Review: Percival Everett revisits Huck Finn
(iStock)Although sometimes criticized for its grammatical errors, vulgarities and racial epithets, Mark Twain’s 1885 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn inspired worldwide praise and numerous spin-offs, including a recent one: Percival Everett’s 2024 National Book Award-winning novel James.
Telling the story of the two main characters of Huckleberry Finn, Huck and Jim, from Jim’s point of view, Everett presents a character who is allegedly the real Jim: the one who reads Locke, Voltaire and Kierkegaard and who talks to them in his dreams, the one who speaks in correct English to Blacks and in dialect to whites, the one without the blackface and the minstrelsy, the one who calls himself James.
A distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California, Everett is a prolific African-American author of 25 novels, eight poetry collections and four books of short stories. He has won numerous awards and was twice shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize—first for The Trees (2021) and most recently for James.
Described as “a masterful, revisionist work” by the Booker Prize judges, James is set in the South just before the Civil War. That conflict breaks out on the final pages of the story, as James travels to a farm that markets Black slaves, taking the ending of James to an adult level far removed from the childish hijinks that conclude Mark Twain’s story.
“With its virtuosic command of language and moral urgency,” James, as the Booker judges explain, “is a towering achievement that confronts the past while holding out hope for a progressive future, cementing Everett’s deserved reputation as a literary sensation.”
Everett’s work grapples with philosophical and metaphysical questions as well as racial issues, while enveloping all in sarcasm and irony. It often makes for difficult reading. In James, for example, the eponymous hero reflects on his anger over enslavement: “I was as much scared as angry, but where does a slave put anger?… the real source of our rage had to go without redress, swallowed, repressed.”
He also ponders matters of religion and God. “Waiting is a big part of a slave’s life,” he says. “Waiting for the just and deserved Christian reward at the end of days.” But James doesn’t believe that slaves are rewarded or that their prayers are answered and tells Huck as much: “you be the one to ax him [Jesus] for help. He don’t seem to pay no mind to the wishes of no slave.”
James goes into more detail when he says, “Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient…. There might be a higher power, children, but it’s not their white God.”
In Twain’s book, Huck Finn has a crisis of conscience in which he expresses his belief that his “white God” will send him to hell for helping a runaway slave. That crisis reverberates in James, where Huck and James have heated discussions about religious matters.
There’s more than enough irony in this metafictional story. James, using a stolen pencil and notebook, begins writing his autobiography; this, it turns out, is a narrative within the narrative that will sum up the meaning of the novel and add to the themes that Everett expresses through the central character.
James develops in three sections, with the first part most similar to the plotline of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Huck and Jim run away, hide out on Jackson Island and travel together on a raft on the Mississippi River. Throughout their adventures, they hope to arrive in Ohio, a state where slavery is prohibited.
James wishes to avoid being sold and doesn’t want to leave his wife and daughter. Huck wants to avoid the Widow Douglas (who tries to civilize him) and Pap, the town drunk, his abusive stepfather, who locks him in a cabin and beats him every night.
The second and third parts of James mostly diverge from Twain’s novel. James, having been separated from Huck, joins a group of traveling minstrels and befriends Norman Brown, another light-skinned escaped slave. James then takes a job as a blacksmith. When James again meets Huck, he shows himself to be an educated man and one capable of revenge as he learns about a young slave who has been raped by her white overseer.
The opening pages of James contain poems written by Daniel Decatur Emmett (1815-1904), whom Everett brings into his story, making James seem more alive with this blending of reality and fiction. Everett includes “Dixie” and other songs that Emmett composed—all suggesting the poetic and musical devices embedded in Everett’s style with sentences like: “Tell your story with your ears. Listen.” Or: “He drew the leather back slowly, so that the sound became part of the torture.”
In the novel, Emmett founds a minstrel group that James joins for a short time. Since James is light-skinned, he covers his face with black polish, evoking the irony that runs through the narrative.
As the novel develops, readers see that Everett’s James is almost nothing like Twain’s Jim. Both characters are Black men living in Hannibal, Mo., around the time of the Civil War; both care about Huck; and both are ostensibly slaves. James, however, is not owned by anyone—even though Miss Watson, Judge Thatcher, Huck and other characters in the story may think differently.
James’s journey with Huck is not composed of boyhood adventures. There is nothing boyish about the protagonist. He is planning to free his wife and daughter from slavery. His actions are not playful; they are set against moral, metaphysical and philosophical codes.
James is also Huck Finn’s friend and mentor. But is there more to their relationship—something that draws Huck’s love and loyalty? And is James the voice of the author, the one who conveys Everett’s opinions about religion, humanity and freedom? Those questions go to the heart of the story and will gnaw at readers’ consciences until the final page and beyond.
Everett writes about the abuse that James and other slaves endured. But, he says, his book is not about slavery. It is about people who suffered and survived often by telling white people what they want to hear, as opposed to what they as Black people actually think. He doesn’t call James a retelling of Huckleberry Finn, as most reviewers describe it. He calls it a conversation.
“I hope that I have written the novel that Twain could not have written,” Everett said in an interview with the Booker Prize organization. “I do not view the work as a corrective, but rather I see myself in conversation with Twain.”
He has read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 10 times. This gave him not only an understanding of the novel but an emotional connection to it, something that can be seen especially as he goes inside James’s head and reveals his thoughts: “I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world,” James writes, “a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related but self-written.”
Ultimately, Everett presents James as his own man. What that means is fleshed out in this novel—one that starts with ironic implications that build to a stunning climax.
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