James: A Masterpiece of a Masterpiece

 

 

 

James (2024)

By Percival Everett

Doubleday, 320 pages

★★★★★

 

Scads of novelists have given treatments to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the book I’d nominate as the elusive Great American Novel. It’s fair dinkum for anyone to take cues from Twain as Finn itself is a variant of The Odyssey. There’s no need to rehash Twain’s story arc; if you don’t know it, for heaven’s sake read the novel before your citizenship is revoked.

 

Bouquets and kudos to Percival Everett for his masterful James. I'll get to it in a moment but first, for irony lovers, I’ve been rereading Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent, his tongue in cheek search for the perfect American small town. The week before I got a copy of James I read Bryson’s take on the Mississippi River town Hannibal, Missouri, the setting for Huckleberry Finn. It would be safe to say that Hannibal was not a candidate for the perfect small town. Having been there, I agree. Bryson used terms such as “disappointment,” “awful,”  and “shabby.” He also noted, “Twain got the hell out of both Hannibal and Missouri as soon as he could…. I began to understand why Clemens not just left town but also changed his name.”

 

If it was bad for young Sam Clemens, you can imagine what it was like for enslaved peoples before the Civil War. Huckleberry Finn took that on directly with Huck’s flight down the Mississippi with Jim, a runaway slave. In Everett’s novel, Jim is the namesake James; that, is, a proud man rather than an infantilized slave. You’ll find numerous similarities between Twain’s novel and Everett’s, but the name James is a tip-off. Everett asks us to imagine that the bumbling, unsophisticated, illiterate Jim–called “Nigger Jim”* in unexpurgated versions of Twain–was an act. Everett didn’t need to invent that possibility; historians have long known that this occurred. It even has a term–passive (or submissive) manipulation–that describes methods of getting over on slaveholders by playing to stereotypes. You could, for instance, pretend to be slow and ignorant as a way to stall, work more slowly, or frustrate a master.

 

Everett writes of the moment in which “Jim” decided to become “James,” but he was well on his way long before that. His James is not only literate, but he also furtively reads the for-decoration-only philosophy books on Judge Thatcher’s bookshelf and holds mental debates with Plato, John Stuart Mill, and others. When a book is missing he easily deflects blame by torturing English grammar and asking what possible use he would have for a book. It worked because white people saw what they believed to be true.

 

James is shot full of the humor that made Twain’s novel a classic, but he subverts it in deeply ironic ways. James is raising his enslaved family to be as smart as he. One very funny section (in a stinging fashion) has James teaching his well-spoken children how to alter their speech around white people. He patiently praises them for clear communication but tutors them in how to make it jumbled, ungrammatical, and vague.

 

Of course, what would a new look at Huckleberry Finn be without a float down the mighty Mississippi? James hides his true self from Huck as they encounter everything from wrecked paddle wheelers and floods to rattlesnakes and hucksters. The last of these is Everett’s take on the duke and dauphin who, despite the dangers they pose to our heroes, rivals Twain for comic relief. In their journey, James develops a paternal liking to Huck. Everett largely keeps Huck’s character intact, though he makes him more of a naïve wide-eyed kid than the confident and reflective character of Twain’s novel.

 

In many ways, Everett’s James has aspects of alt.history revenge film characters comparable to Mann in Rosewood (1997) or Django Freeman in Django Unchained (2012). As in those films, conditions and attitudes radicalize James. Where Everett deftly departs is that James shares intelligence and outrage with Mann and Django, but he also miscalculates–sometimes with tragic results­–and is no superhero. He must ultimately come to grips with what kind of person he wishes to be within the society in which he must live.

 

James is a masterpiece based on a masterpiece. As a Twain scholar, I think Sam Clemens would approve 100 percent.

 

Rob Weir 

 

 

* Twain intended the “N-word” to shock. He was an ardent opponent of slavery and wanted readers to consider Jim’s humanity.