Note on the text: I used James as written by Percival Everett and published by Doubleday in 2024
There is a deep level of anger that courses its way through the very heart of this wonderful book, this incredible re-imagining of the Huckleberry Finn story.
There is a very palpable level of anger that is constantly simmering just beneath the surface of this book. This is more than a retelling of the Mark Twain classic as seen through the eyes of the slave James, also known as Jim. On a psychological level this is a story of how James learns how to take control of, and really own, his anger, and how he uses that anger to become the man he wants to be. In the beginning he sees his anger as a some amorphous and abstract force that he doesn’t really understand or know how to handle. He is angry, and rightly so, at the society that surrounds him but he doesn’t know what to do with that anger:
I was scared as much as angry, but where does a slave put anger? We could be angry with one another. We were human. But the real source of my rage had to go without address, swallowed, repressed (35).
But repressed anger never really goes away. It just comes out funny. And nowhere is this more obvious than in his strange and complicated relationship with Huck.
It’s clear from really early on that although James likes Huck, he doesn’t really understand him. James has spent his whole life living as a black slave and he has gotten really good at learning how to survive in white society. Even the language he uses is an adaption. When he is alone or around people that he trusts he doesn’t use the “slave voice” that he does around white people. He developed that voice, that way of speaking, as a tactic to better survive in the society in which he lives:
white folk expect us to sound a certain way, and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them. . . . The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior, [or perhaps I should say when they don’t feel superior,] is us” (21).
So it is with this whole racial mess as a background that Huck, a white child, enters into his life.
It’s obvious that although James cares for Huck, and even saves his life at multiple points throughout the book, that he fundamentally does not understand Huck. That he doesn’t really see Huck as Huck. To James, Huck is just another white person. There’s a scene at the beginning of the book where Tom and Huck are playing hide and seek and trying to sneak up on Jim: “they were always playing some kind of pretending game where I was either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy” (9). He doesn’t see them as boys simply engaging with him as a playmate, but as white people who are further trying to objectify him. Even when he decides to join them in their game it’s only because “it always pays to give white people what they want” (9). It never even occurs to him that Tom and Huck might be seeing him as just another person. Someone equal to them that they could play with. Huck in fact really loves Jim to the point where he later makes Tom leave some money, and even tries to make him leave a note, when Tom takes steals some candles belonging to a local white woman because he doesn’t want James to be accused of stealing something himself.
This comes up again even later in the book when Huck pulls a pretty harmless prank on Jim, who then allows his anger against white people to once again boil up over onto this this unsuspecting innocent child:
you mean you was pullin’ on my leg?’ I said. It always made life easier when white folk could laugh at a poor slave now and again.
‘I had you goin’ Huck said.
I acted like he’d hurt my feelings. White people love feeling guilty.
‘I’m sorry Jim, I just thought it was funny’ he said.
‘Yes it be funny Huck, sho nuff funny’. I pushed out my lower lip a bit, an expression I displayed only for white people.
‘I didn’t mean to hurt you none’.
It could have been my turn to experience a bit guilt, having toyed with the boy’s feelings, and him being too young to understand the problem with his behavior, but I chose not to. When you are a slave, you claim choice where you can” (77).
To him, Huck will always just be another white boy. A nice white boy to be sure, but a white boy all the same, and therefore he doesn’t feel like he can let the mask drop even for a second.
Norman is another slave but he is mixed race and actually passes for white. It is through James’ relationship with Norman and Huck that he realizes that he’s not as different from other white people as he initially suspected. That the same anger and bigotry that flows through the blood of white people also flows through his own because “bad as whites were they had no monopoly on dishonesty, duplicity and perfidy” (195).
When Norman drowns while he and Jim are trying to escape (Jim opts to save Huck again instead of going for Norman) that represents another turning point for James. Not only was Norman a good friend of his, but he also was able to pass as white. Which means he should have been able to escape the sadistic system of abuse that people like Jim were subject to. So when even a white looking person couldn’t escape it, something in Jim snaps. Here was one of the few white people that Jim liked and even he died because of the insanity of the white culture which simply would not allow Norman and Jim to live in peace: “He had trusted me. Now he was dead. All those dead white faces and none mattered a note to me but Norman’s, with skin just like theirs, was the world” (255). If seeing Norman die as a bi product of the insane world they lived in pushed James to the edge, then hearing about his family being sold to another slave owner pushed him right over it.
When he finds out his family had been sold, he immediately approaches the overseer on the farm he used to work on, Mr Hopkins, because he would know where Jim’s family was sold to. When he eventually finds and confronts Mr Hopkins, he finally loses control and as he is strangling him Jim says
you’re going to die Mr Hopkins. And you know what part of this I’m enjoying? Guess. . . . It’s not your fear. I know that’s what you were thinking. It’s the fact that I don’t really care. That’s the best part of this- that I don’t care” (283).
Jim no longer cares about anything. He no longer cares about trying to fit into the system. He has been too angry for too long and he’s not going to take it anymore. Even later when he thinks about what he’s done, he’s not upset at the idea of killing someone, he’s upset at the idea that he lost control of his temper and wound up killing someone that he could have otherwise used. A sentiment that he probably heard echoed a million times over by the white slave owners as they beat their own slaves to death. They were objects, not people just as Hopkins was at that point an object, not a person:
I was upset with myself for not thinking to question Hopkins when I had him. I had let my emotions, specifically my anger and my end for vengeance, get the better of me. I vowed to never let that happen again. From then on I would never lose control (285-286).
He decides in that moment to fully embrace who he is. That he would embrace his anger and become the person he was meant to be. That he would stop simply trying live within the system, but that he would fight it. That he would try his best to burn that system down and build a better one in its stead. By the time he finds his family he has heard about the Civil War and how the Union is fighting the South to free the slaves and in his own small way decides to fully commit to the abolitionist movement. He’s not running anymore, he becomes determined to fight it instead. And when he finally confronts the person who now owns his family, he looks that person in the eye and says that he, Jim, is “the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night. . . . I am a sign. I am your future. I am James” (302). Jim at that point is no more as we discover in the final page when someone, in the aftermath of everything that has happened, confronts James and asks him “are [you] the Nigger Jim?”, and he just says no “I am James” (303).
What a powerful story about how do this character was able to, in the end, turn into the person he wanted to be. He was able to take everything that happened to him, and instead remaining a victim to it all he turned it into rocket fuel. He refused to continue to “buy into” an unjust system and instead opted to try and burn it all down. To destroy it “by any means necessary” so that a better one could be set up in its place. It’s a reminder to keep fighting no matter what. To allow yourself to still become the person that you want to be, and fight for what you believe in, no matter what the world tells you. It’s a great an powerful message: I am who I am and you cannot change that!
