A Study Guide for Nancy Rawles's "My Jim"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Nancy Rawles's "My Jim," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535829175

Book preview

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My Jim

Nancy Rawles

2005

Introduction

Nancy Rawles's My Jim (2005) is about a woman, Sadie, who was born into slavery in Missouri. Throughout the book she relates the story of her life to a granddaughter who was born after the Civil War and has no idea of the kind of life that her people were forced to live so recently in the past. Speaking in the voice of an uneducated but passionate woman of her time, Sadie recounts the beatings and maiming, the separation of families as some members were sold away and never heard from again, and the forced pregnancies that gave the slave owners a fresh supply of human beings to sell. As she tells her story, Sadie and her granddaughter work on sewing a memory quilt, incorporating into it what few items she was able to keep as her own in a system that forbade slaves to own anything, as well as patterns of fabric that serve as symbolic reminders of people Sadie has known.

The most significant of these people, the Jim of the novel's title, was already familiar to generations of readers before this book was published: he is the slave who runs away from Hannibal, Missouri, with Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain's famous 1884 novel, which is often considered one of the greatest works of American literature. Sadie is present at Jim's birth, and he is her one true love, her first husband, and the father of her first children. Characters and events from Twain's book weave through My Jim, though the focus of the story is always on Sadie and her struggle to survive. Readers should be aware that this book describes, though not graphically, the atrocities inflicted upon slaves during that period, including numerous instances of rape. There is frequent use of a derogatory label used against blacks, a precedented stylistic choice that has sometimes gotten Adventures of Huckleberry Finn placed on lists of unacceptable books, though Rawles explains in Sadie's own voice the context in which such racial epithets are used.

Author Biography

Rawles was born in 1958 and grew up in Los Angeles. She majored in history at Northwestern University, where she received her bachelor of science degree from the Medill School of Journalism. Remaining in Chicago after graduation, she worked as a journalist for various publications, including the Chicago Reporter, and also studied playwriting, having several plays produced. In 2000, her play Keeper at the Gate, about the assassination of Seattle Urban League director Edwin T. Pratt, won the King County Arts Commission Publication Award.

Rawles's first novel, Love Like Gumbo, published in 1997, is about Grace Broussard, a woman whose family is loving and complex. It is set in South Central Los Angeles in the 1970s, an area Rawles was familiar with, and it won her the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award and a Washington State Governor's Writers Award. Her second novel, Crawfish Dreams, published in 2003, is about Grace's mother, Camille, and her history in Los Angeles as the town changes over the decades. Crawfish Dreams was included in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. My Jim, published in 2005, won Rawles an American Library Association Alex Award, honoring books written for adults but having special appeal for teens, and was the 2009 selection for the Seattle Reads program.

Plot Summary

Part One: Marianne Libre

JAR