2 weeks Ago
JAMES . By Percival Everett. Doubleday.
320 pages. $28. Percival Everett’s latest novel, "James," reimagines Mark Twain’s classic "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by centering the action around Huck’s situational sidekick, the enslaved man called Jim.
James, which he prefers to Jim, is enslaved on a plantation in Missouri with a wife and children. His existence is precarious in every way. Wood to keep warm must be stolen, and the risks of getting caught are as horrible as freezing to death.
The masters are always watching, and to maintain power, they rule with violence and dehumanization. This is a world we’ve often read about. It is our nation’s greatest shame and worthy of repeated exploration.
But Everett adds a brilliant twist to the story of slavery. James is not the illiterate, poorly spoken Jim we know from Twain’s classic, but a well-read, eloquent man who must pretend to be ignorant to appease the White folks and survive in their world. “Safe movement through the world depended on mastery of language, fluency,” Everett writes.
Pretending to be ignorant means altering their speech, adopting a different vernacular, whenever White people come around. James teaches secret language lessons to those enslaved, lessons that focus on how to talk and portray ignorance so that White people feel superior and therefore are pacified and less dangerous. James tells his class that the only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior are us.
Adopting the persona of ignorance is a matter of life or death. Even Huck, who James likes, is not privy to the secret double lives of Black people. “My change in diction alerted the rest to the white boys’ presence," Everett writes.
"So, my performance for the boys became a frame for my story. My story became less of a tale as the real game became the display for the boys.” When James learns that his owner intends to sell him down river, separating him from his family, James runs away.
His goal is to head north and somehow make enough money to buy his family’s freedom. He escapes via the Mississippi River, making it to Jackson Island — an uninhabited spit of land in the middle of the river. He’s hiding out there when Huck Finn finds him.
Huck, to avoid his abusive, alcoholic father, has faked his own death by splattering the cabin with pig’s blood. James tries to convince Huck to go home. But if Huck’s father finds out what he’s done, he’ll surely kill Huck.
This further complicates James’ situation because as soon as people realize the boy is missing and probably dead, the slave who ran away at the same time will become the primary suspect. They will put more effort into their manhunt. And so James' and Huck’s strange and perilous journey through the American South begins.
"James" unfurls along the Mississippi River similarly to "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Twain’s book was remarkable in its time and remains an American classic because it was told from the point of view and in the dialect of a half-literate boy, and it humanized the detrimental effects of slavery on everyone involved. Plus it was a wild adventure story.
In Everett’s version, James and Huck face similar situations and meet familiar characters, but experiencing this world through James’s eyes pushes Twain’s story into new territory with even more complex, fascinating conflicts. Today's Top Headlines Story continues below Disabled vet with nearly half-million-dollar salary told VA he was jobless. Now he has to repay $300K.
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When Huck complains to James about his privileged friend Tom Sawyer, he says Tom always gets to be the boss in their games because he’s read all the books. Tom’s family has money to buy books; Huck’s does not. The master’s library is a recurring image.
James is drawn to it, and he secretly reads the books. When a rattlesnake bites him, the library is the setting of his hallucinations. Reading is how he escapes in his mind from his precarious circumstances.
Literacy was, of course, denied to slaves, in real life and in the book. If they can’t read, then they can’t easily better their situations. But the way Everett uses the idea of literacy as a source of power in his story is what makes "James" so timely and important.
As barbaric as the possibility is to consider, literacy is at risk. Books are being banned. Attention spans are shortening.
Public schools are losing funding. The proliferation of weapons has made schools targets for violence. Intellectualism is equated with elitism.
These are real threats to something that is, as Everett points out, essential to survival. Literacy — our human superpower, the thing that allows us to overcome so many challenges — is under threat. Everett — whose work is characterized by irony and satire — has written a highly entertaining story about the power of reading.
The author, who grew up in Columbia, has written more than 30 books, including novels, poetry and short story collections, and works for children. Notable works include "Trees," which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, and "Erasure," which was adapted into the film "American Fiction." "James" has been nominated for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction for 2024, and it is easy to see why.
This book is a wonderful revisit of an American classic, but it’s also a masterpiece in itself. Sign up for the Charleston Hot Sheet Get a weekly list of tips on pop-ups, last minute tickets and little-known experiences hand-selected by our newsroom in your inbox each Thursday. Email Sign Up!.
