James, by Percival Everett, Doubleday, 320 pp, $28, ISBN: 978-0385550369
In a scene from the film American Fiction, Monk Ellison, a frustrated writer who can’t find a publisher for his next novel because it isn’t ‘black enough’, is told by his agent that his dashed-off pseudonymous satire My Pafology – deliberately written to mock the stereotypes white publishers expect from black authors – has attracted a huge offer from a major imprint. Before getting on the phone to the publisher, the agent says, ‘This thing scares me.’ Monk asks why. ‘Because white people think they want the truth,’ he says. ‘But they don’t. They just want to feel absolved.’
One of many insightful (and funny) moments from the movie, this scene lays a subtle trap for white viewers: as we recognise the irony and laugh at the publisher, are we letting ourselves off the hook? Do we fail to include ourselves in the cultural indictment? As we exit the cinema or switch off the streaming service, do we return to our lives unmindful of the truth but happily ‘absolved’?
I’m afraid so. As well-written and -acted as it is, American Fiction fails to deliver its ironies with anything like the bite its intent demands. The satire is muted. The family drama that parallels and impacts the hero’s professional angst borders on the maudlin. Apart from its clever meta ending, the film’s narrative strategy is thin and conventional. Intelligent? Yes. Entertaining? Certainly. Yet it fails to challenge the viewer in any meaningful way, granting the very absolution it purports to deplore.
Fortunately, this failure is easily remedied. Read the book. Percival Everett’s Erasure, the novel on which American Fiction is based, achieves what the film merely hints at. Its satire is savage and relentless, and its many targets include not just buffoonish white publishers and filmmakers but writers of all stripes, male bravado, upper-middle-class African Americans, literary theory, reality television and identity fiction. My Pafology is not, as in the film, a short writer-at-his-desk dream sequence, but a seventy-page novel-within-the-novel full of stereotypical black characters and situations so hilarious and so politically incorrect that readers can’t help but feel guilty as they laugh. The wedding that climaxes the family drama is not a Hollywood feelgood moment with the full cast smiling and dancing but the scene of a vicious confrontation that exposes class differences between the prosperous Ellisons and the family of the woman who works for them. Nobody gets off the hook in this dark novel. Not the characters, not the culture, not the reader.
The book itself and its author are wrapped in an even larger irony: after forty years as a working writer, with twenty-four novels and four collections of short stories on the shelves, Everett has finally entered the cultural mainstream (whether he likes it or not) and fallen victim to the celebrated status that so attracts and frightens his cranky protagonist. True, in recent years he has won a Pulitzer and made the Booker shortlist, but American Fiction, whatever I think of it, has been a huge commercial and critical success, sailing into a host of honours, puffed up by five Academy Award nominations and pulling Everett along in its glittering wake. Not that he has been impressed. Prior to his dutiful attendance at the Oscars, he anticipated the experience as akin to ‘visiting someone’s garden shed. I’ll feel “Oh, that’s a nice lawnmower,” and never go back.’
Yet he must at least be thankful for the boost in book sales and the broadening of his readership, not just for Erasure and the equally innovative and disturbing The Trees (his first Booker nomination), but for his extensive back catalogue. And the timing couldn’t be better for his latest novel, James, which was published a week after the Oscar ceremony in March. Since then, he has been a reluctant celebrity, doing the rounds of morning shows, conferences, media events and interviews, culminating last month with James becoming the second of his novels to make the Booker shortlist. Some of the exposure has been instructive, some of it frothy. You get the feeling he’d rather be in his study.
As most of us learned well in advance of the book’s publication, James is a reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, generally considered the high point of nineteenth century American fiction and certainly the finest book by one of Everett’s favourite writers. Mark Twain’s picaresque story of Huck, a thirteen-year-old boy, and Jim, a runaway slave, journeying down the Mississippi River in pursuit of Jim’s freedom is retold in James from Jim’s point of view. The first half of the novel adheres fairly closely to the events of Twain’s book, though with the expected changes in tone, style and emphasis. The second half is an entirely different narrative. Everett dispenses with almost all of the melodrama and slapstick of the Duke and Dauphin episodes and jettisons entirely the farce of Twain’s ending, in which a recaptured Jim is subjected to the absurd rescue fantasies of Tom Sawyer. In their place is a sequence that significantly alters the time and place of the narrative and builds to a climax that makes us confront the meaning of Twain’s masterpiece in a very different way.
Twain’s novel has always been controversial. Upon publication in 1885, and for many years afterwards, it was considered vulgar and crass by reviewers and booksellers, who thought themselves guardians of public taste. Lifted to classic status in the twentieth century by, among others, TS Eliot and Ernest Hemingway, it has nevertheless been under renewed censorial scrutiny since 1957, when the NAACP charged that it contained racial slurs and ‘belittling racial designations’. Yet, though consistently on the list of books most frequently banned in American schools and libraries, its literary merit is rarely disputed. Everett has described its importance to the tradition well: ‘It’s the first time that a novel tried to deal with the very centre of the American psyche – and that is race,’ he said. ‘It is about a young American, representing America, trying to navigate this landscape, and understand how someone – his friend, actually the only father figure in the book – is also property.’
Like many Americans, I have read Huckleberry Finn multiple times: as a boy, a student, a general reader, a novelist and a critic. Most recently, I have reread it with Everett’s new book in mind. Each reading has been different, shaped by changing personal and cultural circumstances. Yet consistent across the decades has been my sense of joy: at the novel’s daring use of the vernacular, at its inventiveness and range and sense of wonder, at its humour and compassion. I have loved the feeling of freedom it gives me, in every sense. Growing up white, privileged and secure, I was angered but never disturbed by the violence that threatens both the abused Huck and the enslaved Jim. I celebrated the novel’s implicit condemnation of slavery and the complicated development of Huck’s powerful moral compass, and I dismissed its bans as the misguided actions of well-meaning teachers and librarians who lack the faith that readers young and old will see the wisdom and worth of this great novel.
It was a long time, however, before I began to think seriously about how black readers might respond to the book – to its depiction of Jim as a good but naive, comically superstitious man; its limited and mild description of slavery; its violence, reported and threatened; and above all its relentless use of demeaning racial epithets. The novel is in Huck’s voice, and Twain did not shirk from realistic representation of the attitudes and language of an uneducated white boy raised in the antebellum South. It is a powerful and effective narrative mode, but one, I have come to understand, that must be painful for many black readers.
That pain and its meaning for the interpretation of Twain’s fiction and American literature in general is not a new topic. Since at least the 1970s, writers and critics like Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates have been deepening our knowledge of African American culture and how it shapes not just the work of black writers but the entire American canon. The research of David L Smith and Shelley Fishkin has shown how Twain in particular learned much from African American modes of storytelling, and how he used these modes, subversively and systematically, to dramatise the pernicious effects of racism.
So, yes, the pain is there, but acknowledging and decoding Twain’s response to what Smith calls America’s racial discourse creates a critical space where that hurt can be transcended. As Toni Morrison argued in her book Playing in the Dark, our full appreciation of Huckleberry Finn’s achievement is only possible when we acknowledge that slavery and its legacy are the basis for its meaning. She (and I) came to the formal study of American fiction via the traditional criticism of Lionel Trilling, Leo Marx, and others, white men who not only ignored race in their analyses but understood such ignorance to be a ‘graceful, even generous, liberal gesture’ – the literary equivalent of the false ideal of colour blindness, which denies that racial inequalities are embedded in social, economic, and political systems.
Morrison’s own early readings of Huckleberry Finn had been marked by an ambiguous mixture of pleasure and narrative reward on one hand and alarm, rage, and ‘distasteful complicity’ on the other. In the 1980s, provoked, as she put it, by the demands of so many to remove the novel from reading lists and libraries, she returned to the text – this time as a successful novelist, a black writer ‘struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive “othering” of people and language’. This fresh perspective enabled her to see through the willed scholarly indifference of earlier critics and appreciate Twain’s classic as a ‘more beautifully complicated work’, released from the ‘clutch of sentimental nostrums about lighting out to the territory, river gods, and the fundamental innocence of Americanness’. And Jim – subservient, powerless, enslaved – was the key. She saw him as the vehicle by which Huck, the nascent American self, knows he is free. Jim is the agency for Huck’s struggle, and without him, ‘there is no more book. No more story to tell.’
In this context, the book’s offensive language becomes absolutely necessary to its meaning and its power. As Morrison argues,
the term nigger [is] inextricable from Huck’s deliberations about who and what he himself is – or, more precisely, is not … Freedom has no meaning to Huck or to the text without the specter of enslavement, the anodyne to individualism; the yardstick of absolute power over the life of another; the signed, marked, informing, and mutating presence of a black slave.
It is important to remind ourselves of Morrison’s decades-old analysis as the controversy over such language rolls on. In the US, Huckleberry Finn continues to be removed from schools’ curricula, banned by county boards and state legislatures, and bowdlerised by publishers. In 2012, the University of Georgia published a ‘NewSouth’ edition that claims to allow readers to enjoy Twain’s masterpiece without obliging them ‘to confront hundreds of insulting racial pejoratives’. In the UK, the novel is no longer on the GCSE or A Level syllabus. It is apparently too hot to handle. Such efforts, Morrison taught us, are designed to appease rather than enlighten, and fail to acknowledge how a great novel can, at the very least, help us confront and overcome the pain of history.
As he prepared to write James, Everett read Huckleberry Finn seventeen times. He clearly thought long and hard about the language Twain used and how he would handle it in his own novel. Promoting the book post-publication, he was asked in interview after interview why he used ‘the n-word’ so liberally. His answer was much the same each time:
Because I’m telling the truth. If somebody came in here right now and said, ‘You n-word,’ am I going to be less offended than if they used the word ‘nigger’? No. That focus on the word misses the point. I don’t care about the word; I care about the intention. I care about the meaning. I’m not impressed with attempts to cover up anything.
James, no doubt, will also be banned by people who have not read it and who think either that racism no longer exists or that considered literary use of racial slurs will offend without recourse. Both attitudes are refuted by the novel itself. Words – their flexibility and flair, their potency and weight; how they are wielded by those who impose their will on others and those who are their victims – are one of Everett’s principal obsessions. They are currency of his satiric gift and, in this book, the subject of special focus.
‘In language, and in ownership of language,’ Everett said recently, ‘there resides great power, and an avenue to any kind of freedom we’re going to have.’ Jim’s voice gives Everett an ideal narrative platform for exploring the complexities and ironies of racial discourse. From the opening pages, words and their authority are subtly explored. Jim and the other black characters speak one way to each other and a different way to white people. In a world where life literally depends on appearing inferior, a deferential demeanour is a tool for survival, employed without exception and passed from one generation to the next. ‘White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,’ Jim instructs his daughter, who learns quickly. ‘We must let whites be the ones who name the trouble,’ she replies, ‘because they need to know everything before us. Because they need to name everything.’
The power of naming deepens as a theme when, as in Huckleberry Finn, Jim learns he is to be sold down river and separated from his wife and daughter. He goes on the run and joins up with Huck, in flight from an abusive father, on their epic journey. Jim’s goal is freedom and the rescue of his family. The means of freedom, he knows instinctively, is language. Everett gives the incidents from this part of Twain’s narrative – the hiding out on Jackson Island, the discovery of a dead man in a house adrift on the river, Jim getting bitten by a rattlesnake – an entirely different emphasis. We learn of Jim’s literacy and desire for books and writing materials. We see Jim as protector and teacher, skilfully shaping Huck’s moral journey by manipulating his slave persona to give the boy the impression he is learning about fear and racism and violence of his own accord. We watch as Jim shields Huck from seeing his dead father in the abandoned house. And we come to one of the novel’s great set pieces, Jim’s fever dream during his body’s battle with snake poison.
In his delirium, Jim has a vision of Voltaire sitting beside him, laying sticks on a fire. They speak, the first of several imaginary conversations he will have with Enlightenment philosophers throughout the novel. After telling Jim he ‘shouldn’t be a slave’, Voltaire goes on to define equality as ‘the capacity for becoming equal’. Climate and geography, he explains, have given white men a developmental advantage, but Africans ‘can be trained in the way of Europeans’ and thus acquire the ‘skills of equality’. Voltaire says all this while claiming to be an abolitionist. Jim, after listening patiently and recalling the many hours he has spent secretly reading Voltaire and others in his owner’s library, makes his counter-argument, accusing the Frenchman of believing that civil liberties ‘are contingent on hierarchy and situation’. Voltaire, nonplussed, has to agree.
As he emerges from his hallucination, Jim comes to this remarkable conclusion:
How strange a world, how strange an existence, that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality, that one’s equal must hold a station that allows airing of that argument, that one cannot make that argument for one’s self, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree.
Touché. As he so often does, Everett here trespasses on our suspension of disbelief in the service of satire. Do we mind? Of course not. Jim’s mastery of ideas may be getting ahead of the narrative, but readers of Everett’s previous novels know how he likes to use a character’s voice to unveil hypocrisy, just as he loves bending genres, playing with the different registers of language, and using conceits of performance and parody to lampoon the ways in which race has been parsed throughout history.
Having established the scope of Jim’s reading and his understanding of his condition, Everett gives him the tools he needs to rebuild his identity. In the floating house he finds ink and paper. On a steamboat wreck he recovers a cache of books, including a bible and a copy of the first published slave narrative, by Venture Smith. He writes his first words: I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name. Cherishing his books and the moments when, as Huck sleeps, he can read, he is reminded of how reading is ‘a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive’. When he and Huck get separated after their raft is hit by a steamboat, he meets other slaves who, discovering he can write, steal him a pencil and encourage him to tell his story.
With that pencil, he writes himself into being. He starts his testament with the words My name is James. The renaming marks the beginning of his history, which will become the book we hold in our hands. It also opens up his path to freedom. First, however, James must suffer several humiliations as, halfway into the story, the narrative diverges completely from Huckleberry Finn, and Everett replaces Twain’s long Duke and Dauphin excursus with a series of tragicomic episodes involving James’s sale and resale to various owners.
One of those sales is to the leader of a traveling minstrel show, Daniel Decatur Emmett, who hears James’s fine singing voice and, needing a tenor for the group, purchases him for two hundred dollars. Blackface minstrelsy, in which white men with painted faces caricatured African American culture and behaviour, was at the peak of its popularity in the mid-nineteenth century. Though the tradition is not directly referenced in Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s characterisation of Jim owes much to its racial stereotyping. Subversive and ingenious, Everett’s inspired insertion of a minstrelsy episode at this point is the high point of the novel’s satire.
Nominally anti-slavery, Emmett insists he has hired rather than bought James, though he continues to treat him as chattel. His troupe includes a black man passing for white, who forms a bond with James and disguises him by applying blackface and dressing him in costume. Off they head to the first performance, in a town that sits on the border between Missouri, a slave state, and Illinois, a free state. James observes:
Never had a situation felt so absurd, surreal and ridiculous. And I had spent my life as a slave. There we were, twelve of us, marching down the main street that separated the free side of town from the slave side, ten white men in blackface, one black man passing for white and painted black, and me, a light-brown black man painted black in such a way as to appear like a white man trying to pass for black. The storefronts, a bank and a store and such, all looked flat and without depth, like I could just kick them over. It occurred to me that there was no telling which side was free and which was slave.
This is vintage Everett, creating situations that both amuse and disturb, using images of performance and stagecraft to puncture the bloated absurdities of racism, and finding words that clarify and liberate as they dazzle. As James parades along the street, he makes eye contact with white people who, thinking he is white, seek ‘to share this moment of mocking me, mocking darkies, laughing at the poor slaves, with joyful, spirited clapping and stomping’. He thinks he sees only the surface of these people before realising they are ‘mere surface all the way to [their] core’.
This experience, coming at the heart of the novel, is a turning point for both James and Everett. James’s vision of the hollowness of racism, the defining pathology of American history, confirms the validity of his own identity as a black man, a father, and a full, free human being. From here on, though he suffers and negotiates several more confinements and escapes, he is not on the run but on a mission. Reuniting with Huck after a hundred-page hiatus, he heads back to where they started, the town of Hannibal, Missouri, determined to act.
Pivoting entirely from Twain’s plot, Everett moves the timeline forward several decades, to the beginning of the Civil War, creating a more specific historical context for James’s search for freedom. Union troops pass by. James wonders how to find the underground railroad. Secure in his new identity, he alters his relationship with Huck, dropping his slave voice, opening up to the boy, and finally delivering one of the novel’s bombshells: he tells Huck that he and Huck’s mother were friends. More than friends. He is Huck’s father.
It is a critical commonplace that Twain’s Jim is a surrogate father for Huck, but no scholar I know of has argued that Huck is his actual son. Everett’s daring stroke completes the cycle of renewed identity – for both characters – and expands Twain’s theme of freedom to include not just Huck’s escape from ‘civilisation’ but James’s discovery of the agency required to fulfil his identity. Huck too is black and more in need than ever of James’s protection. Yet James still needs Huck who, passing for white, gives him the cover he needs to continue his mission. We are thus prepared for the novel’s final sequence, in which James arrives back in Hannibal to put that agency into motion.
Sneaking into his old quarters, James reunites with his fellow slaves, who tell him that his wife and daughter have been sold and that he is himself in danger of being lynched. They hide him in their cabin, and while hidden he observes the rape of one of his friends by Hopkins, the overseer. Everett describes the incident, like a flogging earlier in the novel, with brutal realism. By now he has put satire aside and shifted the narrative into thriller mode – not bending the genre but using the full force of its conventions to bring the theme of freedom to a conclusion Twain could not. James tracks down Hopkins, dispossesses him of his pistol, and kills him. He uses the gun to kidnap the town’s judge (Twain’s exemplary Judge Thatcher), forcing him to reveal the location of the plantation to which his family has been sold. The book’s final pages flip by in a blaze of apocalypse as James travels to the plantation, incites an uprising, sets the place on fire and faces down the enraged owner. ‘Who the hell are you?’ the armed slave-owner asks. ‘I am the angel of death,’ James says, cocking the pistol. ‘I am a sign. I am your future. I am James.’ He shoots the man dead and with his wife and daughter leaves through the smoke, heading north to Iowa and to freedom.
Though there is great power and redemption in this ending, there is also something missing – irony. For once, Everett abandons the dry, distant stance of the sceptic and plunges headlong into an intimate conclusion that sends his main character into the dark night without judgement or ambiguity. James is no longer performing. He is being who he is, who he has come to know as his true self. And Everett? Well, for this moment he too seems to have abandoned a mask. His novels have always been marked by feints, false paths, and an unwillingness to give the reader what is expected. This time we get the ending we want and the ending the book demands. The blood and gore are not the parody zombie effusions of The Trees, but literal violence made necessary by the fact of slavery.
It is to Everett’s credit that he had the courage to move out of his literary comfort zone and give us this convulsive, even melodramatic ending. As Toni Morrison has written, Mark Twain had no choice at the close of Huckleberry Finn but to deny Jim his freedom. His continuing pain and humiliation are required not just as agency for Huck’s education but as honest markers of the indelible stain of slavery. Twain was not equipped by his time and place to give him any other role. But Everett is. As Morrison does in her fiction, Everett unflinchingly recreates the world of black chattel slavery, revealing its horrors for what they are while using the power of language to turn Jim into James and thus create a character who is a fresh embodiment of freedom, a new American self. James is much more than the retelling of an old tale. It is an original and essential chapter in the story of America, a story that is far from over.
1/10/2024
Kevin Stevens is a novelist and critic and divides his time between Dublin and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
