Runaway slave tells a better story than his friend Huckleberry Finn
Percival Everett’s new novel tells the story of Jim, the runaway slave in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn with whom Huck escapes down the Mississippi River. In James, much from Twain’s original remains, but much has been altered too. For a start, Jim is no longer Jim — he’s James; and James, unlike Jim, is literate, having taught himself to read in Judge Thatcher’s library. His favourite writers are Locke, Rousseau and Voltaire. Everett also shifts the period. Huckleberry Finn is set in the 1830s or 1840s; Everett moves the story forward to the cusp of the US Civil War, which allows him to rewrite the end. Huckleberry Finn concludes with Jim admitting to Huck that the body on the beached steamer was his Pa’s. This does little more than tie up a loose end, and an insignificant loose end at that. James ends with Huck declaring the Union will be his side once he’s old enough to don the blue uniform, and with James, after a long and perilous search, finding the wife and children. This is a dynamic end, far superior to Twain’s, and it sends us away with a sense of the story continuing; Huck will most likely serve, while James and family, providing they get behind Union lines, might survive. What hasn’t changed is the first-person narration, although the quality of the voice is very different. Huckleberry Finn, as narrated by Huck (tender-hearted Twainites should look away now), is long-winded, prolix, clunky and, frankly, exhausting to read in places. James ,on the other hand, which is narrated by James, consists of short chapters and is written in language that is crisp, light and sharp. It’s not exhausting to read either; on the contrary, it’s exciting. It also contains, offering relief from all the talk, James’ thoughts and dreams — where he converses with Locke and Voltaire — and even some of his own writings. Coming to James after Huckleberry Finn ,Iwas gripped by the glorious feeling that what I was reading was Twain sieved, with 80pc of the original discarded and just the best 20pc retained. Everett also has a brilliant conceit vis-à-vis the vernacular, which in Huckleberry Finn can be so wearying. In James, when they are in private, all the black characters speak clear, bell-like, American RP; it’s only when they’re in the company of whites that they speak the kind of Twainish slave vernacular we recognise from Huckleberry Finn. This idea of the slave role being a performance runs right through the novel. Early on, we see James ‘teaching’ his children how to speak as slaves are expected to talk and reminding them how dangerous it is for them if they don’t speak as they’re supposed to. On the raft, we see James explaining and Huck struggling to understand why there are two languages, and Huck’s coming to understand this is one of the joys of the text. Later — and this replaces the theatrical scenes with the king and the duke in Huckleberry Finn, the loss of which is another decided improvement — there is an exquisite sequence that takes the performance conceit to the limit. James is bought by the owner of a white blackface minstrel group and is required (in blackface) to pretend to be a white man pretending to be a black man as he performs before white people laughing at, they think, white people mocking black people by pretending to be black, although James (and he’s the star; he’s the singer) is actually a black man. It’s a comic tour de force and a brilliant skewering of the awful blackface tradition. Writers who produce new versions of classics always have more than just the delinquencies of the original in mind. When Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea, her answer to Jane Eyre, she was not just rectifying what she saw as an omission in the original, the story of the first Mrs Rochester, which Charlotte Brontë largely left out. She was also writing against the arrogance and xenophobia of the English, which she experienced when she moved from the West Indies to England as a young woman. Everett, in James, similarly, is righting an omission. Twain’s Jim is poorly characterised and absent for long stretches of the novel, as he invariably remains on the raft while Huck goes away and has his adventures. In James the runaway is centre stage throughout (while Huck is the character who drifts in and out of focus): he’s also a much richer and more complex character than Twain’s Jim. However, like Rhys, Everett is also writing against something bigger — but what? Rhys, judging by Wide Sargasso Sea, doesn’t like Jane Eyre or Brontë or the author’s culture; her text impugns them all. Everett’s does not have that animus; he draws attention to shortcomings of Huckleberry Finn, but he does so without signalling distaste. I sense he knows there’s no point cudgelling a novel that reflects the period in which its author wrote. Slavery is Everett’s target but not only slavery as an historical phenomenon; yes, James is set in the mid-19th century (so it is historical) but what Everett wants us to know (and this is suggested by the echoes of the present throughout James) is that the catastrophe is not over. William Faulkner warned us — “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” — and Percival Everett reminds us of that truth. Slavery might be over, technically, but its afterlife is still doing its baleful work, still making Black Americans suffer terribly.