A darkly funny road novel about two actors touring a stripped-down Huckleberry Finn through a hostile America - publishing during Banned Books Week, in the year of America's Semiquincentennial, and the 150th anniversary of Tom Sawyer. Inspired by real events.
Axel Emerson isn't chasing a dream - he's running from a body. After the sudden death of his estranged father, and the detective's calls that follow, a washed-up casting agent offers him an exit: tour the schools as Huck Finn in a stripped-down, two-man stage version of the American classic. It's 1991, and the country is cracking open.
His co-star is Moses Morton, a fifty-five-year-old Black actor cast as Jim, and from the first moment, Moses sees straight through him. As the two-man company drives from one school gymnasium to another, performing Twain's text to American children in the year of Anita Hill, the Rodney King brutality, and the height of the culture wars, the road between them becomes a slow reckoning with race, performance, fatherhood, and what it costs to play another man's part.
When performance and reality finally collide, there's no script left to hide behind.
A Publishers Weekly BookLife Editor's Pick, Huckleberry Jim is a reckoning with race, guilt, and the bedtime stories America tells itself to sleep at night. For readers of Percival Everett's James and Paul Beatty's The Sellout.