It’s no news that lovers of literature have sometimes been tempted to write prequels or sequels to great novels or give a prominent place in their own interpretations of secondary characters or themes from the original. What IS unusual is when the revisiting, so to speak, becomes outstanding on its own, which is the case with Percival Everett’s stunning reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In James, Everett takes Huck’s buddy Jim and turns him into a cautious, literate Black man who makes his wary way by pretending to be the stereotypical, ignorant slave of minstrel folk song, and talking in colloquial dialect. Everett, who is Black, says in a brief acknowledgment that he was “affected” by Twain’s “humor and humanity” long before he became a writer. It shows. Cleverly, movingly, memorably.
Advancing Twain’s 1830s-40s narrative by a couple of decades, Everett sets his tale close to the start of the Civil War in slave states bordering on the Mississippi and lets Jim narrate the tale as a runaway, befriended by Huck. Jim knows how to read, write, and talk like an educated white man, a secret he keeps even from Huck, until near the end. And the ending, readers assume, will be Jim’s journey north on the underground railroad. But Jim’s able to read and write, which makes him as he says, “free” in a way and “subversive.” He cherishes a pencil stolen for him by a slave who is viciously beaten and then hanged for it. “With my pencil,“ Jim says, “ I wrote myself into being.”
Jim’s switch in the book between what used to be called Black vernacular, and standard American usage, even when it’s mashed up by uneducated whites like Huck, provides some of the novel’s most hilarious passages, though Everett selects well from Twain’s scenes involving the con men grifters, the King and the Duke. Everett also invents scenes, including a fascinating ambivalent rendering of Virginia minstrelsy – white men corked up to look black who entertain whites. In Jim’s case, he’s not dark enough, but with makeup, he passes as black and reminds readers of the racist origins of Jim Crow. And then there are the scenes of brutality – giving the lie to degrees of cruelty. Ten lashes or thirty? Rape sometimes or every day?
By moving his timeline closer to the Civil War, Everett shows that for many Union soldiers fighting for the country, there was likely little appreciation of Negroes. Abolition might mean liberty, but not equality, “the capacity for being equal,” as James says, drawing inspiration from his readings of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Locke. But not from the Bible, the tool of his “enemy.” “Even Twain seeds ambiguity about attitudes, as his young protagonist, Huck, at the end of Huckleberry Finn decides to go west for adventure. The West then, as Twain well knew, was where Indians would be denigrated, dispossessed, and kill ed.
Everett’s remarkable novel is a cultural document, as is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. “James” is not only the title of his book but its last word, an apt companion to Huckleberry Finn, or as Everett himself has said in interviews, a “long-awaited lunch” conversation with its author he’s long admired.
