I spent the past couple weeks with James. I knew him in my youth as Jim, Nigger Jim, from Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.” On the eve of the Civil War, Jim and Huck go on a spree down the Mississippi. In Percival Everett’s novel, “James,” Huck’s name remains the same while Nigger Jim becomes Jim and then, at long last, becomes James. No accident that these are the last lines of the book:
“And who are you?”
“I am James.”
“James what?”
“Just James.”
I guess that I should issue a spoiler alert, that the main character is speaking at the end of the novel. But you don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. You don’t even know if it’s not an imagined scene, something from the always creative mind of Everett. So I’ll leave it at that.
James is a slave on a journey,
sometimes with his white pal Huck and sometimes not as he and Huck get
separated. We revisit a few of Twain’s characters, the Duke and the Dauphin
among them (I’m thinking of you Jason Burge, The One True Dauphin of Mississippi) and
others are new creations.
But as the Kindle pages turned, I
was less interested in Everett’s Twain trail as I was by what Everett was doing
with his own creation. It’s crystal clear early on when James is still in
Hannibal talking to other slaves about proper diction. And it’s hilarious.
Slaves know how to speak white man’s English (I would say proper English but
this is the South) but they also need to master slave’s English. A hilarious
scene, one that caused me raucous laughs that awoke the family. Slaves must
dumb down their language to make sure white people are not offended by the
possibility of a smart Negro. Even language is a slaveholder’s weapon. That
scene really nails down what’s at stake in “James.” If you are a slave,
everything you do must conform to the white man’s image of you and the owner’s
sense of mastery over you. To challenge that leads to death.
As a slave, James sneaks into
Judge Thatcher’s study to read. He knows Voltaire's "Candide" and John Locke even appears to
James on the trail for verbal sparring matches. This journey is so much fun
that you almost forget the stakes. But not quite. As I read, I thought deeply
about slavery and its continuing hold on America. We are in the midst of a fascist
coup by the same white men who gave us slavery and the KKK and Auschwitz. Massa
Ron DeSantis gloats over his concentration camp in the Glades and plans to open
more. Trump’s White Nationalist Stephen Miller plots the creation of a white
nation, one without those pesky people of color.
But back to the book. It’s clear
why it won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. A work of genius. I
cringed in spots but I fear that not cringing would make me unrecognizable to
me and to James, Just James.
A couple things about Everett. He
grew up in South Carolina, educated in Florida and Rhode Island, but went West
as soon as he could, as the saying goes. He spends time and writes about the
West of Wyoming and New Mexico. I look forward to reading “Walk Me to
the Distance” and “God’s Country.” There’s a funny Twain quote that might have
come from Everett. “I’ve only been as far West as California.” It sounds like
Twain but I can’t find confirmation that he said it. He traveled in what we
know as the real West: Wyoming, New Mexico, Nevada, the gold-mining fields of
California. But the quote has been used sarcastically by those in the inner West
who say “California ain’t West.” Twain knew it. As you see in Everett’s books,
he does too.
In the “James” acknowledgements, Everett
writes this:
“Finally, a nod to Mark Twain. His
humor and his humanity affected me long before I became a writer. Heaven for
the climate; hell for my long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain.”
Always read the acknowledgements.
You find gold nuggets there.
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