JAMES

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

On its surface, Percival Everett's James is a retelling of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of Jim, that novel's runaway slave, and while Everett does recreate many of the events from that novel from Jim's point of view, the book does much more than simply retell the story. Everett's take on Jim's tale adds levels of understanding to the original text that exist because of the changes to the story that Everett elected to make, not least of which was shifting the action of the novel from the 1840s to 1860.

The novel opens with Jim in servitude to Miss Watson in Hannibal, Missouri, a small change since Twain's novel is set in the fictitious St. Petersburg, but a change which hints to the reader that the novel is not going to entirely follow Twain's narrative. the next change is much more obvious. When white folk aren't around, Jim demonstrates himself to be quite erudite, more so than most of the white people in Hannibal, as well as self-educated and able to read. In secret, he teaches the younger slaves, not how to speak well or read, but rather how to hide the fact that they can speak well and teaches them to speak in the sort of lingo the white people of Hannibal expect from them.

Much of the novel follows the outline of the source material, with Jim offering his own take on the events and occasionally being able to add a wider world-view to the story Huck told. This section of the novel really shines, however, when Jim and Huck are separated and Everett is free to flesh out Jim's character and activities without concern for remaining true to Twain's novel. Everett is helped by the fact that Finn is an unreliable narrator and so Everett can add things to the story that Huck would not have included or would have misinterpreted, such as the times Jim slipped up and didn't speak with his slave's patois.

Many readers have expressed dissatisfaction with the ending of Twain's novel. Once Tom Sawyer shows up at the Phelpses, he engages in the sort of make-believe hijinks that were appropriate for a young boy living in St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but seem out of place when Jim is being held a slave further down the river. Everett elected to re-write the entire ending of the book, given Jim a chance to have adventures without Huck Finn, and to allow Everett to explore the horrors of slavery in a detail that Twain never did in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Everett's lengthy finale focuses on Jim's trials and tribulations and he finds himself associating with characters who never graced Twain's novels...slaves who supported their masters and slaves who undermined their masters, Blacks who were passing, whites with abolitionist tendencies, and whites who had no compunctions about wounding or killing slaves in order to maintain the status quo. Eventually, Jim and Huck are reunited, but Everett offers his own twist on their reunion, both on a personal level and a macro level with news of the outbreak of the Civil War filtering through the book, although it is presented more as a hypothetical than anything with real consequences for the characters.

James doesn't supersede The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but it does amend it. Everett's book enters a complex conversation with Twain's novel. Twain's novel still stands on its own, but when the reader is open to the arguments posited in Everett's book, it adds a twenty-first century depth and reinforces the relevance of Twain's magnum opus.

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