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James by Percival Everett 

Percival Everett is a prolific author whose works include the novels Erasure (adapted into the recent film American Fiction), The Trees (shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize), and some twenty-two others. His most recent work is James, also shortlisted for the Booker, a partial retelling, from a different viewpoint, of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. James employs the literary device of creating a story which puts another novel’s secondary character into the starring role of their own narrative. Like Jean Rhys with the “madwoman in the attic” of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea, and Geraldine Brooks with the absent father of Little Women in March, Everett has allowed the character Jim in Twain’s classic novel to tell his narrative from his own point of view. And what a point of view it is, and what a different and edgier road it strides down.  

The action in James, which is told in the first person, follows a good part of Twain’s story line. James, a slave, overhears that he is to be sold to a man in New Orleans and separated from his wife and family, so he flees his owner’s home and hides on a small island in the Mississippi River to buy time and plan. Meanwhile, Huck’s father, a violent alcoholic, has returned to town, and to get away from him, Huck has faked his own death, has run away from home, and is also sheltering on the same island. Together Huck and James flee down the Mississippi on a raft. With Huck thought to be dead and the runaway James presumed to be his killer, James realizes that Huck’s safety and survival are the only proofs of his innocence.   

Many of the episodes of Twain’s novel are here, but when James and Huck become separated, James’s independent narrative begins. He is left in the service of a blacksmith, where his singing attracts the attention of a leader of a minstrel troupe, who purchases him. But to perform, James must first be made up as a white man and then wear blackface. The troupe also contains a light-skinned black man passing as white, who befriends James and runs away with him. They wind up on a crowded riverboat and James discovers that Huck is on the same boat. The ship’s boiler explodes, the ship capsizes, and James must decide to save either his friend or Huck. He saves Huck (there are multiple reasons for this) and then sets about trying to return home to find his family and get them to safety…and freedom. 

James is often funny, but it is not light. Separation of families, whippings, and killings are presented as the backdrop to daily life—which renders them even more horrible. However, Everett is not just interested in retelling the Huck Finn story from another character’s viewpoint; he is interested in telling a different story: James’s. Turning the racial dynamic upside down, Everett’s slaves speak perfect English among themselves, but purposely revert to deep stereotypical dialect when around white people. They understand that by code-switching in this way they are giving the whites what they want and expect; to do otherwise would challenge the rigid social hierarchy and thus put the slaves in grave danger. Their use of dialect keeps them relatively safe, and importantly, helps them maintain a kind of control of the situation. When you have so little, a secret is a powerful thing. 

For much of the book is about power. There is a wonderful scene early in the novel where James is holding a class for slave children in which he drills them on the way they must speak around whites: 

“White folks expect us to sound a certain way, and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” I said. “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say when they don’t feel ‘superior.’ So, let’s pause to review some of the basics.” 

The children then proceed to enumerate the rules: don’t make eye contact, never speak first, never address any subject directly when talking to another slave. The correct way to report a fire in the kitchen is not “Fire, fire!”, but “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere.”—because “…we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.” In this and other sections Everett lets us peek behind a curtain to see Black resistance in action. He also makes us see beyond Twain’s literary stereotype to understand the enslaved Black characters as fully formed people: aware, articulate, clever, and possessed of deep emotional lives, creators of a complex society within the general society of the time and place. Everett isn’t interested in the myth of the long-suffering, infinitely patient, preternaturally wise servant, except to explode it.  

James suggests that it is the control of the tools of the intellect—primarily spoken language (though James can read and write as well)—that is ultimately the slaves’ power and their defense. Denying the enslaved an education was, of course, a way of keeping them down, and many in the South fought hard to maintain this status quo. James’s treasured possessions are a book, a notebook, and a pencil, and the code-switching mentioned above is not merely a defense, but a way in which white masters can be manipulated.  

Besides education, Everett explores another source of power (or its lack): skin color, its implications and, despite the rigid social system, its malleability. Beyond the primary black/white power implications of the antebellum South, we have in the minstrel performance section white men in blackface, a black man “passing” as white who dons blackface, and a black man who must be made up to look white before he can put on blackface. There is even a biracial character in the novel, who shows up so unexpectedly that the reader is left to wonder about the author’s motivation here; is he saying this is far more common than anyone thought? Is he sending up the Great American Novel? Saying that the black and white roots of American history—and literature— are more inextricably commingled than we could imagine? Everett doesn’t expound on this but leaves us to hypothesize. 

 Perhaps the most obvious signifier of power in the novel is in the title. The protagonist is not James, the name the white world—his enslaver—calls him. but James, the name he chooses for himself. At one point he is told to identify himself:  

“And who are you?” 

“James.” 

“James what? 

“Just James.” 

He is not someone’s property, no longer to be identified by a name someone else has given him. He has chosen this name, and the ability to name (see the children’s discussion above) is a power in itself. 

James is brilliant, clever, eminently readable, a tale of personal victory and an emotionally rich yet biting commentary on the dynamics of race relations. It is also grimly serious in its portrayal of the horrors of daily life for enslaved people in the antebellum South. Everett starts with Twain’s work and takes it in another direction, with another voice heard from. James’s intelligence, humanity, and determination run through the entire novel; in Everett’s telling, James is not simply Huck’s long-suffering sidekick, the good loyal companion who is ultimately liberated—literally—by Huck and Tom Sawyer. James has his own agenda, and though he may be bought and sold, he is at no time a pawn. He is hyperaware of his situation and always searching for a way to accomplish his ends; he has agency. Near the novel’s end we even have a Biblical moment where James brings down a cataclysm upon his enslavers and leads his people to freedom.  

A retelling of Huckleberry Finn, indeed. 

James is shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Nonso Anozie reads an excerpt:

James
Percival Everett 
Doubleday, New York
320 pp (hardcover) 

Feature image by Guille Pozzi

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