James
Percival Everett
- 13 minutes read - 2663 wordsAuthor: Percival Everett
Rating: ★★★★★
James is probably the best novel I’ve read in years. Even more, it’s possibly the best American novel of my adulthood.1
James is a perspective on the events of Huckleberry Finn.2 James, whom we know from Twain as “Jim,” flees his enslavement upon receiving a tip that he was to be sold and separated from his family. Scarcely into his flight, he makes contact with another runaway: Huckleberry Finn.3 Like an American Odyssey, the voyage up and down the river bring James and his various compatriots into contact with confidence men, enslaved folk, runaways, slave-catchers, and grifters.
Perhaps what’s most remarkable is that with three small choices, barely more than six sentences, Everett’s James alters the DNA of the respected body of Huckleberry Finn and widens its (already wide) wide audience and deepens its (already deep) impact. Perhaps for this moment of plotting alone, the book earns my recommendation. But it’s not just that the plotting is good or the insights about the philosophy of slavery more keen, simply put, Everett is a master of characterization and a ferryman of beautiful sentences as well.
James shows us a different reality behind the story of Huckleberry Finn. Everett knows that his white audience, who likely encountered the book decades ago (raises hand), did so from a different place of awareness of certain Black or minority concerns: e.g. “privilege,” or “passing.” This technique unsettles because nuances and language that have only just bubbled into common vernacular have their precedents and mechanics clearly demonstrated within the familiar frame of Huckleberry Finn. It shows the lengthy pedigree and also banality of some of our inhumane institutions.
One fabulous move that gives a taste of this technique is to dispense with the dialect that Twain made use of. Early on, James explains that “slave English” is just a useful cover to secure enslaved folks’ welfare. By constantly using a lower-registered dialect, whites are constantly affirmed in their beliefs about their position and are thus less likely to meddle or take notice of the enslaved person’s activities or body.4 It makes the book much more readable than its core reference.
As James moves about the river, there is action and there are picaresque episodes, but there’s also James’ poetic sensibility, his humor, and his anger. Everett’s mordant sense of humor is also on display: James argues the finer economic points of slavery with an imaginary Locke who seems to forget he’s lecturing a man whose flesh has borne the whip. In another near-death episode, Cunegonde from Candide explains that the reason capital is so helpful to police enforcing slavery is that the equipment (that is, James) is mortgaged. It’s a reminder from Everett that it’s easy to see slavery as a social ill between owner and owned, but he’s not going to let capital off the hook. Wall Street, in abolitionist New York, was built by the enslaved. Another farcical bit of humor hinges on James joining a minstrel group and being a black man performing being a white man in blackface to be acceptably Black. Outside of the story, we can all ask who is Black and who is Black Enough – themes on display in his other work Erasure (which I haven’t read) or it’s film adaptation American Fiction (which I thoroughly enjoyed).
It’s a very interesting series of vignettes and then Everett drops a bomb at about the two-thirds mark. It’s such a fascinating turn to the story, I don’t want to spoil it and am thus hiding it below.
Spoilers
First, James lets us know Huck’s father is dead – James saw the body in a flood near Hannibal. Secondly, in one conversation Huck pushes James to say whether the mother he never knew was pretty. James comments that it’s not safe for a slave to have any ideas whatsoever about a white lady.
And then the bomb: Everett supposed Huck’s mother to have not been white (or at least not White enough), but merely passing white. And then Everett detonates another powerful bomb: James was Huck’s real father, not the man that beat him, Pa Finn. The beatings were a drunk, racist cuckold flogging his non-biological son.
The way this slips out in the conversation between the two after a near-death accident on the river made me feel like the ground has slipped out from under me. I think I may have uttered an “ohhhhhh wowwww” to the amusement and bafflement of my fellow subway companions.
With that in place, this whole book suddenly took on a different character. With these ideas in place, Huckleberry Finn took on an entirely different character. As Huck asks James what to do with this knowledge and how to live with his new racial identity, James makes the simple observation that it’s easier and better to pass and that Huck doesn’t owe anyone anything but to live. It’s the hope every father has for his son.
The final part of the book turns to a vengeance story, but it’s very brief. I don’t really feel like the book needed this part, but then again, this might be for a different audience. But to the degree that Huckleberry Finn made “Jim” passive or an object (as I recall), I think Everett needed to let James be bigger and more active to restore “Jim” to being a more-fully realized character. I also think that there were certain gross, violent, and nasty parts about slavery that Everett wanted to show and for that to happen James needed to go behind enemy lines into the heart of the plantation system.
Conclusion
While I hated, and took a D in Junior English (if memory serves) due to my inability to tolerate Huckleberry Finn, I so adored James that I might very well give this landmark of American letters a second look. I expect that James will be winning multiple book awards this year and deservedly so.
Footnotes
- An idea I’ve covered elsewhere in more depth: My Favorite American Novels
- Historically I loathed the idea of “talking back” to the original narrative. It always seemed derivative and lazy, riding on the coat-tails of a pre-established work. That’s a perspective borne of privilege and ignorance of the literary canon: no less a writer than Ovid embraced the form in the Heroides, so the form’s pedigree validates the form.
- Whiteness is a hell of an armor: the stakes for Huck being caught in flight are considerably different than James, namely: not fatal
- That poor whites also speak in this register is not a topic that goes without comment in the text.
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"title": "James: A Novel",
"author": "Percival Everett",
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{
"highlight": "It always pays to give white folks what they want,",
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"highlight": "I sat down with Lizzie and six other children in our cabin and gave a language lesson. These were indispensable. Safe movement through the world depended on mastery of language, fluency.",
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"highlight": "“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.”",
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"highlight": "“Slavery.” “Got that right,” Luke said. “If enough of them kill you, they’re innocent. Guess what the judge’s name was.”",
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"highlight": "There was nothing that irritated white men more than a couple of slaves laughing. I suspected they were afraid we were laughing at them or else they simply hated the idea of us having a good time.",
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"highlight": "“I cain’t believe Miss Watson gone sell you. I mean, she likes you.” “I reckon she likes money mo’. Mos’ peoples likes money mo’ ’n anythin’",
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"highlight": "“Ain’t people a part of nature?” “If’n dey is, den dey ain’t no good part. Da rest o’ nature don’ hardly talk to no human peoples anymo. Maybe it try from time to time, but peoples don’ listen.",
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"highlight": "At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair",
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{
"highlight": "had never read a novel, though I understood the concept of fiction. It wasn’t so unlike religion, or history, for that matter.",
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{
"highlight": "acted like he’d hurt my feelings. White people love feeling guilty.",
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"highlight": "If’n I took a mule from the side of the road and I knowed who it belonged to, wouldn’t that be stealin’?” “I ain’t a mule, Huck.”",
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"annotation": "but under chattel law, he is"
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"highlight": "I read and read, but I found what I needed was to write. I needed that pencil. I could not keep track of my thoughts. I could not follow my own reasoning after a while. This was perhaps because I couldn’t stop reading long enough to make space in my head. I was like a man who had not eaten for a season and had then gorged himself until sick. And my books, once read, were not what I wanted, not what I needed.",
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"annotation": ""
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"highlight": "had already come to understand the tidiness of lies, the lesson learned from the stories told by white people seeking to justify my circumstance.",
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"highlight": "understood, as absorbed as I was, that I was not interested in the content of the work, but its structure, the movement of it, the calling out of logical fallacies. And so, after these books, the Bible itself was the least interesting of all. I could not enter it, did not want to enter it, and then understood that I recognized it as a tool of my enemy. I chose the word enemy, and still do, as oppressor necessarily supposes a victim.",
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"highlight": "“What do you mean, Young George? Tell my story? How do you suggest I tell my story?” He looked at his feet. I did, too. They were bare, his toes grabbing the wet grass. He looked at my face. “Use your ears,” he said. “What’s that?” “Tell the story with your ears. Listen.” “I’ll try, Young George.”",
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"highlight": "With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here",
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"highlight": "Dead white people in the vicinity of a black man never worked out well for the black man.",
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"highlight": "“What you’re saying is that if someone pays you enough, it’s okay to abandon what you have claimed to understand as moral and right.”",
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"annotation": "flashback to “erasure”"
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"highlight": "After being cruel, the most notable white attribute was gullibility.",
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"highlight": "He contorted his face and offered what I thought was an unconvincing cry. It turned out that con men are the easiest people to con. As soon as Huck started into weeping, the two men joined him. Had I been thinking, I might have added my voice to the chorus for effect, but I was more astounded than anything.",
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"highlight": "weren’t neber no pirate.” “Yes, but them people liked it, Jim. Did you see their faces? They had to know them was lies, but they wanted to believe. What do you make of that?”",
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{
"highlight": "“Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ’em.”",
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"highlight": "“We’re slaves. We’re not anywhere. Free person, he can be where he wants to be. The only place we can ever be is in slavery.”",
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"annotation": ""
},
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"highlight": "with all that running, no place appeared like a new place. Perhaps that was the nature of escape.",
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{
"highlight": "“There are some slaves who don’t mind being slaves. I found that out just recently.",
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"highlight": "Even in the dim light I could see how disheveled he was. Aside from being soaked, his clothes were filthy from the hull’s tar. Looking at him like that gave me a renewed appreciation of the power of his skin color. That alone had been enough to faze and control the slave in the engine room. Even though Norman looked like the poorest and worst-off white man, he still commanded fear and respect.",
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"highlight": "he would not be able to pass through the throng of white people on the decks above us—though they could never identify him as black, they would see him as something worse, a very poor white person.",
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"annotation": "wow how much does this explain modern gop"
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"highlight": "“Just keep living,”",
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"annotation": ""
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{
"highlight": "“Just keep living,”",
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"annotation": ""
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{
"highlight": "“You can be free, if you choose. You can be white, if you choose. Me, I have to go north, find some money and send somebody back to buy Sadie and Lizzie.”",
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},
{
"highlight": "“Belief has nothing to do with truth.",
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"annotation": ""
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{
"highlight": "Without someone white to claim me as property, there was no justification for my presence, perhaps for my existence.",
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"highlight": "I imagined Norman’s face. I recalled his expression as he went down the last time I saw him, a mixture of complaint, fear, confusion and anger. In other words, in that moment, he looked like a slave.",
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{
"highlight": "White people often spent time admiring their survival of one thing or another. I imagined it was because so often they had no need to survive, but only to live.",
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"highlight": "One side is against slavers, is what you’ve told me. I don’t know what precisely that means. People who sell slaves or people who own slaves.” “What difference does that make?” Huck asked. “I don’t know that it does.”",
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"highlight": "You think they want you because you can carry a load. You think they want you because you can hammer a nail. They want you because you’re money.” “What?” “You’re mortgaged, Jim. Like a farm, like a house. Really, the bank owns you.",
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"highlight": "My sleep was bothered by the scene of Katie’s rape. I hated that man. I hated myself for not intervening. I hated the world that wouldn’t let me apply justice without the certain retaliation of injustice. I hated that such violence had been served to my wife and would be served to my daughter. I hated that the overseer would return to Katie. Again and again.",
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"annotation": ""
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"highlight": "I had never seen a white man filled with such fear. The remarkable truth, however, was that it was not the pistol, but my language, the fact that I didn’t conform to his expectations, that I could read, that had so disturbed and frightened",
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"highlight": "It was no longer my diction that scared him. It was not the fact that I had premeditatedly killed. He was frightened now by the knowledge that I didn’t care that he knew of my crime.",
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