“Huck” first, then “James”:II

In author Percival Everett’s “James” (2024), the inverted “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (Mark Twain: 1884), as introduced last week, Huck is just a boy and Jim is the wise and well-read adult. Jim is well-read even in the classics for having had the good luck of surreptitious access to a personal library of a prominent White resident of Hannibal. However, Jim is still dependent on Huck to preserve their inverted relationship of Huck as boy master and Jim as adult slave in order to survive being taken as the runaway that he is actually. He cannot speak aloud before Whites in the learned English that he knows, but must speak in the slave vernacular, and dare he not ever be caught reading, or writing. Those are offenses for hanging from a tree, no court trial intended. Yes, that…