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Percival Everett’s James has been heralded as a retelling or even a complementary version to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a sequel to Tom Sawyer long considered the definitive Great American Novel since it was first published 140 years ago. It’s a shame that so much attention has been given to the book’s use of a particular word as it remains both one of the most important works of literature from perhaps the most beloved author in American history, but also a rallying cry against the inhumanity of slavery.
Such reimagining is a gimmick we see often in modern literature, from Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (The Wizard of Oz), Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife, or The Star-Gazer (Moby Dick), or the most celebrated of them all, Tom Stoppard’s Hamlet-expanding Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Even Huck’s doomed Pap got the backstory treatment in Jon Clinch’s Finn.
Opinion may vary as to their literary importance, but one thing is certain. Even at their best, attempts by modern authors to continue, expand, explain, or play in worlds created by another author are fan-fiction. That source material is usually in the public domain must factor in the desire to expand on the material, or take it in entirely new directions.
via YouTubeMost readers diving into James will likely be familiar with Everett’s Erasure, which was adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction. It may be their only exposure to his work, which would be a shame as he’s been one of the most eclectic and unpredictable novelists out there, and in some ways the perfect author to reinterpret Twain’s most iconic work.
Everett’s James is fan-fiction, but it shares the two initiating events of Twain’s narrative: Huck faking his own murder to escape his abusive father and Jim learning that Miss Watson aims to sell him to a man in New Orleans. But the basic premise remains, at least for a while; two mix-matched souls have an adventure on the Mississippi River in a time when one man could legally own another.
There are small, but noticeable, changes throughout, such as Jim telling Huck that he “ain’t never had no money” (omitting the story of Jim’s brief investment in cow “stocks”), and while the events of Twain’s book occurred sometime in the 1930s or 40s, Everett shifts the period to just before the outbreak of the Civil War, a change that will play a critical part before the end.
Since it was first published nothing has been as controversial as Twain’s usage of the n-word, except maybe Jim’s “negro dialect”, which has made reading the book both uncomfortable and difficult for many. Right away Everett introduces his book’s main trick: Jim’s “slave dialect” is an act of subterfuge, an intentional misdirect by slaves to put their white masters at ease. Jim teaches his children to use “the correct incorrect grammar”, to save their true intellect and thoughts for each other, in private.
We learn this practice isn’t limited to his family, but to all slaves across the country. We also learn that Jim can read, and has been secretly using Judge Thatcher’s library to educate himself on all matters of philosophy and the rights of man.
The way Everett applies this code-switching could have been played as satire or even for cheap laughs, but I suspect his real intent is more terrifying; the suppression of one’s natural talents in the face of inhumane treatment for mere survival. In this version of Huckleberry Finn we’re never allowed to forget that slavery is a blight on humanity, no matter how much “fun” the adventure is.
The focus on Jim allows Everett to omit or shorten Huck-centric portions of the story, such as Huck disguising himself like a girl or evading killers on the wrecked steamboat, leaving Jim alone with his dreams (or hallucinations) where he imagines conversations with John Locke on the hypocrisy of human bondage while preaching morality or with Voltaire on equality (after his bite from a rattlesnake, of course).
For much of the narrative both the story and its events are bound by the invisible walls set out by Twain’s original text…until they’re not. By the time Jim and Huck meet with the Dauphin and Duke the narrative becomes fully unmoored from Twain’s. From here Jim is sold and conscripted as a tenor for the Virginia Minstrels, led by Daniel Decatur Emmett, based on the actual founder of the first minstrel troupe (and composer of that most famous of Southern hymns, “Dixie”).
This leads to the book’s most audacious spectacle: a runaway slave pretending to be a white man playing a black man to entertain white audiences. One terrifying scene has Jim attracting a young woman’s attention with an especially curious father who simply can’t help wanting to touch his realistic “wig”. The stakes couldn’t be more dire; if Jim’s real identity is discovered a lynching is all but certain.
But this feels strange because this version of James feels transplanted from the 21st-century, via Everett’s pen, and doesn’t talk, think, or act like someone who belongs in this version of Twain’s story. From page one Jim is already literate, a fully-formed person possessed of knowledge and insight far beyond even that of his slave masters. But we never learn how this could have been possible, given his situation. How did he learn to read? How was he able to teach other slaves to read without aid of writing or reading materials? We don’t know, and the book isn’t curious how, either.
Jim often seems surprised by the violence around him, surprised by rape, surprised to learn there are slaves who actually like being slaves. Even the idea that slaves secretly speak grammatically precise English seems new to them, as Jim slips up so often even Huck notices, asking why he’s talking so funny.
I suspect much of Jim (now James) is really a self-insert of Everett himself, a device that lets the author challenge the hypocrisies of a so-called “children’s story” that too often made light of slavery (or often made nothing of it at all). It might have been more satisfying had Everett gone full meta and just done this, but that would probably have been too familiar to Octavia Butler’s sci-fi time-traveling Kindred.
Still, once freed from the literary bounds of Twain’s narrative James (the book) is free to become its own thing, to blaze a new trail for these characters. But doing so means abandoning the literary gimmick that made the premise so fascinating in the first place. Rather than engage with Twain’s world Everett feels it necessary to set fire to it, to transform characters into rapists, to have James become both the victim of savage brutality and an avenging angel of death spouting one-liners as he dispenses violent justice on those who perpetrate the evils of slavery.
I won’t mention it here, but there is a late-stage “reveal” about the relationship between the two main characters that feels designed to upend everything we thought we knew about them, only it’s been so transparently telegraphed throughout that when it comes the only real surprise is there’s no surprise. By the time Jim slowly chokes a man to death all literary restraint is gone, replaced by the kind of retconning exploitation you’d find in a Quentin Tarantino film.
All of this feels in conflict with everything we’ve read up to this point, a betrayal of purpose in what had previously felt like such a careful deconstruction of Twain’s novel that degenerates into a cheap denouement that could have been much more interesting, and satisfying.
If Twain’s book proved that Jim, a man enslaved in human bondage, could be just as capable of love and compassion as any white man, Everett’s version suggests Jim, like any man, isn’t above his base instincts. Too often, Everett’s version feels like it’s taking revenge on it.
Conclusion:
Everett’s James doesn’t so much complement Twain’s Huckleberry Finn but interrogates it, questioning its central premise and place in Americana from a distance only 140 years and a million interpretations could offer. A hallmark of any great piece of art is to allow itself to be open to interpretation, and while Everett proposes a fascinating idea that should have provoked a new discussion on its cultural and literary merits, it’s a shame such an intriguing premise from such a gifted writer allows itself to spin into a freefall towards the end. To be fair, some critics have long said the same about Twain’s book. In that respect, Everett’s James is in good company.