Published by Random House / Mantle / Picador, 2024, 303 pages

“My name is James. I wish I could tell my story with a sense of history as much as industry. I was sold when I was born and then sold again. … 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.

“With my pencil, I wrote myself into being.”

Percival Everett has given us a fresh take on Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the point of view of the slave Jim. While James stays fairly close to the plot of the original, it imbues it with a completely different perspective.

Jim and his wife Sadie and daughter Lizzie are Miss Watson’s slaves. When Jim hears that Miss Watson is going to sell him, separating him from his family, he escapes to Jackson Island, an uninhabited island on the Mississippi. Meanwhile Huck, who lives with Miss Watson, fakes his own death to escape his violent father and also ends up on Jackson Island.

The two of them join forces and take off on the Mississippi river. Jim wants to get enough money to buy Sadie and Lizzie, so he can free them. But he cannot do that as a slave: he needs to go north, where slavery has been abolished.

We get to know Jim much better than we did in the original—he emerges as a much more rounded character. He has educated himself, teaching himself to read and write, and passing that knowledge on to other slaves—secretly, because white folk will never allow a slave to acquire any kind of knowledge. This is reflected in the way slaves speak—proper English among themselves, and slave talk in front of white people, playing to their image of the slave as stupid and gullible, and by doing so, subverting the image. James holds classes for Black children, teaching them how to act stupid in front of white people, to never reveal their knowledge, their ability to read and write. And how better to do this than by speaking like dumb, illiterate folk.

“The children said together, ‘And the better they feel, the safer we are.’
‘February, translate that.’
‘Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.’”

When James slips into normal speech in front of Huck, Huck asks him why he is speaking funny. Although he and Huck are close, Jim cannot trust him enough to let him into the secret.

Knowledge is central to how slaves try to better their lot—it is forbidden fruit as far as their masters are concerned, and therefore even more precious. George, a slave Jim runs into, steals the nub of a pencil for him, with the injunction, “Tell your story”. When the theft is discovered, George is whipped and killed for having dared to steal a nub of a pencil. That incident speaks volumes, not just about the value placed on the lives of slaves and the tyranny they have to live under, but the power that knowledge confers. A slave who can read and write is a threat to the system.

Jim values that pencil in the same way he values the books he stole and carries with him everywhere—that nub is the key to his freedom in a much deeper sense.

There is an incident that I believe is not in Huck Finn and is typical of Everett’s writing: Jim is caught by a farmer, who then sells him to a travelling blackface act—white men who paint their faces with shoe polish and pretend to be Black. Jim becomes one of the actors, but ironically, he isn’t black enough and has to be made up like the others, except that he needs some white make-up around his eyes. A Black man pretending to be a white man pretending to be a Black man. But Jim is not the only Black man in the troupe. There is another Black man, who is pale enough to pass for white.

James was one of my best reads of the year: it is not just clever but has a depth of feeling. I loved Jim—a man who refuses to be defined by others, who walks the tightrope, trying to improve himself, while at the same time, hiding his true self from white people because exposure could get him killed. He is clearly erudite—he has long internal dialogues with philosophers, dialogues that are unimaginable to the people who claim to be smarter and better than him.

By giving this character his own voice, Everett has given the story much more depth. This is a book about race, friendship, and the power of knowledge and language.