You Should Read JAMES by Percival Everett
“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.”
Reading Notes
When I finish reading a book, there are two fool-proof signs I liked it.
One: I spend the next week starting all my conversations with “You should read…”
Two: I immediately start planning how to incorporate some aspect of the book into my classroom.
Percival Everett’s latest, James, checked both of those boxes. (See text messages below for proof.)
In full transparency, I was skeptical of James. I couldn’t have given you a good reason. I’ve never read a book by Everett, so I didn’t have a bad experience to blame, and I loved American Fiction, which was based on his novel Erasure. But James is a retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and, well, let’s just say I have some complicated feelings about Huck Finn. I wrote recently about my decision to stop teaching Of Mice and Men a few years ago, in part because of an experience in my past when I disregarded a student’s concerns about the n-word. The n-word appears in Twain’s novel as well, but that’s not the only cause of my ambivalence. I spent my first four years in the classroom teaching Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and it was about as much fun as getting my kids to clean their rooms. (See photos below for proof.)
We teach Twain as an exemplar of many literary skills, including humor, satire, characterization, and dialect. The dialect that makes Huck Finn who he is, however, was often too big a barrier to comprehension for my students. For example, here’s what Jim says when Huck and Tom sneak up on him: “Say, who is you? Whar is you? Dog my cats ef I didn’ hear sumf’n. Well, I know what I’s gwyne to do: I’s gwyne to set down here and listen tell I hears it agin.” We spent so much time parsing what was going on that we hardly got around to discussing how it was presented and why it mattered (Layers of Meaning footnote). Even when I shifted gears and started teaching chapters as stand-alone texts with additional scaffolding, many of the teenagers in my class struggled—which is why I am thrilled about Everett’s take on Jim’s story in James.
Rewriting the story from Jim’s perspective, Everett undermines Twain’s Huck as a narrator right away. In the first line of the novel, Jim notices Huck and Tom Sawyer sneaking up on him:
“Those little bastards were hiding out in there in the tall grass.”
Never in Twain’s time would Jim’s enslaved character have been able to voice that thought about two white boys. Therein lies the genius of Everett’s premise: James is all about what Jim has to say—and how he says it.
In the second chapter, Jim sits down with his daughter and other enslaved children to “[give] a language lesson” because “[s]afe movement through the world depend[s] on mastery of language, fluency.” In Everett’s reimagining, slaves speak grammatically “correct” English amongst themselves. The language lessons are to teach the children to speak incorrectly around white people. As Jim explains:
“Let them work to understand you. Mumble sometimes so they can have the satisfaction of telling you not to mumble. They enjoy the correction and thinking you’re stupid. Remember, the more they choose to not want to listen, the more we can say to one another around them.”
That line both chilled and cheered me. This is the book I want to teach, I thought. The scene reminded me of John McWhorter’s Words on the Move. In the introduction to that book McWhorter, a linguistics professor, argues that language constantly evolves: “One of the hardest notions for a human being to shake is that a language is something that is, when it is actually something always becoming.” Additionally, language is also employed as a gatekeeper because speaking “correctly” reflects on your character—as Jim well knows.
Throughout his travels on and off the Mississippi River, Jim must be cautious to speak in the appropriate vernacular. After being bit by a snake, he hallucinates a conversation with Voltaire. When he returns to consciousness, Huck says, “You sho talk funny in yer sleep. . . . What does hierarchy mean? . . . Are you possessed, Jim?”
Jim scrambles to cover for himself by using his “slave” speak again: “A snake is da devil, ain’t he. I hopes he din’t put no demons in my blood.” As he pretends to sleep, he reflects:
“I was afraid to sleep again for fear of Huck coming back and hearing my thoughts without their passing through my slave filter. I was even more afraid of further unproductive, imagined conversations with Voltaire, Rousseau and Locke about slavery, race and, of all things, albinism. How strange a world, a strange an existence, that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality, that one’s equal must hold a station that allows airing of that argument, that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree.”
Along his journey, Jim finds a pencil and begins to write his story, one that is particularly his—and Everett’s. One thing I loved about this book was that although I knew the bones of Twain’s story, I was still surprised by the twists of Jim’s journey in James. Everett’s quick pacing pulled me through the book in two days, and he landed a magic feat of an ending that felt at once inevitable and unpredictable.
Another Parnassus First Editions pick! Ann Patchett and I should be friends since we like the same books.
While I don’t know that I’ll get the book through the full approval process with my board of education this year, I’m planning a side-by-side lesson with excerpts from James and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for this fall. I’ll share that when it’s done, but in the meantime, (if you teach!) you can check out my three-tiered before-during-after reading task cards for characterization, which uses a couple quotes from James.
Whether you’re in a classroom this fall or not, you should read James.
Need-to-Know
Pub Date: 2024
Length: 302 pages; audiobook runs close to 8 hrs
Setting: Missouri and the Mississippi River, 1840s
Narrator: Jim’s 1st POV
Fun Fact: Everett retells Twain’s classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, Huck’s enslaved companion.
Pairs Well With: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (duh); Norwegian by Night by Derek B. Miller (a sort of Huck Finn-meets-Scandinavian-noir situation that I remember liking years ago); Erasure by Percival Everett (for an earlier work); Words on the Move by John McWhorter (for some nonfiction linguistics context)
Book Club
If you’ve read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, what was that experience like? Did you enjoy it? In what context did you read it? How did that experience compare with reading James?
Jim witnesses a white man, Hopkins, cruelly violate a young slave woman named Katie. Afterward Jim thinks, “I wanted to tell her I was sorry, but that really didn’t make any sense. We both knew where we were and we knew that we didn’t know anything else. We knew that she, I, all of us, were forever naked in the world” (278). Jim is specifically referring to the condition of slavery.
When you consider the ending of the book, how do you think Jim might reflect on being “forever naked in the world.” Do you think his feelings might change? In what ways? How do you think this generational legacy of being “forever naked in the world” might be passed on to his daughter Lizzie?
Close Reading
Direct characterization occurs when an author tells readers about a character. When Jim finds out Miss Watson intends to sell him, he runs for his freedom, promising to return for his wife and daughter. He thinks:
“I was as much scared as angry, but where does a slave put anger? We could be angry with one another; we were human. But the real source of our rage had to go without address, swallowed, repressed.”
In this moment, Everett deploys direct characterization to tell us how Jim feels. While it seems to break that silly “show, don’t tell” mantra of writing (silly because as advice, it lacks nuance), it’s actually very effective here. Everett tells us exactly how Jim feels because the point here isn’t to infer. Slavery’s dehumanization of Jim is what Everett wants us to consider.
Indirect characterization occurs when an author reveals a character’s personality through carefully chosen details, such as that person’s actions or effect on others. Jim finds a stack of papers in a flooded house floating down the river. Once he’s recovered, he waits for Huck to leave before fashioning a pencil from a stick:
“For the first time in my life, I had paper and ink. . . . Then I wrote my first words. I wanted to be certain that they were mine and not some I had read from a book in the judge’s library. I wrote: I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name.”
Here Everett opts for indirect over direct characterization. Through Jim’s actions, we understand the importance of this moment. His careful choice of words—his insistence on owning them, rather than repeating something he’s already read—hint at what writing will come to mean to him. The grammatical construction of his first sentence is significant because it’s in the passive voice. There is an implied prepositional phrase, “by others,” at the end of the sentence. “Others” are the ones who do the action of calling. Jim recognizes that “Jim” is a construction of the slave system he grew up in. His second sentence reveals his determination to claim his own name and identity.
Creative Writing
Fiction: Choose a novel you’ve read and loved. Imagine it from another perspective. For instance, Geraldine Brooks revisited Little Women from Mr. March’s perspective in March. Jo Baker reconsiders Pride and Prejudice from a servant’s point-of-view in Longbourn. (Read both! They are some of my favorite historical fiction titles!).
Start with one scene where your character is in the background. Bring them to the forefront. Focus on their senses: What do they hear, see, taste, feel, smell? Now zoom into their emotions: What do they want, fear, value, believe? When the story is framed this way, how do you start to see the original “main” characters differently?
Creative Nonfiction: Suffering from his snakebite, Jim hallucinates conversations with French philosopher Voltaire. The scene serves a couple of purposes. First, it illustrates Jim’s intelligence that is capable of arguing with a renowned thinker of the Enlightenment. Second, it highlights the hypocritical reasoning that bolstered the slave trade. Voltaire tells Jim, “I think we are all equal, regardless of color, language or habit. . . . However, you must realize that climate and geography can be significant factors in determining human development. It’s not that your features make you unequal, it’s that they are signs of biological differences . . . that stop you from achieving the more perfect human form found in Europe” (49). When Jim asks Voltaire how he justifies slavery, “Voltaire shrug[s]” (50).
Choose a well-known historical figure from any discipline. Imagine you can ask them to explain their opinion on a current issue. What does Monet think about AI-generated art, for example? How does Beethoven feel about country music? Which presidential candidate would Lucille Ball support?
Sentence Study
When Jim finds a small collection of books, he reads “like a man who [has] not eaten for a season and [has] then gorged himself until sick.” While initially he is ecstatic about his discovery, he soon realizes these aren’t books he wants, particularly the Bible:
“I could not enter it, did not want to enter, and then understood that I recognized it as a tool of my enemy. I chose the word enemy, and still do, as oppressor necessarily supposes a victim.”
I love how thoughtful Everett is with Jim’s diction. Let’s look at that first sentence, where Jim uses “enter” as a synonym for “read.” The use of that word indicates Jim’s awareness that reading is an active task. There are many ways an author could invite a reader to engage with a text, but something about the Bible is off-putting to Jim. Instead of viewing the book as a guide, as believers might, or as literature, as a scholar might, he realizes that it is a “tool,” a word that connotes work. He can’t “enter” it because the “enemy”—society—has put it to work against him.
In the second sentence, Jim explains his word choice more clearly. (Note: “enemy” and “oppressor” are italicized in the original, but the formatting didn’t work for my pull-out quote.) Just as reading requires active engagement, so too does resistance. When he uses the word “enemy,” he signals that he is equal in his humanity, if not in his rights. He rejects the word “oppressor” because it suggests a passive victim. Because we have already seen Jim at work giving language lessons, this brief aside where he explains his diction fits right into his character. Also, it’s a pretty brilliant and succinct example of how to do a close reading!
