An old story with a new voice: Percival Everett's "James"

Percival Everett’s James met all my expectations and then some, and it’ll be a contender for one of my favourite books of 2024.

Like many of us, I have a complicated relationship with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Everett’s source material. I read it repeatedly as a kiddo and adored the 1993 Disney adaptation starring a baby Elijah Wood. Always, my favourite character was the runaway slave, Jim. As I got older, I began to interrogate the text for all that Twain offered to the canon (particularly in the time of the book’s original publication) as well as for all that Twain failed to say – or said poorly, taking up voices that were not his own.

With his new novel, Everett approaches Twain’s 1885 text with both a critical eye and a tender heart. In fact, tenderness is a thread that runs boldly throughout the novel, colouring the project with a level of warmth not always found in literary fiction.

The novel takes Twain’s text and retells aspects of the story from the perspective of Jim (or James, as he prefers), the enslaved man whose quest for freedom dovetails with young Huck Finn’s own runaway attempt. But where the source text couples Huck and Jim’s journeys and applies the same emotional and historical weight to both, Everett’s retelling is enmeshed in a realism that illustrates how Huck and James are running from two very different worlds, one undergirded by a more systemic terror than the other.

In this manner, James, with its first person POV, embodies the tone and voice of 19th century slave narratives, offering a chronological journey detailing the enslaved man’s pursuit of physical and spiritual freedom and his many encounters with danger along the way. In fact, the novel’s emphasis on the role of literacy and its relation to freedom calls to mind Frederick Douglass’s autobiography (which would make a great companion read for any teachers wanting to use James in a high school classroom).

Language is a key theme in James’s journey, and private naming conventions become important ways for Everett’s enslaved characters to hold aspects of their life sacred. Perhaps the most delightful element of this theme is explored through the enslaved characters’ exploitation of language in order both to encode and protect. Vocabulary and dialect become crucial in the taking back of power in whatever way possible. “Let them work to understand you,” James cautions a group of children. “Mumble sometimes so they can have the satisfaction of telling you not to mumble. They enjoy the correction and thinking you’re stupid. Remember, the more they choose to not want to listen, the more we can say to one another around them.”

Ann Patchett’s pull-quote on the cover calls the book “funny and horrifying, brilliant and riveting.” I did not find much humour in this text; the horror felt far too real for it be funny. But I found heart in plentiful doses, especially in the developing relationship between James and Huck. There are wonderful surprises along the way, and a determined avoidance of easy resolutions to history’s most heinous questions. In James, Percival Everett has taken something old and made it wonderfully new again, infusing this dark and compelling tale with philosophy, tenderness and rollicking storytelling.

James
Percival Everett
Published March 2024
304 pages