James - Percival Everett (2024)

James won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award last year. I can hardly call myself an authority on whether it was deserved, but it certainly feels like it. I'm getting ahead of myself.

Oeuvre rule: I was unfamiliar with Percival Everett until American Fiction was nominated for Best Picture, and I began trying to see all nominees each year. I would have watched that regardless, and it's certainly on the cusp of greatness and worthwhile. It was based on Everett's novel from more than 20 years earlier, Erasure, and Everett has published a lot more. He has basically been as prolific as Philip Roth. So it feels as though he is finally having his "moment," after getting a big-screen adaptation and then dominating the literary landscape with this novel, which cannot be denied. Few books in recent years have been more celebrated than this.

The first thing I'll say is that I have never read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and while it is not necessary to have done that to appreciate this, it probably would enhance enjoyment. The closest referent I can think for this is Foe, which I believe I've mentioned before on this blog (in the review of Disgrace), along with the circumstances of reading it (in Paris, at University of Nanterre, in an English-language class). That is J.M. Coetzee's re-imagining of Robinson Crusoe, except told from the perspective of a woman that told her story to the author Daniel Defoe, who hijacked the narrative. There is no such literary trickery involving Mark Twain in this, and it is simply another version of Huck Finn told from the perspective of the runaway slave Jim, here known as James and revealed to be putting on an act that also seems to have a reverse-referent in the recent film Sorry to Bother You. It is odd to say that, but does feel like Sorry to Bother You is in fact a big influence on this, as is the experience of having American Fiction adapted. I'd be rather surprised if James does not get optioned. If anything, it may rekindle interest in Twain's work too, and it is never a bad thing to have people in 2025 stretching their perspective to try to appreciate something from the early 1880's. It made me want to read it more, at least. But for now, the Cliffs Notes will have to suffice. 

***

I reviewed those previously and from what I can gather, some of the episodes in this novel are taken straight from the source material (notably, a scene with a house that has been ripped from its foundation by a storm and is in the river, where Jim sees something that he doesn't tell Huck until later). Also, the episodes with the King and the Duke. And some of the characters on the periphery of James may play a larger role in the source material (Tom Sawyer, for example, is barely a factor here, mentioned at a few random moments, acknowledged as Huck's best friend, but they do not appear to share as deep an emotional bond as he does with Jim). For a fair stretch of the novel, the two are separated, and reunited during a duel scene involving some jealousy between older "young adult" characters that probably looms larger in the source material.  This is neither here nor there, but is to say, it made me want to read the original more, and there are few better aims in literature than to turn people onto the classics that are almost 150 years old (and sometimes much older) by reinvigorating them with a fresh perspective. 

It feels like it was a long time coming, for Jim. Even though I hadn't read the book, I was familiar with the character, and that he represented something about the American South. Perhaps Jim Crow had some connection. But no, Jim Crow was a character created for a minstrel show nearly 50 years before Huck Finn was published, which both that novel and James also depict in an extended episode (one of the several songs performed is about him). This is another reason James is great, for those that have read both books. I am not sure but I am reasonably confident that the depiction of minstrel shows in 1880 and 2025 are quite different. And those minstrel shows were created while slavery was still very much a thing. While James/Huck Finn takes place some 20 years prior to 1880, with rumblings of the Civil War also percolating at various points (Huck wants to fight for the Union), the two novels are not about the American South. They are about the Midwest, and the odd boundaries in play in Missouri and Illinois as slavery is abolished or simply against the law in certain areas and not others, very close to one another. 

Thus, as far as historical novels go, not only for true American history, but also for the history of American literature, this pinpoints a crucial moment. For all of the horrible things this country has been put through over the past hundreds of years, one can at least admire the artists that have exemplified its greatest qualities, and laid groundwork for a humanistic progressivism. 

It's not really a safe time in American to make that claim, that the history of our country is steeped in genocide, class subjugation and white supremacy.  Most recently, it was decreed that the Smithsonian will be getting a makeover to wipe its "wokeness" away. We live in the greatest country of the world, and we are no worse than any other country. Every other country is racist too, and hates people that are not from there originally, too. This is what those in power want us to believe, and this is what their sycophants preach ad nauseum to the point that the lie becomes the truth, for very many people to the point that it shifts a political tide. 

So this is additionally why James is such an important novel, and got so much of the love that it rightfully deserves--and the backlash against it as well (somewhat limited as it is) further underscores the urgency of its "message," or what I understand it to be. We've undergone massive waves of panic in "post-racial" America from absolutely being ashamed of racism and doing everything we can to acknowledge how we have been and what we have learned and how we can do better as a people, to now being validated in feeling that stereotypical views of non-whites are actually the true picture of reality, and not the "whitewashing" that "libtards" have shoved down the throats of Real Americans. It's been a horrifying thing to witness, and the only comfort we may take is that there really are just a lot of bots on X that spew hate that the algorithm promotes and the problem is not as bad "on the ground" as it seems on the Internet. Yet unfortunately, dozens of mentally ill people with guns kill hundreds of innocent people every year, and such incidents are flashpoints for opposing viewpoints on gun control laws and family values. There are plenty of reasonable conservative people that recognize the propaganda being utilized by MAGA and disavow it, and the debate between those that have not yet totally gone off the deep end and the more compassionate amongst us is what can still drive our country towards Real Greatness, and provide a glimmer of hope for the future. Debates with MAGA "conservatives" are, unfortunately, often given to straw man arguments that devolve into name-calling and line-drawing. Because if they've been duped and are being told they've been duped, they throw it back on the other side, and claim the other side is the one projecting. We get nowhere except hating each other more. There probably would be a civil war if there was not too much other shit going on around the world that people had to argue about, but sadly it appears that will always be the case now until we all destroy one another in a mass act of stupidity. 

The world has become impossibly complex, and yet still, smaller and smaller minded. It is good to have a book like James that goes back into the past and offers up a simple story, a parable of sorts, to remind us of the prior state of affairs in this country, and to help us recognize the parts that have been bubbling up ever more often since 2016, and really, post-Covid 19 (because I think most everyone acknowledges Trump 2016-2020 as not nearly as bad as Trump 2024-?). We are REGRESSING as a country and it is absolutely terrifying and artists are more important than ever in their role of moving the culture towards greater enlightenment.

***

Some window into the language of the novel is appropriate, as the performance of "slave speak" is one of its key defining features. That is, when James drops the ruse of Jim--either as a slip-up or intentionally, to shock and frighten--the novel reaches its critical moments of suspense. Relatively early on, we learn of James's literary designs. After being bitten by a rattlesnake, shortly after they have run away, he lays down to rest and has dreams of a kind:

"I was in Judge Thatcher's library, a place where I had spent many afternoons while he was out at work or hunting ducks. I could see books in front of me. I had read them secretly, but this time, in this fever dream, I was able to read without fear of being discovered. I had wondered every time I sneaked in there what white people would do to a slave who had taught other slaves to read? What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenuse was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled? I was burning up with fever, fading in and out of consciousness, focusing and refocusing on Huck's face.

Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire put a fat stick into the fire. His delicate fingers held the wood for what seemed like too long a time. 
'I'm afraid there's no more wood,' I said. 'Which is fine, because I am hot enough. Too hot.' 
He reached in again and moved some charred pieces around. He looked at his blackened fingertips. 'I'm like you,' he said.

'How is that?'

He wiped his hands on his pants, left smudges. 'You shouldn't be a slave,' Voltaire said, sighing. He sat beside me, moved to feel my forehead with the back of his hand and then thought better. 'Like Montesquieu, I think we are all equal, regardless of color, language or habit.'

'You do, do you?' I asked.

'However, you must realize that climate and geography can be significant factors in determining human development. It's not that your features make you unequal, it's that they are signs of biological differences, things that have helped you survive in those hot, desolate places. It's those factors that stop you from achieving the more perfect human form found in Europe.'

'Is that right?' 

'The African can be easily trained in the ways of the European, of course. He can come to be more than he naturally is, to learn those manners and skills that will allow him to become equal.'
'Yes?'
'That is what equality is, Jim. It's the capacity for becoming equal. The same way a black man in Martinique can learn French and so become French, he can also acquire the skills of equality and become equal. But I repeat myself.'......

'How do you explain slavery? Why are my people subjected to it, treated with such cruelty?'

Voltaire shrugged. 

'Let me try this,' I said. 'You have a notion, like Raynal, of natural liberties, and we all have them by virtue of our being human. But when those liberties are put under societal and cultural pressure, they become civil liberties, and those are contingent on hierarchy and situation. Am I close?'
Voltaire was scribbling on paper. 'That was good, that was good. Say all of that again.'" (48-50)

This is one of the more blatant entreaties to post-Covid racism (we might say post-George Floyd, but we conflate those periods), and gives heed towards those armchair intellectuals that justify despicable views on the basis of rather dubious anthropological precepts. That is a mouthful but maybe you know what I am talking about. We look back on Voltaire and think of him as one of the great humanists in history, a philosopher that also wrote amusing novels and is responsible for many famous epigrams, and it is true that many such Europeans in the Enlightenment Era couched white supremacy in this mix of science and philosophy--which on the one hand, acknowledges basic humanity, and on the other, mass-generalizes any entire continent of people that can be "trained." We don't need to start going down the list of famous thinkers from that era. 

(Rousseau is the one that comes to mind, and he is referenced elsewhere in this text, and "On the Origin of the Nature of Inequality" is, in my opinion, a great text. I am also sure if we learn more about the lives of such thinkers, we may see that they hold other beliefs that are not as great, but I prefer to leave such investigations for another day and take the text at face value--that is, a depiction of Savage Man, pre-civilization, not a depiction of "savages" in undeveloped nations that exist adjacent to a "more civilized" brand of people that find glory in conquest. As man created more structures to make life less harsh and untenable, so too did machinations of inequality enter into the picture.)

Suffice to say, there is a philosophical element to this novel that additionally puts it into a higher echelon, on an issue that sadly continues to be evergreen, even if I thought in say, oh the 1990s, that such lessons had already been learned by all (or at least in Chicago, and thankfully, we have not lost our collective minds in 2025--though I am sure down by say, oh Cairo, IL, we may find views only slightly advanced from the 1880's, though it's a ghost town now, and has a ghastly history). 

Here too, Kierkegaard is invoked, then just five years deceased, and perhaps his work had yet to be translated into English, but there does appear to be some limited awareness of him at the time:

"'Kin you ax for more wishes?'

'You know, that was what I said, but it seems you cain't have but three. What would you wish fer?'

Entertaining such discussions in character was exhausting, but I had thought about such a thing many times before and, just like a story I'd read in the judge's library, I could see that anything I thought was good could entail some bad consequences. For example, living forever would mean you'd have to watch everybody you loved die. The question I played with, but certainly couldn't share with Huck, was what would Kierkegaard wish for. 'I dunno, Huck. I reckon I'd be scared to wish fer anything.' 

'Think about it.'

'I reckon the genie be white. I ain't got no need to wish for sumptin' dat ain't gone happen. Good story or no.'

Huck let that sink in, then he looked at the sky. I kin tell you what I'd wish fer. First, I'd wish fer some adventure.' He smiled big. He looked at me. 'Then I'd wish dat you was free like me.'

'Thank ya.'

''Course. Well, I'd wish all slaves was free.'

I nodded.

'Don't every man got a right to be free?' Huck asked.

'Ain't no such things as rights,' I said.

'What say?'

'I ain't said nuffin.'" (71-72)

In any case you have a distillation of the modus operandi of the novel in this exchange, a fairy tale within the heavier philosophical context of free will and self-determination. James does ultimately pursue that path, and the novel also works on this second level as an allegory of sorts. Even after we get what we wish for, the very notion of wishing for anything begins to appear problematic, as it unleashes other consequences which necessitate further wishes. And yet, this is not about making peace with one's fate, but rising above it and achieving what was thought impossible through sheer persistence and belief in personal destiny.  

Apart from that, there are just several touching moments, such as this:

"Big Mike slapped a small hand on my shoulder. 'Help me take down this here tent,' he said.

Everyone worked to collect their things, large and small. Emmett stopped for a second and looked at me. He said something that confused me. Confused me because I wasn't quite sure what it meant. Confused me because I had never heard anything like it before. He said, 'I'm sorry.'

I had been about to help take down the tent, but this white man's apology screwed me to the ground." (179)

There seems to be a derogation of the apology in our time, a belief in the strength of never apologizing, seen as a sign of weakness of one's own character and rationalistic behavior. In truth, the inability to apologize--driven, no doubt, by the hordes that decry them as never being good enough--is another key factor in the devolution of society. We can all feel safe and secure in the knowledge that what we are doing is right, we can deny the cruelty and pretend that it never happened, or that it was deserved, and we cannot bring ourselves to forgive others, even when they ask for it, because everyone is hopelessly flawed and will never truly change for the better. Emmett is not a "white savior" in this novel, but just slightly less evil than others, "buying" Jim but telling him that he has actually hired him as a performer and that he will be paid and later freed as an indentured servant of sorts. While this does turn into something of a fantasy, the depth of this very small gesture felt rather moving (particularly if the reader is used to never hearing apologies in their own life, as may be the case for many now, even if the context is wholly different). 

Ultimately, this is a simple story with rather complicated angles that reflect on history and how we have advanced in certain regards and yet not in others. For hundreds of years, basic humanity was conveniently ignored, until we finally grappled with it, and tried to take accountability for the cruelties inflicted, undo them to the extent we could, progressing all the way up to the point of issuing reparations--until the counter-narratives and backlash drove political organizing in the opposite direction, back towards cruelty, denial of basic humanity, unwillingness to understand where people came from and where they want to go and why. The novel symbolizes how far we have come, and how far we still have to go, and the constant obstacles that are wedged throughout the path. At the very end, like Voltaire said, we must tend to our garden, and James does have something of a happier ending along the lines of that notion. We cannot change how others think of us. We can only exist among them, chameleon-like, and forge our own paths, finding that freedom within ourselves, driving us towards a destiny that only we define, and not one decreed by those in power. This type of freedom--to be left alone, to be respected as a human being, rather than labeled or boxed-in by stereotypes--should be seen as a natural right. When we are not so lucky to have that, fighting for it is a good and noble cause. 

Still, we shouldn't have to fight for basic human decency, and once those in power recognize the obvious results of this paradigm--that violence borne out of race-based thinking only begets further violence--we may finally set forward on a path towards greater peace for all, and true greatness.