“If one knows hell as home,” Percival Everett’s Jim asks, “Is returning to hell a homecoming?” Everett’s novel James, a retelling of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, places Jim at the middle of the narrative, just as it tears the story apart from the center.
In the original, Jim is a runaway slave and erstwhile companion to the mischievous young Huck during his adventures along the Mississippi. Loyal, credulous, and mystically wise, Twain’s Jim is the prototypical, perhaps most famous Magical Negro in American literature. When he returns to his home and his enslavers, he chooses to save a white boy over his own freedom. In accordance with the philosophy of the stereotype, Jim gets his freedom anyway, a reward for his selflessness. Huck frees him from his literal chains, and Tom Sawyer gives him forty dollars. They all eat supper together. After a book of hijinks, Twain deals with Jim effectively and, in a pat literary way, morally.
Everett, author of I Am Not Sidney Poitier and Erasure (recently adapted to the Oscar-nominated film American Fiction), has made a living out of readers not quite knowing when he’s joking. He is sometimes prickly when interviewed and has called literary awards (of which he has won many) “offensive.” At first, James appears to be just what Everett would write: a winking tribute-takedown of the original.
Early in the story, Jim wonders, “What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenuse was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled?” James, like Huckleberry Finn, is funny. When he talks to other Black people, Jim has no regional dialect, but to keep the white folks happy, he speaks to them in the over-the-top slave dialect that Twain gives his original Jim. Of course, this language is barely different from the Southern rural white accent of Huck and others.
Still, Jim’s greatest weapon is his mind, a pencil he acquired at great cost, and his cool ironic understanding. When he finds a book with blank pages, he begins to write – and rewrite – the story of his own life. He renames himself James. In fitful sleep, he argues with ghosts of Enlightenment thinkers about theories of slavery and freedom. “I’ve been thinking about you,” he tells a vision of John Locke. “I’ve been pondering hypocrisy.” In one of several narrative inversions that seem, at first, to be the point of Everett’s retelling, Jim is no longer just victim, but thinker, and always, gallows jokester.
In other stories, this reclamation of narrative would be the point. Newspapers and magazines, including this one, have recently focused on publishing these sorts of stories. For those of us who believe it, one of the most certain benefits of writing is that we can correct the narrative injustices and fill in the blank spaces of history with good storytelling, maybe even inch an institution toward goodness. It is an attempt to correct, yes, but it is also an implicit apology. Everett doesn’t think this is enough. “Metaphor,” another slave tells Jim, is “nearly all we have.” The final punch of James hangs on that “nearly.”
About halfway through the book, the plot diverges from Twain’s. Slowly, its wry satire gives way to rage. As Huck goes on his separate adventures, James is sold several more times, witnesses murder and sexual violence, and nearly dies himself. Language is no longer strong enough to defend him. As he returns to his hometown, where his family is still enslaved and his enslavers want to kill him, he has kept his pencil in his pocket, but he picks up a pistol, adding object to symbol.
In the final scene of the book, no longer using his arch-slave assumed dialect, Jim proclaims, “I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night.” Readers will be inclined to believe him. James is not so much a reclamation or redemption of Twain’s story. Its aim is mostly destruction. Can we write our way out of historical wrongs? Can we always correct, or must we at times destroy? Percival Everett doesn’t tell us to praise James’s final act of destruction – the slave’s ultimate show of agency – but he does make it seem inevitable.
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