I’ve had this on my radar for a while, since it first came out and won so much acclaim. I love a good retelling of a classic story, whether from another character’s perspective (Natalie Haynes is brilliant at this) or transposed into another era (Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead is a great example). The key with these examples is they are GOOD retellings. James is not.
In case you don’t want to read this entire report: This book is subtle as a sledgehammer and about as clever. Everett wasted an opportunity to tell a nuanced and empathetic version of a classic tale. Eye-rolling and ridiculous. Drivel.
James purports to tell the story from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the man who accompanies Huck on his adventures. While the Twain story is essentially a boy’s adventure, there is a depth of reflection of the time and place (the South in ~1840) and a moral reckoning for Huck as he recognizes Jim’s humanity and the moral challenges of slavery. Jim is little more than a caricature of an enslaved person of that time – folksy, subservient, illiterate, strong – with sufficient spirit to play an active part in Huck’s moral and physical deliverance. The James of this novel is quite different.
In this tale, James’ folksy subservience is revealed to be a ruse all Black people play with when around White people. From their illiteracy and “sho-nuf” way of speaking through to their placid “yessuh” obedience and stoic endurance of abuse, these enslaved people are edified, opinionated, and entirely self-aware of their place in this society. They live within it but work around its edges and dark places to sustain their physical and mental well-being (as much as is possible). James has a wife and daughter, and when he overhears he is to be sold and thus separated from them, he runs away, with a vague plan of returning soon to either purchase or steal his family. Thus begins his “adventure” with Huck, also running away from an undesired fate – being returned to his father, Pap. The first half of the novel follows the Twain story, told here from James’ perspective and in his voice, up to the point where Huck and he are separated by the nefarious King and Duke. From this point, we are told of James’ experiences on the run on his own. After several harrowing encounters with While people – a minstrel group, another plantation, on a riverboat – James and Huck are reunited. They journey back to Hannibal MO, where Huck returns to his adopted family and learns of his own fate and future, while James learns the terrible news of his own – his family has been sold and moved to another farm. James goes on the run again, this time emboldened and enraged by the extreme prejudice of this world, and cuts a swath of violence through the region as he seeks his family and their freedom.
That is the most generous summary I can give. In truth, the story and characters here are farcical and unbelievable. It is intended to be satirical but at the same time seems to want an undeserved degree of seriousness; thus, it fails to work on any level. A central element in this story is code-switching – the adoption of a different language and persona in certain circumstances in order to pass for what others expect. James, known to everyone as Jim, takes on the persona of James as a new identity, separate and emancipated from Jim and slavery. James and all the Black people in the book switch fluidly from slave-speak when White people are around to standard English when it’s just them. This device is almost effective, but James and the other enslaved peoples’ self-awareness of their code-switching makes this farcical; they speak directly about what they are doing so often it becomes less a survival mechanism and more of something done for fun, or to make themselves feel superior. It is this overall that irritated me about the novel – the direct exposition of what they were doing and why, a classic error of tell rather than show, which undermines the entire perspective. If you have to keep reminding the reader directly – look, I’m making social commentary! – the reader is not allowed to learn on their own through the characters’ experiences what they are going through or learning along the way.
The second half of the book, where James is on his own for a while before reuniting with Huck and returning to Hannibal, is the more unendurable bit. The nefarious King and Duke assume ownership of Jim, and promptly sell him to a minstrel troupe. This itself is ridiculous – minstrel shows by definition were comprised of White men in blackface, so how or why would they include a Black man? The narrative contortions required to make this work are absurd. First James is overheard singing by the leader of the troupe. In a Forrest Gump-like brush with famous people, this leader is Daniel Decatur Emmett, a famous minstrel leaders and songwriters of the day. A real historical figure, Emmett is best known for writing the song, “Dixie” (I wish I was in the land of cotton…). In a scene reminiscent of the farce, Lend Me a Tenor (a play which also involves blackface but in a much less nefarious way), Emmett is in need of a tenor; he buys Jim, and then incorporates him into the minstrel show. With even more heavy-handed code-switching, James is required to wear blackface even though he is already Black, so his true blackness won’t be detected by the audience. James detects quickly there is already a Black man in the troupe – a man who is pale enough to pass for White but who is himself a runaway slave and, like James, is planning to return to his plantation to buy his wife out of slavery. This entire section of the story was ridiculous and almost made me give up on the book.
But the ridiculousness didn’t end there. James escapes again, this time with Howard the non-White White man.They concoct a scheme to raise money for their planned liberation of their families – Howard the White man will claim ownership of James, sell him, and then James will escape and they’ll split the profits (this is the scheme originally implemented by King and Duke). Despite the cleverness they each boast about, they take no time to refine their plan but implement it almost immediately with tragic consequences for all. The entire scheme is predicated on the ease with which James can escape from slavery, which he does repeatedly but not without violence and painful results. That James would rely on this improbable ruse over and over again (he does so at least three times in the novel) undermines his purported superior wisdom. Moreover, his cockamamie schemes are responsible for several deaths of other enslaved people; while one could argue death is better than slavery, these deaths are a staggering counterargument.
When Huck and James are eventually reunited (in an unbelievable coincidence, they are on the same sinking riverboat, and almost bump into one another floating in the wreckage), there are two more revelations which, for me, further undermine the credibility of the story. First, we learn this story is taking place some 20 years later than Twain’s novel – right at the beginning of the American Civil War. Why this is matters is never revealed. Other than a passing encounter with a small group of soldiers in blue, and some mentions by others about the war, it hardly influences the story or characters. Indeed, after some remarkable conjecture about how slavery will end after the war (how could they consider this without any understanding of what the war is about?), the fact of the war disappears from the story.
Before we have a chance to reconcile that twist, we’re shocked by a more personal revelation from James: Huck, I am your father (you can almost hear the voice of James Earl Jones). While this news is taken by Huck as alternately a cruel falsehood or welcome news (given how much he hated his purported father), it then slips away in the story almost as if it either never happened or is so universally accepted as to no longer be worthy of comment. This is ludicrous. Both Huck and the reader would have many questions – how did you meet my mother? Did you love her? Who else knows about this? – but these all go unaddressed as if of no interest. A White boy learning (or at least being told) he is half-Black would not have been so sanguine or jovial about it. Huck spends a few moments trying first to reject and then embrace his newfound Blackness, including adopting the slave patois and wanting to stay with James and escape to the North. James explains there is nothing beneficial about being Black or having a Black father (so why did you tell him?!), and so Huck almost shrugs, “okay”, and goes back to being the Huck of old. The fatherhood element is never mentioned again, and Huck continues to pass as White, presumably for the rest of his life (which perhaps got interesting if he ever became a father). This entire storyline seems intended to explain James’ considerable concern and fondness for Huck but is incongruent with their relationship both before and after the revelation, especially as James himself moves on so quickly from this conversation, eventually leaving Huck at Hannibal without so much as a backward glance to pursue his family North and to freedom.
Woven into all of this is James’ improbable extensive knowledge and understanding of 18th century philosophers. Being somehow fully literate (which is never explained but frequently a subject of wonder for others), James used to sneak into Judge Thatcher’s library and read Voltaire and Locke and other writers’ commentaries on liberty (it seems unimaginable the fervent slaveholder Thatcher would have such books in his house). James’ fluency in these writings is reflected in his dreams and hallucinations – conversations with these eminent writers, where he is as eloquent as they are on all manner of topics, especially liberty and society. While it is certainly possible James is a savant-level philosopher, it strains credulity that he could have established such understanding through only brief, solitary, and surreptitious exposure to these works.
Worst of all were the eye-rolling comments by James and others about the fact of their slavery. Their conversations and purported understanding of their circumstances are blatant editorializing by the author. While this can be done well (an example is the people in the film Schindler’s List talking about life in the camps and the cruelty of their world), here is it so heavy handed and frequent it breaks the frame of the story and undermines the very commentary it is trying to make. An example: when discussing a recent court case where a person was acquitted of lynching because the crime was actually committed by a mob: “‘So, if enough people do it, it’s not a crime.’ ‘Good lord,’ I said. ‘Slavery.'” It wasn’t either necessary or plausible for this connection to be made; it is so obviously analogous to people getting away with the crime of slavery, we didn’t need to be told. That Everett felt the need to push the reader’s nose into it in such unsubtle ways – something which happens repeatedly – is my main distaste for this book. Give me at least a bit of credit to be able to read between the lines, instead of assuming I’m one of those thick White people who doesn’t see what’s going on right in front of them.
This book is subtle as a sledgehammer and about as clever. Everett wasted an opportunity to tell a nuanced and empathetic version of a classic tale. The revisions to the timeline (why bother setting it at the start of the Civil War if it has nothing to do with the story?) and relationships (James as Huck’s father is both implausible and under-examined), along with the repetitive far-fetched dialogue by James, lifted (or dragged) this book into the drivel category. I only persisted with it to the end so I could write this scathing review of it.
Fate: little book library as soon as possible.
1- a murder
9 – being made into a film
13 – a place I’ve never been
14 – a name in the title
20 – one-word title
25 – new author to me
34 – prize
38 – drivel
rclr 
Leave a comment