James by Percival Everett
No, you don’t have to have read Huckleberry Finn to be totally enthralled by Percival Everett’s James. This new retelling of the story, from the perspective of the slave character Jim, stands by itself. It’s in conversation with Twain, but it tells a story that, for all his sharp wit and expansive wisdom, he wasn’t equipped to tell.
Huck is still a key character – his scheme to fake his own death sets the plot into rapid motion that rarely lets up – but whenever Huck’s accompanying Jim, he’s something of a naive foil to the world-weary slave. And he’s absent for parts of the adventure, so for anyone who does remember bits of the 1884 classic, it might feel a little like Jim’s observation of how the river they’re trying to navigate by puzzlingly reshapes itself:
Things appeared different facing south from the way they did looking north. […] The Mississippi, in fact, seemed like many different rivers. The level was always rising or falling. Sediment got pushed around, changing the locations of bars and shelves. Islands changed shape, sometimes becoming completely submerged, and old outcroppings disappeared while new ones materialised overnight.
Some of the entirely new islets of plot that surface are where Percival Everett seems to be having the most fun, and he allows for more of this by nudging the story a few decades on. Twain set Huckleberry Finn in around 1840, but Everett opts for 1861 – partly so that rumours of the Civil War can creep in. It’s an interesting choice, and when he gets wind of it all, Jim seems slightly bemused by the fuss over abolition – he’s been in this hell so long that he doesn’t expect much can ever change, and more or less chalks it up to how some white people love to feel guilty. A chat with Huck after they’ve watched some Union soldiers march past in handsome blue coats illuminates this:
“To fight in a war,” he said, “Can you imagine?”
“Would that mean facing death every day and doing what other people tell you to do?” I asked.
“I reckon.”
“Yes, Huck, I can imagine.”
The 1861 setting also allows him to drop in a cameo for a real life character, Daniel Decatur Emmett, who had an iffy claim on being the composer of ‘Dixie’ and established the Virginia Minstrels, an early group of blackface entertainers. Emmett briefly crosses paths with Jim, and an extract from his notebook, containing slave songs like ‘Ole Dan Tucker’ and ‘Jimmie Crack Corn’ that he took credit for, forms a kind of epigraph.
Placed at the very start of James, the stolen songs signal the book’s preoccupation with language. All of the slaves speak in standard English amongst themselves, but slip into a limited ‘lawdy’ dialect whenever in the company of their white masters. This code-switching is established early on when Jim instructs his wife and child on the finer points of language, how every word must be weighed to seem deferential and dumb.
“White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” I said. “The only ones who suffer when we are made to feel inferior is us.”
On the rare occasions when black characters forget whose company they’re in, they correct themselves and translate a perfectly cogent sentence back through the ‘slave filter’, tripping over consonants and mangling any words longer than three syllables. This is often funny to watch unfold, but also deeply sad. The hierarchy is inhumane, but all slaves agree that their best hope is to just reinforce it, with every breath, look and word.
The circumstances that do lead Jim to break these bonds and try to become James are best left as a total surprise – so many episodes of terror and tragedy, all mixed with humour that’s so sharp you don’t notice how deep it’s cut until a page or so later. They add up to an unforgettable book.
Worth a listen: Percival Everett interviewed by Shahidha Bari on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book
Simon Reid 