1. Illustrations of Jim
“Representing Jim, ” by Stephen Railton
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2. Stephen Railton’s Rationale
"Who dah?" This is Jim's first line, which is also the novel's first line of dialogue. It's a good question for Jim to ask. One of the greatest issues raised by the novel is "who is there" as far as Jim is concerned -- a human being? a piece of property? What makes Huck decide to "go to hell" in the scene that most critics call the moral climax of the story is that he can "see Jim before me," instead of the figure his culture has told him is there: "Miss Watson's nigger." But how the novel as a whole "sees" him is a question that remains very controversial.
As a perennially popular text, Huck Finn has appeared in numerous editions, many of them illustrated. Every illustrator must "see Jim" in order to draw him, and at the same time their various illustrations together say a lot about the way that American book-makers and book-buyers have imagined the African American slave.
In this section I've gathered examples from every artist between 1885 to who depicted "Jim" for an American edition of the novel. I think the pictures below tell a story -- about the persistence of racist stereotypes and the slow emergence of the conviction that Jim is a character whose humanity is the equal of Huck's or, say, Col. Grangerford's -- but I've tried not to impose my reading too narrowly on these selections. Whenever there were more than two pictures of "Jim," I've tried to choose complementary ones: i.e. to include the pictures that seemed to me the least as well as the most racist in their representation of Jim.

3. E. W. Kemble (1885)

4. Illustration by E. W. Kemble (1898)

5. Illustration by Worth Brehm (1923)

6. Illustration by Norman Rockwell (1940)

7. Illustration by Thomas Hart Benton (1942)

8. Illustration by Zansky (1946)

9. Illustration by Baldwin Hawes (1947)

10. Illustration by Donald McKay (1948)

11. Illustration by Richard M. Powers (1954)

12. Illustration by John Falter (1962)

13. Unsigned Illustration (1963)

14. Illustration by Warren Chappell (1978)

15. Illustration by Barry Moser (1985)
Clearly Moser "sees Jim" as a person of great dignity. But which artist's work most faithfully illustrates the novel's text? How do MT's words represent Jim -- as a character or a caricature? These remain questions that readers must answer for themselves.