Book Review: James,* by Percival Everett, published March, ’24, 320 pages, Lexile 790, recommended for grades 11 and up, ages 16+ (due to content, opinions as to suitability may vary) Please note: this book is not yet in the Pageturner library and requires students requests made per class for titles to be purchased.
N.B. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn contains the n-word 219 times. In Percival Everett’s retelling, it occurs a “mere” 70 times, most often replaced with “warrior” or “slave.” James has been reviewed as “thrilling,” “majestic,” “brilliant,” and “hilarious,” but also “painful,” “tangled,” “far darker, more imaginative, tender, and sly.” The Guardian review headlines it as “gleeful”—to which my response was, WHA-?
Let’s acknowledge, before turning to the retelling of Twain’s novel, that the last several chapters of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn seem a curious misfit, a disconnect from the rest of the tale. As the story goes in Twain’s original story: although Miss Watson has freed Jim, Huck hides him in Aunt Sally’s shed and even sends in some rats and other critters to make it feel more like a real prison. Huck and Tom are much like cis-Trump guys today, all in for being faux warriors in utter disregard for their fellow beings. Of course, neither of them considers Jim fully a human being, and even Jim doesn’t seem to mind being the butt of their jokes. Twain was, of course, a product of his time and therefore quite limited in his perspective; his aim was to regale his readers with the adventures of two White boys-- the man’s essential humanity peeks through almost by accident.
As I read James, I couldn’t help but think that this book wasn’t written for the well-meaning White folk who jump on every Black bandwagon only, ultimately, to steal it. Like the language Black people here have always cultivated for themselves, only to have it mockingly broadcast without stint of any mercy—consider the word “woke” as one particularly egregious example--I can’t help but think USC Prof. Everett has here created an intellectual James for Black people, a deeply subversive novel not really intended for Whites. The author of more than 30 books all so various it’s been written that his publisher has begged him to do something a second time, Everett has in fact plunged into our racist superstructure far more often than once, in fact almost every time (his retelling of mythology excepted) with novels such as Erasure, Trees, I am Not Sydney Poitier (hilarious), and “A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid” (2004). I almost feel unqualified, as a White person, to review it. (I should note here that I capitalize White and Black as arbitrary and artificially imposed linguistic structures.)
One review that best describes Everett’s perspective, in my opinion, is by Lavelle Porter:
“If you haven’t read Percival Everett, you are missing out on one of the greatest black writers working today. Yeah, I said it. Black writer. African American. Colored. Negro. Afro-American. Etc. Everett can obfuscate and complicate and subvert these designations all he wants, but to the extent there is such a thing as African-American literature, he’s one of the most important writers doing it. “… A Percival Everett novel is never just about race, never limited to race, and certainly never traffics in simplified notions of blackness through urban or rural clichés. In fact, in his entire body of work one finds an ongoing meditation on all the sloppy, simplistic, lazy and inevitable ways that we rely on such racial signifiers. Sifting through his books, and the growing critical tradition around them, we find a writer who is committed to confronting, disrupting, and just plan fucking with conceptions of race at every turn.” —Lavelle Porter, 05/05/15
https://thenewinquiry.com/percival-everett-by-percival-everett/
In James, then, USC Prof. Everett is clearly screwing with White people’s conceptions about race. Let’s face it, even when history attempts to be factual about America, it’s never mentioned how greatly slaves contributed to the building of the American empire—not merely due to their unpaid labor but also to their tremendous inventive contributions to progress, (1) which expanded exponentially after Emancipation and were exceeded in U.S. patents only by English and German inventors in their own countries. (2) For example, when James and another slave, Luke, mock a White man who tells them how great whiskey is as he saunters off to get rip-roaring drunk, they discuss whether his display is “proleptic irony, or dramatic irony.” They do not speak the patois White people believe of all slaves; instead, they speak exactly as educated Whites do.
When James dreams, he argues with English philosopher John Locke, berating him for his sheer hypocrisy in writing about human rights and the equality of all men, while simultaneously drafting constitutions for slave owning nation states. Locke can only respond with something like, “Well, it pays the bills.” He blasts Jean Jacques Rousseau, too, for his laziness in accepting White supremacy. When James reads the French philosopher Voltaire, he dismisses the subject matter as folly because Voltaire was a White supremacist, content to examine instead the structure of Voltaire’s work for its applicability to his own writing, about which he remarks, “I write myself into existence.” James has surreptitiously read every book in Judge Thatcher’s library. He’s teaching all the slaves at Miss Watson’s how to read. In fact, he has to teach his child to sound more like a slave, as both his wife and his little girl speak the Queen’s English, sans the British and slave owning aristocracy’s faux accent:
“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.’”
And he considers the possible penalties for it:
“I had wondered every time I sneaked in there what white people would do to a slave who had learned how to read. What would they do to a slave who had taught the other slaves to read? What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenuse was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled?” We learn what White retribution means when James is gifted with a stub of a pencil by a slave named Young George, who will later be beaten and executed for the theft as James watches, a silent witness and agonized accomplice. In reality, a slave who taught other slaves to read would be executed, slowly and painfully. "Confederate states in the antebellum South that passed anti-literacy laws included South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, and Alabama. Due to fear following the Stono Rebellion, the largest slave uprising in South Carolina in 1739, blacks were prohibited from learning to read. Plantation owners feared that literate slaves could write and use forged documents to gain their freedom. However, many of the enslaved used this method to obtain their freedom. ...Alabama's law stated: Any person who shall attempt to teach any free person of color, or slave, to spell, read or write, shall upon conviction thereof by indictment, be fined in a sum of not less than two hundred fifty dollars, nor more than five hundred dollars.” https://oaklandliteracycoalition.org/literacy-by-any-means-necessary-the-history-of-anti-literacy-laws-in-the-u-s/
A perspective challenging this take on language in James appears in Reddit: “...[T]he idea that Black characters would for some reason speak more "proper" English than white characters struck me as bizarre. Where did they learn that way of speaking, and are we supposed to think what they have to say would be less valid or intelligent if it were spoken in their actual dialect (which may be different than the one Twain portrayed but historically would be different from white English, with its own valid grammar and consistent internal rules)? “It seemed to be privileging a certain "educated" way of speaking and then using the logic "Black people are good and smart, good and smart people sound educated, so therefore Black people actually speak more formally and 'properly' than white people when they're alone."
“The scenes of James formally teaching a class about how to use dialect around white people also rung [sic] really false to me. I'm sure some of those lessons were taught, but probably much less formally and systematically. “
I, too, found this perplexing; it bothered me that the White way to speak is given as the only VALID way to speak, especially as Black people have been brilliantly and creatively changing the English language for four hundred years. One answer Prof. Everett might give in answer to this point is, “Just because A is A doesn’t mean A EQUALS A.** There's another part in which James takes as his last name Golightly, which I'm thinking Everett meant as a joke; I was relieved when much later, he assumes the last name Faber, taken from the manufacturer of his pencil.***
Many of the scenes in the original are repeated in James, as when he and Huck encounter a pair of charlatans who manipulate Huck and pose a continuing grave danger to James. Some scenes NOT in the original, however, are particularly compelling for James. He is separated from Huck by those two and is heard singing while blacksmithing. He has a beautiful tenor voice and is overheard by the leader of a group of blackface musicians—of which there were many, at the time. This guy insists he’s an abolitionist but pays the blacksmith $200 for James. The troupe then puts blackface on James so nobody will know he’s actually Black. The minstrel songs mock Black people and depict them more or less as savages. (Everett records some of these songs in his forward and during these scenes, as well.) In blackface, James gets to look White people in the eye for the first time. Soon the troupe’s leader tells him he must perform the equivalent of $200 worth of performances before he’ll release him—he is still a slave. This is so much worse, because the troupe leader misrepresents himself shamelessly. James steals the song leader’s notebook to write in for himself. He escapes with another singer who passes for White, and they plan to “sell” James, free him, and sell him again until James can earn enough to free his wife and little girl. This ends when James and his friend manage to board a steamer without getting chopped up in its paddle wheels—and he reconnects with Huck, here—but the steamer explodes and he can only save one. He chooses Huck, and his new friend dies.
While James is being sold as a slave away from the plantation where he began, he is twice subjected to severe beatings he was unaccustomed to before, and they harden him. Throughout, though, he tries to retain his humanity and is sincerely reluctant to do real harm. It should be noted here that the novel has leaped forward from Twain some 20 years, and we’re at the start of the Civil War. James is sometimes in a free state, but how would he even know, and how “free” is free? Either way, he’s still a slave.
Late in the story, James reveals to Huck that he is Huck’s own father; he tells Huck that he and Huck’s mom were raised together as children. All this time, Huck had thought his father was the mean drunk who beat him regularly, from whom he had escaped with Jim. James tells him he’d seen his stepfather dead. And when Huck wants to stay with James, James turns him away. Since Huck passes, James tells him, he MUST pass. He tells Huck he is loved by Miss Watson and Judge Thatcher and he must return to their safety. And so they part.
When he learns that his wife and 9-year old daughter have been sold to a particularly brutal “breeding farm,” he relinquishes his resolve and commits to rebellion, finally committing murder, freeing all the slaves there and burning that plantation to the ground. His future is uncertain as he and a group of newly freed people look for the underground railroad and freedom in the North.
In his review in The NY Times, Dwight Garner has written: “My idea of hell would be to live with a library that contained only reimaginings of famous novels... Two writers in a hundred walk away unscathed... “James” is the rarest of exceptions. It should come bundled with Twain’s novel. It is a tangled and subversive homage, a labor of rough love.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/08/james-by-percival-everett-review-a-gripping-reimagining-of-mark-twain-jim-huckleberry-finn
_________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________
* Winner of the National Book Award, November, 2024
**George Makari writes of his inteview with Prof. Everett:
"'You’ve said that you often get prompted by a philosophical problem for a work that then becomes a novel, so I guess that follows from what you said: the scenes develop out of a philosophical problem?'
'Yes, and often a not terribly interesting philosophical problem. Mostly it’s problems of logic, and not the logic of identity or any kind of cultural identity—it’s actually logical identity. I’m interested in the fact that A is A is not the same thing as A equals A, and even as I say it, it gives me a headache. But that’s at the root of almost everything I make." (Here the two were involved in a discussion of Wittgenstein, which sailed right over this head.)
*** I perceived this to be an obvious reference to Holly Golightly, a character in Truman Capote’s novel, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In that novel, Golightly is a young woman of 19 who makes her way in life by dating rich men. I couldn’t fathom any comparison except as an "in joke," but I accept that Prof. Everett is working at a much higher level than my own.
(1) —a list of inventions by Black people https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb00695483/_1.pdf -
(2) --After Emancipation, racial prejudice established as law prevented Black access to patent protection. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-innovators-who-elevated-the-united-states-reassessing-the-golden-age-of-invention/ - :~:text=With 50,000 total patents, Black,country except England and Germany.
—50,000 Black inventors obtained patents during the Industrial Revolution, in numbers exceeded only by England and Germany. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-innovators-who-elevated-the-united-states-reassessing-the-golden-age-of-invention/ - :~:text=With 50,000 total patents, Black,country except England and Germany.
Let’s acknowledge, before turning to the retelling of Twain’s novel, that the last several chapters of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn seem a curious misfit, a disconnect from the rest of the tale. As the story goes in Twain’s original story: although Miss Watson has freed Jim, Huck hides him in Aunt Sally’s shed and even sends in some rats and other critters to make it feel more like a real prison. Huck and Tom are much like cis-Trump guys today, all in for being faux warriors in utter disregard for their fellow beings. Of course, neither of them considers Jim fully a human being, and even Jim doesn’t seem to mind being the butt of their jokes. Twain was, of course, a product of his time and therefore quite limited in his perspective; his aim was to regale his readers with the adventures of two White boys-- the man’s essential humanity peeks through almost by accident.
As I read James, I couldn’t help but think that this book wasn’t written for the well-meaning White folk who jump on every Black bandwagon only, ultimately, to steal it. Like the language Black people here have always cultivated for themselves, only to have it mockingly broadcast without stint of any mercy—consider the word “woke” as one particularly egregious example--I can’t help but think USC Prof. Everett has here created an intellectual James for Black people, a deeply subversive novel not really intended for Whites. The author of more than 30 books all so various it’s been written that his publisher has begged him to do something a second time, Everett has in fact plunged into our racist superstructure far more often than once, in fact almost every time (his retelling of mythology excepted) with novels such as Erasure, Trees, I am Not Sydney Poitier (hilarious), and “A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid” (2004). I almost feel unqualified, as a White person, to review it. (I should note here that I capitalize White and Black as arbitrary and artificially imposed linguistic structures.)
One review that best describes Everett’s perspective, in my opinion, is by Lavelle Porter:
“If you haven’t read Percival Everett, you are missing out on one of the greatest black writers working today. Yeah, I said it. Black writer. African American. Colored. Negro. Afro-American. Etc. Everett can obfuscate and complicate and subvert these designations all he wants, but to the extent there is such a thing as African-American literature, he’s one of the most important writers doing it. “… A Percival Everett novel is never just about race, never limited to race, and certainly never traffics in simplified notions of blackness through urban or rural clichés. In fact, in his entire body of work one finds an ongoing meditation on all the sloppy, simplistic, lazy and inevitable ways that we rely on such racial signifiers. Sifting through his books, and the growing critical tradition around them, we find a writer who is committed to confronting, disrupting, and just plan fucking with conceptions of race at every turn.” —Lavelle Porter, 05/05/15
https://thenewinquiry.com/percival-everett-by-percival-everett/
In James, then, USC Prof. Everett is clearly screwing with White people’s conceptions about race. Let’s face it, even when history attempts to be factual about America, it’s never mentioned how greatly slaves contributed to the building of the American empire—not merely due to their unpaid labor but also to their tremendous inventive contributions to progress, (1) which expanded exponentially after Emancipation and were exceeded in U.S. patents only by English and German inventors in their own countries. (2) For example, when James and another slave, Luke, mock a White man who tells them how great whiskey is as he saunters off to get rip-roaring drunk, they discuss whether his display is “proleptic irony, or dramatic irony.” They do not speak the patois White people believe of all slaves; instead, they speak exactly as educated Whites do.
When James dreams, he argues with English philosopher John Locke, berating him for his sheer hypocrisy in writing about human rights and the equality of all men, while simultaneously drafting constitutions for slave owning nation states. Locke can only respond with something like, “Well, it pays the bills.” He blasts Jean Jacques Rousseau, too, for his laziness in accepting White supremacy. When James reads the French philosopher Voltaire, he dismisses the subject matter as folly because Voltaire was a White supremacist, content to examine instead the structure of Voltaire’s work for its applicability to his own writing, about which he remarks, “I write myself into existence.” James has surreptitiously read every book in Judge Thatcher’s library. He’s teaching all the slaves at Miss Watson’s how to read. In fact, he has to teach his child to sound more like a slave, as both his wife and his little girl speak the Queen’s English, sans the British and slave owning aristocracy’s faux accent:
“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.’”
And he considers the possible penalties for it:
“I had wondered every time I sneaked in there what white people would do to a slave who had learned how to read. What would they do to a slave who had taught the other slaves to read? What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenuse was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled?” We learn what White retribution means when James is gifted with a stub of a pencil by a slave named Young George, who will later be beaten and executed for the theft as James watches, a silent witness and agonized accomplice. In reality, a slave who taught other slaves to read would be executed, slowly and painfully. "Confederate states in the antebellum South that passed anti-literacy laws included South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, and Alabama. Due to fear following the Stono Rebellion, the largest slave uprising in South Carolina in 1739, blacks were prohibited from learning to read. Plantation owners feared that literate slaves could write and use forged documents to gain their freedom. However, many of the enslaved used this method to obtain their freedom. ...Alabama's law stated: Any person who shall attempt to teach any free person of color, or slave, to spell, read or write, shall upon conviction thereof by indictment, be fined in a sum of not less than two hundred fifty dollars, nor more than five hundred dollars.” https://oaklandliteracycoalition.org/literacy-by-any-means-necessary-the-history-of-anti-literacy-laws-in-the-u-s/
A perspective challenging this take on language in James appears in Reddit: “...[T]he idea that Black characters would for some reason speak more "proper" English than white characters struck me as bizarre. Where did they learn that way of speaking, and are we supposed to think what they have to say would be less valid or intelligent if it were spoken in their actual dialect (which may be different than the one Twain portrayed but historically would be different from white English, with its own valid grammar and consistent internal rules)? “It seemed to be privileging a certain "educated" way of speaking and then using the logic "Black people are good and smart, good and smart people sound educated, so therefore Black people actually speak more formally and 'properly' than white people when they're alone."
“The scenes of James formally teaching a class about how to use dialect around white people also rung [sic] really false to me. I'm sure some of those lessons were taught, but probably much less formally and systematically. “
I, too, found this perplexing; it bothered me that the White way to speak is given as the only VALID way to speak, especially as Black people have been brilliantly and creatively changing the English language for four hundred years. One answer Prof. Everett might give in answer to this point is, “Just because A is A doesn’t mean A EQUALS A.** There's another part in which James takes as his last name Golightly, which I'm thinking Everett meant as a joke; I was relieved when much later, he assumes the last name Faber, taken from the manufacturer of his pencil.***
Many of the scenes in the original are repeated in James, as when he and Huck encounter a pair of charlatans who manipulate Huck and pose a continuing grave danger to James. Some scenes NOT in the original, however, are particularly compelling for James. He is separated from Huck by those two and is heard singing while blacksmithing. He has a beautiful tenor voice and is overheard by the leader of a group of blackface musicians—of which there were many, at the time. This guy insists he’s an abolitionist but pays the blacksmith $200 for James. The troupe then puts blackface on James so nobody will know he’s actually Black. The minstrel songs mock Black people and depict them more or less as savages. (Everett records some of these songs in his forward and during these scenes, as well.) In blackface, James gets to look White people in the eye for the first time. Soon the troupe’s leader tells him he must perform the equivalent of $200 worth of performances before he’ll release him—he is still a slave. This is so much worse, because the troupe leader misrepresents himself shamelessly. James steals the song leader’s notebook to write in for himself. He escapes with another singer who passes for White, and they plan to “sell” James, free him, and sell him again until James can earn enough to free his wife and little girl. This ends when James and his friend manage to board a steamer without getting chopped up in its paddle wheels—and he reconnects with Huck, here—but the steamer explodes and he can only save one. He chooses Huck, and his new friend dies.
While James is being sold as a slave away from the plantation where he began, he is twice subjected to severe beatings he was unaccustomed to before, and they harden him. Throughout, though, he tries to retain his humanity and is sincerely reluctant to do real harm. It should be noted here that the novel has leaped forward from Twain some 20 years, and we’re at the start of the Civil War. James is sometimes in a free state, but how would he even know, and how “free” is free? Either way, he’s still a slave.
Late in the story, James reveals to Huck that he is Huck’s own father; he tells Huck that he and Huck’s mom were raised together as children. All this time, Huck had thought his father was the mean drunk who beat him regularly, from whom he had escaped with Jim. James tells him he’d seen his stepfather dead. And when Huck wants to stay with James, James turns him away. Since Huck passes, James tells him, he MUST pass. He tells Huck he is loved by Miss Watson and Judge Thatcher and he must return to their safety. And so they part.
When he learns that his wife and 9-year old daughter have been sold to a particularly brutal “breeding farm,” he relinquishes his resolve and commits to rebellion, finally committing murder, freeing all the slaves there and burning that plantation to the ground. His future is uncertain as he and a group of newly freed people look for the underground railroad and freedom in the North.
In his review in The NY Times, Dwight Garner has written: “My idea of hell would be to live with a library that contained only reimaginings of famous novels... Two writers in a hundred walk away unscathed... “James” is the rarest of exceptions. It should come bundled with Twain’s novel. It is a tangled and subversive homage, a labor of rough love.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/08/james-by-percival-everett-review-a-gripping-reimagining-of-mark-twain-jim-huckleberry-finn
_________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________
* Winner of the National Book Award, November, 2024
**George Makari writes of his inteview with Prof. Everett:
"'You’ve said that you often get prompted by a philosophical problem for a work that then becomes a novel, so I guess that follows from what you said: the scenes develop out of a philosophical problem?'
'Yes, and often a not terribly interesting philosophical problem. Mostly it’s problems of logic, and not the logic of identity or any kind of cultural identity—it’s actually logical identity. I’m interested in the fact that A is A is not the same thing as A equals A, and even as I say it, it gives me a headache. But that’s at the root of almost everything I make." (Here the two were involved in a discussion of Wittgenstein, which sailed right over this head.)
*** I perceived this to be an obvious reference to Holly Golightly, a character in Truman Capote’s novel, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In that novel, Golightly is a young woman of 19 who makes her way in life by dating rich men. I couldn’t fathom any comparison except as an "in joke," but I accept that Prof. Everett is working at a much higher level than my own.
(1) —a list of inventions by Black people https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb00695483/_1.pdf -
(2) --After Emancipation, racial prejudice established as law prevented Black access to patent protection. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-innovators-who-elevated-the-united-states-reassessing-the-golden-age-of-invention/ - :~:text=With 50,000 total patents, Black,country except England and Germany.
—50,000 Black inventors obtained patents during the Industrial Revolution, in numbers exceeded only by England and Germany. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-innovators-who-elevated-the-united-states-reassessing-the-golden-age-of-invention/ - :~:text=With 50,000 total patents, Black,country except England and Germany.
*********