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August 19, 2024

Percival Everett’s Great American Novel

In his new novel James, Everett reminds us of the thorny absurdity that is U.S. history.

Omari Weekes

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Screen still from the 1960 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

(Getty)

Mark Twain loved blackface. In his autobiography, a meandering hodgepodge of facts, feelings, and footnotes that was embargoed until recently, Twain paused on several occasions to laud minstrelsy, the racist cultural form that grossly lampooned the character and speech of Black folk for the amusement of white audiences, as occupying “a standard and a summit to whose rarified altitude the other forms of musical art may not hope to reach.” The Missouri native attended so many minstrel shows while writing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—often hailed as the Great American Novel—that scholars have made note of how its structure and dialogue mimic those of a standard minstrel performance.

In his latest novel, James, the great American novelist Percival Everett offers a riposte: a wildly funny retelling of Twain’s classic work narrated from the perspective of Huck’s friend, travel companion, and enslaved guardian, Jim. The clever reworking of Huckleberry Finn even finds Jim, one of American literature’s most infamous Black characters, forced to put on blackface: Toward the end of James’s first act, Jim, then a fugitive from slavery, finds himself sold to Daniel Decatur Emmett, the founder of America’s first minstrel troupe and the composer of the Southern folk song “Dixie.” Emmett overhears Jim singing an old work song and purchases him so that he might perform before a white audience and from behind a mask of burnt cork. Making matters more absurd, another fugitive from slavery who is passing for white and working for the troupe as a singer and makeup artist whitens the skin around Jim’s eyes before his first performance to make the blackening of a Black man’s face seem all the more believable. The minstrel act beguiles the audience so thoroughly that, the next morning, Jim wakes to find a mesmerized racist combing his fingers through his hair, wondering how such an optical and tactile illusion could be possible.

This scene is a high point in James, one in which the perplexing logics of race play out in a humorous and eerie fashion. Here, Everett drags Twain’s racial past into the future, closing the temporal gap between antebellum and contemporary fascinations with the Black body by imagining a 19th-century occurrence that could inspire a Solange video today. Ralph Ellison, who routinely praised the brilliance of Huckleberry Finn, once famously commented that “Twain fitted Jim into the outlines of the minstrel tradition, and it is from behind this stereotype mask that we see Jim’s dignity and human capacity—and Twain’s complexity—emerge.” Under Everett’s pen, this mask becomes more literal, one that Jim can put on and take off situationally as Everett skillfully toes the line between Twain’s keen sense of satire and the sobering artfulness of fugitive-slave narratives. The resulting work of fiction will leave readers laughing and scratching their heads as they allow the so-called “Nigger Jim” to reintroduce himself: His name is James.

Everett’s work has often bristled at notions of Black authenticity, taking particular aim at language and literary formalism to do so. For those unfamiliar, not all of Everett’s novels or short fiction are about “race” per se; in fact, much of his writing displaces race as a focal point, leaving readers who expect “Black writing” from Black writers to wonder if they have missed something in Everett’s work. When he has written, pointedly, about Blackness, Everett’s irreverent and ironic style—which has always been influenced by Twain—can confound as much as it illuminates.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier, for instance, features a protagonist named “Not Sidney Poitier,” who happens to look remarkably like the iconic Black actor, though he swears no relation. In Glyph, a Black baby prodigy writes against the notion that representation in language can be possible, implicating failures of Black literature in the process. And in Erasure, which was recently adapted into the film American Fiction, we get a damning portrait of a publishing industry that tends to peddle caricatures of Black life as stories of “authentic” Black experience. Everett’s corpus raises legitimate questions about the place of race in the most enduring literary genres and theories. It often feels difficult to pin down one holistic view of how race should fit into literary discourse, but if the title of Ellison’s classic essay on comedy and folklore, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” could describe any writer’s oeuvre, it would be Everett’s.

James is just as slippery as the rest of Everett’s work. The novel oscillates between having Jim in on the joke and the joke being on Jim as it meticulously traces his chaotic and often violent attempts to slip the yoke of slavery. Much of this fluctuation is set up by Everett’s source material: Huckleberry Finn evinces a depth of character in its portrayal of a fugitive from slavery that is relatively unmatched in 19th-century American novels written by white authors. And yet for all of that book’s deserved praise, Jim primarily acts a fool in it. As Toni Morrison observed, the complexity and humanity of Jim’s character depends on his self-recognition of racial and, thus, personal inferiority: “Jim permits his persecutors to torment him, humiliate him, and responds to the torment and humiliation with boundless love.” Huck’s humanity, in other words, is consistently upheld by the mockery of Jim’s.

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In immediate contrast, Everett renders the minstrel aspect of Jim’s character as a willful cover for his intellect and awareness. Take the novel’s opening lines: “Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass. The moon was not quite full, but bright, and it was behind them, so I could see them as plain as day, though it was deep night.” Those bastards—Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, of course—enter the novel through Jim’s keen perceptions of the world around him, reversing Twain’s novel, which introduces Jim through Huck’s mischievous observations of a pleasant and agreeable slave with no interiority and few feelings—simply “Miss Watson’s big nigger.” If Twain’s Huck hides among the trees to surprise Jim with a degrading practical joke, Everett’s Jim knowingly plays along because, through much experience, he has realized that white people are dangerous when they don’t get what they want.

Much of James’s comedy derives from this time-tested dynamic: Black people capitalizing on white people’s insistence on the facile nature of Black imagination. Everett impugns the false notion of Black inferiority by reworking Negro dialect, the often stigmatized form of English commonly attributed to the enslaved, into a tool of cunning subterfuge rather than communication. For the novel, the deliberate systematization of Negro dialect into a language with its own rigid internal logics that must be learned much as one would a foreign tongue helps to conceal Black genius and offers the enslaved some safety from oppressors who are assured in their supremacy.

Readers are made privy to the extent to which code switching is necessary for Black survival during a dialect lesson early in James. Jim, still living on a plantation in Twain’s hometown with his wife and daughter, engages a group of children in language-learning exercises, correcting their grammar and explaining why such a form of speech must be studied when they already know English, telling the youngsters: “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them.” When Jim asks the children how they would inform a white woman that her kitchen is on fire, he notes that the correct answer is “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere” rather than simply “Fire, fire.” The former locution is proper because, as Jim’s daughter understands, “We must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.” Why? “Because they need to know everything before us,” another girl responds. “Because they need to name everything.”

And yet, for the most part, white people seem to know very little about the world, much to Jim and Huck’s advantage. They never realize, for instance, that the enslaved communicate among themselves via the King’s English not only because Black people successfully hide their language skills but also because, as one enslaved man postulates about white people’s lack of consideration, “I don’t believe that they even know we talk to each other.” Their sense of supremacy is so absolute that their curiosity about much of anything beyond the strict maintenance of the dominant social order suffocates.