JAMES
Percival Everett
Mantle (panmacmillan.com)
£20.00
Buy a copy from your favourite independent bookshop
In mid-19th century Missouri, Jim is a slave owned by Miss Watson, a man who often finds himself the butt of the jokes of local boys Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. When Jim hears a rumour that he is to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter, he decides to flee to local Jackson Island where he can formulate a plan without danger of being spotted and recognised as a runaway slave. Meanwhile, Huckleberry Finn has staged his own murder in order to escape the attentions of his drunken, abusive father, Pap, and bumps into Jim when he flees to the same island. When the Mississippi river floods, the pair find themselves heading downriver, trying to stay hidden from the rest of the world, and plotting how to free Jim’s family. Along the way they meet an assortment of characters with more or less questionable motives and, all the while, the prospect of death looms over Jim’s head, should anyone match his face to the drawings on the posters that have sprung up down the length of the river.
Percival Everett, it turns out, is the author of over thirty books; I’d never heard his name until last year when people were talking about his novels, The Trees and Dr No. Having recently watched the excellent American Fiction (based on Everett’s novel, Erasure) I decided it was high time I gave his books a try. Fortunately, I had a copy of James to hand! I vaguely remember reading Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when I was in primary school, which is a long time ago. I remember very little about them, and probably missed many of Twain’s nuances and subtexts as a ten- or eleven-year-old. James is a retelling, for the most part, of Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the point of view of enslaved Jim, and retelling the story of his and Huck’s flight down the Mississippi River, and the many characters they meet along the way.
The first thing that becomes clear as we enter this somewhat familiar world, is that there is more to the slaves that meets in the eye in Twain’s original telling. For a start, the patois that the slaves speak in the presence of white people (“Lawdy, missums!”) disappears completely when they’re alone, as they revert back to proper English. We learn why during a “language lesson” that Jim gives to his daughter Lizzie and some of the other children:
“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 they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior.’”
Jim and his fellow slaves are educated, sometimes better educated than the people to whom they are indentured. Jim occasionally slips when he is alone with Huck on the river, and discovers something beautiful about the act of reading whilst pondering whether he should allow Huck – or any white people, for that matter – to see him with a book in his hand.
I really wanted to read. Though Huck was asleep, I could not chance his waking and discovering me with my face in an open book. Then I thought, How could he know that I was actually reading? I could simply claim to be staring dumbly at the letters and words, wondering what in the world they meant. How could he know? At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.
For the most part, James follows the flow (pun intended) of the original work, with Jim and Huck stumbling across various characters and groups in much the same order as the original book (I don’t remember much of Huckleberry Finnfrom my reading 30 years ago, so I’ve relied on Wikipedia to refresh my memory) until they meet the two men who claim to be a Duke and a King. Here the story takes a somewhat dark turn: up to this point, many of the encounters have been incidental or reasonably short. But Jim and Huck find themselves stuck with the Duke and the King, two conmen who turn nasty quickly when they discover that Jim is a runaway. They sell him to a local family and disappear off with Huck, leaving Everett to extemporise and imagine what might have happened to Jim while he was out of Huckleberry’s story. Here he ends up being bought by a man who doesn’t believe in slavery, one Daniel Decatur Emmett. Emmett was a real person, a songwriter who travelled the country with the first travelling minstrel show, and whose songs include The Blue-Tail Fly (“Jimmie crack corn and I don’t care”). Here Everett shifts into pure satire, as Jim struggles with the question of ownership: if Mr Emmett doesn’t believe in slavery, but has paid two hundred dollars to buy him from his previous owner, what is his current status? Is he a free man? It is here he meets Norman, a Black man who has been “passing” for years, people mistaking his light skin for White.
“Are you really a slave?” she asked.
“I am.”
“And you’re colored,” she said.
Norman nodded.
“Who can tell?”
“Nobody,” Norman said.
“Then why do you stay colored?”
“Because of my mother. Because of my wife. Because I don’t want to be white. I don’t want to be one of them.”
Sammy looked at me. “That’s a pretty good answer.”
Like all good satires, James carries a very important – and very obvious – message. In today’s increasingly politically-divided world it’s a message that bears repeating, even though we should be long past the point where people are considered inferior to others purely because of the colour of their skin. Everett tells his story in a way that makes us laugh and in a way that subverts everything we thought we knew about this period in history. But there are moments when the writing feels angry, vital, where we connect intimately with Jim and get some way towards understanding how he feels, how it feels to be a man with no say in his own life, a man who is little more than a belonging, to be traded or sold when he is of no use to his owner.
I looked at Easter. He knew what I was thinking. I had stood and listened to this transaction and never once was I asked for either opinion or desire. I was the horse that I was, just an animal, just property, nothing but a thing, but apparently I was a horse, a thing, that could sing.
James feels like an attempt to set the historical record straight, to make us see the human side of slavery, to help us understand that these people had ideas and lives of their own, dreams and hopes and families from whom they were often separated by owners who may have been cruel or may – and this feels somehow worse – not really have thought about it. These facts are often lost when we think about the sweeping generalisations of slavery, and they hit home all the harder for the fact that we haven’t really paid attention until someone makes us sit up and take notice. Everett finds Jim’s voice and takes us on a journey through the eyes of a man who has spent years as little more than an object, but who has dreams of becoming a man – a husband and father – once again. James is at once funny, touching and heart wrenching. It’s an emotional rollercoaster that shines an entirely new light on a classic that is part of our shared consciousness (everybodyhas some vague concept of who Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer are, even if they’ve never read the stories). And Everett still manages to find a way to surprise us, to turn the story of Huckleberry Finn on its head and make us think of it in a whole new light.
Percival Everett is a new name to me, but I’m aiming to rectify that as quickly as I can. He is an author of considerable talent, and his latest novel is nothing short of breathtaking. It is, without doubt, my book of the year so far, and I find it difficult to believe that anything will top it this year, or any time in the near future. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finnhas long been considered one of the Great American Novels. James deserves a place in that vaunted company, perhaps one of the first Great American Novels of the 21st century. Regardless, it’s a story that is designed to set the record straight. As such, it should become a companion piece wherever Twain’s original is studied, and should be a must-read for everyone who enjoys literature in all its myriad forms.
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