James

Percival Everett

Mantle, 2024

Review by Suzanne Harrington

There’s a Gary Larson cartoon where a group of cows are standing upright in a field, talking. When the lookout cow by the fence yells ‘Car!’, the cows drop to all fours and silently eat grass, until the car is gone. Then they stand upright again, and resume their conversation.   

This kind of radical code-switching – central to Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure – is further weaponised in his new novel James, where language and what it signifies drives the narrative alongside the novel’s chain of relentless events. The result is heart-stopping, enraging, page-turning, and horribly, appallingly funny.  

To read James, it helps to know Huck – Everett has done something of a Jean Rhys with this classic, problematic American text.  Just as Rhys gave us the perspective of Bertha Mason in her  1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea (the ‘mad wife in the attic’ in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, published almost two hundred years earlier in 1847), Everett – with coruscating wit and fury – has created a new version of the old story from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man in Mark Twain’s 1884 classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In Twain’s text, set in a pre-abolitionist US,  Jim is eventually bestowed his freedom; in Everett’s, James seizes it himself.

Twain’s novel has at its heart – embedded amid the endless boy adventuring – the consciousness-awakening of Huck, an abused white kid who clumsily comes to realise the humanity of the black adult Jim, a husband and father who is presented as simple-minded, superstitious, subservient, and inarticulate.  

Huck says of Jim, ‘I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for ther’n. It don’t seem natural, but I reckon it’s so.’ He has been socialised to regard Jim as property; that it is a straight-to-hell sin to assist in Jim’s escape.  Yet when he has the chance to turn Jim in, he agonises, but ultimately doesn’t:  ‘All right then, I’ll go to hell.’

Mostly Huck’s budding awareness comes from how humanely Jim treats Huck as they stealth-travel on the Mississippi together – Huck fleeing a violent father, Jim running for his life, after learning he is about to be separated from his family and sold down the river. By the end of Twain’s novel, after the reader has navigated the n-word 219 times, Huck gives Jim this compliment: ‘I knowed he was white inside.’  

Percival Everett turns it all on its head.  James is neither simple nor subservient, but a master of adaptation as survival tool, a skilled linguistic trickster. He speaks ‘slave’ when in the presence of white people, and teaches enslaved children to do the same. Some of the funniest scenes are here. When the children say in unison, ‘The better they [whites] feel, the safer we are,’ James instructs one little girl to translate, which she immediately does: ‘Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.’

James sneaks into his enslaver’s library; he can read and write. ‘If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them …. if I were merely seeing them or reading them.  It was a completely private affair, and completely free and therefore completely subversive.’

He knows Voltaire, John Locke, the difference between proleptic irony and dramatic irony.  On the run, his most treasured possession is a stolen pencil and notebook: ‘With my pencil, I write myself into being.’ That this pencil stub originally belonged to a white man results in one of the book’s most horrifying scenes.  

Because unlike the tale of Huckleberry Finn, all hair-raising japes and boyish capers for their own sake, James is about the cold adult horror of slavery. The abject terror of being caught. Dehumanisation, powerlessness, the endless, casual violence.  White savagery. 

However, this being Everett, a writer who (successfully) wrote a comic novel about lynching – 2021’s The Trees – James is confidently, bleakly funny: the story bounces along, bubbling and fast paced as the Mississippi, filled with characters from the original novel, until the pair are separated, and we follow Jim, rather than Huck. We watch as Jim transforms to James, his buried rage surfacing, his powers gathering against a backdrop of the emerging Civil War. The comic absurdity does not abate.

We meet Norman, a black man passing as white, performing with the Virginia Minstrels (a real troupe, said to be a favourite of Twain’s). We navigate blackface:  ‘Ten white men in blackface, one black man passing for white and painted black, and me, a light-brown black man painted black in such a way as to appear like a white man trying to pass for black.’    

We encounter casual dehumanisation: ‘They’s like lil’ monkeys, ain’t they.’ Asked by a white policeman what slaves require, Norman – pretending to be white – says: ‘Food, water,  Just like a dog.  Except they can sort of talk.’  James wonders if his new friend might be ‘an insane white man who fancied he was black’, before realising it makes no difference:  ‘What did that mean anyway?’

This being Everett, we are also treated to an epic twist which adds deeper meaning to the narrative, plus a big ending.  You won’t want it to end. It’s a masterpiece – an American classic.

https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/percival-everett/james/9781035031238