"James," by Percival Everett

Jim, a slave in "Huckleberry Finn" transforms to James.

Note to readers: Seven months ago, I began these weekly essays on reading, writing and real life called Beck and Call. I’d appreciate your clicking on the heart at the bottom of the page to let me know you have read it. Thanks for your support.

There will be many book groups discussing the new book by Percival Everett called “James.” “James” is a reimagining of the tale of “Huckleberry Finn,” by Mark Twain, told from the perspective of the slave named Jim. Jim in both narratives learns he is to be sold away from his family to New Orleans, and runs away to escape that fate, determined to earn money somehow to return and buy his family out of slavery. I’ve heard the author in two interviews this week talk about the novel, his impetus for writing it and his attitudes towards Twain.

Everett’s story instills in Jim, who renames himself James, both intelligence and agency. Jim in Twain’s story was a two-dimensional caricature of a slave and certainly not the main character. In “James,” we learn through Jim’s voice and the fear and violence he suffers, of his bond with his family, and his determination to be free.

I imagine in my book group we will discuss slavery, particularly because we just finished reading a book about Abraham Lincoln and his path to supporting abolition. Lincoln always believed that slavery was both violent and wrong. What he was more perplexed about was what to do with an entire population of enslaved people once they had become free. Of course, due to his assassination, he never got to see the results of the contentious and violent aftermath of abolition. In both “Huckleberry Finn” and “James” the fate of Jim/James as a free man is unknown.

I had the pleasure of listening to “James” narrated by the brilliant Dominic Hoffman, and I highly recommend this approach. Listening to him read underscores one of the central conceits of James, which is that Jim speaks two languages. First, Jim speaks the language of the slave in much the same vernacular that Twain used in “Huckleberry Finn.” But when he is among other black people, he switches to the language of a man who can both read and write and also entertain deep thoughts.

Here is an early passage from the novel where Jim instructs his children on how to code switch between slave speech and real talk.

“Why do we talk differently for them? James asks his kids. “the better they feel, the safer we are,” they respond. And how would you translate that phrase if you were speaking to whites? “Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safter we be.”

At first, I was intrigued because I had not read “Huckleberry Finn” to see which elements of the original novel Everett chose to weave into his narrative. At some point, however, I realized that that was not important. The events are simply the backdrop to a brilliant exercise in transformation.

Everett is a very serious author as one can hear from his interviews, but he plants some moments of hilarity in some of his set pieces. One of them involves Jim being “hired” (or actually sold for $200) to a traveling minstrel show because they have heard him singing at slave labor and decide that they need his tenor voice. The minstrel show is made up of white men performing in blackface, but one of the “white men” is actually a very light skinned escaped slave named Normon, who needed to put on blackface. Then Jim, as the only supposed black man, was also put in blackface because he was light skinned.

Jim escapes from the troupe when the father of a young woman who becomes entranced with Jim’s performance touches his hair and can’t believe it’s a wig, which it would have to be if Jim were actually white. Jim, realizing that he is not going to be able to convince this man that his hair is a wig, realizes he will be unmasked as a slave. Everett is no doubt evoking the micro-aggression of white people touching black people’s hair, a clever ploy.

If I have quibble with the novel, it is the sections where James is visited in dreams by Voltaire and engages in philosophical musings about the nature of freedom. Everett has eloquently shown us in real life what it means to be enslaved. I don’t believe Jim needed to be conversant with Voltaire, but perhaps that was irresistible to the author, who is a professor of English.

When Everett was asked about his feelings about Twain, he stated that he actually was a big fan of much of Twain’s work. In writing James, which he began about three years ago, Everett said he read “Huckleberry Finn” 15 times in order to absorb the world of the narrative and then put it aside and never looked at it again. “I didn’t want to have any allegiance to the text,” he said. Indeed, seeing the illustrations from the original presents Jim like this, who bears no likeness to Jim in “James.”:

“Huckleberry Finn” is replete with the N-word and Everett does not shy away from it. It reminds me of the dilemma I encountered when teaching university students so-called “classic” literature that involved the N-word and asking what students’ views were about using the word in our readings. I confess today I would be less inclined to ask students to balance the historical place of the text and intentions of the author against their reactions. Today, for example, the Boston Public Schools guidelines state “while the word [slur for  African-Americans] appears in the text we are reading, we will not use the full word in class, and instead, use the term “the n-word.” Although this makes for clunky reading, it is a better approach.

In my own life in a somewhat ridiculous twist, I actually have been called an “N-lover” by my rageful father, who hated the rest of our family’s conversion to Jehovah’s Witnesses, which were well over 50% black. There was hatred and vitriol fueled by alcohol in my father’s words. They were shocking, but they called for no defense, because you can’t reason with a drunk. The familiarity of using the word indiscriminately throughout “Huckleberry Finn” is to my mind, even more offensive, because it is not used to show hatred, but dismissal of black people as a lesser form of human.

The use of the N-word is not as offensive in “James,” partly because so much of the dialogue is between Huck and Jim, where they speak as equals. Huck never uses the word when he is talking to Jim except in one incident involving a plot twist that I will not reveal here. This is no doubt one of the questions we will discuss in our book group.

“Huckleberry Finn” was largely an adventure narrative and there’s plenty of adventure on the river in “James.” But slavery, and the fear of being caught and killed as a runaway slave, remains the overriding theme. At one point, Jim and Norman cook up a scheme where Norman (appearing white) will sell Jim as his slave, Jim will escape, and they will pocket the money and run. This plan has disastrous consequences, including freeing a young female slave who later dies in a shootout with her pursuing owners.

One of the central narratives involves Jim’s desire to write down his experience. He comes across some loose papers from a boat that’s capsized, dries them out, but has no way to write. He eventually obtains a pencil that a slave he befriends steals from his master for Jim. The consequence of the theft is the death of the slave, and Jim carries the terrible price of his pencil throughout the narrative. He later obtains a notebook of the minstrel songs and uses the blank pages to continue his narrative. The fact that he keeps the songs rather than ripping them out, says something about the nature of the songs themselves and their reminder of his slavery.

At the end of “Huckleberry Finn,” Jim becomes free when his owner Miss Watson, from whom he has escaped, has set him free in her will. At the end of “James,” Jim is also free, claiming his name James, but through his own efforts, his own bravery and his search for his missing family.

When asked if he knew how he would end “James” when he began the novel, Everett said that he did. However, he added that the choice that Jim makes between saving Norman and saving Huck in the aftermath of a steamboat explosion surprised him and was not in his plan Asked what he hoped the reception of his novel would be, Everett said “I’m of the mama bear school. I throw it out into the world.  If it can eat and survive great, but it can’t come back to the den.” Sounds a bit like an aphorism you might expect to hear from Mark Twain.