James

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.

The Samurai by Shusaku Endo

If there’s one thing you need to know about Japanese author Shusaku Endo before you start reading his novels, it’s that he was Catholic. Fortunately, when Endo’s name comes up, that bit of information is usually close at hand. It’s right there in the first sentence of his Wikipedia article: “Shusaku Endo was a Japanese author who wrote from the perspective of a Japanese Catholic.”

That phrasing is tortured, but there’s a point to it. It is worth noting that Endo was Japanese and a Catholic, since less than .35% of Japan’s population identifies as such, but his writing grapples both ex- and implicitly with questions of faith and religion, of systems and change, and his perspective on such matters is, to say the least, complex. Even operating within the boundaries of his own faith, his novels are very much the work of a man who was, by nature of being Japanese, somewhat outside of Catholicism, and, by nature of being Catholic, somewhat outside of what it means to be Japanese. He very much wrote from the perspective of a Japanese Catholic.

As is often the case with those who live just outside of a group with which they are deeply familiar, Endo was remarkably critical of both Japan and Catholicism. In fact, two of his most explicitly religious works, Silence and The Samurai, feature Japan and the Catholic Church as, at best, self-absorbed and malignant actors, if not outright villains.

Admittedly, the setting doesn’t help. Both novels concern the tumultuous early 1600s, when Japan closed its borders to Christian missionaries after a 40 years period during which the Jesuits had achieved no inconsiderable amount of success. The Japanese response was firm, to put it mildly. The Japan of Endo’s period novels is cold, calculating, unyielding, and cruel. It is a Government consumed only with maintaining order and the status quo, with flushing out bad actors. Throughout both novels, Japan as a nation is more than happy to use its own citizens as sacrificial pawns. Their humanity never enters the equation.

Missionaries and those affiliated with the Church do not fare any better under Endo’s gaze. Their faith is always beyond reproach, consumed as they are by the need to spread their beliefs, but they are uniformly portrayed as self-aggrandizing. As a random example, one of the protagonists in Silence writes, “It might well be that the poverty-stricken Christians were hungering for a priest to administer the Blessed Sacrament, hear their confessions and baptize their children. In this desert from which missionaries and priests had been expelled the only one who could give the water of life to this island tonight was myself. Yes, only myself.” The ardency of his belief is matched only by his ego. In The Samurai, the missionary Velasco constantly schemes to become the Bishop of Japan once it is formally included within Christendom.

Endo writes with anger towards those who forced Christianity onto a nation that did not need it, and simultaneously for the Government who took that as an excuse to consolidate power through violence. Despite the fact that Endo’s own faith is a result of the missionary work he depicts, he portrays them uniformly as contemptible. The pit at the center seems to be the unwillingness of missionaries to consider the ramifications of their actions. His feelings seem best summarized in “Araki Thomas,” the remarkable short story published in 1965 that likely germinated into Silence the following year:

Whilst fully aware of the ban on Christianity, foreign missionaries continued to steal into Japan. Fired by an intense vision to convert Japan to Christianity, their heroic spirit spurned even death. But what was to be done about the poor Christian peasants who were implicated along with them? The missionaries urged dreams of martyrdom upon the Japanese Christians. They expected them to die as martyrs. Martyrdom was now the only path which led to God, and they believed that, if they were to ignore it, they would be guilty of ignoring God. But did their faith offer nothing but this cruel path?

To Endo, the answer seems to be “No.” “Enough Christian blood had already been shed,” he writes a bit later in the same story, “and every time more missionaries slipped into Japan, more Japanese blood would necessarily be spilled. [Araki Thomas] begged the Church in Rome to forsake the people of Japan, to stop forcing its dreams and ideals upon the Japanese.” Over and over again, the Church is shown to be self-absorbed. The lesson of Silence, as I take it, is that the formalities of faith are nothing compared to its values. What good is Christianity if it prioritizes its promulgation over the safety of the souls it espouses saving? To Endo, true Christians are those who understand that the heart of Christianity is much greater than the rules and rituals.

In reading The Samurai, I was struck by the juxtaposition of the Church and Japan. The Church exists to spread itself as far as possible, to make as much Christian as it can, while blanching in the face of any changes that new influences bring into the church. Japan, during the time of these novels, is intensely interested in defining what Is and Is Not Japan. While the Church “invites” people in so long as they conform to its ways, Japan keeps people out. Endo seems to believe both approaches are wrong. You cannot spread yourself without risking change to the fabric of your being, and you should not reject the possibility of such changes out of hand.