Books, Words, & Worlds

[bookswordsworlds]

"Finally a nod to Mark Twain. His humor and humanity affected me long before I became a writer. Heaven for the climate; hell for my long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain." - James, Percival Everett, final lines of the acknowledgements.

[bookswordsworlds]

I nodded. "Judge, I have no interest in killing you, though it wouldn't make my lot any worse, would it? I can't feed your fantasy that you're a good, kind master. No matter how gentle you were when you applied the whip, no matter how much compassion you showed when you raped. So, you dispensed fewer lashes when you punished. You often let us rest when temperatures soared." "I'm going to see you dead, nigger." "No doubt." - James, Percival Everett

[bookswordsworlds]

"I considered the northern white stance against slavery. How much of the desire to end the institution was fueled by a need to quell and subdue white guilt and pain? Was it just too much to watch? Did it offend Christian sensibilities to live in a society that allowed that practice? I knew that whatever the cause of their war, freeing the slaves was an incidental premise and would be an incidental result." - James, Percival Everett

[bookswordsworlds]

"So that's like stealing', right? If'n I took a mule from the side of the road and I knowed who it belonged to, wouldn't that be stealin'?" "I ain't a mule, Huck." [...] "Way I sees it is dis. If'n ya gots to hab a rule to tells ya wha's good, if'n ya gots to hab good 'splained to ya, den ya cain't be good. If'n ya need sum kinda God to tells ya right from wrong, den you won't never know." "But the law says . . ." "Good ain't got nuttin' to do wif da law. Law says I'm a slave." - James, Percival Everett

[bookswordsworlds]

"At that moment 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. They couldn't even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive. I pulled the sack of books closer, reached in and touched one. I let my hand linger there, a flirtation of sorts. [...] The smell of he pages was glorious. [...] I was somewhere else. I was not on one side of that damn river or the other. I was not on the Mississippi. I was not in Missouri." - James, Percival Everett

[bookswordsworlds]

"How strange a world, how strange an existence, that one's equal must argue for one's equality, that one's equal must hold a station that allows airing of that argument, that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equal who do not agree." - James by Percival Everett

[bookswordsworlds]

JAMES by Percival Everett

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐  -  An obscured perspective revealed.

I'm very disappointed with myself for not having heard of Percival Everett until his novel, Erasure, was made into the film, American Literature. I loved the sad irony of that film and its commentary on publishing and public perspectives. While I bought a copy of Erasure, it's still sitting in my TBR.

Fast forward a year, and James is mentioned again and again as one of the best books of 2024. A retelling of Mark Twain's "American classic," The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, James quickly made its way to my TBR. A recommendation from a colleague bumped it ahead of the other Everett novels I own.

Still, given the nature of the book, I had to re-read The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn first. Having read what I now assume to be a heavily sanitized version of the novel when I was a child, I was shocked by the racism of Twain's tale. While it undoubtedly paints a picture of life in America on the Mississippi in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it is a picture that left a bad taste in my mouth. On top of that, Tom Sawyer's yearning for adventure at the expense of lengthening Jim's captivity infuriated me to no end.

As such, I came to James angry. The first 120 pages of the novel largely follows Twain's work, and it took me a while to move through those pages due to my anger. In spite of the magic Everett weaves.

And let me be frank, Everett's writing is magic. Simple magic. He hits the reader in the face with just how racist Twain's presentation of Jim is. In Huckleberry Finn, Jim is not a person - he's a caricature of the worst racist notions of a black man.

In James, Jim is also a caricature, but it's an intentional one. Herein, Everett postulates that most slaves act the part to play into the sensibilities of their white masters, or massas as the case may be. In reality, Jim speaks and thinks in an articulate manner. He reads Voltaire. He strives for freedom and to help others. He fails. He makes mistakes. He's human. Sometimes painfully so.

And this is Everett's magic. Jim is just a man. But he's also an indictment of every racist portrayal of every black person ever put to pen in literature.

By the latter half of the novel, the reader can't help but feel Jim's fear and anger and frustration and outrage. I hate it. But I loved the journey.

Favourite Moment? The slow burn across the novel of Jim's awakening. His love for books.

Who Should Read It? Everyone. Like so many slave narratives (think 12 Years a Slave), this should be required reading for everyone.

Rating & Content Concerns? 14A. Obviously, racist language persists throughout the text. There is also some, at times, brutal violence, discussion of sexual assault, and one direct scene of sexual assault.

JAMES by Percival Everett

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐  -  An obscured perspective revealed.

[bookswordsworlds]

"Every story looks inevitable unless you've living it. Turn and look back at the beginning when you're standing at the end, and everything in between - all those neat little steps - they all look so perfect, so calm and certain. But there's always a billion coulda-woulda-shouldas - a trillion maybes that got lost along the way. Stories pretend to fly straight and true because that's how we like it. That's how we need it. We think in stories. We remember in stories. And it literally hurts us - doesn't it? - when the nice, tidy version goes all to shit and we're reminded how messy and pointless the world really is." - Suicide Squad: Blaze by Simon Spurrier, publishing by DC: Black Label

[bookswordsworlds]

"He takes me by the shoulders, and his eyes are serious and wounded and alive. 'I don't think this was a test for you.'" - We Are Not Free, Traci Chee

[bookswordsworlds]

"The army guys are here to recruit volunteers for Roosevelt's new combat team. See, we don't got liberty, we don't got property, but you better believe we've got the Great American Right to die for a country that doesn't want us." - We Are Not Free, Traci Chee

[bookswordsworlds]

"From an old textbook, we learn how wonderful we are, how lucky, how endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. Because we're American citizens. Because we're free people. Not like my father, or Keiko's parents. They're not wonderful, lucky, endowed Americans like me, here behind the barbed wire." - We Are Not Free by Traci Chee

[bookswordsworlds]

"In the past forty-eight hours, the pressure of the new caseload had begun to weigh on me. I could feel myself being pulled back, feel the desire to go to the cotton-wrapped world the pills could give me. The pills opened the space between where I was and the brick wall of reality. I was beginning to crave that distance." - Mickey Haller, The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly

[bookswordsworlds]

"Sometimes hot sauce was the only way I knew I was still alive." - Mickey Halley, The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly

[britttaperryhasmoved-deactivate]

[bookswordsworlds]

"Sleep when you can, so you won't need to when you can't." - Echo Burning: A Jack Reacher Novel by Lee Child

[bookswordsworlds]

"It's all about building a bank of goodwill. You never want to draw down too much. You want to keep adding to the reserve, one good experience after another. Someday, you're going to ask Sherman to do something he doesn't like, and because you've built up the bank, he's going to surprise you."

[bookswordsworlds]

"It's no coincidence, I realized, that the only Americans who don't need cops, fists, or therapists to settle their differences are also the only ones who haven't abandoned their business partnership with animals. Patience and kindness don't show up on demand; they're disciplines that require constant practice, and there is no better boot camp for learning those skills than hitching your survival to your ability to discern - and respect - the needs of another creature. My Old Order neighbors understood that horses are less about transportation and more about education; for every hour they devoted to training their animals, their animals were quietly returning the favor. If you wanted to yank out the one piece in the Jenga tower that could make Amish culture and character come tumbling down, it's easy: take away their horses, and watch centuries of fellowship and nonviolence begin to fray."