James, Percival Everett. Doubleday (ISBN: 9780385550369), 2024.

Summary: A retelling of a Mark Twain classic in which the slave, James, rather than Huckleberry Finn, is narrator.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain was an American classic for many generations, only to come under a cloud of suspicion because of its use of the “N” word. Huck, to escape beatings from a drunken father joins Jim, a slave fleeing sale on Jackson’s Island.. Subsequently, they have numerous adventures on a raft floating down the Mississippi, hoping to get to a place where Jim can go free. The steal a boat from thieves looting a steamboat and plotting murder. They survive floods and getting between a family feud only to fall in with hucksters passing themselves off as a King and a Duke. We hear the story from Huck’s perspective. And it is one of growing realization of Jim’s humanity as well as a coming of age story.

In Percival Everett’s retelling of the story, the plot elements above are present, although the story takes a turn after the King (or Dauphin) and the Duke. I won’t discuss these plot elements. What is distinctive in the re-telling is that Jim, or rather James, is the narrator. James assertion of his given name rather than slave name is an assertion of his personhood.

Slowly, Huck discovers James is far more complicated than Huck suspects. James and other slaves codeswitch. There is “Massa” talk, what slaveowners expect slaves to talk like and the way slaves speak to each other. James knows how to read, and steals some of Judge Thatcher’s books. James reads John Locke and Voltaire, among others. He also can write. He persuades a slave to steal a pencil for him. Then he learns that the slave who stole the pencil was lynched for his deed. Writing become all the more vital to him, to redeem that death.

James awakens to the anger within him, anger long buried in subservience. He discovers the fearsome things of which he is capable to avenge wrongs like a rape and to elude capture. Anger and love come together in a determined effort to free his wife Sadie and daughter, sold to a slave breeder.

James devotion to Huck, given Huck’s status as a white, is something of an enigma through most of the book. Neither Huck’s support of James’ aspirations nor his growing but still limited grasp of James’ world warrant this. Even Huck seems to intuit this when he asks why James saves him and not a fellow slave after a riverboat explodes.

James, juxtaposed with Twain’s work, reminds those of us who are white of the truth that we often “don’t know what we don’t know” in matters of race. Everett portrays a James far more intelligent, one probing for significance, awakening to his anger against injustice, and capable of resourceful action. As important as Twain’s work was in exposing the immorality of slavery, this goes far deeper. It plumbs greater depths of the evils in both acts and societal structures. And it plumbs the deep scars on the human psyche when one human holds another in bondage.