It is perhaps worth mentioning that I started writing this review on the 4th of July, American Independence Day; a day when Americans threw off British control. To some, this was a liberation. But for many, independence was theoretical, and merely marked the start of a long battle for equality and justice: through the Civil War (1861-1865) and out past the Civil Rights movement (1954-1968). It is fair to say that even now in 2025 those struggles and shadows of the past are still very much present.
Percival Everett, with his Pulitzer Prize winning novel James takes us back to the antebellum era for the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told through the eyes, and crucially writing, of Jim. It’s certainly no requirement to read Huckleberry Finn in order to enjoy James; Everett is a masterful storyteller and guides us through events with his own unique, gripping and insightful style. I have, however, read both back-to-back. My main reason was that, not being American, I am less familiar with the source material, gaining many of Huck Finn’s cultural references from The Simpsons. In reading both in close proximity, I felt I had a deeper appreciation of both Twain and Everett’s work, how both support each other and tell stories that justify historic and future classic status.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Ernest Hemingway reportedly described this book as the greatest American novel, ‘All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since’. Provocative, but nonetheless shows the cultural importance of Twain’s work to American literature.
Twain published this story in 1884 after The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and then The Prince and the Pauper (1881). Set pre-Civil War (1861-1865), Twain describes the escapades of 13-year old Huck Finn in and around the Mississippi river. Taking place after The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but in that same world, Huck already has his winnings holed up in the village and is somewhat adopted by the widow Miss Watkins. Finn and Sawyer are essentially a couple of wild boys; they resist going to school and instead prefer the outdoors and adventure. This may have something to do with Huck’s upbringing; his father is an alcoholic, illiterate vagrant and often returns to town in search of money and drink.
Due to a change in legal structure, Finn’s Pa gets custody of Huck and keeps him prisoner in the woods. Partly feral but fully crafty, Huck fakes his own death in order to escape. On route he re-encounters Jim, a black slave who has escaped from the widow’s ownership. Jim has a wife and children, but we don’t hear much about them in Twain’s story, only that he misses them, that his daughter has been deaf and, from the free states, he hopes he can save enough money to buy their freedom.
As the story is written from Huck’s perspective, we look out on this world of slavery, racism, injustice through the eyes of a child. Finn has been taught that the hierarchy of things is such that black people are property and incapable of the same ways of thinking as the white slave owners. Even Huck Finn’s limited education is sufficiently greater than what has been made available to Jim (as far as Huck is aware). But Jim is wise. Wise, he understands Nature and people but is constrained by his environment and the diabolical treatment befalling black people at this time.
The pair, Huck and Jim, go on various ‘adventures’. The connotation of adventure is potentially childish; full of fun and frivolity. The privilege of a white boy, where the repercussions of misdemeanour would be small. To Jim, this is a flight for his life and hopefully for the freedom of his family. There are no trivialities here for Jim; it is a world where lynching and tar and feathering is commonplace. Mob white rule is pervasive and the lives of black people are disregarded.
Twain introduces us to various sharp tales: the Romeo and Juliet style feud between the Sherpherdsons and the Grangerfords as well as those notable swindlers, the Duke and the Dauphin. Throughout Huckleberry Finn, a 13-year old has to come up with solutions to the predicament. How true and plausible is this really? Again we need to remind ourselves that Twain delivers the story through a child, it is his imagining, and so the absolute truth may not be clear. In this story, Jim is often left to follow in Finn’s wake. There are gaps in the action and thought that Everett, in his reimagining, is able to exploit. Crucially, we never know what Jim thinks; he must maintain the facade of the polite black slave, particularly when the Duke and Dauphin arrive.
Towards the end of the book, we have a reappearance from Tom Sawyer, bringing with him more tension and frustration. I felt sickened that the life of a desperate and virtuous man was in the control of two children. Huck, seemingly younger, or at least less resolutely conditioned by the adult world, can recognise the humanitarian crimes that are being committed and is prepared to separate himself from the Law of the State in recognition of something more true, even if it should mean eternal damnation: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’. Huck sees the human and not the property; Twain possibly reasons that often children have a better moral compass than adults.
Despite the epiphany from Huck, I found the ending of Huckleberry Finn not fully satisfactory and was left with more questions. What happens to Jim now? Can Huck carry on this mentality to adulthood? Will he gravitate to the North or South when the war shortly arrives? Many of these questions are addressed by Everett by his masterful inversion of Twain’s original with James.
James – Percival Everett
What is the power of words? Words spoken. Words written. Words read. This seems to be the central question in James. This time, from the perspective of Jim, Everett re-centres the story to expand on how Jim, truly James, feels throughout the adventures covered in Huckleberry Finn. In Twain’s version of events, Huck and Jim both speak in dialect. Particularly in Jim’s case, this has been seen more recently as minimally an oversimplification and, perhaps further, encroaching on racism. Whether correct or not, this shows a representation of the time and, from Huck’s perspective, an illustration of how white people felt black slaves communicated. The dialect may explain context; Jim is a black slave, not privileged in obtaining the education reserved for whites. You could argue Twain uses language to highlight the dehumanising social hierarchy. Everett takes these ideas further, through the theme of reclamation of language. The truth is told in words and belongs to those that are able to wield it. Such is the importance of telling James’ side of the story and he puts it so eloquently:
‘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 reveals Jim to be James; a highly intelligent person, caring father and loving husband. James is bilingual and both learns and teaches ‘slave-speak’ in order to survive by keeping up appearances with the white slave owners,
I could believe it, I thought, pretending in slave fashion not to be there. After being cruel, the most notable white attribute was gullibility’.
Between the two worlds, signified by the two languages, James must continue to walk on this tightrope to survive. With the inversion of language Everett highlights the intelligence of the black slave community, their will to survive and crucially how the annals of white history have represented only the white perspective, which often gives way to caricature. Here, in James the black slave community have had to forge their intellect through language to live, to survive,
‘Heating and cooling it like that will harden the steel’.
The white oppressors – or rather enemies as Everett puts it to denote equals as opposed to a designated victim – show, by comparison, a laziness to entertain any conceivable alternative to the situation. There is no belief from the whites that the slave community could be imbued with any intelligence. Never would they guess that black slaves could leverage deep intellect and ingenuity for survival. Everett highlights that these views are learned and crafted: James teaches the children how to construct the appropriate sentences in slave dialect to maintain appearances and, across both books, Huck Finn suffices as an intermediary between the worlds, between slave and owner, between black and white.
Huck’s naive child’s view allows him to question further. To Huck, James is a friend and someone to look after. In Huckleberry Finn, we don’t know how James feels about this relationship. We assume he is conflicted; there’s a need to maintain the world hierarchy for his own safety, but also to care for a child and to try to manage escape for himself and his family. In James, Everett brings those views to the fore; eloquent words are forged and tilt-off against the received wisdom of the age. We observe James’ wrangling directly with the philosophies of Voltaire and John Locke, as well as outwitting Daniel Emmett through the contemplation of chattel versus bonded slavery.
Emmett is an interesting character for Everett to bring into his story; he reflects the inner cultural conflict in the past of the United States and questions what our modern values and ideals should be. Famous for his career in minstrelsy, Emmett was welcomed into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame in 1970. He is most famous for his song ‘Dixie’; a Southern anthem that was largely adopted in amended form by the Confederacy in the American Civil War. To that end, ‘Dixie’ has been regarded as a hangover from that time, a symbol of pro-slavery secessionists and a racist limiter to the Civil Rights movement. More recently, the playing of ‘Dixie’ has been halted in higher profile southern institutions. Ole Miss (University of Mississippi) decided to part with that particular contentious cultural piece of history. Of course, it took until 2016 to exact that change, far past the abolition of the Jim Crow laws and the inauguration of Barack Obama. Everett reminds us: traditions can be painful markers of a degrading past. They must be examined, scrutinised and weighed for their harm.
The plot of James is, unsurprisingly, relatively similar to Huckleberry Finn. We again meet the Grangerfords and Twain’s equivalents to Pinnochio’s ‘Fox and Cat’ – the Duke and Dauphin, but from a different angle. I would argue that despite similar plot points, we are treated to a richer experience from James’ eyes. Driven towards freedom for himself and those he loves, James shows his virtuousness in coming to the aid of others. Examples of camaraderie are common and efforts are often reciprocated. The tight community is perhaps most poignantly shown in the procurement of a pencil for James; a powerful tool to write his own history, to control his own narrative and carve out his own existence. The consequences for such acts of kindness are often severe, and typically mortal.
Compared to The Trees, this novel is not as overtly outraged, less of an outright call to arms. Everett still emphasises strikingly the appalling construction of slavery and the terrible treatment that the black community in America had to bear. Despite these conditions, and due to the nature of James himself, there are often moments of gentleness and care amongst the rightful fury. In both Twain’s and Everett’s versions the relationship between Huck and James is explored and is central to the core themes of humanity and race. That they obviously care for one another is clear, but that care is formed within the constraints of social hierarchy, emotion and duty. We are often wanting more from Twain, but perhaps this is unfair given it is a world viewed through the eyes of a child. We are lucky then that a writer as skilled as Everett has taken on this work, advancing our view of the world now whilst also casting our thoughts back to the 19th century.
Indeed, that James extends into the start of the Civil War enriches our experience of Twain’s template and shifts our gaze to the future. We are asked, what would it mean as a war for the emancipation of slaves and what real impact would it have for those former slaves who are then freed? Everett’s answer leaves us in no doubt:
“Nobody wants you free”
“Somebody does. There’s a war”
She nodded “Maybe you won’t be a slave, but you won’t be free”.
James is an incredible retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, brought to life with the full force of Everett’s intellect. To me, this is a rich tale full of dextrous subtleties that require deeper contemplation. You certainly do not need to have read Huckleberry Finn in order to read, appreciate and sit in awe of James. But to do so reveals that standing on the shoulders of one literary giant is another.
D