I finished James by Percival Everett a few days ago and had to think about what I wanted to say. There was so much going on in this book, a lot of nuance. And since I had just read Huckleberry Finn, it was kind of a feast to me seeing what Everett kept and what he changed.
It had me hooked from the opening sentence: "Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass." Referring of course to Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, who in the preceeding novel are playing a trick on a napping Jim. In James, it follows a similar way, except from Jim's perspective, he's only pretending to be asleep and can hear everything the two scheming boys are doing. That's how it goes for the rest of the novel with Jim always one step ahead of Huck.
There was lots of room for Everett to work with, in the original Huckleberry Finn, you can easily reason that sometimes Huck is embellishing or even that he doesn't exactly remember the timeline because he repeatedly uses the phrase "by and by". Huck also gets separated from Jim and there are several chapters where Jim is just not present. In James, Everett is able to craft what Jim was doing in that time in a way that makes sense.
I think it serves the novel well, to frame Jim as an adult man who would know more and have more life experience than Huck, a 12 year old boy. There's a lot of infantalization that comes with slavery, just the bare bones idea of thinking you can be better or smarter than another person is a form of infantilization. So even though Mark Twain's novel was saying "slavery bad" - Percival Everett's novel takes that theme further into a world where Jim is an intelligent man who can read and write, imagining scholarly debates with philosophers. Many abolishionists of Twain's time, may have thought chattel slavery was abhorrent but still believed in pseudosciences like phrenology. So even though they wanted slavery abolished, they still didn't believe in equitable opportunities or equal intelligence.
At times it feels like Jim is a man-out-of-time. He yearns for a better world but is stuck surviving in the framework he's in. Willing to keep surviving to be reunited with his family, sometimes in unexpected ways. Believing neither in Christianity nor superstition, Jim never says what he believes in, how he got those beliefs, or who taught him to read and write. And frankly, it doesn't matter! Huckleberry Finn has become something of an American fable and if we can't have wish fulfillment through extensions of fables, what is the point of literature?
In an interview I read, Everett mentioned he hates the character Tom Sawyer, which I'm assuming is why he leaves the last 1/3 of Twain's Huckleberry Finn novel by the wayside, not engaging with the Benny Hill-style antics of Tom and Huck on the plantation, blaming the slaves for their shenanigans. Instead, Everett sticks to the Mississippi River and the raft - which is the part that most people remember when they think of Huckleberry Finn.
Ultimately, I read this as a hopeful book. Despite the stakes being so much higher for Jim in James than they ever were for Huck in Huckleberry Finn.
I'll finish with a quote from Percival Everett:
(Source)
My rating is 4.5/5 pencils
✏️✏️✏️✏️½
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My next book I found when I was looking up stuff about Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and James. It's called My Jim by Nancy Rawles, and it's about Jim's wife Sadie. It was published in 2008, quite a bit before James. So I figured I should include it since I was already reading one literary response to Twain.
