James and Jim

A new classic as companion and corrective to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

I just finished reading James, by Percival Everett, the author of the fiercely satirical Erasure, which was made into the equally hilarious and biting movie American Fiction. James, as you’ve probably heard, is a retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Huck’s enslaved runaway sidekick Jim—and much more. The book was hilarious and horrifying, as action-packed as Huck Finn, with just as deft an ear for language, and as much exaggeration in its tall tales.

James has also, it seems to me, solved a problem that has beset Huckleberry Finn since it was published, which is being frequently banned for its racially-charged language (there are over 200 instances of the n-word) in its groundbreaking use of vernacular. The book has been on the American Library Association’s list of top banned books for years, yet is also a staple in high school English classes. 

Written in 1884, it was banned from the Concord, Massachusetts library shortly after it was released for being “trash” and “suitable only for the slums.” Initially, according to Twain scholar Jocelyn A. Chadwick, the book was banned for entirely different reasons than it is today. People weren’t as upset at the racially charged language as they were about what she calls the “backwards talking” coming from the mouths of what she said people would consider “lower class” whites. Southerners, in particular, were offended by the use of dialect. In other words, the complaint was that the use of vernacular made white people look bad — which was not unintentional. It wasn’t until the 1950s, that the NAACP first lodged a complaint against the book for its use of racist language. 

Many Twain scholars and readers have argued that Twain deliberately used the racially charged language to expose the racism underlying people in the book who were otherwise considered “kind.” When, for instance, Aunt Sally asks Huck if anyone was hurt in a riverboat explosion, he answers, “No’m. Killed a nigger,” and she replies, “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.” That is scathing and deliberate irony 

Huck Finn is a twist on such into-the-wilderness stories as James Fennimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer, which form the basis of American frontier mythology, which Richard Slotkin, a professor emeritus at Wesleyan University defines as “America as a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top.”  (I took classes with Slotkin there as an American Studies major, a field he helped define.) The frontier myth is one that justifies and celebrates domination, particularly European settlers’ efforts to claim and control land in the New World, and to conquer its native populations—”others” who are dehumanized, considered savages by their closer relationship to nature. America is a land of freedom and opportunity, but only for the few. The frontier mythology extended to the capitalist exploitation of land, and the institution of slavery and its free labor that was the basis for capitalist wealth.

In Huck Finn, the 12-year-old protagonist explores a different kind of frontier. He takes off down the Mississippi, into nature and the unknown in search of adventure and freedom from his abusive father. He runs into Jim, who has run away after overhearing that he would be sold, and is also looking for freedom—from slavery. Their trip down the river is a sort of Heart of Darkness as they get deeper and deeper into the ever-more-racist South. 

The frontier that Twain is exploring isn’t one of conquering new lands, but new landscapes in human ethics and emotions. Huck’s journey goes from believing that helping a runaway escape is a terrible betrayal of all the goodness in his family and that the “right” thing to do would be to turn Jim in to understanding Jim’s humanity and doing what he can to ensure his safety. 

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” Huck says when he tears up a letter revealing Jim’s whereabouts near the end of the book. “I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too.” It’s the turning-point of the book, a coming-of-age moment, when Huck sides with human rights over property rights. It’s also the moment when this fatherless son realizes that Jim has taken care of him in a fatherly way. It was an anti-racist epiphany that was startlingly new in American literature, particularly in a funny book of adventure tales. 

The book finishes as if Twain was trying to wrap it up fast, and perhaps with an audience-pleasing ending. Tom Sawyer of his bestselling book appears, in too much of a coincidence, and after his big moment of revelation and manhood, Huck slides back into the shadow of his more conventional, comfortable, church-going friend. Tom, who loves adventure stories, cooks up all kinds of sadistic tortures for Jim, who is chained in a cell, filling his room with rats and spiders and going to great lengths to steal objects that —who else?—the servants are blamed for being missing. While Tom goes along with Huck's plan to free Jim, he does it in a way that makes it impossible that they won’t get caught. In the end Jim is conveniently and improbably saved from a lynch mob not by Huck, but when it is discovered that he had already been freed when his “owner” died. It’s a colorful, ridiculous, happy ending that doesn’t live up to the rest of the book.

Despite the anti-racist intent of the book, it can’t have been easy, over the decades, for Black students to read and hear the n-word in a classroom setting, particularly in a culture where the murders of young unarmed Blacks at the hands of police are as pervasive as lynchings once were in the South. With a gifted teacher, it might be an opportunity for serious discussion and debate, but perhaps not without appropriate context, warnings, and an alternative text for students who didn’t want to read it. 

When I read the book in junior high school, Huck Finn was presented as a portrait of another historical period, and the n-word was understood to be used only by racists. But when I grew up there were exactly two Black kids in my school and I can only imagine it made them more than a little uncomfortable. At that time, it wasn’t uncommon for people to hurl the n-word around as an epithet. Someone once yelled “nigger ass” at me as a kid because I have a big bubble butt; I was the target of racist taunt merely for having a physical asset that is usually associated with Blacks. My mother got anonymous letters saying she was a “nigger lover” for her work in the civil rights movement. Racism then and now is alive and well, and the n-word in the mouths of white people, even in the context of a book you read for school, has to be as frightening and maddening as fuck.

About a dozen years ago, a “new” edition of Huckleberry Finn appeared in which
“injun” and “nigger” were replaced by “Indian” and “slave.” I can see why the book was edited to make it more palatable to school teachers, but it seems to me you either teach a classic as is or you don’t teach it at all. You don’t mess with the language, especially not with Mark Twain, whose use of language was precise. Replacing the words with softer ones tamps down his intended vitriol.

"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter, Twain once said, “it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."

Enter James, which can be read and taught as a companion and modern corrective to Huckleberry Finn. Seeing the “adventure” that Huck is on is entirely different from James’ eyes (his preferred name). Every encounter with another human being could mean his torture and death, or result in him being sold. The adventures with the conmen the Duke and the Dauphine aren’t just episodes of them having tricked crowds and then having to run from them, but of the carpetbaggers’ plans to sell Jim and help him escape, over and over, to line their pockets, each time at a threat to his life.

Like Twain, Everett uses colorful language to denote character. In James’ case, he code-switches between the expected language of an enslaved person and the language that betrays his ability to write and read—including the likes of Voltaire and Locke, whose works he has pilfered from the Judge's library. This “slave filter” is key to survival, making him seem simple, assuring the white people that he is not a threat, which would be deadly. He even helps a group of well-spoken enslaved children practice translating phrases into slave language, such as “the better they feel, the safer we are” (about white people) to “Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.”

Also like Twain, Everett is a satirist, creating hilarious and ridiculous situations, such as when Jim, sold to a blacksmith, is resold to a man who runs a minstrel group, where they perform in blackface. Jim has to be a Black man portraying a white man portraying a Black man. The episode also exposes the hypocrisy of some white liberals, such as the man who is the “kind” leader of the minstrel group who, when James escapes, tells another of the minstrels, a Black man passing as white, that he’ll lynch James if he finds him.

Everett also makes James a complex character, not the ever-amiable Jim of Huck Finn.

The end of James is surprising and chilling, as well as satisfying, and it’s best not to give away any spoilers. But there’s one moment when Huck calls James a liar, and he responds, “I ain’t a nigger,” in a scene that seems to erase every use of that n-word in the original.

So if the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is taught in schools, then James should be taught right beside it. Rereading Twain’s book, I was struck by how it’s brilliant, incredibly funny, problematic, and occasionally tedious; it’s a high-wire act to write an adventure book that will be a commercial success for frontier-loving boys and a moral tale that gets to the heart of humanity, exposing and overcoming the darkness in racism. From this distance in time and culture, it even seems to me that, though inspired by Twain’s classic, James may even be the better book.