Huck & Jim

The initial idea for “Huck & Jim,” a contemporary retelling of Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," started to develop in early 2017 when I re-read Twain's classic novel.

As I was reading Huck’s account of his and Jim’s treacherous journey for freedom, I was also reading news reports about the present-day treacherous journeys for freedom being made by migrants and undocumented workers fearing deportation and other attacks in the US.

During the early part of 2017, there was a spike in the number of migrants and undocumented workers escaping the US by crossing the border "illegally" into Canada in order to claim asylum, with the largest numbers coming from African countries, from Ghana and other west African countries, and from Somalia and other countries in the Horn of Africa in the east.

Terrified of being deported to countries plagued by war and extreme poverty, many migrants made the dangerous trek by foot across the Canadian border in freezing temperatures, some of them losing fingers and toes to frostbite.

Tragically, a woman from Ghana, Mavis Otuteye, died of hypothermia less than a mile from the Canadian border in Minnesota.

Now in 2025, mass deportations and ICE terror are being unleashed against the populations of cities all across the United States. And in cities like Cincinnati and Springfield, Ohio, immigrant populations originating from countries including Mauritania and Haiti are demonized with outrageous lies spread by the far right and promoted by the new administration.

Chillingly, in December 2024, a lawmaker in Missouri, the state of Huck and Jim, proposed a bounty system for reporting and capturing migrants and undocumented workers, recalling the horrific bounty system that plagued Jim in Twain's novel.

"Huck & Jim" was made in a spirit of defiance against these appalling attacks, and against those who would seek to divide the modern-day Hucks and Jims.

In this context, Twain's immortal depiction of the comradeship between Huck and Jim takes on an increasingly subversive and urgently burning significance.

As the late Twain scholar Justin Kaplan pointed out, “Anyone who responds to Huckleberry Finn’s own conflicts of conscience at heart will never again be able to accept as moral absolutes the conventional wisdom of a particular time and place.”