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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

‘The Trees’ by Percival Everett   (2021) – 308 pages

The lynching and murder of Emmett Till is a horrific example of United States white racism, past and present.

Emmett Till was a 14 year old boy from Chicago visiting his relatives down South in Money, Mississippi during the summer of 1955. Emmett and his cousin went to the Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market to buy candy. Twenty-four year old Carolyn Bryant, wife of the proprietor, was alone in the store waiting on customers. Emmett may have whistled at and may have said a few words to the woman. Mrs. Bryant told her husband Roy about the incident. Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam abducted Emmett from his grandfather’s house, took him away, beat and mutilated him, then shot him in the head, and sank his body in the Tallahatchie River.

Later an all-white jury found Bryant and Milam not guilty of Emmett Till’s murder. The “not guilty” verdict was based on Carolyn Bryant’s testimony. Carolyn Bryant admitted in a 2008 interview that some of her testimony at the trial was false.

Emmett Till was only one of thousands of black people and people of other races who were murdered by white people for no good reason, and the murderers went unpunished.

‘The Trees’ takes place in Money, Mississippi. Two black Special Detectives are sent from Hattiesburg to investigate the mysterious murders of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam. Along with these white men’s bodies, there is the badly decomposed body of a black man.

“You know what they be sayin’,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“That he’s the ghost of that boy Robert Bryant and J. W. kilt all them years back. They say he come back to get revenge. I guess he got it.”

In this town, even those in positions of authority like police officers and pastors use the N-word. This is Mississippi. The white locals use the N-word even when they are talking to black people.

When one of the black Special Detectives starts chatting with the waitress in the local diner, the other warns him,

“You’re going to mess around and get yourself shot,” Ed said once they were on the street. “She could have some crazy-ass husband or boyfriend. You know, a stupid redneck with a gun.”

“That’s redundant.”

In this novel only the black characters are intelligent and decent; the whites are all stupid crazy-ass rednecks and know-nothing peckerwoods wearing Trump hats. This is rural Mississippi.

“May I remind you that we are in Money, Mississippi. Maybe I should say that again: Money, Mississippi. The important part of that is the word Mississippi. You do understand what I’m saying?”

“This is the twenty-first century.” Jim said.

Yeah, well, tell that to those fuckers back there wearing Trump hats.”

‘The Trees’ starts out strong in this small Southern town, but when it goes farther afield and introduces a couple too many extraneous characters, its power gets somewhat diluted.

Grade:   B+

‘Telephone’ by Percival Everett    (2020) – 216 pages

I was genuinely impressed with the first Percival Everett novel I read, ‘So Much Blue’, and so I read another. ‘Telephone’ is again well-written and emotional with an odd mix of plots.

Zach Wells is a professor and geologist-slash-paleobiologist. He studies the bodies of ancient birds found at or near the Grand Canyon and other places. He and his wife Meg and their daughter Sarah live in Altadena which is near Pasadena and Los Angeles in southern California.

It starts when his chess-proficient daughter Sarah does not see an obviously threatening bishop on the chessboard. After some other incidents, it is determined that she has Batten disease, which is the common name for a broad class of rare, degenerative, inherited disorders of the nervous system. There is no known cure.

“Would that my daughter could have clawed her way back or that I could have rescued her, but no such thing was possible.”

Meanwhile the professor must get on with his work. He gets little satisfaction from teaching undergraduates. It is the study of the bones of these ancient birds that really fascinates him. Through one of his female associates, he must deal with campus politics which he really dislikes.

Meanwhile he and his wife and daughter try to adapt to their new situation as best they can.

“I had a smart, lightsome partner…I appreciated the fact that I should have loved her completely, but being the unhappy wretch that I am…”

And then there is one further off-the-wall plot. He buys clothes over the internet from this company in New Mexico, and he starts getting these messages on a piece of paper inside the pockets of these clothes saying “Ayuadame” which means “Help Me” in Spanish. Using the pretense that he is going to New Mexico to find some more ancient bird bones, he investigates what is going on there.

All of these disparate elements add up to a dramatic and entertaining read that kept me fully engaged despite some of the plot elements being outlandish and over the top.

Grade:    B+

‘So Much Blue’ by Percival Everett    (2017)  – 256 pages

Perhaps the best measure as to how much I actually like a novel is how much I look forward to returning to it when I am not reading it.  If I view returning as a necessary chore, that probably means I don’t like the novel very much.  However if I get a smile on my face just contemplating returning to a book, that probably means I like it a lot.  By this measure, ‘So Much Blue’ is a total winner.

The narrator in ‘So Much Blue’ is a fifty-six year old artist who has been working on a giant painting for several years.  He keeps the painting in a outbuilding next to his house, but he won’t let his family or friends see the painting.

There are three main plot lines in ‘So Much Blue’, and the narration switches around between the three. The first is called ‘House’ which takes place in current time and is about the artist’s family in New England.  He is faced with a quandary that it is not too uncommon for a father to face.   In order to extract a secret out of his teenage daughter, the daughter makes him promise ahead of time that he won’t tell the secret to her mother.  However when he hears the secret, he realizes it is something that her mother really ought to know.  What does he do?

Another plot line is called ‘1979’  and takes place back then.  He and his college friend are off to El Salvador to rescue his friend’s brother who is mixed up with drugs and some “bad hombres”.  This story winds up being the most hilarious of the plot lines when they meet this shady American mercenary who they call the Bummer who bosses them around.

The third plot line is called ‘Paris’ and takes place seven years before the present and is about an affair the forty-something artist has with a 22 year old Parisian young woman named Victoire.  Despite the questionable circumstances of the age difference, this affair is handled tastefully.

This is an odd mix of plots, but each is handled in an ingratiating and good-natured manner.  The entire novel does have a unifying theme of “secrets”, but this theme is handled quite indirectly, and the author does not hit you over the head with it.

Although each of the three disparate plot lines of ‘So Much Blue’ is captivating, warm, and humorous, the sum of the entire novel is still much greater than the individual parts.  The novel as a whole is so well-written and subtle, that all of the reviewers including me seem to fall all over ourselves trying to describe it.

Grade :   A