Huck Finn Revisited

P ercival Everett has been writing fiction for over three decades, but his moment has finally arrived. Last year his 2001 novel Erasure was adapted for the film American Fiction, which was nominated for several Academy Awards and won the prize for Best Adapted Screenplay. In March he was the subject of a New Yorker profile by Maya Binyam. Its occasion was the publication of his new novel James, sure to be a candidate for various awards and prizes before the year is out.

James is based on an ingenious premise: It retells the story of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the black slave Jim. Readers anticipating a takedown of Mark Twain will be either frustrated or relieved, depending on their hopes. Everett, who in the book’s acknowledgments offers “a nod” to Twain’s “humor and humanity,” does not supply a predictable, politically correct attack on the canon. To the contrary, he adopts and extends the criticism of racism present in Twain’s novel. In his portrayal, for example, young Huck is at least as troubled by Jim’s plight and the injustice of slavery as in Twain’s original. Huck remains a character with whom we are permitted, even invited, to sympathize.

The shift from Huck’s to Jim’s perspective, however, enables Everett to sharpen Twain’s critique, lifting it from the level of satire to that of jeremiad (albeit a secular one). The youthful, uneducated voice of Twain’s white protagonist, with his naïve efforts to understand the adult world, was well suited to exposing the hypocrisy of American ideals in the face of racism. But the older voice of the black slave Jim cuts deeper, revealing the full horror of chattel slavery. As he encounters whippings, rapes, and lynchings, we confront the legalized violence and systemic terror of slavery. These are not fully visible to Huck, but they are Jim’s everyday reality.

As James begins, Everett sticks closely to Twain’s original plot. Huck slips outside to meet Tom Sawyer for one of their nightly adventures. They hide in the dark to avoid being discovered by Jim; after waiting for him to fall asleep, Tom plays a prank by removing his hat. In Everett’s version, Jim is well aware of the boys’ presence and merely pretends not to notice them as he feigns sleep. From the beginning, therefore, we realize that Jim knows much more than he lets on. Soon enough Huck’s father is back in town, Huck fakes his own death to get away, Jim runs off to avoid being sold downriver, and the two meet up on Jackson’s Island. All this is familiar territory to readers of Huck Finn.

As the novel progresses, however, Everett gradually loosens the framework of Twain’s narrative. He takes special advantage of those moments when Huck and Jim are temporarily separated. These become opportunities to recount some of Jim’s more searing experiences, ones that were not in the original story. In one episode, for example, Jim receives assistance from a group of slaves who stumble across him while he is hiding. At his request, one of them brings him, along with some food, a small pencil, stolen from his master. Later Jim discovers that the young man has been lynched because of that stolen pencil. On another occasion, Jim is temporarily held by a cruel master who works him hard all day, then whips him in the evening for not working hard enough. When Jim learns that one of his fellow slaves is a 15-year-old girl who for years has been raped by the master, night after night, they escape together, only for Jim to see her shot and killed by their pursuers.

These episodes function as insertions, filling lacunae in Twain’s novel while leaving its structure intact. As Everett moves toward his conclusion, however, he departs more dramatically from his model. Huck Finn ends with a long episode in which Jim, having been recaptured, is held prisoner while his captor waits to collect the ransom for him. Tom Sawyer shows up and hatches a ridiculously complicated scheme to help Huck free Jim. After weeks of labor, their plan ultimately fails and Jim is imprisoned once again. Only then does Tom reveal that in fact Jim is already a free man — has been a free man the whole time he was being held captive — because Miss Watson had previously freed him in her will. Perhaps no other episode in Twain’s novel so pointedly reveals the failure of his white characters to recognize the genuine humanity of a black man like Jim. Tom Sawyer is by no means the worst of them, nor does he bear Jim any ill will; yet even he treats Jim as a mere object, a kind of tool or plaything to support Tom’s starring role in his own self-scripted adventures.

One might expect Everett to make hay with this episode. In fact, he omits it entirely, opting instead for a less satirical but more explosive ending. Huck and Jim return home, where Huck gradually vanishes from the story, so that by the end our attention is focused entirely on Jim. Learning that his wife and daughter have been sold, he confronts first Judge Thatcher’s overseer and then Judge Thatcher himself, in two scenes of remarkable intensity. Jim heads to the farm of the breeder who has purchased his family. There he sparks a slave revolt in order to rescue them, and the three head north, toward Iowa, in pursuit of freedom. Their flight offers a veiled reminiscence of Twain’s conclusion, in which Huck famously announces his intention “to light out for the Territory . . . because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” Jim, of course, has far more reason than Huck to light out for the territory and flee “civilization.”

If Everett’s imaginative reconstruction of Jim’s story evokes profound empathy for the plight of black slaves, bringing alive their fear, suffering, and righteous anger, he also challenges the common assumption that race is a straightforward category by which we can classify people. More than once Everett draws attention to the phenomenon of “passing,” whereby a black person with white skin and features “passes” for white. We meet a former slave, for example, who successfully passes for white while searching, like Jim, for his family. He accompanies Jim for a while and poses as his master, even selling him into slavery as a moneymaking venture, with the goal of reuniting after Jim makes his escape. Another prominent character, assumed by everyone to be white, turns out to be of mixed race, with a white mother and a black father.

In one of the book’s funniest racial episodes, Jim joins up temporarily with the real-life “Virginia Minstrels,” who were headed by Daniel Decatur Emmett, composer of the tune “Dixie.” Emmett, in need of a tenor and having heard Jim sing while working, purchases him. Emmett is an initially appealing but ultimately troubling character: He is opposed to slavery but is not an abolitionist; he tells Jim that he has only “hired” rather than purchased him, but he expects Jim to work for him until the debt is repaid; and his minstrel troupe sings in blackface. Jim, a light-skinned brown man, also needs to wear blackface, because he doesn’t look dark enough to meet the audience’s expectations. And because they would never allow a real black man to perform, he must be made up in such a way that he appears to be a white man wearing blackface. The sheer absurdity of this is a powerful reminder that race is to some extent a social construction but nevertheless a lived reality with deep consequences for people’s lives.

If race is one unstable yet potent force shaping people’s lives, language is another, and it is perhaps an even more central concern for Everett. The stolen pencil that Jim receives becomes for him a symbol of freedom and autonomy, and he clings to it as a cherished possession. He begins to write with it and immediately links language with his own search for identity: “My interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on this page can mean anything at all. If they can have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning.” It is as if he were to say, “I write, therefore I am.” When he and Huck make off with some loot from a wrecked steamboat, Jim, who has secretly taught himself to read, is excited to discover a supply of books among the goods. Tempted to read them, he hesitates, lest he betray himself to Huck. But then he realizes that the younger boy, assuming him to be illiterate, would think he was just looking at the letters as if they were pictures. “At that moment,” Jim thinks, “the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. . . . It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.” Even his name testifies to the power and the elusiveness of language: He begins the novel as Jim but ends it as James, “just James” (in the book’s closing words).

The most striking thing Everett does with language turns out to be one of his more questionable decisions, in a book that has relatively few missteps. Jim and the other slaves speak two dramatically different versions of English. Among themselves, they speak entirely correct, standard English; when whites are present, they speak an exaggerated black dialect, the sort of thing one might associate with Amos ’n’ Andy. This code-switching between versions of English offers Everett some advantages: It illustrates the agency of enslaved blacks; it offer moments of drama, such as when Jim risks giving himself away to Huck by talking in his sleep; and it can be very funny, especially when Jim teaches children how to “translate.” (One does not, for instance, warn Mrs. Holiday that her house is burning by shouting “Fire, fire!” Rather, one says, “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere!” — because “we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.”) Nevertheless, the two Englishes lend a flavor of artificiality to a book that is distinguished from its predecessor in no small part by its greater realism. African-American speech certainly possesses a rich range of registers, and black Americans have long known how to modulate their tone in different contexts, by adopting a note of deference toward whites, for instance. Everett’s decision to simplify that into two utterly distinct idioms, between which his slaves routinely switch, back and forth, is less textured than the reality and feels too much like a literary conceit to be persuasive.

If Everett’s inventiveness carries him away in this employment of language, his imagination fails him on a different point: his treatment of religion. His Jim neither believes in God nor has any use for him, explicitly proclaiming his atheism on more than one occasion. When a child asks him why God made masters and slaves, he responds bluntly, “There is no God, child. . . . Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.” Later he repeats the accusation. Compared to other books by authors such as Voltaire or Locke, “the Bible itself was the least interesting of all. I could not enter it, did not want to enter it, and then understood that I recognized it as a tool of my enemy.” Twain was certainly a critic of institutional religion, as Huck Finn makes abundantly clear, but his target was more often hypocrisy than belief. Given the role that Christianity has played historically in ending the slave trade, supporting abolition, and inspiring the fight for civil rights, Jim’s terse and categorical dismissals of religion are a missed opportunity.

At its core, however, James is a valuable companion and corrective to Twain’s own limited, perhaps inevitably limited, imagination. For all his “humor and humanity,” for all his biting satire of racial and religious hypocrisy, Twain does not really get us inside Jim’s head. Everett does. His novel thus provides an enriching counterpoint to Huck Finn. Both books are funny, suspenseful, linguistically playful, and politically serious; but James is a bit darker, angrier, more sobering. It is an admiring hommage to Twain, but one that speaks in its own voice and to its own era. The reader who turns from Huck Finn to Everett’s James will find in it a worthy successor.