Percival Everett’s sly take on ‘Huck Finn’ upends Mark Twain’s literary world
Samuel Clemens, who took the steamboating term “Mark Twain” as his pen name, knew the Mississippi was a deadly river to navigate. But it feels like a tranquil brook next to the tumultuous waters of American literature.
You can hear that stress prefigured at the end of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” when Huck admits, “If I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it.”
Indeed, Huck has never had it easy.
Mark Twain toiled on the manuscript off and on for years — sometimes unsure how to continue it and clearly unsure how to end it. Before the novel was released, someone noticed that an illustration of Uncle Phelps had been enhanced with an obscene endowment. That act of vandalism, presumably by an unknown engraver, was fixed, but just weeks after the book appeared in 1885, the library in Concord, Mass., condemned “Huckleberry Finn” as “trash.” Once critics caught that scent, they never let up.
Huck’s coarseness was initially the problem — “the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people,” according to one library committee. And the dialect that Twain sweated over offended the sensibilities of self-styled defenders of English who knew how a proper book should sound.
As many white Americans began to catch up with Huck’s respect for his Black friend, the book’s use of the n-word — more than 200 times — was increasingly intolerable. By the 1950s, some schools were expelling “Huck Finn” for its racial insensitivity. As late as 2007, it was still one of the 10 most challenged books in the country.
It’s worth noting that Huck begins his own story by referring to Mr. Mark Twain with a little metafictional joke: “He told the truth, mainly.”
That word “mainly” runs as wide as the Mississippi in the spring. And on the currents of such a stream of possibilities, Percival Everett has now set “James,” his sly response to “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
The timing may be accidental, but it couldn’t be better. Our barely United States is once again tearing itself apart over which books should be banned and how African American history should be taught. Meanwhile, “American Fiction,” an adaptation of Everett’s 2001 novel, “Erasure” — which satirizes the publishing industry’s condescending regard for Black writers — took home one of the five Academy Awards for which it was nominated (best adapted screenplay). What better moment for one of the nation’s preeminent authors to reconceive the nation’s central novel?
Like Huck, you might think, “I been there before,” but the title, “James,” immediately suggests what Everett is up to with this subversive revision. In these pages, the enslaved man known as Jim can finally declare: “I will not let this condition define me. … My name became my own.”
Early in the novel, James acquires a pencil at an unspeakable cost, and he’s not afraid to use it. Stand aside, Mr. Twain. “I wrote myself into being,” James proclaims.
Here is the story we thought we knew, told from the point of view of a “man who is cognizant of his world,” a savvy 27-year-old who reads Kierkegaard and can laugh about the tension between “proleptic irony or dramatic irony.” Everett isn’t exactly hitching a ride on Twain’s raft, but he’s moving down the same river, docking at some of the same points while letting others pass by. Meanwhile, the original story’s wit has been recast in a different shade. This is a book haunted by a little boy’s innocence but no longer corralled by it. While “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” lampooned American society through the naiveté of its young narrator, “James” critiques white racism with the sharp insight of a character who’s felt the lash, and who has a wife and child to protect from state-sanctioned torture and rape.
Everett, who’s been writing for more than 40 years, has wended through terror and humor before. Most notably, in 2021, he published a novel called “The Trees,” which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s a merciless comedy about lynching — something I wouldn’t have thought possible before I read it in one wincing day.
But the horror gathers gently in “James.” First, Everett moves to reorient these characters in his own moral landscape. “Those white boys, Huck and Tom, watched me,” James says one moonlit night. “They were always playing some kind of pretending game where I was either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy.” No longer.
Notice, too, that voice. Rather than merely discard Jim’s dialect, Everett makes it central to the story. Every enslaved person in “James” is essentially bilingual, capable of code switching between the sophisticated English they secretly use among themselves and the shufflin’ vernacular they speak around white people. “Safe movement through the world,” James notes, “depended on mastery of language, fluency.” And so we see him training his daughter how to thank Miss Watson for a piece of her horrible cornbread:
“What are you going to say when she asks you about it?”
The girl practices: “Miss Watson, dat sum conebread lak I neva before et.”
“Try ‘dat be,’” Jim says. “That would be the correct incorrect grammar.”
The “correct incorrect grammar” is a perfect metaphor for the rigid but absurd structure of American racism that James contends with. Every situation, he insists, must be carefully engineered to preserve the illusion of Black inferiority. At a nighttime meeting that reads like an HR training session in hell, James explains that whites’ fragile sense of generosity, justice and ease is constantly threatened by their own brutality and their victims’ humanity. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” he says. “The better they feel, the safer we are.”
Even if you haven’t read “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” since high school, you’ll catch Everett’s reenactments of many scenes from Twain’s novel. But each one has been reset in surprising ways. Here, for instance, it’s not Huck’s fault that a rattlesnake bites James, and in his delirium, under the effects of the venom, James debates the meaning of equality with Voltaire.
Later, those familiar scoundrels, the King and the Duke, shoulder their way onto the raft. Everett can do their shtick well, but he keeps them on a shorter leash. That’s partially because James is less impressed by these con men than Huck is, but also because Everett has a firmer control of his plot. This is not a story told by a boy drifting down a river; it’s a story told by a man racing against chaos to retrieve his family.
Of course, that means some memorable moments are entirely missing, including anything that Jim doesn’t witness in Twain’s story, like the feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons. Personally, I can never get enough of Emmeline Grangerford — her maudlin poetry! her spidery portraits! — but as compensation, Everett gives us evocative new incidents, such as James’ stint as a member of a blackface singing group, which is a pitch-perfect example of the author’s contrapuntal satire.
Other omissions are more strategic and more telling. Everett dispenses with the inane trip to Phelps’ farm that spoils the end of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Instead, “James” leans in hard on its thriller elements and gathers speed and terror like a swelling storm. Its conclusion is equally shocking and exhilarating.
What’s most striking, ultimately, is the way “James” both honors and interrogates “Huck Finn,” along with the nation that reveres it. What does it mean that — in Hemingway’s words — “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn’”? How did we manage to privilege the story of a white boy’s moral insight over the plight of a Black man’s existential peril? For all Twain’s comic genius and social courage, “Huckleberry Finn” allows white readers to talk about slavery while remaining at the center of the story. Like Huck, we can feel warmed by bravely resolving to go to hell for Jim without getting burned.
In the opening pages of Everett’s novel, Miss Watson notices something amiss. She asks James, “Have you been in Judge Thatcher’s library room?”
“You mean dat room wif all dem books?”
“Yes.”
James laughs and says, “What I gone do wif a book?”
Just wait and see.