Many readers view the speech of Jim in Mark Twain’s 1885 novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as part of a racist and disrespectful characterization of a Black man by a white author. But although nearly all of his white contemporaries who wrote in Black dialect viewed it as a source of humor, Twain did not. To assume that he did is to make a category mistake—one that misrecognizes what Twain was up to when he crafted one of the most iconic Black characters in American fiction. Black dialect was a fraught subject in the nineteenth century. While Black writers generally Read more