Broadway Had Come to Binghamton

Broadway Had Come to Binghamton.

Here’s what the show actually is in Huckleberry Jim:
A school gym. A heavy red curtain. Kids crowding in “to watch two grown men play pretend.”

And for a moment, the book means it:
“Broadway had come to Binghamton.”

Before the curtain opens, a teacher prepares the children for Huckleberry Finn by explaining slavery:
“There was a time in our country’s history when white people owned Black people.”

One sentence.

Then the curtain opens. Applause. The performance. Load out. The next school.

But behind that curtain is Moses Morton—a Black actor who has played Jim more than 2,800 times, waiting to walk onto a stage and embody everything that sentence has just reduced to history.

The whole novel lives somewhere in the space between that sentence and the man waiting behind the curtain.

Publishers Weekly BookLife Editor’s Pick: “Adam Nelson’s incisive, provocative, and robustly American debut... honors the fathoms-deep American divisions that Twain marked and urges us to look closer rather than away. For readers of Percival Everett’s James and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout.”
{Full Review} [https://booklife.com/project/huckleberry-jim-108347]

Huckleberry Jim publishes October 6 during Banned Books Week. Audiobook from Blackstone Publishing.

Official launch October 10 at the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in Hannibal, Missouri.

Available at Amazon Books, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop and fine bookstores everywhere.

First Edition autographed copies available at HuckleberryJimBook.com.
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