Percival Everett's Retelling of an American Classic

One of the books that I was most excited to read this summer was Percival Everett’s latest novel, James, a reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn but told from Jim’s point of view. Before reading James, though, I wanted to refresh my memory by rereading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I actually taught years ago when I was still a high school English teacher. 

Widely considered to be an American classic, but not without its share of controversy, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is written in the voice of Huckleberry Finn, or “Huck,” who fakes his death and hides out on Jackson Island to escape from his drunken, abusive father. While there, he meets up with Jim, “Miss Watson’s slave,” who is also on the run because he learned that Miss Watson intends to sell him to a slaveowner down south, which would mean permanent separation from his wife and children, something that he can’t allow to happen. The two team up to try to survive in a world that is anything but “sivilized,” as Huck would say--a place where the threat of violence waits at every turn, particularly for Jim as an escaped slave. Twain’s satire is at its finest with the churchgoing Grangerfords and Shepherdsons, engaged in a perpetual feud that no one even remembers the reasons for anymore; the Duke and the Dauphin, unscrupulous con men who are always coming up with another plan to swindle people out of their money; and Boggs and Sherburn, who create quite a scene for the rubbernecking masses in a dirty, rundown Arkansas town. The only place that Huck and Jim feel somewhat safe is on their raft.  Huck muses,

“We said there weren’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.” 

Jim is undeniably the kindest, most moral character in this book, and he often serves as a moral compass for Huck, who frequently struggles to distinguish “right” from “wrong.” When Huck tries to play a trick on Jim, making him imagine that he had only dreamt that Huck was missing, Jim chastises Huck:    

“En when I wake up en fine you back again, all safe en soun’, de tears come en I could a got down on my knees en kiss’ you’ foot I’s so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin ‘bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes ‘em ashamed.”

He rightly shames Huck in treating him, a “friend,” in such a way, and Huck is genuinely repentant, saying “I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t done that one if I’d a knowed it would make him feel that way." 

But while Jim serves as a moral compass for young Huck, Twain’s characterization of Jim is problematic in many ways. He is often unfairly the butt of Huck and Tom Sawyer’s jokes and is portrayed as being extremely superstitious and gullible; he also speaks in a slave dialect that can make him sound uneducated and uncouth. This is where Everett’s James steps in to dramatically subvert the narrative. 

Unlike Twain’s Jim, Everett’s James–who refuses to use his slave name “Jim” –taught himself to read by using books in Judge Thatcher’s library. In one of the funniest scenes of the book, James gives his daughter and six other black children a lesson on how to speak in “slave dialect,” despite the fact that they are perfectly fluent in standard English. When his daughter asks him why they have to learn this new way of speaking, James responds,  

“White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them. . . . The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us.”

Basically, the enslaved people in this novel use a put-on slave dialect to hide their intelligence from white people as a survival tactic, but they speak to other slaves in standard English, which is pretty funny (in a black humor kind of way). 

While Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a kind and selfless person, sacrificing his personal freedom to save Tom when he is shot, he also feels a little one-dimensional. In James, Everett more fully humanizes James, giving him a backstory: a wife named Sadie and a daughter named Lizzie who he loves deeply, fears for, and wants desperately to bring to freedom. And he does not shy away from describing just how brutal and inhumane the slaveowners of that time could be, raping women and children at will and beating the men into submission. This is a side of slavery that Twain does not show in his “adventures” of Huckleberry Finn, but that is nonetheless important to recognize and not forget. 

While Everett uses many of the same events and situations that appear in Twain’s novel, you will be surprised by his James, who is a whole other brilliant creation.