A Review of James by Percival Everett
I have long been a fan of Percival Everett. The Hollywood success of American Fiction, the movie based on his brilliant novel Erasure published in 2001 by University of New England Press, as well as his move from the small press world to Doubleday with his latest novel, James, are the dreams of any author. It gives one hope for the idiosyncratic writers of the world, the non-crowd-pleasers, the ones who write what they want because—why else write? James does not depart from his hilarious, dark and brilliant, very extensive body of work. A re-telling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the slave Jim, James, with its short chapters and rollicking plot, is a fast read. But like all of his work, it is full of so much. So much philosophy, so much sadness, so much rage, so much sustained hilarious absurdity, so much meta.
In James, slaves speak in slave language in front of their masters to appease them or—as said on the first page, and a theme repeated throughout the novel—to “give white folks what they want.” When slaves are alone together, they talk in erudite English. In this way, they have their own secret language, one they perform for white people. Jim explains how it is not “slave talk” or thoughts that go through their “slave filter”—it is something else entirely. This hiding of their true selves, and the true way they speak and think and know, is maintained throughout the novel, constantly showing the exhaustion of having to pretend, to perform, to hide one’s true self.
Jim also is well read, very taken with philosophy (like Everett), and in particular, I’d say, with Voltaire. Jim is also a writer, which like the real language spoken amongst the enslaved, must be a secret and is a plain, historical truth. But in this novel, it is also perfectly in line with the “make believe” of how Everett imagines and writes of the formal language spoken in secret. A stolen pencil becomes symbolic of desire for power and an actual power, however personal, in itself. Lately, the saying “controlling the narrative” is getting a lot of attention and for good reason.
Faithful to much to the original tale in plot, Jim decides to run when he hears he is to be sold and hides out on Jackson’s Island. He consoles his wife that he will return to get them, and leaving them causes him great anguish. Throughout the novel, it is his family that gives Jim’s life meaning, gives him the desire to survive. And it is where Everett, reminiscent of the emotion around the family in Erasure, becomes sentimental. Everett’s sentimentality, ironically (irony is often discussed throughout this novel), is made a refreshing aspect of the narrative. This is one of the many ways that Everett shows his subversiveness, taking tender things—love, family, and the hope to be with them, to save them—and turns them into something true and meaningful. Everett can take the maudlin or violin string-pulling of sentimentality and, within his framework of the novel, make it real. The hope Jim has is a sliver of a thing, a barely surviving thing through so much madness and evil in the world, and it is everything to him. When Huck fakes his death to escape his violent father, he finds Jim on Jackson’s Island and it is then that all the white people think that Jim murdered him—he is thought to be a black man who murders a white child. And so, the adventure of Jim and Huck down the Mississippi begins, as her Twain. The conmen known as the Duke and King cause all sorts of trouble; the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons make an appearance. The Mississippi, the raft, the weather, the catfish eating, the steamboats and thieves are all there.
Halfway through the novel, when Huck and Jim get separated at length, is where because we are given Jim’s perspective instead of Huck’s and the narrative departs significantly from Twain’s novel in the best way. Jim is sold first to a man named Wiley, who then sells him to Daniel Decatur Emmett, a historical figure known for founding The Virginia Minstrels, supposedly the first group to perform all in blackface, or, alternately, the first to perform as a group of men in blackface at an actual concert. He buys Jim for his great tenor voice and because Jim is light-skinned, thanks to his mother having most likely been raped, he plans to have Jim pass as a white man pretending to be Black by putting on the blackface paint—a layering of something that seems insane, but could very well have happened because existence is insane, in particular the existence of the horror of slavery.
The mashing up of historical and fictional characters into a narrative that takes from a famous novel isn’t anything stranger than what Everett has done before. But God is he good. In the troupe, Jim meets a black man, Norman, who easily passes as white, and like Jim is trying to save money to buy back his wife. The two men become partners and allies.
The meta. The layers. Everett loves the meta and that he can do this and write a propulsively page-turning novel is a sort of balancing act. I can’t quite think of any other writer to compare him with.
During this layered pretending to be a white person painting himself to look black, but actually being a slave trying to get the hell out of hell, things continue to get strange, awful, and hilarious—and narratively as perfect as a plot can be. When Jim’s hair makes some white audience members suspicious—a man touches his hair—Jim realizes: “I found a new emotion as we trudged. A couple of new emotions. The woman’s father had touched my hair. Slaves didn’t have the luxury of anxiety, but at that moment, I had felt anxiety. Slaves didn’t have the luxury of anger toward a white man, but I had felt anger.”
Anger gets a bad rap with many New-Agey “heal yourself” writers. I personally am a big fan of rage. Anger and the violence it leads to are tied to the sentimental in James, which makes perfect sense. Exhaustion is mentioned more than once. How exhausting it is to perform as a slave, how exhausting it is to be endlessly violated, pettily de-humanized. Endlessly emotionally and physically abused. The daily grind of being under someone’s foot, metaphorically, spiritually, and in actuality.
In Vivian Gornick’s essay “Put on the Diamonds: On Humiliation,” she writes: “When we speak of ourselves as an animal amongst animals we misspeak . . . A four-footed animal may go berserk if attacked by another four-footed animal and not rest until it kills its attacker, but it will not experience the vengefulness that the walking wounded do when humiliated.” I’m not so sure I agree with this, but it’s a thought.
Toward the perfect end, one that echoes some scholarship on Twain, but that Everett makes totally his own, Jim thinks, “I wanted to feel the anger. I was befriending my anger, learning not only how to feel it, but perhaps how to use it.” Later, Jim, who’d been able to make some time to write, relates: “I wrote to extend my thought, I wrote to catch up with my own story, wondering all the while if that was even possible.”
I don’t know if it’s possible, but I’m so grateful for Everett’s beautiful attempt.
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