Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is arguably the first great masterpiece of American literature.
Rich in humour and social realism, it tells the tale of a young boy from a small town in Mississippi who has faked his own death to escape the brutality of his drunken, sadistic father only to have his hiding place discovered by Jim, a slave owned by his guardian, Miss Watson.
Jim is on the run after learning that Miss Watson is planning to sell him, and he hopes to reach the north to become a free man and earn enough money to buy the freedom of his beloved wife, Sadie, and their children. Huck has left his childhood behind, craving his singular emancipation and the possibility of great adventure. Huck and Jim join forces, following the course of the powerful, treacherous Mississippi River as they evade rattlesnakes, conmen, hunger, lynching and slave catchers.
The revolutionary amplitude of this work lies in the fact that Huck and Jim’s bond transcends caste and preconception. In flight, they are equals. Huck is struggling with the racist beliefs of his upbringing and Jim is reluctantly dependent on Huck’s social permeability to achieve his goal of freedom.
Their bond is unique and signifies not only Huck’s coming of age but also the coming of age of American literature, as the novel subtly grapples with the great threats to the nation’s soul – racism and slavery. Twain’s literary innovations include employing the vernacular as dialogue and using humour to underscore the great horror and abuses of a political and economic system built upon the sweat and labour of the enslaved.
It is necessary to talk about Twain’s novel before discussing Percival Everett’s astonishing new novel, James, which recreates The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, Huck’s slave accomplice, whom he now refers to as James, transforming him to the rational, contemplative protagonist of his narrative.
The novel’s revisionary conceit is that James has taught himself to read and write by secretly studying the philosophical texts in Judge Thatcher’s study, employing the thought of such Enlightenment thinkers as Locke and Voltaire to debate the morality of slavery.
For Everett, words and knowledge have become the tools and weapons of James’ liberation. In fact, one of the pivotal moments of the novel is when James and Huck encounter a group of slaves who ask them what they can do to help them on their journey. Besides food and drink, James asks for a writing instrument to write the narrative of his escape. One of the slaves steals a pencil stub from his master and gives it to James. His theft is discovered and he is lynched for his crime, his death witnessed by an emotionally tortured James in hiding.
Percival endows James with intellectual prowess, complicating the narrative by invoking “code switching”. The slaves adopt a black dialect when in the company of whites. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them.” So James runs his every public utterance through what he calls his “slave filter”.
In the beginning of the novel, he explains to his children how to survive. The children speak their thoughts and James asks them to revise them through their filter. The text reads like the responsive readings in a prayer service. The children say, “And the better they feel, the safer we are.” James asks a young girl named February how to speak that thought in ways the whites want to hear. “Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be,” she says.
“Nice!” he explains, for his lesson has been well learnt.
And here is James, finding himself in Judge Thatcher’s library: “I had wondered every time I sneaked in there what white people would do to a slave who had learned how to read. What would they do to a slave who had taught the other slaves to read? What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenuse was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled?”
In James, books are treasures, words are weapons, thought is revolutionary. Rage is subverted into action. James is not a helpless victim but empowered by his skills of observation and rationality to conceive the notion of true freedom, which remains an aspirational ideal.
He is a compelling character, passionate and aware, understanding that in the world of the South there is an impermeable duality. Liberation can be achieved not by physical force but by outwitting expectation.
To rewrite one of the iconic masterpieces of American literature requires great skill and daring. Everett has written more than 30 novels and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer and Booker prizes. His skill is evident, his writing clear and accessible, driven by plot, humour and imagination, like his literary hero, Mark Twain.
Most of his earlier works were published by small, independent literary presses. A writer’s writer, his greater renown has come unexpectedly through the celebrated film American Fiction, which he had nothing to do with but which he likes and is based on his novel Erasure, a novel within a novel, satirising the publishing industry’s complicity by perpetuating African-American stereotypes.
Everett is a serious novelist unafraid to employ humour to “disarm the reader so he can then address more serious issues”. When recently asked who his greatest influences were, he answered “my father, Mark Twain, Groucho Marx and Bullwinkle”. In fact, he wrote Erasure with a pet crow on his shoulder named Jim Crow. The Jim Crow laws were the state and local laws introduced in the South that enforced racial segregation. It is such cheeky irony and love of language that propels his work and allows him to succeed at such impossible tasks as writing a perversely funny novel about lynching called The Trees, written in the form of a police procedural.
James is a great work born out of the bones of a masterpiece. In excavating the past, Everett has written a novel which boldly comments on the nation’s haunted history that continues to fuel its current implacable division.
