EPISODE 240: David F. Walker, Mark Twain, and Big Jim
TRT 52:20
BETH ACCOMANDO David F. Walker tackles serious material but sometimes with unexpected influences.
DAVID F. WALKER Then I thought of The Muppet show, of all things, and I thought of Statler and Waldorf, and I thought of how there's nothing funnier than… It doesn't even have to be two old people. It can just be two people telling the same story but disagreeing on the details.
BETH ACCOMANDO And that’s how he came up with the idea of retelling Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with Big Jim and Huck as old men adding a fresh commentary to the familiar tale. It’s a clever reimagining of a classic but problematic work of literature.
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BETH ACCOMANDO Welcome back to listener supported KPBS Cinema Junkie, I'm Beth Accomando.
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BETH ACCOMANDO David F. Walker has been a frequent guest on Cinema Junkie, often talking about Blaxploitation. But I have also had him on to discuss his graphic novels such as The Black Panther Party. He just published a new graphic novel called Big Jim and the White Boy, which allows Jim to be the protagonist in Twain’s story rather than Huck. That means we get to see him as a more fully fleshed out character and we get to learn more about his family. Walker also weaves in real history and historical characters to provide more context to Twain’s novel. Walker discusses his creative process, the rabbit holes he went down in his research, and why he loves sequential storytelling.
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BETH ACCOMANDO I need to take one quick break and then I will be back with David F. Walker.
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BETH ACCOMANDO Welcome back to Cinema Junkie. I’m Beth Accomando. Before we get into the details of David F. Walker’s Big Jim and the White Boy, I wanted him to shed some light on how the project first came about.
DAVID F.WALKER It's actually a two-fold process. I'm going to say maybe 10, 15 years ago, I had the idea of doing a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At the time, it was going to be prose. It wasn't going to be a graphic novel. And I dinked around with it, and I have a very dear friend And she calls it slow writing. And slow writing sometimes is very close to being no writing. And so I would always go back to this Huck Finn book. My cousin would yell at me periodically. He's like, Man, this is going to be a great thing. You got to do I was like, Yeah, whatever. Then over at 10 Speed Press, I did the non-conviction graphic novel on the Black Panther Party. And I had finished writing it, but it was still being drawn by Marcus Kwame Anderson. My agent reached out to me and he said, 10 Speed, they're trying to figure out what are some projects we could do next. He said, They're interested in doing retellings of certain works of classic literature, and they're interested in maybe doing adventures of Huckleberry Finn if you'd be interested in writing it. I was like, Well, as a matter of fact. Years later, this idea that I had started, something came along that ignited a new interest in it and made me realize sometimes you'll have an idea, but if someone's not paying you to do it, you're not going to do it. You're just going to sit around on it. I fell into that trap with what became Big Jim and the Whiteboy. I don't think I would have done it had my agent not said anything, had 10 Speed not been interested in doing something along these lines. Then ultimately, it's the way the fates of the universe work. It all worked out. Then Marcus was able to draw it. At the time, he was drawing Black Panther Party, and that was such a positive experience that even during that process, I was like, I don't know if I could ever do another long project again if Marcus isn't part of it.
BETH ACCOMANDO Do you remember the first time you read adventures of Huckleberry Finn and how you reacted to it?
DAVID F.WALKER I don't remember the first time I read it. I remember the first time I saw a film version of it, which was in the '70s.
CLIP Jim? I got to go. Jim, honey, what? I got to go now. I got to get away from here. Got to go? What did you do, Jim? I ain't done nothing, but You're going to sell me to the slave traders. Not Ms. Walsh? She can't help it. Huck's Pap and came and took him away. And the ladies, they need the money to buy Huck back. Jim, you know what they do to run away slaves? They catch you, they whip you, they trust you up like a hog. But if they sell me, then I may as well be dead because I won't ever see you no more.
DAVID F.WALKER All I remember is that I believe Jeff East, who played young Clark Kent in Superman the movie was in it. CLIP Starring Jeff East as… Sarah Williams. George Peters. My real name is George Jackson. Huckleberry. And Paul Winfield as Good Old Jim. Find anything? Nothing. Ain't nothing in there, bro. A Dead Man. Ain't nothing but a house of death. Let's get out of here. DAVID F.WALKER But I knew the book, and I read the Classics Illustrated version. I feel that every great comic book writer should have read all the classics, but they should have read the Classics version first, right? But that didn't really answer your question, did it?
BETH ACCOMANDO Well, I was just curious how it impacted you. I mean, why was this something that eventually came up as like, I want to revisit it?
DAVID F.WALKER That's a great question. That I can answer. I couldn't tell you exactly when I read the book. It had to be probably around 12 or something like that. But as with a lot of things, the way my brain was wired, even as a kid, if there was a book or a comic or a film, TV show, if there was a black character in it, I would be drawn to that character. Then I would start asking a lot of questions, and usually the questions were like, Why? Why is this happening like this? And so with adventures of Huckleberry Finn, most of the film versions ease back on the vernacular and the way Jim is portrayed. He's always portrayed in a pseudo-minstral-like way. But in the book, Mark Twain's original book, that vernacular that he uses, which at the time seemed very revolutionary and groundbreaking, was also firmly rooted in the tradition of the Minstral Show. I just remember reading it and thinking, Okay, come on. Really? But the two big questions, and I've said this in other interviews, that I asked was, one is, why is he going south? If you're a runaway slave, The only thing they taught us about slavery in the underground railroad was you run north and you follow the North Star. Then the other question that I had was, why is he so loyal to Huck? At the time, I couldn't quite wrap my head around on some of these concepts. But the older I got, and the more I studied the story, the more I read, the more I wrote, the more I began to formulate these ideas of like, Okay, well, the question just kept coming back. Because at the end of the day, when we look at American literature, Jim and Uncle Tom are the two most famous Black characters in American literature from that era, from the 1800s. One is pre-Civil War, one is post-Civil War. Both of those characters, I think, have merit. I also think that most people don't even understand the historical significance of those characters, what they were really all about. Most people don't know about Harriet Beecher-Stowe and her background. They don't know about Mark Twain and his background. They also don't know about Margaret Mitchell and her background and why she were gone with the wind and the fact that she was a horrifically racist human being who would fit in very well in today's society.
BETH ACCOMANDO We'll just leave it at that. To answer some of your questions of why you've reimagined this Mark Twain book. Describe a little bit about the approach you take to that source material and how you wanted to re-imagine it for your graphic novel.
DAVID F.WALKER Yeah. The first thing I did was I sat down and I reread the book. I highlighted all the passages with Jim, and I had multiple copies of the book. I found an annotated version with footnotes and glossary and all that stuff. So that was helpful. And then from there, I immediately was Okay, I had a choice. One was, do I retell the book scene by scene, the scenes that Jim is in? This is ultimately what Percival Everett did with his book, James. I made the decision really early on to not do that. The reason why was Mark Twain, there's two things he didn't deal with in the book. One is he didn't really deal with the subject of slavery in a larger context, and then he didn't deal with the Civil War. The novel was written pretty much after the failure of Reconstruction. And I want to be careful not to condemn him for how he wrote it, why he wrote it, whatever. But there's a lot of interesting stuff that was left on the table. I was like, if I want this book to really stand apart and not just be a cover song, a cover version of a classic song, I'm going to need to recompose it. I'm going to need to take the idea of what Mark Twain started and build from that. Then that led to like, Okay, I need to understand Missouri. I need to understand what slavery was like in Missouri. I need to understand the world that Mark Twain came from. I knew that he worked as a newspaper reporter, so I needed to understand what was in the news both before he became a reporter and then during it. All of this is really my way of not doing work. This is my my preferred form of procrastination. I did a ton of research and just started They're discovering all these things. I was like, this would really fit in well with an adventure story. The goal with Jim and the story itself was I want to take the idea of the American folk hero, be that folk hero, someone based in reality, Davy Crockett and Daniel Boon and all those guys, or the fictional folk heroes, the Johnny Appleseeds and the Paul Bunnions. I wanted to create the only African American folk hero there is that people remember, it's not the only one, but the only one that people remember is John Henry, the steel driving man. I was like, Okay, let's think about how would we turn Jim into a folk hero. Then it was like, But once he's a folk hero, how do we unpack who he is behind the scenes? This is how the brain of David Walker operates, which is not a fun place to be in sometimes. It can be scary, but at the end, it gets the job done.
BETH ACCOMANDO Now, the book starts with a number of pages that feel lifted from the original book. You have three pages of this, and then you interrupt that. So talk about your decision to do it that way, because it does. When you start looking at it, the way the images are, the language that's used, does strike you as, however you want to put it, dated, problematic whatever. Discuss why you wanted to do it that way and what impact you hoped it had.
DAVID F.WALKER I'm a fan of Little Big Man, the book and the film, and the idea of both a semi unreliable narrator, but also that person that you meet who has all these crazy stories to tell, and you're like, Is this person telling the truth, or is this just a load of garbage? As I was thinking about it, originally, I was like, Okay, in the '30s and '40s, there were a lot of audio recordings of the former enslaved, which is where a lot of what we should know about slavery comes from, although so much of that is that is being held back from us. But I was like, Well, what if Jim lived to be a really old man? He's that old man who's always upset that's like, This is my story, and they stole my story from me. And so began from there. And in the early draughts of the book, it was this New Deal history recording crew because I believe that came out of the New Deal, a lot of those slave recordings. It started out that way. Then I was like, Yeah, it's It sucks and it's boring. I was like, How do you make it better? Then I thought of The Muppet show, of all things, and I thought of Statler and Waldorf, and I thought of how there's nothing funnier than… It doesn't even have to be two old people. It can just be two people telling the same story but disagreeing on the details. And I was like, Okay, let's have Huck be alive, too. Let's have these two really old men. And if the reader doesn't know if they're being honest or not, that's fine. Because that's the story. My grandfather would tell these stories sometimes, and it was like, Really? You are best friends with Harry Belafonte? How is that possible? And then he would tell these stories. And what was interesting is a lot of times, there's no pictures to back it up. I come from a family. I don't come from a family. We all come from families that are intricate parts of history, period. Just because their names and their actions aren't written down in history books, doesn't mean they didn't do significant things. I was thinking a lot about that. I was thinking about the stories that if I tell folks, not only... My grandfather was good friends with Harry Belafonte. My grandfather's cousin was not only good friends was with Ossie Davis. He was also good friends with Malcolm X, who he met through Ossie Davis, but he also knew Martin Luther King Jr. If I tell people that, they look at you and they just go, No, that can't be possible. I wanted to play with some of those notions of how history works, how we share that history, how it's passed along. Then the books are that and a lot of kicking and screaming, and the book came along from there.
BETH ACCOMANDO Talk a little bit more about the structure because in addition to your characters interrupting a narrative, you also jump back and forth in time to have characters from the '30s and then the '80s and I think the 2000s all adding layers to your story. How did you come up with that approach?
DAVID F.WALKER A lot of it was trial and error. A lot of it was I love context. I pick up a book, and if the book has pictures, I like to read the captions because the captions usually tell you something that's slightly different than what's in the body of the book. I just was thinking about all the different ways information can be transmitted and how one generation can affect all the generations that come after, even though we don't talk about it. Again, a lot of it was trial and error. Marcus Kwame Anderson, my artist, is an amazing collaborator. I would start to write sequences. I would start to go down a certain path with the story, and then I'd go, This quite working. And I would talk to him and I would say, How do you feel about it? He hadn't started drawing it, certain things yet. And I was always looking for, How do I make this more compelling? What is it that I always wish I had from a story that I'm not putting into this story. These are the questions I was asking. Then at one point, I hit this moment where I was like, There's no good female characters in adventures of Huckleberry Finn.It's like, How do I work a good female character in? So then I created the college professor. But she was dry and lifeless. I was like, She doesn't work, but I need her. How do I make her more compelling, more interesting? Oh, wait a minute. What if she is the descendant of Jim? Suddenly, then the story new layers begin to develop. The thing I had to do, and I do this a lot with my work now, is to never be afraid to make the changes that need to be made for it to become more compelling. It's not done in until it's off to the printer. Until it's off to the printer, you should always be willing to change certain things and move things around. I wanted this to be the best book it could possibly be. I wasn't afraid to listen to what the book and the characters were telling me whenever they were like, No, this ain't working. You have to turn down the volume on those voices that when they talk to you, the creative voices, they're usually right. They usually steer you in the proper direction.
BETH ACCOMANDO Now, you've mentioned the artist Marcus Kwame Anderson a couple of times. Because this is for radio, his visual style, describe how he brings these characters to life through his illustration.
DAVID F.WALKER He has a style He's a style that I think is often used in a negative way. People would say it's cartoony, right? The stuff he does isn't super photorealistic, but he's also a very versatile artist. Anyone who's looked at our Black Panther Party book can see that versatility there. But one of the things he's able to do is convey emotion with a minimal amount of lines. That's what comics are supposed to be. The great Alex Toth always talked about, use the least amount of lines possible and then use less than that. Marcus and I talked a lot about artists like Alex Toth, Will Eisner, folks like that who really define this medium that him and I love so much. There was also that sense of familiarity. When the publisher said, who's an artist that you would like? I said, I think Marcus would be good. And they were like, oh, but he's so cartoony. And I was like, yeah, no, he is cartoony. We know that, but he's also more versatile than that. What we want to convey in this story is both emotion and clarity of action. And by clarity of action, I mean, it's what I call Squares and rectangles, which is comics, comic pages are rectangular, and then the panels that fit into those pages are both squares and rectangles most of the time. The moment you start deviating from that grid, the harder it can be to read. The one complaint I hear a lot of times from people is like, Oh, I don't know how to read comics. I don't know how to read graphic novels. I don't know. I'm not sure what order I'm supposed to read those bubbles with the words in them. Marcus and I are always talking about how do we make it easier for the reader to look at a page, to look at a panel, know what to read first, know where the eye is supposed to move. In that regard, he's as classically trained an artist as they can be, and you forget that it's cartoonish. You forget that it looks almost like animation cells and that Jim's eyes are just a line in a semicircle. You can't even really see the pupils or anything. But it's like that doesn't matter because the way his brow line is, the way his eyebrows are, speak a motion. And that understanding of how to create complexity through something that seems to look simple is not an easy task, but Marcus knows how to do it.
BETH ACCOMANDO I thought it was really impressive, too, that change you get from those panels of Mark Twain's story. At first, you cut to them as older characters, but then to Jim. I mean, those are, like you say, simple lines, but the difference in how you perceive Jim drawn in those two different styles is light and day.
DAVID F.WALKER This is a testimony both to Marcus, and this is all stuff I think about, too. So even the first time we see the real Jim, it's when you turn a page. So if you're reading it as a physical book, boom, that you turn that page, there he is, and you're like, Wow. My good friend Brian Bendis was talking to me about that, and he was like, That was intentional, wasn't it? And I was like, Of course, it was intentional. You know me well enough to know that it's like, What do we reveal on the a page turn. With a page turn, it always has to be that image that's on the right-facing side of a spread, not the left-facing side. Because what people usually see first when they turn a page is what's on Excuse me, what's on the right-facing side. You have it on the left-facing side, people look at the right and then they look over, and it's this weird dynamic of how people read comics. They look, you don't want to have that spoiler image facing them on that on that odd number page. It has to be on that even. You look, That's Jim? That's what we wanted. We talked about it. We talked about everything from how different sections of the book would be drawn to how they would be colored so that we could take the readers on a journey that in a lot of ways, they would understand stuff almost on an instinctive level. As part of my inspiration, there was two or three Spike Lee films Most notably would be Malcolm X, but then do the right thing. Everything up to Malcolm X, really, there was a level of inspiration because Spike Lee's team that he worked with, which included Ernest Dickerson as his director of photography. But that whole team did all these things with color and with shot choices and editing choices. I was like, this is what it looks like when a filmmaker uses the right team, the best team you can possibly get. It's interesting because I've talked about this regarding other filmmakers. Sometimes there's this drastic shift in the quality of their work. The first thing I always do is, who's their DP and who edited this movie. You can see it. If you know how to look for that stuff, you can start to figure it out. Marcus and I wanted to treat this not like a film per se, but using some of those principles of like, Okay, how do we use color to evoke emotion? How do we use drawing styles to... What can we do so that when the reader turns the page, they know, Oh, we're back in the 1930s as opposed to the 1850s?
BETH ACCOMANDO You mentioned research earlier, and there's a lot of real history in the book and real historical characters. In doing all that research, was there anything you found that surprised you, or was there You talk about going down rabbit holes. How many of those rabbit holes did you have?
DAVID F.WALKER I had so many of them. I think the biggest thing... There was a couple, and there were stuff that didn't end up really making it into the book. But there was a lot of it was just about Missouri and Kansas, specifically. What a lot of people don't know, historically, is that what would become the American Civil War when the Southern state seceded from the nation The precursor to that was what was known as the border wars in Missouri and Kansas, going back into the 1850s. I knew a little bit about that, but I really did a deep dive into the research of that particular era and what was going on, what slavery was like in the state of Missouri, and then what was going on in some of the surrounding states. While Illinois was technically a free state, it was a state where a lot of unscrupancies group of US business people would rent enslaved individuals to work as slaves in Illinois. There was a thing that now is known as the reverse underground railroad. So the underground railroad was what the enslaved used to escape to freedom. The reverse was these people that were running around, kidnapping free Blacks, kidnapping or capturing those who'd run away, and then selling them back into slavery. And so there was a lot of little things like that that I stumbled across. I think the biggest thing, and it's in the book, there was a town in Illinois called New Philadelphia. And when I'd read about that in my research, the existence of New Philadelphia and the man who founded it was a guy named Free Frank McWarder. He had already died by the time adventures of Huckleberry Finn was set. But I had to have him in the book. I had to have the town in the book. It was one of those things like, how come more people don't know about him? They don't know about this town. There was always these little things that I would stumble across. Mark Twain was a huge fan of a writer named Ned Buntline, and Buntline wrote the equivalent to the pulp novels of the earlier 1800s. There were all these characters that really inspired Mark Twain. In fact, in Tom Sawyer, Tom Sawyer is a fan of Ned Buntline's books. I was introduced to even the pop culture that Mark Twain was consuming. Everything was… I feel like if you're doing research, whether it's for a fictional book or a non-fiction work, if you're not finding stuff you didn't know, and if you're not surprised and looking around going, How come I didn't know this? How come more people don't know this? Then you're doing something really, really wrong. I was just having a conversation with my good friend, John Jennings, about this thing. You John in his work, I'm assuming. I can't remember what it was that I dropped on him, but he was like, What are you talking about? I always feel like if I can surprise John with something, I've done a year's worth of work in five minutes. Whatever it was, it had something to do with comics. Oh, no, it was this white writer named Octivist Roy Cohen, who wrote a lot of stuff for Saturday Evening Post. He had this character whose name was Slappy McWhite, or something like that. But it was a black private investigator. And he wrote something like 100 short stories for a Saturday Evening Post with this character who was this bumbling private detective who talked in this vernacular very similar to the minstral's of the day. But up until two weeks ago, I'd never heard of this character. John had never heard of this character. And they actually made a series of short films in the late '20s, early '30s with this character. Again, And I know you know this, Beth, because you're on that same nerd level where you're like, How did I not know this? And I felt so good stomping John Jennings on that one. I was like, Oh, my God, I got him. I got him. But it also made me go, and I stumbled upon this really randomly, and then suddenly the wheels start turning. This is how the wheels of creativity start to turn. You're like, What could I do with this character? I I'm obsessed with Charlie Chan, but I'm more obsessed with his chauffeur, Birmingham Brown. What could I do with these characters? What could I do with... And there's so many of them throughout pop culture that have been forgotten. A lot of them lapsed into public domain. You just have to be... I think so many people are afraid of the concept of research, and it's like, no, research is the best... It is the best form of procrastination. It's the best form of bizarre addiction. It's the best obsessive compulsive behavior we can have. You learn all sorts of new fun stuff.
BETH ACCOMANDO The Black Panther graphic novel you did was very much based in fact and history. And And with Huck Fenn or Big Jim, you're taking a more fictional approach, but weaving history into it. Both of these were graphic novels. So what is it about the graphic novel or the comic book form that attracts you and that makes you feel like this is the way I want to tell these stories and mix all these elements in?
DAVID F.WALKER You would have to ask me the hard question, right? I loved comics as a kid, right? I was that kid. I'm not exaggerating. I literally learned how to read with comics. I've always loved the juxtaposition of visuals, imagery, and text. And I love comics more than I loved even Dr. Seuss books. Because Dr. Seuss books or any of those children's books, the Bernstein bears, any of that stuff, you had one image per page, that was it. There might be some action or dynamic there, but there's something about what Will Eisner called sequential art. Sequential storytelling, which just really pulled me in as a kid. I came of age. I was reading comics by the early '70s, which was a really great time for American comics. If I had the patience and the wherewithal, I would have become a comic book artist. I think very visually, but I don't have the skill set to pull it off. A lot of times when I have an idea, my first thought is, how do you turn this into a comic? I need to turn this into a graphic novel. I just happen to think, even if I'm reading a book on the history of film or the history of music or whatever, I like to see pictures. I want to know what this person looked like. And I think that most people We've quickly moved out of this phase of people wanting to read and see pictures. Now they just want to listen. They want to watch their video essays or their podcasts or whatever, and that's fine. But For me, there's a way to take all these things that I love, visual elements, visual works of art, written word, sequential storytelling, history, mixing history with fiction, all these things that I just love and just going, Okay, here's a medium that allows me to do this in a way that film can allow me to do it in some ways, but there's so many more hoops, film is so much more expensive to do. And prose, while I love writing prose, it feels almost like a lost art form to me. Or maybe I should say reading straight prose feels like it's becoming an increasingly lost art form. People want something else. And so now it's about trying to find that balance between all of that.
BETH ACCOMANDO Mark Twain supposedly based the characters of Jim and Huckleberry Finn on people he knew. You take that, and then you take that a few steps further. How did you want to develop these characters and how much other history did you want to weave into this?
DAVID F.WALKER That's a great question. Well, yeah. So Huckleberry Finn was primarily based on a kid he grew up with that he knew growing up. And same with Jim. Jim was based on a man named Daniel Quarles, who was owned by Mark Twain's uncle. But I had this notion in my head from the very beginning of knowing that Mark Twain by his own admission, based a lot of the characters in his work on people that he knew. What if there were just some people he never talked about? What if he was just like, he essentially, for a lack of a better term, stole their lives stories and and turn them into something else. I wanted to play around with that a lot just because I thought it would be funny. I thought it would be funny to have a really angry, irate black man that's 102 years old who's mad that his life story has been taken from him. I leaned heavily into that. Then there's a couple of really solid books out there that are specifically about Missouri, what slavery is like in Missouri. There's a book that's all about the world that Mark Twain grew up in. Then all you have to do is find two or three solid books. They don't even have to be that good. You go to the back to the bibliography, and then you start looking to see what their resources were. Then you go to the public library, and these are the hacks for everybody who wants to do this. You start getting books from the public library. You don't buy them from Amazon. You get them first from the library. If they're really good and you think you might need them for longer, then you find an independent bookstore that has them and you buy them there. That way you can mark up the books and write on the sides of the pages. It's funny because I just had to do that with another book for another project that hasn't come out yet, but I had returned one of the reference books that I used to the library, and I put it on hold, and it was taking forever to fulfill. And I was like, All right, I'm just going to buy this book. It was one of those more expensive books, but I found it used For me, what I consider a reasonable price, and for all you people out there who are wondering what's a reasonable price when you're a researcher, there's no such thing. It's like if the book's out of print and you need it, you just need to decide if you're going to buy groceries that week.
BETH ACCOMANDO Well, what you do with Jim also allows you to take one character and weave a lot of history into his one life story, but basically letting us know a lot of stuff that we don't in history books, but we're connecting with one character and being able to get all these different things.
DAVID F.WALKER Yeah, no, that's it. It's like, I didn't want it to be Mr. Peabody and the Professor, per se, where they're traveling These characters travel back through time and they're meeting folks from history. Although I will say that I think Mr. Peabody and the Professor was part of the Jay Ward world of animation, which include like Bullwinkle and Commander McBrag. Because Commander McBrag did… There's always these history stories. I watched a lot of that stuff. I hadn't even thought about that until just now. I watched a lot of Jay Ward animation as I was working on this particular project, just thinking like, Okay, let's look at how those animators and those storytellers flipped things on their head. Some of that stuff is really hard to find. The gogo gopher is really hard to find. I mean, some of that stuff is racist or problematic by today's standards. But if you can look past those things, you're going to see all sorts of inspiring things. I mean, you can't understand. I honestly believe this now. You can't truly understand Mark Twain's adventures of Huckleberry Finn if you don't understand the history of the Minstrel Show. Because the Minstrel Show is what gave America what it thought was the Black voice, the voice of Blackness, the voice of the enslaved or the formerly enslaved. Once you understand the Minstrel show, I've never talked to Percival Levert about this, but it's like, clearly that's what he got from Huck Finn and the adventures of Huck in some capacity because it's reflective in his book as well. I wanted to play with all of these ideas of how we perceive Blackness because the idea of being Black in this country is an artificial construct that came out of all of the ideologies that made slavery possible and allowed slavery to flourish. So you have to look at those ideologies. I have to look at those ideologies and think, how do I pull them apart? How do I break them apart? How do we begin to chip away at the myth of the noble Confederate and the carpet-bagging Union abolitionists?
BETH ACCOMANDO Well, one of the things you bring up, too, is you talk about Mark Twain himself And you acknowledge that he was a writer who was trying to humanize a character like Jim, but that he falls short and fails in part because he's as trapped by some of the tropes and stereotypes of his time, and that he may be a step forward, but he's also restricted by just the world he knows personally.
DAVID F.WALKER Yeah, that's exactly it. And so it's It's really easy to be hyper critical of anything that's happened in the past, but without context, that critical analysis. It's okay to be critical, but there should also be critical analysis within that criticism. Again, you have to look at Mark Twain. You have to look at his life. You have to look at all the other, not all the other works of fiction that were going on then, but what was the accepted norm? And then begin to pick it apart. It's not just enough to go, Oh, I hated Huckleberry I thought Mark Twain was racist, which is what I've heard so many people say. It's not about hating him, and it's not about thinking the book is racist. It's about, well, let's look at what those times were like and understand where it came from. I do think that character for its time was probably as progressive as you were ever going to get. The only way you would get a more progressive character would be if that book was written by a Black writer and then published. For all we know, that book was written and never got There's so much stuff that never sees the light of day. Even in this day and age, when it's so much easier to get work out there, there's still stuff that doesn't see the light of day. But I'm a big, huge fan of contextualizing as much as possible. That's definitely reflective in the non-conviction work that I've done. When you look at the Black Panther Party book, I couldn't just start the book with the formation of the Black Panther Party. It was like, We have to look at the years leading up to the formation of the party. Oh, wait a second. It's not enough to look at the years. Okay, now we need to go back decades. Oh, wait a second. Decades is enough. We need to go back to the beginning of what I call the original sin of this nation. Even before it was a nation, slavery was an accepted practice within the British colonies in the American colonies. If we don't understand that, it makes it more difficult to understand how you get something like the Black Panthers.
BETH ACCOMANDO Well, in your introduction, you also introduced this idea that Twain's book has been banned in some places because of problematic, offensive language, however you want to characterize it. But that one of the things you wrote, you said that the depiction of racism and the dehumanization of slavery should never be made to seem less offensive because doing so dilutes the truth. So that sense of context and not forgetting the past seems important to you.
DAVID F.WALKER It's very important to me. And I was complaining recently. There was a podcast that I was listening to. I won't name the podcast. You will be able to figure it out in a moment when I say what had me bothered about it. But the podcast was about Motown and Sacks Records, and it was a comparison contrast of the two. It was like the people that hosted this show and whoever wrote the episodes really looking at it through a very contemporary lens. They were looking at it through this lens of like, well, Motown was owned a Black guy. Stax was owned by a black guy, Sacks was owned by white folks, and therefore, Motown was better. It was like, yeah, that's what you would think if you didn't do the research, if you don't really study what's going on. To me, I don't know. Maybe I'm old fashioned that way, but I feel like we should do deep dives into research. We should be looking at like, Okay, well, how much money and royalties did Motown keep from artists like Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gay versus what was Stax doing? These white folks that own this label in Memphis, Tennessee, in this recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee. What was the music that came out of it? You do a compare and contrast, and you listen to the music, and you read the biographies, and you don't just read the Wikipedia pages, and you don't just read the contemporary history books, because a lot of times the contemporary history books, I say this as I call myself, I'm an amateur historian. A lot of times you find a factual error in one book, and then it starts turning up in other books over and over and over again. You realize, oh, everybody is just quoting this one book or they're just using this one resource. I have a book coming out about the history of the Black Image in Film. I tell people the best book about Blacks in Film was written in 1949 by a British writer. There's never been a better book, and I think it's called The Negro in American Film. Everything after that has been pretty much a watered-down version of that book. And there's so many facts and interesting information in that book that didn't make it into more contemporary books. And so it's just you have to not be afraid to dive headfirst into research. But just by saying that the best book about blacks in film is The Negro in Film, there's people that would bristle at that. Don't bristle at it. Don't run away from the things that you might find problematic because you never know what you're going to find in there.
BETH ACCOMANDO Talking about history and facts and stuff, a lot of your other writing, you've written Shaft and Power Man and Iron Fist. You deal with heroes. But no matter what you're writing about, I feel like you do bring a sense of, if not history, a sense of reality or realism to whatever you're writing?
DAVID F.WALKER I try. I think a lot of that comes down to what I wasn't getting as a kid, right? I was that kid who watched a lot of TV in the '70s. This was also a time when there was never more than three to five channels, depending on what part of the country you lived in. But I was always fascinated with Black characters, Black actors, how those characters were portrayed, who played them. There was a magazine that was published for years, Jet magazine, Jet and Ebony magazine, both of them by Johnson publications. Jet was a weekly publication. In the back of it, it would tell you what was to be on TV next week and if there was Black actors in it. It would be like, it was early '70s, there's always, Flip Wilson is on this week or Sanford and Son is on this week. But it would also tell you who the actors were that were in it. I was that kid growing up who knew. To this day, I still watch something, I'll be like, Oh, that's so and so. It's not just Black actors, too. It's like, Oh, wow, that's Elijah Cook. He was in Kubrick's The Killing, but he was also in Blackula. People look at you like, How do you know this stuff? It's interesting to me. But again, those Black characters that I saw as a kid growing up, whether it was Marla Gibbs or the entire cast of the Jefferson's, Ted Lange, who is an actor and was on shows like Loveboat, and that's my mama, I would become obsessed with them, the work that they were doing, and then wanting to know more about them. I'll never forget that going back to Ted Lange, who was on Loveboat, he went on to become a director, and he made his own film version of Othello, where he directed it and he started as Othello. I happened to see a random picture of it in a book, and I was like, Wait a minute. This guy, Othello? Who? Where? You begin to understand that there's more going on behind the scenes. It's like, how come I've never got to see this? To this day, I've never seen that version of Othello. I've also never seen the version that William Marshall, who started as Blackula, was in. There's a filmed version of that. All that stuff is really hard to find, whereas the version with Laurence Olivier, those are pretty easy to find. The blackface versions of Othello are really easy to find, as opposed to any of the versions that had black actors playing the difficult. But it also says something about those actors, the William Marshalls, the Ted Langes. It says a lot about them. I feel like I just want to do my part in igniting or opening up the imagination and the curiosity of readers, the way mine was opened up. Again, with things like Jet magazine, Ebony magazine, Gary Null's book, Black Hollywood, which there's two volumes of that. They were essentially picture books. It was either Citadel or St. Martin's Press that would put out these oversize coffee table books that were just nothing but pictures. You could get one on monster movies, you get one on science fiction movies. But they had Gary Noel did, too, on Black Hollywood. It's like, wow, what is this? Who is Mantean Morland? Oh, Hattie McDaniel. Yeah, she was in Gone with the Wind, but oh, she did all these other movies. That's the stuff that I want to I don't ever want to lose any of that. I want to make sure other people know about it because it's very easy for that history to be lost, forgotten, or hidden for that member.
BETH ACCOMANDO Well, the character in your book who's an author and other characters also mentioned this, that it's the idea that you have to tell your own story. You have to make sure to tell it. We're currently in a time where the ideas of truth and fiction and myths myth and legend and fake news and alternate facts are all swirling around. So having this book out right now with those themes about who tells history and what gets printed, the myth, the legend, the truth. How does that feel right now at this moment?
DAVID F.WALKER It feels scary, but it also feels good. I mean, I had this conversation long before the election. I've been having it even more since the election. It's like, our work never ends. It didn't end during the eight years of the Obama administration. It didn't end during the four years of the Biden administration. It still needs to... Our work never ends. There's always going to be attempts to rewrite history, to obscure history. Again, our work never ends. Rather than getting caught up in all the things that are going wrong, all the things that we don't have control over, all the things that stress us Part of what I'm trying to do is focus on what can I do? What can I bring to the table? Sometimes it can seem silly to some people when you say, Oh, yeah, I'm going to write a graphic novel about this, or I'm going to bring back a publication called Bad Asmo It's like, But I know how to do this. This is as Gordon Parks senior, one of his memoirs was called a Weapon of Choice. His weapon of choice was the camera and the pictures that he took. My weapon of choice are the words and the ideas that I craft and the things I build around them. It's like, Okay, so what are the weapons of choice moving forward in this ongoing culture war? It's been going on for centuries at this point in this country. It's been going on since the colonists came over here, looked around and said, There's a lot of land here. All we have to do is steal it from the people that are here, thinking as if land can be owned, and then figure out, Well, how can we work this land as easily as possible? Someone came up with the bright idea that it's easier to go all the way across the globe to Africa, steal a bunch of people, make them do a lot of the hard, heavy lifting, and you collect the money. I'll talk about that. I'll talk about that till I'm blue in the face and it offends people or it makes them hate me. The hatred of complete strangers does not faz me at all. What does What does move me, though, are especially younger people who are like, Oh, I did not know this. Sometimes it's older folks, too. It's because we're never too old to keep learning. In theory, stop learning the moment we die. But then who knows what there's to learn on the other side, right? So I choose to find my ways through the difficult times, through my creativity and this passion for knowledge and sharing knowledge that was instilled in me as a kid.
BETH ACCOMANDO Well, that idea of learning with Huck, you see that the racism is taught to him on a certain level by other white characters, but that he starts to make some choices on his own being close to Jim. So this sense of that racism can be taught, but you can also unlearnt it or you can learn a completely different experience. And that seems to be one of the things that's central to the book is that friendship. That friendship seems at the core.
DAVID F.WALKER Yeah. To me, it was really, again, it was crucial. It's going back to the questions I asked when I was a kid, why is Jim so loyal to Huck? What is the relationship between these two? I come across as a pretty cynical person, but there's also this optimistic side of me, too, in that optimistic side that there's still hope and that people can change their ideas and their philosophies. Sometimes they change them for the negative. But all of this comes and goes in phases. All this comes and goes in waves. We just recently laid to rest Jimmy Carter. It's interesting to me because I'm old enough to remember when Jimmy Carter was essentially crucified by the media. He was called the worst president of the 20th century, all of this stuff. Now, he's great. This is how the cycles work. It's different It's different every time, but it's also the same every time. There has to be somebody, and there has to be multiple somebody who stand around, sit around and wave their hands and go, Yeah, I think you got this wrong. I guess I'm one of those people.
BETH ACCOMANDO Well, it's always a pleasure to talk to you, and I want to thank you very much for talking about Big Jim and the Whiteboy.
DAVID F.WALKER Thank you. I appreciate it very much, and I hope more people read it. The best thing I hear from people is when they go, I read your book and I cried so hard. I'm like, Yes, that's what I wanted.
BETH ACCOMANDO
That was David F. Walker, author of Big Jim and the White Boy.
That wraps up another edition of KPBS listener supported Cinema Junkie. If you enjoy the podcast, then please share it with a friend because your recommendation is the best way to build an addicted audience. You can also help by leaving a review. And check out Cinema Junkie presents Middays Movies video podcast on the KPBS YouTube Channel.
Till our next film fix, I’m Beth Accomando your resident Cinema Junkie.
