The Curmudgeon: Huck’s Jim Gets a Chance to Speak for Himself In James

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of America’s greatest works of literature—and one of its most problematic. Contemporary writer Percival Everett provides a new path into the book’s greatness and addresses its problems head-on in his own novel, James, published this month. 

Twain’s book contains brilliant comic set pieces and powerful evocations of small-town American life in the mid-19th century. But its greatness lies in its ability to put us in the head of the waifish, barely literate title character, a 13-year-old boy who has unwittingly absorbed the bigotries of the day. Once Twain has lured us inside that head, he has us experience the cathartic epiphany that Huck has about the evils of slavery.

 The problems with the book stem from Twain’s willingness to share those unfiltered bigotries with us. The novel’s second major character is Jim, an adult runaway slave, frequently referred to with a racist epithet. The language may be true to 19th-century vernacular, but it grates horribly on 21st-century ears. It seems unfair to require college students of color to confront that language on every other page, so it’s understandable that the book doesn’t get assigned as much as its importance might suggest.

 More troubling in some ways is the way Jim is portrayed within the text. He’s clearly the most moral, most sensible human being in the book, but it’s a childish kind of saintliness. His good morals and good sense come from his instincts rather than from mature, analytic thought.

Everett retells Twain’s narrative from inside Jim’s head rather than Huck’s. Most of the events are the same, but the perspective is radically different. Everett’s James is far from childish; in fact, his internal monologues resemble those of a grad student at a good university. In Chapter 2 of James, the title character teaches his six children how to speak to white people—how to speak like Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

“Why do we talk differently for them? James asks his kids. “The better they feel, the safer we are,” they respond. And how would you translate that phrase if you were speaking to whites? “Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safter we be.”

At the end of the chapter, a white man interrupts two slaves conversing in good English. The slaves immediately revert to the pidgin dialect, and when the pompous man walks on, one slave asks the other: “When we see him staggering around later acting the fool, will that be an example of proleptic or dramatic irony?” 

Everett is not trying to convince us that slaves actually spoke like jargon-addicted academics. He’s using comic hyperbole to make the point that slaves acted childish around their masters as camouflage and acted like thoughtful adults around one another—as have the members of many an oppressed group throughout history.

 And because we’re in the head of James, an intelligent, well-read man, we get a running commentary—a political and psychological analysis of every event in the story. This is very different from Twain’s book, where we’re inside the head of an undereducated kid who misunderstands much of what’s going on. 

In Huckleberry Finn, the irony derives from the gap between what the reader knows and what the narrator (Huck) knows. In James, the irony derives from the gap between what the narrator (James) knows and what Huck knows. This leaves the reader with less work to do—and less room for participation—but fills in the gaps in our understanding of Twain’s book.

Both books begin with a comic set piece where Huck and Tom play a joke on Jim by stealing his hat while he’s asleep and hanging it on a nearby peg. In the Twain version, Jim is really asleep; in the Everett version, he’s merely pretending to be asleep—to indulge the youngsters’ foolishness and to avoid quarreling with white folks.

Jim soon learns that his owner, the widow Miss Watson, is going to sell him downriver to New Orleans, separating him from his wife and children. He slips away that night and swims out into the Mississippi River to hide out on Jackson Island. He discovers Huck is already camping there, having faked his own murder to get away from his abusive father. Huck sneaks back into town and discovers that Jim is wanted for Huck’s “murder.”

The two fugitives need to get away, so they pluck a timber raft out of a flood’s flotsam. Intending to reach the Ohio River and the free states of the north, they follow the current south. They visit a grounded steamboat and outwit the thieves there; when they’re separated in a fog, each tries desperately to find the other. They outwit two slave hunters, only to be separated again when their raft is shattered by a large steamboat. They both wash up on separate points on the Illinois shore where the feuding Grangerford and Shepherdson clans battle each other and still own slaves in a supposedly free state. All these plot points are in both books.

 Twain portrays the Illinois scenes. though, through the eyes of Huck, still separated from Jim, while Everett tells them through the eyes of James, who is adopted by the local slaves. When the latter ask what they can bring to James’s hiding place, he replies, a pencil. This is a crucial scene, for it emphasizes that the right to own a stubby yellow pencil, the ability to tell one’s own story on paper, is as important, maybe more important than the clothes or nourishment he might have requested. It marks James as someone who needs to express himself, and who might develop into an author who writes a book very much like the one that bears his name.

The two books converge again for the chapters about the Duke and the King, two scruffy con men who fleece the locals and threaten Huck and Jim into submission. But Everett springs James loose from Twain’s brilliant comic set piece to invent a new one: James becomes a slave in a blacksmith shop and then in a blackface musical troupe called the Virginia Minstrels led by Daniel Decatur Emmett. Emmett was a real person who claimed to have written “Dixie,” “Polly Wolly Doodle” and “Old Dan Tucker,” and all three tunes were popularized by his real-life group.

This sets up the absurd spectacle of a Black man applying blackface to himself, so he can pretend to be a white man pretending to be a Black man. And that allows Everett to riff productively on America’s racially confused culture. Emmett is one of the book’s more interesting characters: both a charlatan and a true artist, not as racist as most, but racist nonetheless. Norman, one of the other singers, is also a runaway slave but light enough to pass for white. He and James soon tire of Emmett and run away from the troupe.

 The following nine chapters, constituting Part Two of the three-movement book, are devoted to Everett’s version of the classic escaped-slave narrative, complete with disguises, ingenuity, close calls, hard times, and violence. Huck doesn’t reappear till the very last page of this section. He hangs around for the first eight chapters of Part Three, which includes a surprise revelation that I won’t disclose, but then James is on his own for a final fury of revenge against those who have done his kind wrong.

Everett moves Twain’s story ahead several decades to the 1860s, to accommodate not only the Virginia Minstrels but also the Civil War. By demonstrating how slavery was the root cause of both minstrel music and the war between the states, Everett provides an additional resonance to Twain’s tale, which was strangely ahistorical. 

By following James’s righteous anger to its logical conclusion, Everett gives the story a political coherence it lacked in Twain’s version. In doing so, however, Everett robs the reader of the chance to make up one’s own mind. The genius of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the way it camouflages itself as a boy’s adventure story and/or a comic satire of life on the Mississippi. Twain leaves it to the reader to wrestle alongside Huck as to what’s more important: the letter of the law or the humanity of Jim. Everett is so direct about what’s right and wrong that the reader needn’t wrestle with much of anything.

There is, however, an analogy between Huck’s gradual recognition of Jim as a complete, complicated person in Twain’s book and James’s gradual recognition of Huck as the same in Everett’s book. In the opening chapters of the latter volume, James sees Huck and Tom as annoying, untrustworthy white boys who have to be put up with rather than engaged. Even when he helps Huck out, he asks himself, Why am I doing this? But the reader sees a genuine friendship evolve—one that would be convincing even without the gratuitous plot twist near the book’s end.

 That bond between Huck and James provides the emotional gravity in both books. The weight of that connection allows both authors to indulge in all kinds of social commentary and comic hijinks while remaining grounded in true feeling. It’s a relationship of mutual respect that seems impossible in that world and improbable in ours, but it’s friendship that Twain and Everett—each in his own way—persuade us to believe in.

James is being published in the latter stage of the 67-year-old Everett’s career. After publishing more than 30 books, the often-overlooked author has never had a higher profile than right now. He is best known, perhaps, for writing the 2001 novel Erasure, which was the basis for the 2023 movie American Fiction. In fact, he was sitting next to the film’s director-screenwriter Cord Jefferson when the latter rose to walk down the aisle to accept the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay earlier this month.

 It’s a brilliant movie, thanks not only to Jefferson’s astute adaptation of Everett’s book but also to Jeffrey Wright’s virtuoso performance—has an actor ever expressed more with just his or her eyebrows? He plays the English professor and critics-favorite/poor-selling novelist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, named after the jazz pianist and the author of Invisible Man. Monk is tired of seeing his elegant updatings of Greek myths consigned to university presses (as Erasure originally was) and shelved under African-American Interest in bookstores. “The blackest thing in my books is the ink,” he complains.

Meanwhile, the TV shows and best-seller lists celebrate poorly written, transparently pandering depictions of ghetto life. Monk seeks revenge by writing his own version of such a book; he calls it  My Pathology, changes that to My Pafology, and finally to Fuck, as if daring publishers to accept it. When the politically correct—both Black and white—embrace the book, Monk is even more depressed. This is all very funny, but it’s humor with a sting. It’s a great movie, and it’s mostly faithful to Everett’s book. But because a film can never contain as much dialogue and plot as a novel, a lot had to get left out. Everett’s book, for example, includes the complete manuscript of Fuck and a lot more literary-insider satire.

One thing that Monk complains about is how Black artists and academics are always asked to comment on racial issues and seldom about the field they’re actually an expert in. Everett himself has written incisively about race in Erasure, James, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, and Trees, the latter a fantasia inspired by the killing of Emmet Till. But Everett has also written many novels that touch on race only glancingly.

 My favorite of those other books is 2020’s Telephone, which quotes from both Soren Kierkegaard and Groucho Marx. At its core, though, the book provides one of the best descriptions of a healthy father-daughter relationship I’ve ever encountered. There are modernist touches—notations from chess games and geology expeditions are sprinkled through the text—but at the center is an emotional bond as surprising and as compelling as the one between James and Huck.

It would be easy to mistake Everett’s intent in James, to assume he’s making a take-down attack on Twain. Everett dispels that notion in the acknowledgments after the story has ended. “Finally,” he writes, “a nod to Mark Twain. His humor and humanity affected me long before I became a writer.” This is a critique that comes out of affection rather than enmity.

From this year forward,  James and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be forever linked—each one less a companion than a completion of its partner. By filling in what’s missing in its fellow, the pair create a full-spectrum American voice.