BookBrowse Reviews James by Percival Everett

BookBrowse:

A fresh reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with Jim at the narrative wheel.

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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.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in April 2024, and has been updated for the December 2024 edition. Click here to go to this issue.