“James,” novelist Percival Everett’s retelling of “Huckleberry Finn,” which published Tuesday, not only makes the runaway the narrator, but it imagines him as a kind of Frederick Douglass: that is, possessed of a capacious mind, a mastery of language, a willingness to fight and a reckless burning to write his own story.
As forward-thinking and imaginative as Twain was, not even he could have conceived of a James.
James is not the Jim from Mark Twain’s late 19th century masterpiece. As forward-thinking and imaginative as Twain was, not even he could have conceived of a James. And if by some miracle he could have conceived of such a man, he needed his books to be commercial successes, which means he wouldn’t have been foolish enough to write a character white readers would have been certain to reject. Here in the 21st century, though, we need this Jim: a Jim who knows that slavery isn’t what Ron DeSantis wants kids in Florida to think it was; a Jim who can show a pandering Nikki Haley what America’s always been; a Jim who knows that the real American pastime is creating mythologies of white American goodness and telling similarly implausible tales about who Black people are. All this, of course, means that the book banners are likely to mount a concerted effort to keep “James” away from the children.
Sadly, 30 years ago some parents were trying to keep “Huckleberry Finn” away from the children. Because of Jim. Or, more specifically, because of the word Twain’s characters most often use to refer to him. Those who criticize Twain’s use of that epithet have always struck me as wanting his book to have been set in a later time, which, given the plot, it couldn’t have been. In his 1996 book “Dark Witness,” Ralph Wiley, the late Southern-born Black writer, captured my thoughts perfectly. “There is not one usage of ‘n—-r’ in ‘Huck Finn’ that I consider inauthentic,” Wiley wrote, “and I am hard to please that way.”
Even so, Everett telling the story from Jim’s perspective means his character gets to reveal how he thinks of himself. In a pivotal scene, after the title character has stopped pretending that he doesn’t know grammar and doesn’t know how to make his subjects and verbs agree, he tells Huck plainly, “I’m not a n—-r.”
It’s sad, but somehow fitting, that a great American novel that argues for the humanity of those who’d been held as chattel is a mostly comedic odyssey, in which an uneducated and naïve white boy is the center, and the Black husband and father running for freedom is the secondary character. But Twain told the story he could tell. Everett puts the people in the most peril in the center of the story. The people being systematically exploited, the people being chained, the people being whipped, the people being raped. His decision is not unlike, say, putting the plight of enslaved Africans in the center of the story of America.
In a March 9 MSNBC column, professor Koritha Mitchell pointed out how important it was to Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs that they be credited for having written the story of their lives. That is, they did not want readers to hold the false belief that they’d merely told their story to a writer. Why? Because the ability to write a narrative undercuts the argument that Africans were subhuman and, therefore, deserving of enslavement. Even those who could accept that Douglass and Jacobs were capable of the high-order thinking that writing requires likely saw them as exceptions. In “James,” Everett pushes us to see them as the norm.
In his dreams, James argues with philosophers Voltaire and John Locke and accuses them of hypocrisy for finding exceptions to their views regarding freedom and equality. While he’s on the run, he makes the fateful decision to take possession of a pencil. Among the first words he writes are these: “I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.”
Everett, a master satirist whose novel “Erasure” was adapted for the Oscar-winning film “American Fiction,” told NPR that he isn’t trying to erase Twain.
“My writing ‘James’ is not in any way an indictment of Twain at all,” Everett told NPR. “I’m writing the novel that Twain was not ill-equipped, but unequipped to write. That being the story of Jim. So I consider this more as being in discourse with Twain.” Wiley — who loved “Huckleberry Finn” and Twain so much that he wrote a Huck Finn screenplay for his friend Spike Lee — argued that Twain thought more highly of Jim than he’s given credit for. As Wiley saw it, Twain wrote scenes where Jim is playing like he’s slow, which some readers misperceived as Twain writing a slow-thinking character. Percival Everett, @TheBookerPrizes shortlistee, shows American classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a wholly new and transformative light by telling the story of Huck's slave, Jim. For signed copies of this enthralling, witty and powerful novel: https://t.co/3GHiy0kS5Y pic.twitter.com/f1nQeSZrtf Everett highlights the disparity between what the character thinks and how he acts in a way that not even Twain could have done. Because Twain could never have seen more of a Black person than that Black person wanted him to see. That gets to the core of our current fight over books, our current fight over history. There are those who act as if the whole story can be told from one perspective and insist that those who are left out should shut up. Then there are those who know, as James does, that we’ll forever be misperceived and misrepresented if we don’t tell the story ourselves.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. He was previously editor-in-chief at the Louisiana Illuminator and a columnist and deputy opinion editor at The Times-Picayune. 
