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‘James’ by Percival Everett    (2024) – 303 pages

‘Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘Tom Sawyer’ by Mark Twain were two of the first non-picture books that I read. I’m quite sure these were the two books that, for good or bad, spurred my early interest in literature. I still remember the scenes of Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher lost in the cave vividly.

Now Percival Everett has written a new version of ‘Huckleberry Finn’, but in his version the black slave Jim or ‘James’ is the central character. Twain’s ‘Huckleberry Finn’ was quite progressive and enlightened for its time, but still the slave Jim is treated as a minor character in Huckleberry’s story.

In ‘James’, the slave Jim tells the story. Jim has a wife and daughter, and when he finds out that he is to be sold to another slave owner and thus forever separated from his family, he makes his escape to the Mississippi River where he hopes to head north and somehow earn money to keep his family together. At the same time Huckleberry Finn is running away from his abusive father.

“But his father being back, that was a different story. That man might have been sober or he might have been drunk, but in either of these conditions he consistently threw beatings on to the poor boy.”

Huckleberry and Jim meet up on the Mississippi River. Jim has heard about the father’s brutal beatings of Huck. At that time, just before the US Civil War, an escaped slave, if caught, would often be hanged or shot on sight. So they are both running away from an intolerable situation.

Although Jim can read and write, he hides that fact from white people, because it would upset them. He can speak normal English, but he hides that also and speaks in a slave patois which is what the white people only want to hear from black people.

“Folk be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scare em.”

This last weekend I watched ‘American Fiction’ which is based on another Percival Everett novel, ‘Erasure’, which is a comedy that deals with modern-day writing and publishing by black writers, and how black writers must still write in a slave patois in order to please their white audience. It’s a clever funny movie, and I urge people to watch it.

So, just as in ‘Huckleberry Finn’, we follow Jim and Huck and their adventures along the Mississippi River. They meet up with two white con men, the Duke and the King, but later these two want to make some extra money by catching the runaway slave Jim and turning him in, so Jim and Huck must make their escape. Later they get separated.

Along the way, Jim sees a slave, Young George, severely whipped and beaten for stealing a pencil for Jim. Later he finds out that Young George has died from his wounds.

Later Jim confronts his owner Judge Thatcher to find out to whom the Judge has sold the rest of Jim’s family. The Judge tells Jim that Jim is in more trouble than he can imagine.

Jim responds.

“Why on earth do you think that I can’t imagine the trouble I’m in? After you’ve tortured me and eviscerated me and emasculated me and left me to burn slowly to death, is there something else you’ll do to me? Tell me, Judge Thatcher, what is there that I can’t imagine?”

I read ‘Huckleberry Finn’ probably when I was in the fifth or sixth grade. It would be a good idea for the publisher of ‘James’ to create a young adult version of ‘James’, with perhaps only a few pictures, to sell to the teen and young adult crowd.

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Grade :   A