I don’t like grandiose predictions, and I understand that I risk sounding silly by making one now. But I’m going to predict that Percival Everett’s James, a novel just released to considerable fanfare, is going to transform the study of American literature across the country. At last we have a novel that can serve as a foil to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and thus can return Twain’s book to the classroom. Everett’s novel is every bit as radical as Twain’s in its use of language and point of view and subversive irony. What happens, in case you have missed the excited articles in the NY Times and the Washington Post and the New Yorker, is that Everett re-tells Huckleberry Finn in the voice of Jim, Huck’s companion. He shows us a story that both chimes with and diverges from the one told by Huck, and the result is a narrative that evolves from cheerful homage to furious corrective.
As a storyteller Everett compels us to keep turning those pages. As a polemicist, he ranks with Voltaire, who happens to make more than one cameo appearance in James. As an artist who can imagine his way into the atrocities of slavery, he’s as good as one can get. Yes, I’ve read Frederick Douglass’s Life, which derives its power from the eyewitness accounts and first-hand knowledge of enslavement. I’ve read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which registers for me more as 19th Century melodrama than as trustworthy testimony. Until I read Everett’s novel, the two most artistically successful explorations of slavery have been Toni Morrison’s Beloved and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom. They remain monumental, breathtaking, triumphant works of genius. But nobody until Everett has revealed to me the sense of eternal despair that the American slave faced. We get a glimpse of a 15-year-old enslaved girl who lived her entire life never more than twenty yards away from the workplace where she was born. We see a routine rape by an overseer who has sent an enslaved woman’s husband away for a few hours in order to make the man’s wife available. We understand that life and imprisonment are synonymous for the slave, who is born into bondage, spends every day in fear, and dies without hope. Everett has achieved what seems impossible: he has made a reader in 2024 see the horrors of 19th-Century slavery afresh.
But before we get any farther with Everett’s masterpiece, let’s consider his source. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not an anti-slavery book. There’s no need for it to be anti-slavery; it was published in the U.S. in 1885, twenty-three years after the Emancipation Proclamation, twenty years after the end of the American civil war, and 17 years after the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing citizenship to every person born in the United States. Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, when slavery was thriving. Hers was an anti-slavery novel. Twain set Huckleberry Finn in the mid-1840’s, and he very clearly demonstrates how awful slavery was. But he’s not attacking an institution that died two decades earlier. He’s attacking the racist attitudes that prevailed in his day and that we still observe in ours.
Consider the moment in the final section of Twain’s novel, the cringe-worthy Evasion Sequence, when Huck shows up at the home of Silas and Sally Phelps, two good, law-abiding Christians who turn out to be the aunt and uncle of Tom Sawyer. Huck improvises a lie about being delayed by a serious mechanical problem on a steamboat. Here’s the crucial moment in the conversation. Aunt Sally speaks first and reveals just how dismissive this culture is when it considers the humanity of black people:
“Good gracious! Anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed a nigger.”
“Well it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”
Later, when Tom Sawyer arrives and learns that Jim is shackled and confined to a flimsy shed, he withholds the news that Miss Watson has died and freed Jim in her will. Instead, he contrives an elaborate plan to free Jim using methods he’s read about in The Count of Monte Cristo and other romances. Tom Sawyer becomes an emblem of the complacent, unthinking, smug American citizen for whom a black man is nothing more than a plaything. When a disillusioned Huck learns the truth about Tom’s deception, he decides that he’s going to light out for the Indian Territory—alone, by himself, “ahead of the rest”—in order to leave both Tom and his country behind. That country has taught Huck that he’s going to Hell for helping Jim find freedom, and then he has seen Tom Sawyer make a joke of the entire process of emancipation. Twain’s target is not slavery. His target is the legacy of slavery, specifically the social muscle-memory of regarding black people as things, as property, as inferior.
Now Everett lets Jim speak. The opening line—“Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass”—pulls us into the story with a replay of an early scene in Twain’s novel, when Tom and Huck prank Jim by stealing his hat and then telling him that witches must have done it. Now, however, Jim reveals that he’s aware of their scheme and indulges them for his own safety, given that white people will not feel threatened by his presence, and thus be inclined to sell him to a plantation downriver, if they perceive him as stupid. Then we learn that all African-Americans are bilingual; they speak perfectly standard English among themselves, but in front of whites they adopt the dialect that Twain uses for all of Jim’s speeches. Later, in a language lesson with some slave children, Jim says, “…the more you talk about God and Jesus and heaven and hell, the better [white people] feel.” Then we get this exchange between Jim, who is clearly a superb teacher, and his pupils:
The children said together, “And the better they feel, the safer we are.”
“February, translate that.”
“Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.”
“Nice.”
This kind of satirical comedy does not last. The deeper we get into Jim’s journey, the farther Everett diverges from Twain’s story. By the end we’re caught up in a thrilling and terrifying escape narrative that recalls, in no particular order, Ralph Ellison, Nat Turner, Malcolm X, and Colson Whitehead. So I’m hoping, fellow English teachers, that you will let your students hear the voices of both Mark Twain’s Huck and Percival Everett’s Jim. If you run into resistance, push back. If necessary, get in touch with the marvelous Jocelyn Chadwick, who not only knows schools and knows Twain, but who recognized the dignity of Jim way back in 1998 with the publication of The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn. Good for Percival Everett for his ingenious re-imagining of Jim, but Jocelyn Chadwick got there first. Or, as Huck Finn might say, she’s been there before.