Writing Into the Canon
On Percival Everett's "James"
The national bestselling books list is typically a quality-free zone, topped by genre specialists who know how to deliver reliable product year after year. Every once in a while some piece of literary fiction will sneak its way on there, thanks to the market pressure of a celebrity book club or the imprimatur of an awards win, but those blips are usually few, far-between, and short lived. James McBride’s Heaven & Earth Grocery Store has been a notable exception, staying on the Times list for 37 weeks, and now Percival Everett’s James has joined the fray, debuting on the list in March and staying up there for a respectable seven weeks. It helps that American Fiction, a film (dubiously) adapted from Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, won an Oscar and performed well among critics and audiences; it also helps that James is a riff on an All-American classic, Mark Twain’s seminal 1885 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. So, at the height of Percival Everett’s fame – which isn’t saying much, given his rigorous disinterest in being famous or writing market-friendly books – he puts out a book (with Penguin’s fearsome PR machine behind it) that actually has a one-sentence sell-line: It’s Huck Finn, but from Jim’s perspective. It’s a pleasant surprise to see an author as good as Percival Everett on the bestseller list, but also gets the hackles raised: could it be up to Everett’s lofty standards and still sell that well? The good news is that Everett has not sold out or given quarter to the market; James is a wonderfully strange book, a playful text that continues to engage with slippery postmodern questions of meaning-making. The not-so-great news is that the novel sometimes feels like Everett going through the motions, playing the hits, and not so subtly undermining the ‘revisionist-text’ genre that he’s chosen. To try and nail it down: it’s good, a funny and warm novel with a hard edge, leagues better than other bestsellers, but also not quite up to the mark of Everett’s previous novels. When you release a book almost every year, there are bound to be peaks and valleys; at least Everett’s valleys still tower over the competition. It’s never fun to be the guy at the sold out show saying a band’s earlier albums were better, but, well, here I am.
James’s world is one ruled by performance, most of all the performance of race. He’s Jim to the masters but James amongst his fellow slaves, and most importantly to himself. As opposed to a classic novel simply narrated from another character’s perspective, James is principally interested in its title character creating his own perspective, not only the person behind the character but also the authorial voice. James, unlike the Jim of Huck Finn, is highly educated, having snuck into Judge Thatcher’s office and read the dusty tomes of philosophy that line the shelves. He can read and write, and has taught his family and the other slaves in town as well. He and his fellow slaves only perform ignorance and servility for the benefit of their white masters, knowing that any possibility of them being superior to white people will lead to violent punishment. In the “language lessons” that James gives to the local children, he remarks, “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior.’” The “basics” of these lessons on talking with white people are: don’t make eye contact, don’t speak first, never tell them they’re doing the wrong thing, and “the better they feel, the safer we are.” Or, as James has one of his pupils “translate”: “Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.”
Everett’s immediate focus on performance opens up two interpretative avenues; one, a commentary on Twain’s Huck Finn and its outsize cultural impact, wherein Jim is portrayed as a kind-hearted simpleton and the butt of many jokes, enshrining a certain type of nobly ignorant Blackness into the American cultural lexicon. All of James’ attention to language implicates Twain as a writer enforcing a cultural hierarchy of white supremacy, even with the character’s heroic function within Huck Finn. That’s the ghost text that Everett is stringently writing against, but there’s also a sense that Everett is writing against a contemporary set of literary market mores that privilege a certain kind of Black narrative: the slave story. To list some of the more notable recent examples of the last decade-plus: Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, Ta-Nahisi Coates’ The Water Dancer, Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Robert Jones Jr’s The Prophets, James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird, Marlon James’ The Book of Night Women, and Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend. Not to say that these novels are necessarily bad books – some of them are in fact excellent – but Everett clearly bristles at the idea that a Black writer would have to write these kinds of books in order to make a living as a Black novelist, just as Thelonious Monk in Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure bristles at the idea of having to write an “urban novel” to be a successful Black writer.
Far along in James, in one of the novels’ strongest sections – the novel is at its best when Everett is inventing new scenarios rather than reframing Twain’s – James is sold to a group of minstrel singers in desperate need of a tenor. With the novel’s characteristic mix of humor and terror – race is ridiculous, but will also get you killed – James is forced to don blackface and perform with the troupe, which already features, unbeknownst to the rest of the group, a runaway slave who passes as white. So the group ends up featuring two Black men who have to perform a white person’s comic idea of Blackness to raucous crowds, each wearing cartoonish facepaint to perform caricatures of their race. James, lacking shoes, even has to paint the tops of his feet to complete the illusion. The financial agreement between James and the bandleader, though, ends up mirroring a book advance:
"Does I belong to you now? I mean, seein’ as you bought me from dat fella back in da livery.”
“No, you don’t belong to me.”
“You mean dat if’n I wanted to, I could jest run off through dem trees ‘n’ be gone, dat be okay?”
“Well, I did hire you to be my tenor. I paid two hundred dollars, and you ought to pay me back.”
“So I understan’. I cain’t run away and you be paying me, but you be keepin’ da money untils I pay you back.”
“Until I get my two hundred dollars.”
“How much I be gettin’ paid?” I asked.
“We didn’t discuss that, did we? I think a dollar a day is fair, don’t you? A dollar a day is a good wage, especially when you’ve never bee paid before.”
“Dat how much a tenor norm’ly make?”
“A nigger tenor, yes. I think that’s a good wage,” Emmett said, nodding his big head and humming his “Dixie Land” tune.
“A dollar a day,” I said. “So, dat be two hunnert days,”
“Two hundred performances,” he corrected me.
Yes, it’s more bondage slavery than book deal, but Emmett’s separation of “days” and “performances” and the fact that it is James’ literal ‘voice’ that has been bartered for, hints at Everett’s sly prodding at the publishing industry, which has since 2020 been interested in a particular kind of Black voice, one that, analogous to the minstrel shows, performs a version of Blackness that appeals to the newly penitent white reader. As James reflects at one point: “White people love feeling guilty.” So of course it’s this novel, about a runaway slave, that’s become Everett’s best selling book yet.
But Everett’s novel is not primarily focused on grinding an axe with the publishing industry, and his reservations about the genre and the public’s desire for Black trauma narratives do not get in the way of delivering a good yarn1; they’re just complications in the framing, Everett problematizing his own novel as he creates it. The scenes that Everett reworks from Twain are given a new valence with James’ narration; what was once a series of swashbuckling adventures becomes a series of terrors, as James is not only a runaway slave (he’s learned that his owner is planning to sell him) but also the prime suspect in Huck’s disappearance (Huck’s run off from his abusive father). Every run-in on the river is not the opportunity for a new adventure, as it seems to Huck, but another encounter that James must slip out of. As Roberto Bolaño pointed out in his appraisal of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn2, the two kinds magic to be found in the original novel are “Survival” and “the magic of friendship… what persists in the end is a lesson in friendship, friendship that is also a lesson in the civilization of two totally marginal beings who have only each other and who look after each other without gentle words or tenderness, as outlaws or those outside the bounds of respectability look after each other…” Everett’s version is tipped much more towards the lens of survival, with James having to precisely modulate his own behavior at all times to remain alive and indeterminately “free” as he and Huck wend down the river. James also recasts the “friendship” aspect as more of a protective relationship; Huck is an impediment to James’ escape from bondage, but he also can’t help but want to stick by Huck and protect him from the dangers of the real world.3 The difference in their experience in the world is key in James wanting to aid and shelter the boy. Take this scene, shortly after James comes into the tail end of Huck’s solo adventure with the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, pitched in Twain’s novel as a comic family feud:
I could see the business with the warring families had troubled him. Killing is hard to see up close. Especially for a child. To tell the truth, I hadn’t seen much killing myself, except that I lived with it daily, the threat, the promise of it. Seeing one lynching was to see ten. Seeing ten was to see a hundred, with that signature posture of death, the angle of the head, the crossing of the feet.
James gets better the further it strays from Twain’s novel, and after the appearance of the King and the Duke – Twain’s quintessential confidence men, which Everett can’t help but also take out for a spin, including a hilarious scene at a revival tent where the King performs Shylock’s monologue from The Merchant of Venice to a befuddled and soon enraged crowd – Everett hardly sticks to Huck Finn at all. As opposed to the end of Twain’s novel, where Tom Sawyer cruelly extends James’ captivity under the Phelpses so that Tom and Huck can “heroically” free him, James puts its title character into flight, first with that surreal minstrel show, and then along the banks of the Mississippi, where James and Norman (the runaway slave in the minstrel show who can pass as white) devise a plan to have Norman sell James to various slaveowners, splitting the money after James escapes the plantations and work-camps. James’ ultimate goal is to buy his wife and children’s freedom, and so he and Norman try to at least turn the economic value of their bodies to their benefit. The work is hellish – the scenes at the sawmill that James is sold to are harrowing – but then again, every day for a slave is hellish, so what’s one more, especially if it might actually lead to a tangible freedom eventually. Huck eventually does swing his way back into the story, but the resolution of the novel is much different than Huck Finn; rather than just Huck “lighting out for the territories,” it is James who becomes a figure of wandering retributive justice, not so much running away from the South as burning down as much of it as possible on the way out. “I am a sign,” he says to one slave owner. “‘I am your future. I am James.’ I pulled back the hammer on my pistol.”
More dangerous than turning violence against the enemy, though, is the power of James’ thoughts, his ability to put them into words, his ability to make a text, in the postmodern sense. James is given a pencil by a slave early on in his journey; later, he sees that same slave being whipped to death for stealing the pencil, a reminder of how much of white supremacy depended on keeping their subjects separate from any form of knowledge as to prevent true embodiment. And so James, and Everett by extension, revels in the possibilities of meaning-making throughout the novel, using the full width of the field of the novel. “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here,” James writes soon after getting that hard-won pencil, which allows him to venture afar even in captivity. With it, James is able to imagine dialogues with famous philosophers – Rousseau, Locke, Voltaire – and pin them on the hypocrisy of their views of slavery and their doctrines on human freedom; James can also pick the surname “Golightly” for himself; and most of all, James is able to write himself into the canon, to completely defamiliarize and reframe a bedrock American classic as if what we thought we knew was never there at all:
The Mississippi, in fact, seemed like many different rivers. The level was always rising or falling. Sediment got pushed around, changing the locations of bars and shelves. Islands changed shape, sometimes becoming completely submerged, and old outcroppings disappeared while new ones materialized overnight. The upshot was that we had no idea where we were.
That’s one way to light out for the territories: make them entirely new.
Huck Finn might be The Great American Yarn.
“Our Guide to the Abyss,” Bolaño’s introduction to 1999 Spanish language edition of Twain’s book, positions Huck Finn as a key work for Bolaño and all (supra) American writers: “All American novelists, including those who write in Spanish, at some point get a glimpse of two books looming on the horizon. These books represent two paths, two structures, and above all two plots. Even sometimes: two fates. One is Moby-Dick and the other is the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Later, when accepting a prize for The Savage Detectives, Bolaño noted that his novel was “a response, one of many, to Huckleberry Finn; the Mississippi of The Savage Detectives is the flow of voices in the second part of the novel.”
Spoiler warning! Don’t read the rest of this footnote if you want to preserve James for yourself. Everett turns the relationship between James and Huck from one of strange potentiality – many critics have picked up the liberatory possibilities of Huck and James’ barge on the river, including a homoerotic streak that the sculptor Charles Ray has focused on in his work – to a familial relationship, with a heavily-foreshadowed reveal late in the book that James is Huck’s father. It serves to explain why James feels obliged to keep saving Huck throughout the book (I was reminded of James Baldwin’s essay on the film The Defiant Ones: "Liberal white audiences applauded when Sidney, at the end of the film, jumped off the train in order not to abandon his white buddy. The Harlem audience was outraged and yelled, Get back on the train, fool!”), and also further muddles the American canon, insisting that Huck’s quintessential Americanness, his appeal to readers across generations, is born out of a latent Blackness, his essential restlessness and rejection of civilization, a sin for any other race, made palatable by his whiteness.
Which Everett do you recommend? Wonderful essay, Evan.