No Such Thing as a Slave

No Such Thing as a Slave is an afro-futurist revision of the American history Slavery. An edgy and action-packed novel in verse telling the story of Jim, Mark Twain's fictional "runaway slave", by remaking him into a bold, self-liberated Black man. From Jim's impulse to kill to protect his freedom against betrayal, to thoughts of rescuing his family to the Black nation of Haiti, to his final act of taking the first name of his poor White helper, Huckleberry, to root his new legacy, Jim owns himself. Jim longs for his wife, pines for his children, contemplates the nature of a God that would allow slavery, and calls out the superstition at the center of White supremacy. Jim tells his own story with the blues-infused lyricism of a poet and the fierce truth-telling of a revolutionary. Featuring true historical facts of American Slavery, No Such Thing as a Slave frees Jim from Twain's imagination, and the man is reborn as a true story of human resiliency and resourcefulness come to bring the possibility of America's reconciliation with its history.

No Such Thing as a Slave reimagines the history of American Slavery in five dimensions. 1. No Such Thing as a Slave retells slavery as the story of full, complex human beings being enslaved by other full, complex human beings. 2. By retelling Mark Twain's telling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, No Such Thing as a Slave shifts the reader's view from so-called 'masters' and their evil to so-called 'slaves' and their goodness. 3. By exploring the internal motivations of an enslaved man, No Such Thing as a Slave shows the human capacity for greatness showed by those forced into the lowest levels of society. 4. By expressing Jim's thoughts in rhymed, rhythmic speech, No Such Thing as a Slave shows the dignity, creativity, and intelligence of the enslaved in a dimension outside of the oppressive reality of their lives. 5. By showing that there is no such thing as a slave, this book calls out the true brutality of enslavers and the real super human resilience of the enslaved and their allies. In these five dimensions, No Such Thing as a Slave points readers to a future free of the legacy of slavery.