By Achim Hescher

12 July, 2024

‘You don’t know about me unless you have read a book by the title of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but that doesn’t matter.’ Well, it does. With his lastest novel James (Doubleday 2024), Percival Everett accomplished the risky undertaking of rewriting Mark Twain’s world classic. The character of James, however, Everett’s self-empowered narrator and protagonist, has little in common with Twain’s Jim, who resembles a stock character from a minstrel show, subject to jokes and pranks pulled on him by Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. 

Everett equips James with agency unknown to Twain’s Jim. James is highly literate, makes his own decisions, rationally calculates his chances, becomes a liberator (by helping other slaves escape), a life saver (saving Huck from drowning), and a killer—his detailed account of how he strangled the overseer Hopkins to death makes me shiver and think, if only for a moment, I am reading a horror story. James is driven by anger (which Twain denies Jim), arising from experienced frustration and the perceived injustices under the system of slavery.

As a character, James is as ironically overdone as Twain’s Jim, yet in different ways. Considering the historical facts concerning the usual illiteracy of slaves, James is absurdly intellectual, knowledgeable in grammar, standard American English, philosophy, and rhetoric (he even knows about “proleptic irony”).

In Everett’s adaptation, it is James, not Huck, who puts on the show when he talks slave vernacular or when he joins Daniel Decatur Emmett’s Virginia Minstrels (historical reference); and it is doubly ironic that, as a minstrel singer, James is made to put blackface on his black face to act as a white impersonating a black minstrel stock character—a depthless template that imprisons Twain’s Jim from beginning to end. After his first performance as a minstrel singer, James decides to abscond.

I shall not give away the plot twist toward the end of the book when James makes a surprising confession to Huck and the emotional twinges it entails for the boy.

Can you read James without knowing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Of course, but the pleasure (not to say depth) of the text qua adaptation, i.e. the numerous instances of irony on the planes of action, narration, and of the paratextual frame (the insipid minstrel songs from Daniel Decatur Emmett's notebook opening the book), would be lost—unless it makes you pick up Mark Twain’s ‘great American novel.’