(Photo illustration by Marty Schladen, Ohio Capital Journal)
Many are terrified to take a new look at our culture’s stories through another’s eyes. Just look at all the fake frenzy over “DEI” and the many, many attempts to hide the glaring fact that dominant, white males in the United States haven’t always treated others equitably. It would seem that the truth is just too true for these erstwhile tough guys to hear.
But I’ve always loved being drawn — or dragged — to a new perspective; to see a broader, brighter reality as yet another benefactor removes yet another set of blinders I didn’t know I was wearing.
Percival Everett did just that last year’s novel “James,” a reimagining of Mark Twain’s 1884 classic “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” He wrote it from the perspective of Jim, a runaway slave at the center of the earlier book, only in the new one, his name is James.
Since it’s Black History Month, which aims to elevate unheard perspectives, I lucked out by reading “James” just in time to have a news excuse to prattle on about it. But isn’t only topical because it’s February. It also shows to devastating effect how vital literacy and writing are to freedom at a time when those gifts are threatened.
With “James,” Everett emphatically does not try to condemn Twain. In fact, he pays Mr. Clemens this encomium in the acknowledgements: “His humor and humanity affected me long before I became a writer. Heaven for the climate, hell for my long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain.”
Everett’s purpose instead is to take a tale woven deeply into the fabric of American culture and get people to focus their minds a little more directly at reality. I’m sure Twain himself would have loved it.
“Huckleberry Finn” is one of those books I’ve read at least 30 times. First picking it up as a boy, it became a staple of summertime reading, in part because the riverine epic echoed strongly with a kid who grew up not far from — and then along — the Ohio. I also love what everybody loves about that book. It’s a wonderful tale, told with great wit and in dialects that demonstrate Twain’s exquisite ear for the language.
But then there’s the deeper import that is paradoxically dark and ennobling.
We’ve certainly seen retrogression now and earlier, but as Dr. King said, the arc of the moral universe ultimately “bends toward justice.” If that means anything, it means that most white Americans — and probably Americans generally — were a whole lot more racist in 1884 than they are now. The country wasn’t even 20 years past abolishing official slavery. And, in all the ghastly manifestations of Jim Crow, the unofficial version was alive and well and would be for at least another 80 years.
Despite that, “Huckleberry Finn” received a strong public reception upon publication. Some fastidious critics condemned it as “crude,” but average people lapped it up.
This despite the fact that there are only two truly sympathetic characters in the novel — a white-trash boy and a slave he’s helping to run away. Most of the others are at turns ridiculous, hypocritical, selfish, crooked, or all of those things. “Huckleberry Finn” was serious social criticism, and most of Twain’s readers didn’t get it.
The fact that he was able to make fun of Americans to their face and get away with it is said to have contributed to his deep depression in later life. But in a talk I attended years ago, it also prompted journalist and critic Alistair Cooke to dub Twain “the American Voltaire.”
So when Everett sought to push “Huckleberry Finn” another step toward truth, he waded into waters that were deep indeed.
He starts right off, showing that while Twain has Huck and Tom Sawyer playing cute pranks on a gullible Jim, James sees them as obnoxious little brats he has to humor. It’s one of the many exhausting ways Everett’s James has to conform himself to white stereotypes about Black people because he’s completely at their mercy.
“Ain’t no such things as rights,” James says to Huck after they’d run off, but before James lets Huck in on the fact that he was speaking in a slave dialect because if the wrong white people heard his true, more-proper speech, he would be tortured or even killed.
For James — as opposed to Jim — was something slaves weren’t allowed to be; an autodidact. He sneaked into Judge Thatcher’s extensive library, taught himself to read, read voraciously, learned to speak correctly and, crucially, to write.
Other slaves might not have been literate, but throughout the novel, when they’re among trusted peers, they throw off the step-and-fetch-it caricature white culture forces on them and talk soberly, intelligently and often cynically.
For James, however, literacy is an indispensable pathway to freedom.
While they’re on the run — and before James has outed himself to Huck — he salvages a stack of books from a wrecked steamboat. Reading while Huck’s asleep, James worries what to do if Huck wakes and catches him.
“At that moment, the power of reading made itself clear and real to me,” James narrates. “If I could see the words, no one could control them or know what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.”
Writing is an even more powerful freedom. James gets a trusted slave friend to steal a pencil stub for him. The friend, Young George, understands the power of the tool in capable hands. Subject to a merciless flogging over the theft, Young George winks at James as he and Huck flee, unseen by the whites, into the forest.
That humble stub is a treasure James carries in his pocket through the rest of the story, using it sparingly as the means of controlling his own narrative.
“With my pencil, I wrote myself into being,” he says.
Those images struck me as especially relevant just now, as public discourse is drowning in a cesspool of logarithm-driven social media. Expertise, facts and independent voices are being muffled under the mountain of BS shoveled by tech billionaires who seem to be finding the democracy that made them so rich to now be inconvenient.
For James the power of freedom emanated from a pencil stub. Similarly, Halik Kochanski in her 2022 book “Resistance” wrote that civilian efforts to undermine Hitler and his minions drew their power from underground newspapers that gave resisters identity, cohesion and purpose. It remains to be seen if modern pens can retain such power.
Everett converts “Jim” to “James” in large part by making him literate and thus able to appreciate the full possibility of freedom even while he’s denied it at every turn. Everett departs from the Twain narrative in a number of other important ways. But far from being a preachy polemic, the book is an enthralling story that I think people should read for themselves. So I don’t want to give away some of its startling endings.
One important departure that doesn’t need a spoiler alert (I don’t think) is that Everett gives Huck an innocence that Twain doesn’t. That might seem ironic, given that Everett tries to wipe away any nostalgia for an ugly period that Twain might have evoked in his readers. But in “James,” gone are Huck’s guilt-racked musings that he had to be the lowest sort of white person to help a slave run away.
That might have been Twain’s way of illustrating the hypocrisy of racial “values” in antebellum Missouri. In “James,” however, Everett seems to be demonstrating that racism is a sin that as yet is not completely internalized by young Huck.
“I kin see how much you miss your family and yet I don’t think about it,” Huck tells James at one point. “I forget that you feel things jest like I feel. I know you love them.”
Everett also leans far deeper into the cruelty of slavery than Twain did.
Twain treated two charlatans with whom Huck and Jim are thrown together as somewhat lovable scoundrels. “James” portrays what is likely a far truer version — one that an 1884 audience wouldn’t have abided.
Everett’s story tells how the “Duke” and the “King” quickly recognized James’s potential value either from being sold as a slave or from any reward they might collect if they turned him in as a runaway. They took him hostage, at one point beating James so badly that it temporarily lamed him. That earned the heartless, ungrateful bastards Huck’s everlasting hatred.
In an even more harrowing scene, Everett describes James being hidden by a slave couple in a cabin on the Widow Douglas’s place. While Katie’s husband is gone, the sadistic overseer, Hopkins, enters the cabin and tells Katie to hike up her skirt, and casually rapes her. From his hiding place, James is forced to watch in silence — and think about how many times this has happened to his beloved wife — because he knows that if he kills Hopkins in that setting, terror would rain down on every slave in the place.
Think this depiction is over the top? Read Ty Seidule’s Robert E. Lee and Me. The West Point historian writes that not only was the rape of slave women routine in the old South, masters often sold their own resultant children off into further slavery. Southern honor indeed. To me it seems blindingly obvious why white racists were so obsessed with the idea of Black men raping white women as they lynched Blacks in their thousands. White men had been raping powerless Black women for centuries, so in the lynch mobs’ fevered minds, Black men naturally would want to do the same.
In “James,” Everett neither copies Twain nor does he try to reject the earlier work. Instead, he takes it the next logical step and brings it into an era when, troubled as it is, one can tell more truth about this past than one could in Twain’s day.
Twain would have loved his successor’s demonstration of the absurdity of “race” in American culture as he described James’s brief participation in a blackface minstrel band.
“There we were, twelve of us, marching down the main street that separated the free side of town from the slave side, 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 passing for Black.”
No wonder James was exhausted.
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