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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published December 4, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published December 4, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
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A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. From the "literary icon" (Oprah Daily) and Pulitzer Prize Finalist whose novel Erasure is the basis for Cord Jefferson's critically acclaimed film American Fiction.
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river's banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim's agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a "literary icon" (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.
Excerpt
James
Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass. The moon was not quite full, but bright, and it was behind them, so I could see them as plain as day, though it was deep night. Lightning bugs flashed against the black canvas. I waited at Miss Watson's kitchen door, rocked a loose step board with my foot, knew she was going to tell me to fix it tomorrow. I was waiting there for her to give me a pan of corn bread that she had made with my Sadie's recipe. Waiting is a big part of a slave's life, waiting and waiting to wait some more. Waiting for demands. Waiting for food. Waiting for the ends of days. Waiting for the just and deserved Christian reward at the end of it all.
Those white boys, Huck and Tom, watched me. They were always playing some kind of pretending game where I was either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy. They hopped about out there with the chiggers, mosquitoes and other biting bugs, but never made any progress toward me. It always pays to give white folks what they want, so I stepped into the yard and called out into the night,
"Who dat dere in da dark lak dat?"
They rustled clumsily about, giggled. Those boys couldn't sneak up on a blind and deaf man while a band was playing. I would rather have been wasting time counting lightning bugs than bothering with them.
"I guess I jest gwyne set dese old bones down on dis heah porch and watch out for dat noise 'gin. Maybe dere be sum ol' demon or witch out dere. I'm gwyne stay right heah where it be safe." I sat on the top step and leaned back against the post. I was tired, so I closed my eyes.
The boys whispered excitedly to each other, and I could hear them, clear as a church bell.
"Is he 'sleep already?" Huck asked.
"I reckon so. I heard n*****s can fall asleep jest like that," Tom said and snapped his fingers.
"Shhhh," Huck said.
"I say we ties him up," Tom said. "Tie him up to dat porch post what he's leaning 'ginst."
"No," said Huck. "What if'n he wakes up and makes a ruckus? Then I gets found out for being outside and not in bed like I'm supposed to be."
"What if'n you wake Jim?"
"I ain't gonna wake nobody. Thunder can't even wake a sleepin' n*****. Don't you know nuffin? Thunder, nor lightning, nor roarin' lions. I hear tell of one that slept right through an earthquake."
"What you suppose an earthquake feels like?" Huck asked.
"Like when you pa wakes you up in the middle of the night."
Excerpted from James by Percival Everett. Copyright © 2024 by Percival Everett. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Doubleday. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.
The Oscar-nominated film American Fiction (2023) and the Percival Everett novel it was based on, Erasure (2001), are about whose voices are heard and in what context. In the movie, Jeffrey Wright and Issa Rae, both playing authors, argue with their white peers against awarding a literary prize to a novel by a Black author that invokes pernicious racial stereotypes. When Wright and Rae try to explain this, one of the white authors responds, "I just think it's essential to listen to Black voices right now," drowning out the only two Black people in the room.
In James, Everett brings readers the voice of Jim, the enslaved companion of Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain's 1885 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Jim's voice, along with the voices of the other enslaved people he knows and meets on his journey, is one of constant code switching. Chapter 2 opens with Jim teaching a group of enslaved children how to speak in a racialized dialect reminiscent of Twain's novel — "Lawdy, missum! Looky dere." — explaining, "White 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." This is a clever detail for creating the world of chattel slavery from the perspectives of the enslaved, and the code switching introduces frequent opportunities for humor (if perhaps a little too frequent). The ignorance-feigning language of minstrelsy also hearkens back to Erasure's book-within-a-book called My Pafology, which is written with a white audience in mind, employing the stereotypical language this audience would expect to hear from a streetwise Black criminal.
Everett covers many of the incidents readers will recall from Huck Finn — most vividly and disturbingly Huck and Jim's encounter with the confidence men calling themselves the King and the Duke. He also includes, of course, many incidents that are not in the original text, which occur during periods in which Jim and Huck are separated. The plot is stuffed with action and it moves quickly, though Everett finds time to show Jim's philosophical side, as he pores over books stolen from Judge Thatcher's library and engages in imaginary dialogue with Voltaire and Rousseau about the morality of enslavement.
Slavery's violence is unflinchingly captured in all of its horror, but also in its absurdity. At one point, Jim and another person fleeing enslavement are shot at by their pursuers. After the fact, Jim's companion expresses astonishment, declaring, "They were shooting at us...You can't work a dead slave. Why would they shoot?" Jim's response is simple: "They hate us, Norman." Slavery is a matter of capital but it's also fundamentally an expression of hate, rage, and dehumanization.
Of course, Twain was a humorist and Huck Finn is, though possibly less so to a modern audience, meant to be comedic in spirit. Perhaps one of the greatest achievements of James is that the funniest lines are given to Jim, and humor is a great humanizer. In one scene, Jim tells Huck that he knew his mother, whom Huck doesn't remember. Huck asks Jim if she was pretty, leading to the following exchange:
"I dunno. I reckon. It's a scary thing for a slave to think such things."
"Why is that?"
"Jest the way the world is."
"You think this here river is pretty?" Huck asked.
"I reckon I do," I said.
"Then why you cain't say if my mama was pretty?"
"River ain't a white woman."
Like the author supposedly standing up for Black voices in American Fiction, there are white savior types in James held up for satirical ridicule. While separated from Huck, Jim is purchased away from an enslaver by a group of a cappella singers who claim to be anti-slavery. He is ostensibly "free" while among them, but when he discovers they still intend to exploit his labor for profit and care little for his safety around those who would do him harm, he flees. It is clear that without true liberation, sympathetic words from white people are nothing but empty platitudes, or worse, veils that obscure a violence less naked but equally harmful for its insidiousness.
Readers of some of Everett's other work may find themselves yearning for the stranger qualities of books like Erasure and Dr. No. James is a straightforward novel with few frills. However, it features some excellent surprises and the build up to and execution of the final act are expertly done. Everett captures the milieu of slavery at the start of the Civil War with precision and depth and frees his protagonist from the bonds of offensive caricature.
Reviewed by Lisa Butts
Rated 5 out of 5
by Gloria M
Destined to be a new classic!
I honestly only have minimal memory of "The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain. I know I read it after "Tom Sawyer" and I was probably eight or nine years old-that was the time frame when I was borrowing a lot of classics from my local library. I recall Huck's basic character and I did not pay as much attention to the character of Jim. Granted, I was a child and I did not yet care about the perspectives of adults (particularly male viewpoints as I was already a budding feminist!) so I am glad (like thousands and thousands of others) that I picked up "James" by Percival Everett.
This is the book we did not know we needed. Powerful and memorable, funny and poignant, and a masterful work everyone should read. Everett has a masterful writing style and the reader is immediately drawn into the narrative. Giving voice to Jim was a brilliant choice and stirs up so many emotions. This one is a keeper, get it now!! I would definitely enjoy a sequel!
Rated 5 out of 5
by Jill
Brilliantly Written and Told
JAMES by Percival Everett
Narration by Dominic Hoffman was perfectly done. Percival Everett has written a brilliant story of reimagining at its best. I absolutely loved everything he took liberty with in this story about James. James is a father and husband, and an enslaved man living in Missouri before the civil war. I suppose you can say this is a reboot of Mark Twain’s 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, narrated by the enslaved Jim. James is a father and husband, and an enslaved man living in Missouri before the civil war. James has found out he is to be sold and separated from his family. He flees to a deserted island and encounters Huckleberry Finn, also on the run.
The two begin their adventure in this entertaining read on multiple levels that is painful, funny, gripping and horrifying. This is definitely a top read for me in 2024 and Percival Everett certainly knocked it out of the park with this ingenious book. Kudos to him!??“To fight in a war,” he said. “Can you imagine?”?“Would that mean facing death every day and doing what other people tell you to do?” I asked.?“I reckon.”?“Yes, Huck, I can imagine.”
Percival Everett's James is a reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck's enslaved companion Jim. This kind of reconfiguration is a common source of inspiration for authors, as one can see in the following list of books that similarly provide new points of view on classic works of literature.
Beautiful Little Fools by Jillian Cantor (2022)
This novel is a retelling of The Great Gatsby that focuses primarily on the women from the original story: Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby's former flame; Jordan Baker, Daisy's best friend; and Catherine McCoy, a suffragette who appears only briefly in the original text. In an interview with The Avid Pen, Cantor explains that she was inspired to write the novel by the relative little space given to these characters by F. Scott Fitzgerald: "I've always wanted to know more about the women in The Great Gatsby. They're such a huge part of the plot, and yet they barely speak."
The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud (2015)
In The Meursault Investigation, Algerian author Kamel Daoud reimagines Albert Camus' The Stranger (1942) from the perspective of a character who does not appear in the source material: the brother of the (nameless) Arab man shot by main character Meursault on a beach at the end of Part I. The brother, Harun, reflects over the course of the novel on God, Algeria, and alienation, among other subjects. Calling the book an "instant classic," The Guardian explains the significance of the book as an indictment of French colonialism: "Harun is an ur-Algerian reflecting on colonialism, the legacy of thousands of Meursaults and their callous indifference to Arab life."
The Women of Troy trilogy by Pat Barker (2018-2024)
Like Beautiful Little Fools, Pat Barker's Women of Troy trilogy reimagines a classic work from the perspectives of its women. In this case, Barker tells the story of Homer's Iliad with a focus on Briseis, former queen turned unwilling concubine of first Achilles and then Agamemnon. Briseis meets other female characters from the original text along her journey, including soothsayer Cassandra and Helen of Troy; but Barker also introduces characters of her own invention, such as an enslaved girl named Amina, who appears in the second volume and is loosely based on Antigone. (Though not retold from a different perspective, Marcial Gala's 2022 novel Call Me Cassandra is another excellent story inspired by the myth of Cassandra.)
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
In "The Husband Stitch," one of the short stories in Machado's collection Her Body and Other Parties, the author draws from a French folktale of unknown origin commonly referred to as "The Girl with the Green Ribbon." In the original story, a man falls in love with and marries a mysterious woman who never, over the course of their entire lives, removes the green ribbon she wears around her neck. When she finally allows her husband to do so on her deathbed, her head falls off. Alexander Dumas and Washington Irving both wrote versions of this story; Machado's version tells it from the woman's point of view, with a haunting feminist twist.
There are many, many more examples of authors exploring famous works from a new perspective. Readers who enjoy James might also want to check out Finn (2007) by Jon Clinch, which imagines a potential story for Huck Finn's father (more recently, in 2019, Clinch published Marley, a new take on A Christmas Carol). March (2005) by Geraldine Brooks tells the story of the patriarch of the March family from Little Women. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys is one of the most celebrated examples, as it gives agency to the famously imprisoned and unfairly maligned character of Rochester's wife from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, the "madwoman in the attic."
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By Lisa Butts
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