‘James’ transforms Twain’s tale of boyhood adventure into a brilliant neo-fugitive slave narrative thriller
JAMES By Percival Everett Doubleday, 320 pp., $28
Percival Everett’s “James,” his thirty-fourth book, is a retelling of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (1885). Like “American Fiction,” Cord Jefferson’s Oscar-winning film based on Everett’s 2001 novel, “Erasure,” this new novel could be read as an adaptation. But although it takes up some basic plot movements, characters, and scenes from “Huck Finn,” and remains set in eastern Missouri, on and along the Mississippi River, “James” turns away from Huck’s perspective in favor of Jim’s. Everett’s revision of “Huck Finn” translates it from a boyhood memoir of picaresque adventure to a neo-fugitive slave narrative thriller.
At the novel’s opening, Jim is a 27-year-old enslaved husband and father, a surreptitious reader of the Enlightenment philosophers John Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau, and a masterful “multilinguist.” Among themselves, the Black characters in “James” speak a heightened, sophisticated, irony-laden American English. Before whites, feigning ignorance and indolence, they purposely abuse and mangle diction. Notable as a skillful signifying storyteller, Jim trains the Black children in the arts of indirection and “code switching,” guiding them to understand that “[w]hite folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them . . . The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us.”
Learning that Miss Watson intends to sell him down the river to New Orleans, Jim “lights out,” hoping to escape north where he can earn money and buy freedom for Sadie and Lizzie, his wife and daughter, respectively. Unbeknownst to Jim, Huck fakes his death to escape Pap, his father. Though they manufacture their disappearances separately,
Huck and Jim stumble into each other on Jackson Island, in the middle of the Mississippi River, and begin their fugitivity in tandem. Through snakebites, storms, miscalculated navigation, and general misadventure,
Huck and Jim spend the first half of the novel’s 301 pages together. Then, Everett tucks Huck away, off stage, in order for Jim to experience the horror, absurdity, and surreality of what South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun,
in 1830, euphemistically termed the “peculiar institution.”
Separated from Huck and on the lam, Jim encounters a group of enslaved men who, noticing that he’s traveling with books, offer him food, direction, and — at the risk of grave physical harm — a purloined pencil. Jim begins writing himself “into being.” But social context itself thwarts his attempts at self-invention, forcing him into various guises in order to survive. At one point in “James”’s second half, Daniel Decatur Emmett “buys” Jim to sing tenor in his blackface troupe, The Virginia Minstrels. Jim learns that Norman, a troupe member who’s passing as white, is also an escaped slave. Before his first show, Jim prods Norman for help understanding the hard ironies of his presence in the group and Emmett’s demand that he “black up” to “look authentically black” on stage:
“‘You’re black,’ Norman explains, ‘but they won’t let you into the auditorium if they know that, so you have to be white under the makeup so that you can look black to the audience.’”
Everett appears to have inherited his satirical vision from Twain himself: both “Erasure” and “Dr. No” (2022) carry epigraphs attributed to the Missourian writer. Perhaps “James” is both an acknowledgement of that lineage and a rejection of Ernest Hemingway’s infamous claim that readers of “Huck Finn” ought to stop “where the [N-word] Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.” Ralph Ellison chastised Hemingway for this reading, arguing that his striving for technical acuity on the page clouded his moral judgment. Unwilling to relinquish mythologies about Black people, 20th century white American writers like Hemingway used “Negro” stereotypes to represent “the unorganized, irrational forces of American life, forces through which, by projecting them in forms of images of an easily dominated minority, the white individual seeks to be at home in the vast unknown world of America. Perhaps the object of the stereotype is not so much to crush the Negro as to console the white man.” What 19th century writers like Twain understood, Ellison explains, is that in America “humanity masked its face with blackness.”
“James” is a novelistic defense of Ellison’s thesis. Everett knows Ellison’s oeuvre intimately; the protagonist of “Erasure,” Everett’s most famous novel, is named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison. That character is a novelist whose funky improvisations on Aeschylus, Euripides, Roland Barthes, and Richard Wright ignite “Erasure”’s acerbic critique of American publishing, Black literature, and the joke central to American experience, the Black mask of humanity.
Jim’s minstrel performance draws that joke into “James.” He recognizes that the white audience is open to him; they imagine he shares their disdain for Blacks and the enslaved. Returning one woman’s intrigued gaze, however, Jim finds no depth in her eyes: “I saw the surface of her, merely the outer shell, and realized that she was mere surface all the way to her core.”
Though Enlightenment philosophers visit his fever dreams, Jim’s profound self-realization is modeled on the two slave narratives he collects while racing toward freedom: “The Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America” (1798) and William Wells Brown’s “Narrative of William W. Brown:, A Fugitive Slave” (1847). Under these influences, Jim declares his true name and personhood: “My name is James. I’m going to get my family. You can come with me or you can stay here. You can come and try freedom or you can stay here. You can die with me trying to find freedom or you can stay here and be dead anyway. My name is James.”
Using erasure, Everett has produced a daring emendation. Redacting swaths of “Huck Finn,” he’s revealed another code: the untranslated story of James’s self-emancipation. Like his recent novels “Telephone” (2020), “The Trees” (2021), and “Dr. No,” “James” is a provocative, enlightening work of literary art.