Mark Twain introduces Jim, the slave who accompanies Huckleberry Finn down the Mississippi, at the start of the second chapter of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
We went tip-toeing along a path amongst the trees back towards the end of the widow’s garden, stooping down so as the branches wouldn’t scrape our heads. When we was passing by the kitchen I fell over a root and made a noise. We scrouched down and laid still. Miss Watson’s big nigger, named Jim, was setting in the kitchen door; we could see him pretty clear, because there was a light behind him. He got up and stretched his neck out about a minute, listening. Then he says:
‘Who dah?’
James, in which Percival Everett retells The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, announces itself with astonishing clarity. It dropps readers into the opening of that second chapter as Jim saw it:
Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.
That is such a perfect encapsulation of everything the novel is doing, such a succinct explanation of its tone and its viewpoint, that I cannot help but hope it was the wellspring of the entire project. In my mind, Everett was talking about Huckleberry Finn with friends, joking about how Jim could probably see those little fuckers, only to realize he had something here. I have to believe he wrote that sentence down and the rest of this wondrous novel came spilling out. It’s the romantic in me.
I was prepared for James to gently subvert the tropes at play in Twain’s novel, to slowly add detail where none had been, but it doesn’t really do that. Instead, James does away with those tropes fully within its first five pages, mostly through Everett’s use of language.
All of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is written in dialect, but Jim’s dialogue is particularly hard to parse: “A harem’s a bo’d’nhouse, I reck’n. Mos’ likely dey had rackety times in de nussery.” A lot of “dey”s, a lot of “warn’t”s, that sort of business. Jim is a comic foil, always an object and never a subject. His dialogue supports that.
Not so the Jim of James. Even if we ignore the timbre of the narration, he says as much in the second paragraph: “[Huck and Tom] were always playing some kind of pretending game where I was either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy.” The narration is so assured, particularly when taken in contrast to the source material, that I was jarred when I turned the page and came to the first line of dialogue: “Who dat dere in da dark lak dat?”
First of all, it is a miracle of book publishing that the first line of dialogue sits at the very top of page 10, and not at the bottom of page 9. Having just finished reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in preparation for James—something I don’t think is essential to enjoy it, but which certainly enhanced my experience—I had already noticed Everett’s rejection of dialect, so it was dizzying and exhilarating to turn the page and see it. In that moment, before I knew everything Everett was up to, it suggested a sort of radical egalitarianism, the idea that our thoughts are not bound by the particulars of how we speak.
Second of all, I love that Everett chose not to use the same dialogue as Mark Twain. Both books are explicitly, textually first-person narratives written down after the fact. Huck remembers Jim saying “Who dah?”. Jim remembers it a little different. The choice to deviate from Twain’s/Huckleberry Finn’s account in the particulars while adhering to the broader structures reinforces the conceit behind both books.
Third and lastly, that is the moment in which James announces its love of language to the reader. One of Everett’s primary thematic obsessions here is code-switching, and the ways in which the specifics of the language we use communicate much more than just the words themselves are saying. Three pages later, Jim has a conversation with another slave in which they speak entirely without dialect. A page or two after that, Jim instructs his young daughter on “the correct incorrect grammar” for speaking to white folk. It’s all an act, a façade put in place to make sure the white people feel comfortable and secure.
The rapacity with which Everett acknowledges and discards tropes reminded me of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, a movie that burns away all the comforting slave tropes the audience might bring with it. The “kind slaveowner” is kind and good right up until the moment it’s inconvenient for him. The southern belle is just as malicious as her husband. An attempted lynching is slow, aching, and miserable, not a grand and dramatic burst of horrifying cinematic action. For his purposes, McQueen turned cinema against itself, just as Everett uses language here to find what’s at the bottom of one of the Great American Novels.
To say James is a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a good hook to get you interested—it worked for me!—but the reality is that James is done with Twain by the end of Part One. Everett has his own story, and his own concerns. This is a project of reclamation. It is a strident assertion that black people aren’t, will not be, and never were anything less than just that, people, whole and unto themselves, no matter what the white people write down.