, what was slavery like in Missouri?” Because Missouri is a very different state than, say, Georgia or Tennessee. It wasn’t a big agricultural state. So you didn’t have a lot of big plantations, whether it was tobacco, rice or cotton. So when I started the initial research of what Missouri was like in the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, I kept reading the same things over and over again, that said, “Well, slavery wasn’t that bad in Missouri.” And it was like, “Yeah, I’m not believing that,” you know? So that was the jumping off point.
And what a lot of people don’t know, when we talk about the history of the United States and we talk about the Civil War … Well, first off, the biggest misconception is people who still believe that the Civil War was fought over states rights, which wasn’t what it was all about. It was about the right to continue to have slavery, And we’re taught that the civil war began when southern states seceded from the Union, and the firing on Fort Sumter. But the truth is that it actually began in the border wars between Kansas and Missouri, which is something I didn’t really know anything about till I’d read about it in passing.
When I dug in deep, I was like, there’s a really fascinating story to be told here. And that if Jim and Huck were trying to go down the Mississippi River for whatever reason, or even if they were just stuck in Missouri, if they were in Missouri in the 1850’s, they’re going to run into guys like John Brown. Or they’re going to run into the people who would eventually become the Confederate guerrillas of the Civil War – people like Quantrill or Jesse James, who’s now this legendary folk hero of the Confederacy. And we talk about him like he’s an outlaw of the Old West, but no, he was a Confederate guerilla. They did horrible, horrible crimes. And so, that level of research really began to shape the narrative as I wanted to tell it.
Miller: What you’re talking about there are things that you definitely wanted to include in your book. Were there also things that you wanted to avoid, things you didn’t want the book to be?
Walker: Well, I always knew that I wanted Jim to not just be the hero of the book, I wanted him to come across as being almost a larger than life hero. I grew up with the Davy Crockett’s and the Daniel Boone’s, and all that sort of stuff. We had these folk heroes, these folk characters here in the United States. There’s very few of them that were African Americans, very few that were slaves or the descendants of slaves. And that’s what I wanted to do – I really wanted to turn him into, not quite a superhero, but very superheroic.
Miller: Some kind of supernatural element or nearly magical powers – is that the difference between the kind of folk-hero you’re talking about, and the superhero? Because you’ve written both.
Walker: Yes, I have. No, I really thought about it in just the way of, you take somebody like Davy Crockett or …
Miller: I was thinking about Paul Bunyan.
Walker: Paul Bunyan’s got a supernatural vibe to him because of the big blue ox and he was a giant. Or John Henry, the steel driving man, who goes up against the big steam engine machine. I didn’t wanna go that far into the supernatural or larger than life quality, but I wanted Jim to have that feeling of, for lack of a better term … like in American cinema, like John Wayne had become this idealized embodiment of white masculinity. And there is no Black equivalent to that. The closest there was in the early ‘60s was Woody Strode. And then later, you get guys like Jim Brown and Fred Williamson – they come along.
I wanted to try to capture some of that but in a way that was a little bit more grounded. Especially, because usually when we see narratives that involve slavery or the Civil War, there’s the myth of the “docile” slave, there’s the myth of the “contented” slave. There’s the myth of the “ignorant” slave, but there isn’t much by way of – whether you want to go mythology or whether you want to go legends – the larger than life, heroic slave, who’s willing to fight and kill for, not just his freedom, but the freedom of others. And to take Jim on that journey, because initially in the story he’s looking for his family. That was the beginning of the premise of the book, as I wanted to write it. He’s looking for his wife and kids.
Miller: And we should say, just to put a fine point on that, that was not present in the first book
Walker: No, he does have a family, in the original book, in Mark Twain’s book, but they almost feel like afterthoughts or like Mark Twain forgot about them. And that’s why I say a lot of times, the book reads like he was just making it up as he went along. It’s like, “Oh, well, wait a sec, where is … ?” Like the way Mark Twain handles Pap Finn. In the original book, they come across a wrecked boat. Jim goes aboard the boat … or it’s not a boat. It’s a house that’s been swept away by a storm. He goes inside and he finds Pap Finn, but he keeps that a secret from Huck. He doesn’t tell Huck for whatever reason. And reading that was like, well, Pap Finn should be the main villain of this story. There’s something there.
So, for me, it was like figuring out, OK, if Pap Finn is truly going to be the villain, how do I make him the villain? Here are the pieces that Mark Twain gave us. What can I add to it here?
Miller: If this gives something away you don’t want to, we can not go into the details. But can you explain your decision to make more explicit the connection between Jim and Huck?
Walker: Well, I don’t want to get too deep into it, because it is a pretty big reveal later on. But, first off, I wanted to give Jim a level of agency and humanity that didn’t exist. I wanted him to be the hero of the story. The moment I made that decision – he needs to be the hero of the story – then you call into question even more, “why is he hanging out with this kid?” And in the original pitch that I had written for the book, and even in some of the earlier drafts, Jim has essentially kidnapped Huck. Huck doesn’t realize that he’s been kidnapped, and Jim is using him almost like a human shield.
He knows that with Huck at his side, he can go places that he couldn’t otherwise go. Elements of that still remain in our book, but I felt like it ran the risk of taking too much sympathy or too much empathy away from Jim. And it still didn’t give me a good enough answer. We’ll say, if I was 10 when I read the book, 12 when I read the book, it didn’t give me a good enough answer as to, why is he traveling with this kid? That was always a driving force. And I was probably a solid quarter of the way through the first draft, before I started to figure out what it was I wanted to do. As I was moving away from this whole, “oh, wouldn’t it be funny if he’s kidnapped Huck and convinced Huck that this is all a game,” I was like, “yeah, it’s just not going to work.” I would lose interest in reading that book, so I don’t want to write it.
And it just started growing from there. Marcus, the artist, him and I talked about all this stuff, too. I wanted to make sure that he was on board with every decision that I made as a writer, and sometimes he would bounce ideas around with me. The story would take shape from there.
Miller: It’s worth noting that Percival Everett, who put out this – as you noted – novel called “James,” is very different. But it seems like he, too, dealt with some bedrock questions that he answered in related ways: “Why are they together?” It’s fascinating to see how two artists, working totally separately but sort of simultaneously, had to reckon with the same questions. When did you find out that he was also doing a reimagining of Huck Finn from Jim’s perspective?
Walker: Oh, man, that was a brutal day.
Miller: Was it really?
Walker: Yeah, it was probably a solid year-and-a-half ago. I’ll say it was around mid-2023. I was done writing the book and Marcus was drawing the book. He was definitely more than halfway done with the book. So we’ll say he was around page 160, 170. And we get this email from our editor and she was freaking out a little bit. And then we all kind of freaked out. It was like, oh, Percival Everett, who’s an amazing writer and has won just about every award a writer can win, he’s doing this book and it’s called “James.”
Miller: And he was just about to become more famous, too.
Walker: Yeah, because “American Fiction” hadn’t come out yet. So we all freaked out. We were trying to figure out how to circle the wagons, what could we do? And the reality was that close to half the book still had to be drawn. So there was no way we could speed up the process of releasing our book. We had a brief conversation, maybe we split the book into two volumes, and that just didn’t feel right. And finally, I just said, “Look, I can’t speak to what Percival Everett is going to do with his book. But the one thing his book will never have, is he will never have pictures by Marcus Kwame Anderson.” Even if we had all the same story beats and everything was the same, our book was gonna be different enough. So that was me being the voice of reason during what seemed like an unreasonable time.
Then his book came out, and by the time his book came out, ours was at the printer. This was earlier in 2024. So Marcus and I were like, “OK, we’re going to have to read the book,” because people are going to ask us about the differences. But we both waited till we knew there was absolutely no way we could change anything. We couldn’t do a, “Hey, stop the presses!” And, it was interesting, because when I read the book, I was engrossed in it. I really enjoyed the book and I’m asking some of the same questions. I was like, “OK, why are Jim and Huck together?” And I’m starting to suspect where he’s going with his explanation. And I’m like, please don’t let it be where we went.
Miller: It’s a hard conversation to have, when we’re trying to not spoil two books at this point! But, I’ll let you continue.
Walker: And one of the great things that happened was … again, I really enjoyed Percival Everett’s book, but he sticks pretty close to Mark Twain’s narrative. And, at one point I was wondering if I should do that. And I had mapped out the entire book. I had an outline of Twain’s original book, and every chapter where Jim was in it and what Jim was doing, because there’s entire sections where Jim just sort of disappears. So, in my mind, it was like, “OK, I can have him go on separate adventures and do his own thing.”
But the more I thought about it, the more I was – and this is more ego, than anything else – like, I want to make sure that this is my book. Some people might call it fan fiction. Some people might call it reimagining, remixing, whatever you want to call it. But I was like, I want people to look at it and I don’t want anyone to ever go, “Well, that was a waste of time, reading this book.” They might not like our book. They might not like “Big Jim and the White Boy,” but they’re never going to say, “Well, it was just like ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ except Jim’s like Fred Williamson in a ‘70s blaxploitation movie.” I didn’t want that.
Miller: You said it might be ego, it might be something else. Is it also just that it seems more interesting as a creator, to really push yourself to create something new?
Walker: Oh, well, yeah. But it sounds better for me just to say it was ego than getting into the philosophy of, hey, let’s push the boundaries of what we can do in this particular medium. Honestly, Marcus and I were talking about this, and one of the things that we said early on [was], “Look, if ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ is considered literature – and I’m not going to argue that it isn’t, I say that it’s literature, I agree with that – shouldn’t our retelling be no less?” Then that raises this question of, can a graphic novel be literature? You very seldom hear anything said about that, with the exception of maybe, people talk about Art Spiegelman’s “Maus.” And there’s a handful of others, but “The L Word” does not come up when you’re talking about graphic novels or comics.
So we went into this with this attitude of, we are going to create something, we are going to create a literary work that has a lot of pictures in it. And we didn’t say this to anybody else other than ourselves. This is us going back and forth. When we were first sending out advanced copies, there were a handful of people who knew me and knew my philosophies on graphic novels, on the medium. One of them wrote back to me immediately and was like, “I think this is literature.” It’s this crazy feeling of, “Oh, maybe this is more than what we thought it could be.”
Miller: What do you mean when you say “literature”?
Walker: Well, there’s this misconception … graphic novels and comic books are essentially similar mediums. The most obvious delineation between the two is the length of the work – a comic book is usually a periodical that’s maybe 20 to 32 pages, whereas a graphic novel, in the case of our book, is nearly 280 pages. But people still think of comics as being for kids. They still think of the superhero genre, they still think of Spiderman, Batman, the X-Men or Archie comics. And it’s that thought process and the fact that when you say comics or graphic novels, most people think “superheroes,” right away.
Miller: Do you think that’s still the case? Because I can imagine having somebody who writes graphic novels say this to me 10, 15 years ago. But, just today, I saw in The New York Times, “The 10 Best Graphic Novels of 2024,” or something [like that]. I mean, the Times wouldn’t have done that, I think, 20 years ago. It does seem like there has been a seismic shift in the way graphic novels are understood, appreciated and celebrated worldwide. Maybe it’s happened outside of the U.S. earlier than it happened here. But in this country, within the last 15 years.
Walker: It’s been a massive shift, but it’s still there. Marcus and I were doing a little mini-tour of the northeastern part of the U.S. – Connecticut, New York – and we did an event at SUNY, State University of New York in Albany. And I knew some people in the audience, they came out, they were friends of mine. But we started talking about students reading our graphic novels in college and college courses, and my friend was like, “They read comic books in college?” So, it’s like the average work-a-day person, or people who aren’t big fans, don’t necessarily think about it that way.
I’ve been teaching at Portland State University in their comic studies program for close to 10 years and convincing people – and if anyone from Portland State University is listening, pay close attention to what I’m about to say – that this is a legitimate course of study. And there’s still people that are very dismissive of it. What I remind them of is the fact that there was a time 50, 60 years ago when film was considered not a legitimate course of study, and there weren’t serious film study programs. Then they started popping up – UCLA, USC, NYU. That’s where we are with comics right now. So, 60 years ago, you wouldn’t be taking a course at a university on the history of cinema in America, or world cinema. Now, you can take courses in Manga, Japanese comics, American comics or graphic novels.
But there’s still people that roll their eyes. I’ve literally had to have conversations with people when they say, “You write graphic novels … so ‘graphic’ … does that mean ‘pornographic?’” And it’s like, “No.” Like, if I said I’m a graphic designer, would you think I was a pornographic designer? No, you wouldn’t think that. So, again, a lot of it’s about reeducating people or introducing them to the possibilities. But I’ve gotten good, I don’t lose my cool too much. But every now and then when people are like, “oh, comics are junk and they’re for kids,” it’s just like, “uh, well, whatever.”
Miller: I wanna go back to this fact that these three artists simultaneously released into the world, a reimagining of Huck Finn from Jim’s perspective at around the same time. And I should say that I’ve read that you first started work on a Jim-focused reimagining a decade ago. But then you return to it and it came out. Was there something about 2022, 2023, where the time was more right for it? How do you explain it?
Walker: I can’t. And Marcus and I have talked about that quite a bit. I could just go on and on about my philosophies about creativity and creative energy. And I think that there was something floating around in the universe and in the atmosphere of creativity. I always tell people, I tell my students this: Never be so arrogant as to think that your idea is original. The idea comes to you from somewhere else. We don’t understand where that is and it’s our job to either turn it into something or not turn it into something.
Miller: This is the way Elizabeth Gilbert and Ann Patchett have talked about some ideas. Two novelists and one of them had an idea. It didn’t work for her, and it went to the other, it went to Ann Patchett. That’s the way Elizabeth Gilbert has told the story. There’s something sort of spiritual about this idea of ideas floating around.
Walker: There is, and you’ll see multiple volcano movies, or multiple movies about twisters, or whatever. And part of that is what’s going on in the public consciousness or the public subconscious. So, for me, I’ve never met Percival Everett, but my guess is at some point he read the book and he had the same idea that I had. Then it just was like, the timing seemed right.
When I started writing my book, “Big Jim,” it was supposed to be prose. It was at least 10 years ago and it’s what my partner calls “slow writing.” It’s where you maybe write down an idea on a napkin or you start a file document, and you save it. Then, every six months, you go back to it and you don’t do anything with it. And that’s what my version of “Big Jim” was for years. I had a couple of people that were telling me, “This is such a great idea. You have to finish this book.” And I was like, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll get around to it … I’ll get around to it … I’ll get around to it.”
When the opportunity came up with our publisher, Marcus and I had just done “The Black Panther Party.” Actually, we were still working on it, when the idea of “Big Jim” came up there. And I realized I was never gonna finish writing this book that I had started, without some great motivator.
Miller: And the motivator was a publisher saying, we’ll publish your book if you write it.
Walker: Yeah, but it was terrifying because I hadn’t thought about it as a graphic novel back then. I was influenced by Thomas Berger’s “Little Big Man,” and that was what I was thinking of: “Oh, I’m gonna write this as a really darkly comedic satire.” And that’s where the idea of Jim taking Huck hostage came from. I was writing it as Jim is a very old man who had survived all of these countless battles, and fought in the Civil War. So a lot of those elements ended up staying in the graphic novel, but they were loose ideas that had yet to take shape. Then fate intervened, or the creative gods, or whatever.
Miller: How did you approach the way Jim talks?
Walker: Oh, that’s such a great question. And I gotta say that Percival Everett did it better, but it works better as prose than it does in graphic novels, I felt. I played with the idea that Jim would essentially speak two languages, which is a huge part of what Everett’s book is. There’s the way he talks when he’s just being himself. Then there’s a slightly different version – it’s putting on this show, this show of ignorance or being more docile than he is …
Miller: Code switching, literally, for survival.
Walker: Exactly. And this is something Marcus and I talked about quite a bit. Marcus, again, being the artist whose regular day job … he lives in upstate New York in the capital region. He’s the assistant director of the Underground Railroad Museum there. He and I were having these conversations and talking about how, for the enslaved, every day was a day of impossible choices. Every day was a day of doing things that, in this day and age, I would never do. And it’s like, yeah, you don’t have a choice. Like, you’re living with a threat that your children are going to be sold away from you and never seen again.
I think that, even to this day, there’s a certain amount of code switching that goes on, whether it’s communities, ethnicities or religions. And it was just, let’s play with that. Let’s play with that in a way that’s not so over the top that it becomes ridiculous.
Miller: I had written out some of the lines that early Jim, sort of Twain-style Jim, says, to give folks a reminder of the way he talks in that book … and even just saying them to myself felt like verbal blackface.
Walker: Yeah. It’s like a minstrel show.
Miller: Yeah, in ways that I will not say. But this relates to an author’s note that you have at the very beginning, about the way that the two of you decided to handle the very frequent use of the “N” word in the original novel and in your graphic novel, but in a clever way. Can you describe, first of all, what you came up with?
Walker: Well, it was one of those topics that Marcus and I talked about a lot from the very beginning, and we were like, the word can’t come out of the book. We have to keep the word in the book, because the word was part of everyday vernacular, everyday conversation in America. And it helped to normalize the dehumanization of the enslaved. And I didn’t want to take that impact out of the book. But I didn’t want to look at that word over and over again. I didn’t want to see the “N” word, whether we used it five times or 500 times … I didn’t want to see that in the book, but I knew it had to be in the book.
So we talked about that. And when I say I knew it had to be in the book, like, in my guts, I felt this. I was like, well, what if we just redact it, and redact it in a way that you always know what that word is. You can see the “N” and the “R,” and you just can’t see the other …
Miller: And then there’s just a black line running through it. I hadn’t thought about this before, but it’s like the graphic novel or the visual version of bleeping out a word. And then, it’s funny the way you put it that way, because my favorite way to bleep out a word is so the listener can have a pretty good sense of what the word is. Otherwise, I feel like we’re doing a disservice to listeners. And that’s when the stakes are lower than what you’re getting at, in terms of the historical impact of this word.
Walker: I took a lot from both Dave Chappelle’s show on Comedy Central, then Key and Peele, with their show. Whenever they bleep out a word, you know exactly what the word is. And you’re like, well, why did we bleep it out?
Miller: And you’re wondering if you can get away with that from the FCC too. I’m wondering that.
Walker: Exactly. So that was an inspiration. And when we got the original, they sent us these printouts of the book before it went to press and we hadn’t blacked the word out. And so you didn’t see it. You didn’t actually see the word till you read it and you’re like, “Oh, there it is.” But then when you started seeing these pages with these black bars, and suddenly it felt like, that was what I wanted. I wanted that level of discomfort. You know it’s there. We’re hiding it from you. We haven’t taken it away. It’s there. And that was the thing. I never wanted to … there’s versions of the book that have replaced that word with something else.
Miller: Versions, like, let’s make a version for seventh graders so they can enjoy the fun adventures.
Walker: Let’s make a version for the state of Texas … and I didn’t want to do that. But, again, I didn’t want to stare at that word. I didn’t want it to be there. We thought about it, we thought about it long and hard. And at this point, it’s the most asked question we get. The second most asked question is, “Hey, did you and Percival ever hang out at some point and talk about this?” Like, “No, we never did,” so …
Miller: I haven’t asked that one yet. [Laughter]
Walker: … And we haven’t met yet. I’ve never met him. One of these days I’d like to, just because I’d like to congratulate him because he just won the National Book Award, but to also tell him I really enjoyed his book. Like, there’s no rivalry on my end. He might be sitting there fuming, like pounding his fist. And if he is, all I can say to that is, “Hahahaha!”
Miller: One of the messages in this book – a character says this – is that an old cliche, “history is written by the winners,” is not necessarily true. Do you believe that it’s not true?
Walker: I believe 100% that history is not written by the winners. And I believe that we are living proof of that right now. I think one of the greatest lies told in the history of this country is the lie of “The Lost Cause,” which was a book written by Edward Pollard in the years after the American Civil War. [It] changed the fact that every state that seceded from the union that formed the Confederate States of America, every single one of them in their articles of secession says, “We are seceding because we want the right to keep slaves.”
And now, we are taught Southern states seceded because of “states' rights.” Changes everything, right? And when you see all the things that have happened in this country, especially with this recent election, so much of this is fueled by those same lies, the lies of “The Lost Cause.” We hear people say, “Oh, slavery wasn’t that bad. Slaves had a better life than they would have had in Africa” – all these things. They’re all total lies. I’m not going to say what I really think of them, otherwise it would be bleeped out.
But when you really get into the history of the United States and you get into the history of the Civil War, which is something that’s fascinated me for decades, you begin to realize, “Oh, ‘Gone With the Wind’ is not an accurate depiction of what the South was like. It’s not an accurate depiction of the war or slavery.” But this is what most people think when they think of that era. So, history is not always written by the winners. It’s often rewritten by the losers.
Miller: And the traitors.
Walker: That’s right. I just called the Confederates a bunch of traitors, which is what they were.
Miller: One of the main ways that you incorporate a lot of historical context into this book is through a fictional character named Almina Burnett. She is a Howard University professor, but we also come to find out that she’s more than that. What’s her connection to the central protagonist?
Walker: She is the great, great, great – I always forget how many “greats” – granddaughter of Jim. The idea in our book is that Jim and Huck were real people, and that she learned the story of Jim and Huck from her grandmother, who grew up with them in the 1930s. That character was not originally in the book. Originally, there was a college professor lecturing, and that college professor was very boring, and that part of the book wasn’t working. It was very much like the character of the narrator in “Rocky Horror Picture Show” that everybody yells at, “Where’s your neck?”
Miller: How do you find that out – that something’s not working? And, was it, in this case, you?
Walker: It was me. It was always me. I was like, there’s something wrong here. We were breaking away to have this college professor give historical context, which is what I knew we needed, but it just wasn’t working because it was very boring. And I was like, the reader at some point is going to have to really like this college professor, and not just skip those pages.
Miller: As you said, you’ve already explained that she is a part of this multigenerational dimension. And when I read it – and maybe this is a credit to you, as one of the creators of this work – it didn’t feel like a “pasted on” connection. I mean, to me, the multigenerational aspect seemed like it’s baked into the whole ethos of the book. But, it seems like you’re saying that it was a solution to a problem that you’re running into because you needed to have the history, but the historian didn’t make sense without a literal connection to the other characters.
Walker: No, that was it. And then once I made the decision, I talked to Marcus about it … and Almina is named after his mother. I was like, now I’m going to go back and I’m going to rework certain scenes and rewrite them, so that it makes more sense. So when the reveal comes that they’re related, you’re like, “oh, now it’s making sense,” because a lot of the way the story is structured is these little revelations.
It was interesting because as I was writing, I was like, these scenes don’t work because I’m getting bored writing them. And if I’m getting bored writing them, the reader is going to get bored reading them. Then it hit me, as someone who, I call myself an armchair historian, but as someone who loved to talk to my grandparents about the past, and realizing how much their stories influenced me to become a storyteller … I was like, well, what if the college professor is like that? What if the college professor is somebody who, the reason she went on to do this was because of the stories that she heard as a child that made her think to herself, “Oh, there’s more to history than what I’m being taught.” And that’s one of the themes of the book, that there’s more to history than what we’re told.
Miller: When you say that you were getting bored writing some of the historical pages … and it’s not full chapters, it’s just a couple of pages here and there that are really focused on the historical underpinnings of the rest of the story. It does remind me that that’s the majority of the first book that you worked on with Marcus Kwame Anderson, which was all history. But I don’t imagine that that was boring for you to work on. What’s the difference?
Walker: Well, “The Black Panther Party” was a nonfiction book. It is a graphic novel, but there’s parts of it that read more like an illustrated textbook, where there’s like, here’s a picture of Angela Davis, and a big block of text about her. And it’s pushing, I guess I could say, the very limits of what we could consider a graphic novel – meaning, there’s not that many scenes that have a sequential order of panels. People think of an action sequence in an issue of “Superman,” that’s sequential storytelling. And we do have those in “The Black Panther Party,” but I was like, I want a true graphic novel. I want a true story that’s a series of images strung together that tells a story for “Big Jim.”
But then, as we were working on it, I was like, well, what if we just flipped some of that and we threw in … again, because I love history, and there’s a part in the story where Huck and Jim take shelter in a town in Illinois called New Philadelphia. And it was like, I needed to make sure that the readers knew that New Philadelphia was a real place, and that Free Frank McWorter was a real person. And those are the sort of things that I was stumbling across during the research. And I was like, this has to go into the book. How do I make this work?
Miller: Can you describe briefly what New Philadelphia was? And then, this scene of the kitchen table between Jim and this man … based on a real man, who would have been dead by the time Jim had arrived, as you say. I learned from this book. If you can just briefly tell what New Philadelphia was, and then this extraordinary scene when they’re sitting there together.
Walker: New Philadelphia was a town in Illinois that was founded by an enslaved man who had bought his freedom, a guy named Frank McWorter. He was known as “Free Frank.” He moved to Illinois, he bought some land, and then he proceeded to buy his family’s freedom. And then this town began to grow and it was open to Free Blacks to live there. But then white folks started to move in, so it was, for the time, a fairly integrated town. It wasn’t very big, but it was there up until the late 1800s, I think. Then, towns just sort of went away.
But when I’d read about it, and I read about Free Frank, I was so inspired by him and his wife I was like, “I’ve got to put them into the story.” So I was trying to find a good place … and I had a map of all the places that Huck and Jim, and where their adventures would take them. And then, there were also certain narrative things, like, how do I present this to the audience?
I needed a scene where somebody was going to tell Jim that he was actually free, that he’d been running for so long that he didn’t really understand the concept that he was free. And who better to tell you that than a guy named Free Frank? And it’s this moment, where it’s obvious Frank knows that Jim is a runaway, and he says to him, “You don’t have to run anymore. You’re free.”
I knew all along I was always going to need a character that Jim was going to meet, that would instill in him the next evolution of who he was as a person. Free Frank became one of those people. And then John Brown became one of those people. Suddenly, it was like, oh, wait a sec, what if I can have some real people that I can pepper into this story. So, that was it. A lot of it was me … I always tell my students, I tell everybody, the first draft is just the beginning, and if you haven’t done a solid 10, 15 drafts of anything, you’re not taking it seriously. And draft 15 should look way different than the first draft.
Miller: You have a very moving dedication at the end of the book to your mother. Can you tell us about her?
Walker: Yeah, my mom was great. My mom passed away earlier this year. She had been diagnosed with vascular dementia back in 2021 or 2022, I can’t remember exactly when. But I had already started working on the book at the time. Her memory hadn’t started to fail her the way it would towards the end. And it became really difficult for me to finish the book, in part because I was taking care of her full time in addition to working on the book. But, the more I worked on the book and the more her cognitive abilities faded, the less I could even talk to her about the book, because she was always the first person I talked to about everything. And I would [say], “Hey, what do you think of this idea?” She was someone who I bounced ideas off of all the time. And …
Miller: What made her such a good first listen, first read?
Walker: You know, I think part of it was, she was the one who cultivated my interest in reading. She encouraged my interest in film, comics, all that sort of stuff. So, when I was a kid and I was figuring out how to do these things, she’s the first person I would show it to. As I got older, there was always a level of hesitancy because you worry, oh, your mom is gonna love everything that you do. But my mom wasn’t like that. My mom would be the first one to go, “This doesn’t work.” So it was really difficult because I knew that this project was going to be the biggest project of my career up until whatever point. And in my mind, there was this race to: “Can the book be done and come out before she dies?”
I knew she was gonna die this year. The writing was on the wall. So the key was, was she ever going to be able to hold the book? And then what I realized at one point or another was, it doesn’t matter because she’s not gonna remember holding the book. When I’d gotten a printout, it was just this massive printout that the publisher sent me before we went to press, and proofreading everything by hand. And I showed that to her, and she got really excited, but she didn’t remember that it was me, that I had written it. Her favorite book towards the end was the graphic novel “The Black Panther Party,” which she would just read over and over again. She would hand me the book and she’d go, “You should read this book. This is a great book.” And I would say to her, “Ma, I wrote that book.” The beautiful thing was, when you’re losing someone to dementia, there’s some people who react to what they don’t remember. It’s a very negative reaction. My mom was always, like, “You wrote this book. That is so cool!” It helped me through a very difficult time.
I was like, can she hold on long enough for the physical copies to arrive? And she didn’t, but I knew I was going to dedicate the book to her, and there was even a moment … because, I said in the dedication something to the fact that I knew my mom wasn’t gonna live to see it. She was still alive when I wrote that. But I knew it, like sometimes you just know these things. I knew like a year before she passed, “Oh, we’re not going to make it to … ” I was surprised she made it to her birthday.
Miller: David Walker, thanks so much for joining us. Congratulations on this new book. Thank you.
Walker: Thank you.
Miller: David F. Walker is the co-creator of the graphic novel “Big Jim and the White Boy.”
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