Percival Everett’s James and the literature of resistance

Here is a photograph in the Glen Ellyn News from the spring of 1958 — the fifth-grade students were putting on a minstrel show in this all-white suburb. It claimed to be an authentic minstrel show, with all the traditional music and costumes. I’m in that photograph, since I had a lead role, Mr. Bones, sitting on the right side of the semicircle of a chorus of little black-faced white-lipped white kids.

I found the clipping in my parents’ attic when I was grabbing my last few memories after I had come back from years underground. I quickly tossed it into the trash, mortified by this reminder of my white supremacist roots and terrified of being found out. But then I fished it out. Better to own my history in order to change it. I now have the clipping preserved in plastic lamination and share it with my social justice grad students, future teachers. “This is real, this is part of my story, our story,” I tell them.

I was reminded of this photograph while reading the powerful new novel, James, by Percival Everett. It is a rewrite of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn but with the enslaved runaway Jim as the narrator and central character — as he reclaims the more dignified full name, James. In one scene, James is drafted into a minstrel show, all white people dressed in blackface. But James is involved in a double deception, a Black man pretending to be a White man playing a Black man. A flood of reflections came over me reading this book, about American history, its original sin, about literature and power, and about how we raise our children. We may imagine that these sins were of the distant past, but that 1958 minstrel photograph reminds us what Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

The novel begins by following the plot of Huckleberry Finn pretty closely, from Huck’s hijinks with Tom Sawyer, him faking his death to escape his abusive father, the flight to Jackson’s Island where he teams up with Jim, and the subsequent trip down the Mississippi River — Huck fleeing his family life, Jim escaping slavery. But since it’s James’ perspective, he is not naïve or easily fooled, as he appears to be in the book. The first line shows he is on to Huck and Tom’s tricks, “Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.” It would be tedious, of course, to completely adhere to the tale Mark Twain spun, so James goes off and separates from Huck for some time, experiencing every kind of life of Black people who are enslaved — working as a blacksmith, a minstrel, a field worker, and a coal tender on a steamboat. He is also deeply read (from sneaking in his captor’s study), debating Voltaire and the enlightenment. In this version, the Civil War starts by the end of the book and James frees himself and his family from slavery at the point of a gun.

Certainly many people have been upset about the original Huckleberry Finn, especially the liberal use of the n-word. Some teachers would dismiss the concerns, saying “that’s just how they talked.” But that’s a cop out. It was an offensive term then and it’s offensive now. But, remember, the book is narrated by Huck, a racist little white boy in the pre-Civil War south. Mark Twain was doing something pretty radical: he was “telling on” white people, revealing the way whites think. Does that get you mad? It should. But he goes there in order to expose it. We could, of course, have read the white author Henry James. There is no n-word to offend us. In fact, there are no Black people. The deep sickness in America is not addressed. Is that better? Of course not.

In fact, I feel the same about Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s novel on colonial penetration of Africa. Again, the narrator is himself a European colonialist. Again, the perspective is offensive. But he is telling on the Europeans, exposing that we are the ones who project our nightmares on Africa but it is our own heart of darkness that is most horrifying. Should we also read Black authors, from Martin Delaney to Jesmyn Ward? Of course. But it is on white people to explore the sickness and horrors of white supremacy.

I have had the experience of teaching Huck Finn in at Oakland High School, to a class that was about half African American. I faced the dilemma of the white perspective and the sick blood-drenched reality of nineteenth century America. I anticipated the turn that Percival Everett took by asking students to create a narrative of Jim’s perspective. As we came to the crucial turning point in chapter 31 when Huck has to decide whether to betray Jim or commit to the illegal course of escape, I had students watch Kurosawa’s classic film Rashomon. This tale explores an event, a crime, from three different perspectives, retelling the story through the eyes of each protagonist. After discussing that great film, I asked them to rewrite the moment in chapter 31 — but from Jim’s perspective. Students took to it with enthusiasm. Their versions had Jim saying things like, “If that little punk turns on me, I’m going to kill him for sure.” They could imagine themselves into Jim’s mind and could read the stance he had taken towards Huck earlier, being friendly and rather naïve, as a performance he had learned for his own survival.

While I love the turn that Everett has taken with the story, I would also give Mark Twain credit for a pretty insightful grasp of the different roles — including Jim’s clever survival strategies as well as his determination to get free by any means necessary. The story, though, is about white racism and the many burdens it places on one’s humanity. It is fascinating to see Huck try, again and again, to find acceptance and belonging in white society. His forays into the violent feuding world of the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons, his experience with the conniving hustlers who call themselves the Duke and the Dauphin, continually repel him, drive him back to the humanity of the life with Jim on the raft. In fact, you will note that he does not use the n-word, it is not present, when he is with Jim. It is only deployed when Huck is trying to fit in to white society. Much as Huck tries to be a “good white boy,” his real ethical dilemma arises because virtue, even biblical values, lie with Jim.

Finally, after all these experiences, Huck declares, “I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’ — and tore it up. [tore up letter to Miss Watson turning in Jim]. It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.”

We white people all imagine that if we were alive in 1850 we would certainly be abolitionists, would fight against slavery. But in reality, to be so is to take a stand against custom, against your school, against the church, against your family, and against the law. Huck finally had to face the awful truth of the sickness in his society and had to become an outlaw in order to do right. And what is taken for granted, what is enforced, today that we would need to have the moral courage to defy? Mass incarceration? Genocide committed against Palestinians? Children in cages at the border? Stolen native land? Mark Twain wrote a novel on the radicalization of a little white racist.

Percival Everett depicts the white boy much more generously than Mark Twain did, as Huck says much earlier in the novel James (p. 72), “I kin tell you what I’d wish for. First, I’d wish for some adventure. . ..Then I’d wish dat you was free like me. . . Well, I’d wish all slaves was free.”

The fact that Mark Twain, for all his limitations, was able to name the sick inhumanity of American white supremacy makes me think of a similar duality in Shakespeare’s dark comedy, The Tempest. The complicated character of Caliban represents every nightmare in the European heart — a half monster, part African, part Native American. Caliban is held in contempt, and in slavery, by the island boss Prospero. Caliban suffers whippings and snarls at his captors. Yet when Miranda suggests killing him, Prospero responds

“But, as ’tis, We cannot miss him.

He does make our fire, Fetch in our wood,

and serves in offices that profit us.”

In other words, they must keep Caliban as a slave as he provides the labor for the Europeans. The colonized have been doing the labor to enrich Europe and the US, have provided the primitive accumulation of capital, from the beginning. What a confession!

The great Black author Aimé Césaire from Martinique wrote his own talk-back version, called A Tempest. I always have students read this text alongside Shakespeare’s. And Césaire’s Caliban is an angry militant, his first words being, “Uhuru!” the Swahili word for freedom. Caliban adopts the name X,

and plots rebellion against his oppressors. It is a brilliant and satisfying rewrite of the story. I love the Césaire version, certainly, but it is surprising to see how strong a resistance character Shakespeare’s Caliban is. Certainly Shakespeare, writing around 1610, carries all the European prejudices and fantasies, and yes sexual fears, about the “other” from the Global South. But, true to his fiercely dialectical approach, Shakespeare gives Caliban agency and rebelliousness.

In one of his first comments, Caliban without hesitation calls down curses on his captor Prospero. He says that he first trusted this European arrival, showed him the wonders of nature on the island (doesn’t it sound like the trusting indigenous people in North America at first contact?). But now he realizes he was tricked:

As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed

With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen

Drop on you both. A southwest blow on you

And blister you all o’er. . .

I must eat my dinner.

This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother,

Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first,

Thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me

Water with berries in ’t, and teach me how

To name the bigger light and how the less,

That burn by day and night. And then I loved thee,

And showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle,

The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile.

Cursed be I that did so! All the charms

Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you,

For I am all the subjects that you have,

Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep me from

The rest o’th’ island.

When Prospero protests that he educated Caliban, taught him his European language, Caliban shoots back,

You taught me language, and my profit on ’t

Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you

For learning me your language!

That’s about as clear an anti-colonial response he could have thrown back at his captor. After that, Caliban goes on to organize a rebellion, enlisting the help of some of the low-level sailors from the European ship. While the uprising fails, ultimately Prospero and his crew depart and the island is once again left to Caliban and the more mild slave, what Malcolm X would call the “house Negro,” Ariel.

The character of Caliban has long stood for the oppressed of the Caribbean and what we now call the Third World. The historic essay by Cuba’s Roberto Retamar riffs on this relationship. And Aimé Césaire adds an important dimension to the canon.

Surprisingly, much of what we call the western canon is not just authoritarian declarations by dead white men. The best of the literature is oppositional, critical, skeptical of the conquests. That’s how we have to read it, even if the frightened reactionaries start banning Shakespeare. I think Percival Everett gets this duality, the obligation of the white authors to expose the genocidal history of their own people as well as the importance of the Black authors to tell the full story. In fact, Everett writes in the acknowledgements, “Finally, a nod to Mark Twain. His humor and humanity affected me long before I became a writer.”

So that takes me back to my own upbringing and the pathetic newspaper clipping of the minstrel show that reveals what it means to be raised in the world of white supremacy. In fifth grade, you really don’t have a choice. But the world, and its diverse stories and struggles, point to the possibility of radical change and perhaps a chance to redeem the blood-soaked, shameful history of this country.