Book review: Percival Everett’s novel James

JAMES. Percival Everett. Doubleday. 320 pages. $28.

Percival Everett’s latest novel, James, reimagines Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, centering the action around Huck’s situational assistant, an enslaved man named Jim.

James, whom he prefers to Jim, is enslaved on a plantation in Missouri with his wife and children. His existence is unstable in every way.

Wood must be stolen to keep warm, and the risk of being caught is as terrible as freezing to death. The masters are always watching and, to maintain power, rule through violence and dehumanization. This is a world we often read about. This is our country’s greatest shame, worthy of re-examination. But Everett adds a brilliant twist to the story of slavery.

James is not the illiterate, poorly spoken Jim we know from Twain’s classic, but a well-read, eloquent man who must feign ignorance in order to appease the white people and survive in their world.

“Safe movement through the world depended on mastery of the language, its fluency,” writes Everett. Pretending to be ignorant means changing your speech, switching to a different spoken language whenever white people appear.

James teaches the enslaved lessons in a secret language, lessons that focus on how to speak and feign ignorance so that white people feel superior and therefore pacified and less dangerous. James tells his class that the only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior are us. Accepting the image of ignorance is a matter of life and death.

Even Huck, whom James likes, is not privy to the secret double lives of blacks. “My change in diction alerted others to the presence of white boys,” Everett writes. “So my performance in front of the boys became the frame for my story. My story no longer seemed like a fairy tale, because the real game became a spectacle for the boys.”

When James learns that his owner intends to sell him down the river, separating him from his family, James runs away. His goal is to go north and somehow earn enough money to buy his family’s freedom. He escapes across the Mississippi River and ends up on Jackson Island, an uninhabited piece of land in the middle of the river. He is hiding there when Huck Finn finds him.