Huck becomes a secondary main character, a deuteragonist. The antagonist remains the same as in the Mark Twain book James comes from: slavery in the US mid 19th Century — or more specifically, slave traders or sellers, owners, and others benefiting or attempting to leverage for some advantage from the arrangement.
They are brought nearby, and the slapstick is not funny. But to be without a surname is to be free from predispositions, assumptions, or any kind of argument about who you are or might be, where you come from or where you might be going. I wish I could tell my story with a sense of history as much as industry. I was sold when I was born and then sold again.
I cannot claim to any knowledge of that world or those people, whether my people were kings or beggars. I admire those who, at five years of age, like Venture Smith, can remember the clans of their ancestors, their names and the movements of their families through the wrinkles, trenches and chasms of the slave trade. I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.
And how do the two terms differ? But he seems to feel it is published as soon as he writes it down. James presumably will not lie, not to his reader. To be a writer is to make choices, to string together those choices.
Then I wrote my first words. I wrote:. I have yet to choose a name. In the religious preachings of my white captors I am a victim of the Curse of Ham. The white so-called masters cannot embrace their cruelty and greed, but must look to that lying Dominican friar for religious justification.
