James

A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS

A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.

This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.

James
Percival Everett

You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers.

Well, besties, it finally happened. After I read Huck Finn and then slogged through Tom Sawyer, I have finally read James. It made me want catfish. This is annoying because I love catfish but rarely eat it, though since I’m too lazy to fry it up this is pretty much my fault. I realize Jim himself gets thoroughly sick of catfish after eating it for one too many meals, but I can’t help it. I am a hungry hungry blogger, and I absolutely lose my mind over food descriptions.

Set in Hannibal, Missouri (renamed St. Petersburg in the original novels), James relates the tale of Jim, slave to the elderly Miss Watson, who also owns his wife, Sadie, and their daughter, Lizzie. Though they speak to each other in standard English, the slaves maintain relative safety by code-switching to an exaggerated patois in the presence of white people. As an added protection, they take great care to present themselves as ignorant, superstitious, and ultra religious, which generally helps them avoid unwanted attention. Beneath this carefully crafted image, Jim is fully literate, having secretly taught himself to read from Judge Thatcher’s private library, and his fever dreams feature heated debates with prominent philosophers, including Voltaire and John Locke. He regularly gives camouflage lessons to the slave children, whom he instructs in language and comportment, but he is also frequently consulted by Miss Watson’s adopted son, Huckleberry “Huck” Finn, who has a lot of questions about religion, slavery, and morality.

Unfortunately, all lessons are set aside when Sadie learns that Miss Watson is planning to sell Jim. After an emotional goodbye, Jim runs away, promising to return for Sadie and Lizzie, and makes his way to nearby Jackson Island. Here he runs into Huck, who faked his own death to escape his abusive father (“pap”), and they flee down the Mississippi together, traveling by night and hiding by day. They get along well, but Jim worries that he will be blamed for Huck’s murder, while Huck becomes confused when Jim unintentionally breaks character. After a while they stumble across a wrecked steamboat and pick up a sackful of books, which Jim reads on the sly, but are separated when their raft is destroyed. Jim washes up in Illinois with his books and is discovered by a handful of local slaves, who tell him that he will need a white man with him in order to buy his family’s freedom. At his request, one of the slaves smuggles him a stub of a pencil, but is later lashed and then lynched for the so-called theft. Learning of his murder, Jim vows to write his own story.

Eventually Jim reunites with Huck just in time for them both to be enslaved by a pair of con men passing themselves off as the lost Dauphin of France and the equally lost Duke of Bridgewater. Efforts to ditch the leeches unavailing, they end up separated again when the King and the Duke are intimidated into leaving Jim with a man named Wiley, who demands Jim’s labor in reparation for the deliberate injury of his own slave, Easter. This arrangement is supposed to be temporary, but Jim is quickly discovered and coveted by Daniel Decatur Emmett, leader of a blackface singing troupe called the Virginia Minstrels. Wiley quickly agrees to Emmett’s terms for the outrageous price of $200, and Jim is bundled off as the Minstrels’ newest tenor. Though initially taken aback by the courtesy shown to him by the Minstrels, Jim soon realizes that Emmett is no different from the average slave owner, and that he himself will suffer a torturous death if their audiences learn that he is black. On the bright side, he is befriended by Norman Brown, a white-passing former slave who is quietly saving money to buy his wife’s freedom.

After a terrifying incident with a belligerent audience member, Jim escapes the Minstrels during an unguarded moment, taking Emmett’s songbook with him. Norman flees as well upon witnessing Emmett’s extravagant fury over the loss of Jim, and catches up without too much trouble. They don’t entirely trust each other – Norman is afraid that Jim will leave him; Jim low-key wonders if Norman is a lunatic who is pretending to be black, a Rachel Dolezal, if you will – but they share a common need for money, and so agree to a fraudulent scheme (inspired, ironically, by the King and the Duke) in which Norman, posing as Jim’s master, will sell him to as many people as he can. The scheme works well for a hot second when Norman manages to sell Jim to the owner of a sawmill, but the plan goes sideways when Jim meets a young slave named Sammy and realizes she has suffered extensive sexual abuse at the hands of the miller. He brings her with him, wishing to save her from further abuse, only to lose her when she is shot and killed during their escape. Not knowing what else to do, Jim and Norman bury Sammy on a quiet beach and briefly pray for her.

With few options and their safety dubious at best, Jim and Norman just barely manage to stow away on a steamboat, where Jim is discomfited to make the acquaintance of Brock, a slave who feeds the furnace and claims to love his work. Brock is equally disturbed by Jim, and he becomes so upset upon observing Jim’s less-than-servile interactions with Norman, who is still posing as Jim’s master for safety’s sake, that he overfeeds the furnace in an unhappy frenzy. I don’t know enough about steamboats or boilers to say whether the disaster that follows can be attributed entirely to Brock (probably not), but the result is the same: the boiler explodes, sinking the ship and leaving quite a lot of people to drown in the middle of the Mississippi. Their number includes Huck, brought onto the steamboat by the King and the Duke during their attempt to flee the newly declared American Civil War. Jim chooses Huck over Norman and swims him to safety, afterwards admitting that Huck is his biological son. Initially confused and disbelieving, Huck accepts Jim as his father and insists on accompanying him back to Hannibal to retrieve his family, though Jim urges him to forge his own path.

Upon arrival, Jim learns that Sadie and Lizzie have been sold to an unknown buyer, and he begs Huck to find whatever information he can. While hiding in his old cabin, now occupied by a couple named Cotton and Katie, Jim is forced to watch from the shadows as Katie is raped by an overseer named Hopkins. After the rape, he leaves the cabin and ends up on Jackson Island, where by chance he finds Hopkins a few days later, alone and drunk, and steals his pistol before strangling him to death and dumping his body in the river. He then forces Judge Thatcher to tell him where Sadie and Lizzie were taken, then abducts him at gunpoint and leaves him stranded but alive on Jackson Island. Against staggering odds, he makes his way to the slave-breeding plantation to which Sadie and Lizzie were sold and incites a fiery riot, shooting a man who can safely be presumed to be the plantation owner before escaping north. Though the breakout is largely unsuccessful, Jim and his family escape to Iowa, where he introduces himself as James.

So: having covered all that, was the journey (i.e., forcing myself to read Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer) worth it? No. I don’t regret reading Huck, despite my thoughts on the ending, though I regret the time I wasted on Tom. But to be honest, I didn’t need either one of them to appreciate James, and I kind of wish I hadn’t started with them because I ended up unnecessarily confused. Going into James, I was envisioning a straightforward retelling of the original novel rather than a complete rewrite. When the two began to diverge I thought that maybe James would end by revealing Huck as an unreliable narrator or something similar, but that obviously didn’t happen. There is absolutely no point in keeping the two side by side when James strikes off on its own after a fairly faithful opening. I was also thrown by the lack of the Pike County dialect, which, again, would not have been an obstacle if I didn’t have an uncontrollable need to read the inspiration before getting to the rewrite. If this sounds like a me problem, that’s because it is. Still, it was jarring, and I would have been better served if I had just gone into James completely blind. On the other hand, I would still have been confused if I had then proceeded to read Huck after James, so maybe it’s just a no-win scenario.

Whatever the case, I liked Huck – with significant caveats – but I prefer James, which is a compulsive, addicting ride from start to finish. It sure helps that Tom Sawyer is barely present and is never given the opportunity to stage the prison break of his idiotic preteen dreams, though I am very mildly disappointed that I didn’t get to see Jim’s take on this entirely self-serving farce. Where Twain’s Jim is mild-mannered, credulous and gentle-hearted, Everett turns this on its head by revealing Jim’s outward persona as a defense mechanism intended as protection against a society that quite literally could prove fatal at any given moment. This Jim is canny and dark-humored, gifted in survival-related improv, and he would’ve been more than a match for Tom and his antics. At the same time, his grim ironies never make him inhuman or unlikable. He is a loving husband and father, even to children who aren’t his. Though he knows he can’t save everyone, he does try to protect others to the extent that he can: the children of other slaves, Norman, Sammy, Huck. I have to admit I am sore over the death of Norman, but there was no perfect choice (Jim himself laments the situation as a bad philosopher’s dilemma), and I cannot fault a parent for choosing to save their child over some stranger they met maybe a few days ago. His feelings towards Huck are complicated; of course they are. He lies to him (mostly by omission), uses him for his own ends, and considers leaving him multiple times, but he also takes the time to answer his more abstract questions, worries about his relationship with pap, shields him from the worst cruelties of the King and the Duke, and, in the end, saves his life.

For his part, Huck is kinder and more emotional than he is in the original book, and far more convincing because of it. Unlike Twain’s self-sufficient river imp, this Huck feels like a genuine human child: still mischievous, though more cautious than the brazen Tom; curious; inquisitive; uninterested in making his bed because he’s just going to mess it up again; unsure of the point of prayer when, as far as he can see, praying just means asking for things you can’t have; unsure of himself in difficult situations but capable of ad-libbing, sometimes with help from Jim. He cares about Jim and tries to protect him from people like the King and the Duke, and becomes frightened and upset when that protection isn’t enough. At no point does he try to send Jim back to Miss Watson; nor does he waste his time worrying that his travels with Jim will send him straight to Hell. The question of the legality of slave-poaching does come up in his conversations with Jim, but it isn’t a prominent feature in either of their journeys. Everett’s Huck is less rigidly bound by the indoctrination that ruled Twain’s, better able to see it for what it is, and I’m glad of it.

Every now and then I run across a book that leaves me with zero thoughts, just vibes, and this happened to be one of them. I had to read this book twice just to have enough to get started on any sort of review; but I’m glad of that too because it was absolutely worth the reread, not least because of its conclusion. The explosive ending was completely unexpected and so deeply satisfying that I kind of wish I could wipe my memory and experience it again for the first time. Having had some time to sit with it, I’m even glad that James differs significantly from its source material: the King and the Duke are more malevolent than they are in the original, more controlling and less cartoonish, but they were also less ruinous to my general experience because Jim spends most of his time apart from them. It’s also possible that I mind them less because their abusive, persistent entitlement inspires one of Jim’s funniest observations.

Now that traveling south had failed to throw off pursuers, I needed to get to the Ohio to travel north. Traveling only at night made going slow. Somebody riding the current day and night could travel twice as fast. Another way to say it would be that the King and the Duke could cover the same distance in half the time. I point out this fact because that is precisely what happened.

Thanks, fellas. I needed that laugh. And, now that Jim has made his observation, I hope you both exploded and drowned.