“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 is how the most malignant southern Whites ruled, whether your sensibilities are jarred or not.

In “James” Huck and Jim relive Mark Twain’s period adventure story down the Mississippi, with that twist in their relationship: self-educated, runaway Black dependent on being perceived as slave to this White boy. And why would they be going south anyway if Jim is seeking free soil, or so Huck offers to buttress one of his many fabrications to protect Jim.

From a modern perspective this may be an unimaginable story, and thereby easily deniable, but it was an easy perspective on which Twain could drape his satire with humor in the 19th century and an easy one, too, for Everett to impose his take in the 21st. A take that reminds the reader in clear words that this downtrodden slave of a Black man has intellectual capacities and curiosities well beyond those of his tormentors, if only he were free to express them openly.

Lines from “James” that made me smile sadly, in recognition of their truths, include:

“They had to know them was lies, but they wanted to believe. What do you make of that?” Huck to Jim in Chapter 21, Part 1. “Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ‘em.” Jim in response.

“The two men sat out in the open, unafraid of being seen. That was new to me and Huck. A boy and a Negro attracted suspicion, but grown men and a Negro, that was normal.” Narrator Jim in Chapter 23, Part 1.

“It pained me to think that without a white person with me, without a white-looking face, I could not travel safely through the light of the world, but was relegated to the dense woods. Without someone white to claim me as property, there was no justification for my presence, perhaps for my existence.” Jim in Chapter 2, Part 3.

Jim’s story is a searing commentary of life in that 19th century America, at a moment when war is about to break out, North against South, the Civil War, for which hundreds of thousands perished in blood-soaked dioramas captured in the new photography of the day. Even so, the picture story is no more vivid than Percival Everitt’s prose, inspired, without any visible rancor, by Mark Twain himself. “His humor and humanity affected me long before I became a writer. Heaven for the climate; hell for my long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain.”