"Huck” first, then “James”: I

Percival Everett, author of recently released book title “James” (2024), recounted in a late March NPR interview on WESA radio that he read and reread Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” “some fifteen times in a row” as preparation for writing his novel. James is Jim from the point of view of the enslaved black man. “My writing ‘James’ is not in any way an indictment of Twain at all," he says. "I'm writing the novel that Twain was – not ill equipped – but unequipped to create. That being Jim’s story.” He goes on to say, “So I consider this more as being in discourse with Twain."

In preparation for reading “James,” I reread “Huckleberry Finn,” once. For the present article, I am revisiting “Huck,” and then next time I’ll comment on “James.”

The character of Huck Finn, which evolves from a narration by Huck himself, is one of the best known of Mark Twain’s. Huck is intelligent, though not particularly literate. He speaks in the dialect of the mid 19th-century rural Mississippi basin of which he is a part. He is an adventurer by nature, not a sitter in classrooms, conversant in the ways of White relationships to Black slaves and how to at least feign that relationship on their adventure. Above all, Huck is thoroughly uncommitted to any truth. With respect to this last, he is a master at fabricating adventure escape stories that often rebound back upon him under close scrutiny by other characters. And the fun is in seeing how he stands one lie upon another lie to sweat his way out. Twain is, after all, humorist in all things Huck, playing his character out as few after him have been able to recreate in their own characters.

Jim is an escaping slave, beholden to Huck for his safety in that role as companion on the raft of their downstream journey and escapades. He speaks in his own dialect, which is important to the story told in “James.” Jim’s story, told by Huck, is best described by Twain’s satiric sentence in Chapter 16, spoken by Huck: Jim “was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free state he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn’t sell them, they’d get an Ab’litionist to go and steal them.” Steal them back! Yes, that is what Twain wrote for Huck to say about Jim’s thinking.

Followed by: “It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn’t ever dared to talk such talk in his life before.” That is being an escaped slave on the run.

But it is Jim’s dialect that is also important to “James.” Just to illustrate from further down the page in Chapter 16, and prepare for “James,” here is an example: “ Dah you goes, de ole true Huck; de on’y white genlman dat ever kep’ his promise to ole Jim.”

There you have a taste of Twain and his satiric twist on those times. Next time, in discourse with Mark Twain, as Everett says about “James,” I’ll tell you more.