Percival Everett’s brilliant novel, “James,” is a significant achievement, almost as important, perhaps, for what it is not, as much as for what it certainly is. It is not simply a “reimagining” of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Nor is it simply an “updating” or “retelling” of Twain’s magnificent contribution to American literature. It is, instead, a moving, fiery, anger-inducing, sad, and occasionally humorous account of a slave in 1860 America. That slave, Jim, is a friend of a semi-wild fourteen- or fifteen-year-old ultra-country boy named Huck.
The two novels follow broadly similar plot lines at and near their beginnings. But even at those points, their respective emphases are entirely different. Huck is the narrator in Twain’s 1885 novel, which is in some respects a sequel to his earlier work, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” So Huck informs us at the start of “his” story about his own background. Jim’s story (Everett’s novel), on the other hand, begins as Jim, the narrator, observes the two young tricksters, Tom and Huck, planning some devious tricks to be played on Jim the slave.
But the differences in their narrative styles and techniques are telling and obvious. Huck declares, “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter…’ Jim, by comparison, sounds like an adult, and an educated one, at that, as he watches and listens to the boys: “Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass. The moon was not quite full, but bright, and it was behind them, so I could see them as plain as day, though it was deep night.” So Huck is a country rube; Jim is a thoughtful, clear-eyed, clear-speaking, intelligent adult.
But he is a slave. We might temporarily think, Should he not ‘sound’ like a slave — as he does when he speaks to Miss Watson, one of Huck’s caretakers?: “No ma’am. I is a might tired, but I ain’t been ‘sleep.” So here we are immediately introduced to one of the novel’s primary conceits. Jim and the other slaves are intelligent, well-spoken, and insightful. The “massas” are ignorant, petty, violent, cruel, and often stupid. But they are white. And in charge. The slaves’ dialect, then, is a two-tiered phenomenon. When they converse among themselves, their dialect is similar to James’ narrative voice. When they’re with white people, they use their “Negro slave” grammar and pronunciations. If they were to use their “smart” language, they’d be in difficult territory because they’d be revealing their intelligence, thus becoming a clear threat to the Whites’ self-perception of racial superiority. They’d be causing peril to all their fellow-slaves’ well-being and risking the possibility of being sold and separated from their families, not to mention the very real threats of lashings and death. So they simply and understandably exhibit faux-stupidity as they continue to live their lives of presumed inferiority, fear, accumulated anger, and general horror.
As Jim’s story progresses, we read about many of the same events that we encountered in Twain’s novel: the homecoming of Huck’s cruel father, Pap; the threat of Jim’s forthcoming sale and forced separation from his family, the cause of his escape; Huck’s faking of his own death and his escape to a nearby island, where he meets Jim, and from which they leave on their long raft journey up the Mississippi; and their many adventures, sometimes rather comic, more often deadly serious.
One of their most important adventures, the one that will lead to several new and different ones, is their meeting with the Duke and Dauphin, the conmen who pretend to be a king and a prince. All the episodes up to this point of “James” have been similar to Huck’s story, but now seen through the eyes and sensibilities of Jim rather than Huck. And the differences are huge. Observing those adventures through the eyes of a slave rather than a naive young boy makes the tellings of those stories seem like almost entirely different events. We readers identify now with Jim’s rising anger, frustration, and disgust with his world as opposed to Huck’s feelings of discovery and wonder.
And here, the plots of the two novels separate like two branches of a river. Now the story of “James” becomes fully Jim’s. Through the maneuverings and manipulations of the Duke and the Dauphin, Jim is sold to a slaver who owns a blacksmith business manned by an old slave. This one is the first of a series of scams, sales, ensuing whippings, escapes, and variations on the theme, each situation in many ways worse and more painful than the previous one. But the blacksmith episode comes to a unique ending and an even more unique new beginning.
At the blacksmith’s place, Jim is in especially dire straits when his “owner” finds out that he had managed to be unshackled overnight. But just as things begin to look darker than ever, a minstrel group marches into town. Minstrel shows were a classic feature of nineteenth century American entertainment. White singers, actors, and musicians donned costumes that, they imagined, made them look like Black people, and then applied lamp black or bootblack to their faces and hands with white makeup around their eyes. They looked like a poor parody of Black entertainers and spoke and sang songs in their poor impressions of Black dialect and musical style.
When this particular group of minstrels arrives in town, their lead tenor vocalist has just run away, so they’re in desperate need of a replacement. The leader and boss of the group, one Daniel Decatur Emmett, happens to hear Jim singing and realizes that Jim is the tenor he needs. So, bucking all tradition and present practice, he buys Jim for two hundred dollars, insisting with transparent hypocrisy all the while that the transaction is not the sale to him of a slave, but simply the hiring of a new entertainer, albeit a Black one. Jim becomes part of the troupe, and the preparation for the show with the new tenor, the application of the makeup — Jim’s skin is not dark enough to match the others’ blackface — and the presentation of the show itself are very successful, very funny, and very ugly. The official makeup artist for the troupe is a man named Norman, who reveals to Jim, and to Jim only, that he is in fact a Black man with white skin. And he becomes a very important character in later events in the novel.
The minstrel episode is a superb vehicle for author Everett to spotlight Jim’s talents and brains. He learns the songs quickly and sings them beautifully — and also clearly demonstrates the hypocrisy, stupidity, and greed of all the white minstrel men, especially Daniel Emmett himself. The entirely silly presentation of the show includes white men pretending to be Black; a Black man who looks white pretending to be Black, which he actually is; and a light-skinned Black man painted black and white to look blacker. And not one of them actually looks like a Black man, including the two who are.
The ironies and sort-of-inside jokes proceed: Daniel Emmett fancies himself not just a brilliant entrepreneur and talented entertainer, but also a songwriter of “note.” He performs for Jim a song that he has written; it’s called “Dixie’s Land.” His song, like all the others the minstrels sing, purports to reflect the sincere feelings of Black men and their true love of the South. The chorus proclaims with pride and honor:
“Oh, I wish I was in Dixie
Hooray! Hooray!
In Dixie Land I makes my stand
To live and die in Dixie.”
“Dixie’s Land,” of course, is a real song that became a classic, unfortunately. Many of us happily learned it in elementary school. The actual composer was Daniel Decatur Emmett. If only we knew then….
Jim and Norman manage to escape from the town and Emmett and the minstrel show, and the “funny stuff” is now over. They pretend that Norman is Jim’s owner and also that Norman is willing to sell Jim to a cruel slave owner, though the actual plan is for Norman and Jim to escape with the money from the sale. Jim’s work, cutting timber while standing in mud, is like torture, and he is whipped yet again, but he and Norman manage to escape with a slave child named Sammy. Their owner tracks them down with the help of other men, and the shooting begins. The two men escape, but Sammy, who they have discovered is a fifteen-year-old girl, is killed. They bury her and make their way back to the Mississippi and their final fiery episode on the river.
From their raft, they spy a boat, a ship of death, a vessel of Hell on water that will ultimately turn out to be a fittingly blazing inferno. Boarding the boat from the raft is itself a near-death experience as their bodies are nearly torn to shreds by the paddle wheel. They barely survive but make it safely onto the ship. Jim knows that he will surely be recognized by someone on the boat as the escaped Nigger Jim, kidnapper and murderer. So he and Norman must hide out in the bottom of the boat. There is one man with them down below decks, an old slave whose one uninterrupted life’s activity is to stoke the furnace that powers the ship. He can never escape, and he can never stop stoking. The fires of Hell fill the space and the lungs of the three men, but Norman, appearing to be a white man, can move up to the deck for brief periods. When he returns from one of his forays, however, there is a deadly problem with the furnace. It’s broken, and fire is streaming everywhere. The fire easily races past any attempt to squelch it, and it soon embraces and envelops the whole ship, front to rear and top to bottom. The passengers and crew flee en masse and jump for their lives, falling, falling to their very own watery Hell.
Jim and Norman jump, too, but unlike the forged-in-steel-strong Jim, Norman is weak. He cries to Jim for help. Jim just might last long enough and prove strong enough to save him, but he suddenly, startlingly hears another familiar voice, another cry for help. It’s Huck. Jim had no idea that Huck was also on the ship, but now he, too, will die unless Jim saves him. So Jim is faced with a climactic 1861 horrendous Sophie’s Choice decision and dilemma — whom to save. He must choose between his two most cherished friends. Finally, Jim chooses to save Huck, knowing all the while that Norman will soon perish.
The denouement of this thrilling and complex novel is long, terribly significant, and as touching a conclusion as we could imagine. But it is not a Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn happy ending. I cannot and will not provide a detailed description of the final few chapters because to do so would constitute an all-time spoiler of an all-time incredible — yet entirely logical — plot twist, one that I could certainly not see coming. At all. Anywhere. Any time.
But I can comment on the very ending because it, too, is thematically important, even necessary. Jim is free; free through a final violent adventure, committing kidnapping, theft, and a revenge murder in the process. What price justice? But he has freed his wife, his daughter, and all the slaves who had been housed with them. Jim, his family, and two other men find their way to a small town in Iowa. Yet even now, Jim’s fight for true freedom must continue. In that town, he’s greeted by the sheriff — with fear and suspicion: “Any of you named Nigger Jim?” Jim simply introduces his fellow ex-slaves, avoiding the sheriff’s question.
“And who are you?”
“I am James.”
“James what?”
“Just James.”
James is not Nigger Jim. He is James the Teacher, James the Just, James the Philosopher, James the Prophet, James the Freedom Fighter.
Yet to that sheriff and to thousands of other Americans in 1861, Civil War notwithstanding, and to millions of Americans, today and probably tomorrow, he will be the Nigger Jim we met in The Adventures of both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn; and James knows all too well the unvarnished simple truth of that undeniable reality, precisely because that is exactly where those millions of Americans want him to be and want him to stay.
Review by Jack Kramer.