James is Percival Everett's answer to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Like Huckleberry Finn, it is narrated by the eponymous character, in this case, Jim, the runaway slave who escapes from Hannibal, Missouri, when he discovers that Miss Watson, his owner, intends to sell him. Huck is also on the run and they're both headed towards dreams of personal freedom, Jim to a life as a freed man who can buy back his wife and daughter, and Huck freed from his murderous and unpredictable father.

James is a novel of many layers. Not only does it import Twain's characters, setting, slave dialect and the general attitudes of the pre-Civil War South, but it speaks to white readers, and I include myself in this group, who grew up reading Twain's most popular novel. It singles out this reading demographic because it must boldly and quickly disabuse us of certain assumptions about Jim, most importantly, that he's uneducated and illiterate. Then he develops Jim in ways Twain wouldn't have imagined. The irony is that he both uses and destroys Twain's original character. At the same time, while taking the story in a different direction, he cuts out some of the most tiresome parts, minimizing the interminable Grangerford/Shepherdson duel and all of Tom Sawyer's cruel antics. In fact, Tom Sawyer is barely mentioned. But not only does Everett do away with all of the Tom Sawyer nonsense, he reimagines Jim in wildly fascinating ways, allowing him to tell a story that is as complex as it is engrossing, turning it into a novel about language.

Jim speaks two languages. One is the slave dialect, a language that protects him from his masters because it suggests the speaker is child-like and stupid, and therefore will never be a threat to the white population, and the other is the proper English he reads and writes, the novel James being the result of his labors. He also speaks proper English, but only to fellow slaves. In addition, he's familiar with literary terms and how to use them, and addresses other slaves on subjects like irony.

We all know that language is a code that identifies the social position of the speaker, but in James, it's an invisible passport to two entirely separate worlds. Notice what happens in this exchange Jim has in Chapter One where Huck asks Jim a question:

"Jim, you work the mules and you fix the wagon wheels and now you fixin' this here porch. Who taught you to do all them things?"

I stopped and looked at the hammer in my hand, flipped it. "Dat be a good question, Huck."

"So, who did?"

"Necessity."

"What?"

"Cessity," I corrected myself. "Cessity is when you gots to do sumptin' or else."

"Or else what?"

"Else'n they takes you to the post and whips ya or they drags ya down to the river and sells ya. Nuffin you gots to worry 'bout" (17-18).

"I corrected myself": that's the giveaway that Jim is bilingual. Necessity is a word that doesn't exist in slave dialect and he's eager to erase it from Huck's memory. For Jim, language is such a vital form of protection, he gives language lessons to the children of other slaves, teaching them how to make use of the protective mechanisms of slave speech. Here he is giving a lesson:

"Let's try some situational translations. Something extreme first. You're walking down the street and you see that Mrs. Holiday's kitchen is on fire. She's standing in her yard, her back to her house, unaware. How do you tell her?"

"Fire, fire," January said.

"Direct. And that's almost correct," I said.

The youngest of them, lean and tall five-year-old Rachel, said, "Lawdy, missum! Looky dere."

"Perfect," I said. "Why is that correct?"

Lizzie raised her hand. "Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble."

"And why is that?" I asked.

February said, "Because they need to know everything before us. Because they need to name everything" (22).

Does the reader go along with it? Can the reader accept this vision of Jim, a man who not only reads, but writes and teaches? The answer is yes, for the simple reason that Everett doesn't belabor it. This is the lesson James offers me as a writer. Everett doesn't try to invent the situations that gave Jim the opportunity to learn to read and write; instead, he boldly and assertively (and always within Jim's character) makes it a given. It seems to me that reinvention, whether it's of a character, an event, a mood, requires this kind of authorial assertiveness. It allowed me to succumb to the beautiful persuasion of a novel that has another enslaved man asking Jim a question like this:

"So when we see him staggering around later acting the fool, will that be an example of proleptic irony or dramatic irony?"

"Could be both" (28).

They are, of course, speaking about a white man. When history and literature has dumbed down and ridiculed a character who represents an entire race, as well as a time and a place, and when all of this is already enfolded within Everett's narrator, radical surgery is required. With Jim's correction, "Cessity" on page 17, the author is making the first incision to successfully separate Everett's Jim from our cultural memory of Twain's. In a way, Jim has more than his own story to tell. It's really the story of an entire nation and that's why a radical view of the man is not only appropriate but necessary.

Everett, Percival. James. New York: Doubleday, 2024.

Filed under: Reinventing a well-known character