For years, I taught Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to 11th graders in my American Literature Seminar Class. When you teach a book over and over again, especially one that takes as much care and courage to teach to modern teens as Huck Finn, what with its dialect-heavy dialogue and 219 instances of the “N” word, you develop an intimate relationship with the book. You come to feel that you know it as you know a dear friend.
But, it turns out, after all these years, and over dozens of readings, not to mention the development of discussion questions and essay prompts and project themes, I didn’t know Jim, one of the book’s main characters, as well as I thought I did—or very well at all. Perhaps no one did. Not even Mark Twain himself.
I recently finished James, the new novel by Percival Everett, a writer I only recently discovered, but has been writing books since 1983. Over the past couple years, I’ve started to catch up, reading The Trees, then Erasure, and now, James. He’s fast becoming one of my favorite authors.
In the simplest terms, James is a re-telling of Huck Finn and Huck and Jim’s trip together on a raft down the Mississippi River, but this time from the slave Jim’s POV instead of the Huck’s. But to leave it at that is selling the book far short of what it actually accomplishes, which is both a celebration of as well as an epic take down of an American classic. Need a refresher on the plot of Huck Finn? Click here.
James’ central innovation is in the language it gives back to Jim, and the power that comes with the knowledge and mastery of language, and the choosing of when and when not to reveal that knowledge and mastery. Endowing Jim with advanced language, and allowing him to code switch at will, revealing that the “slave” speech Twain’s book limits him to was an act all along that he and other slaves put on to keep the local whites at ease, is to introduce us to a character we only thought we knew, but who has been eluding us all along.
In Huck Finn, Jim is a sympathetic character. Tragically sympathetic, actually, nearly to the point of being a stereotype of the kindly, wise slave with the language and understanding of a child. He functions as a mentor and father figure to Huck, and he’s so dedicated to the boy’s well being that even though he is on the run from the threat of being sold and hoping to re-unite with his wife and daughter, he risks re-capture to take care of Huck. The only time our affection for Jim wavers throughout the book is when he confesses that he beat his daughter for not listening to him, not realizing in that moment that she was actually deaf. But otherwise, Jim is morally pure. Almost saintlike.
The reason that the book needs to portray Jim this way is that Huck Finn is not about Jim’s growth, or changes in his character. As the title tells us, it’s about the adventures of Huck, who lives in a world that has taught him over and over again that Jim is sub-human. Property. No better or worse than a dog, or a hammer. Jim’s purity and childlike limitations allow us to focus on the book’s central pre-occupation: the evolution of Huck’s empathy and moral compass. The book’s central question is: can Huck defy his racist upbringing and find the courage to do what he knows in his heart to be right? And it is upon our perception of Jim’s purity that Huck is able to project his growing understanding that a person is a person. That Jim is not property; he’s a man, deserving of care and consideration. Which is why Huck tears up the letter that would condemn Jim back to slavery, proclaiming “Alright, I’ll go to hell,” fully believing that by helping liberate Jim, he is doing the “wrong” thing but for all the right reasons.
Except, as James will eventually show us, or ask us to consider, this is all kind of bullshit.
James asks us a somewhat simple question that may have never crossed our minds: What was Jim really thinking during all the shenanigans that transpire in Huck Finn? And how does access to Jim’s interior life make us see not just him, but Huck, and the world around them, in strange and incredibly painful new ways?
A lot has been pondered over the years about what Mark Twain himself thought about slavery. And about Jim, one of his most beloved and famous characters. I’ve always believed that Huck Finn, the book, was fervently anti-slavery and anti-racist, but also that it is burdened by being a product of its time (it was first published in 1884). Some readers are understandably distracted by the book’s dated colloquial speech and the racism of its characters, including our hero Huck, who casually throw around our modern society’s most unsayable word like it’s no big deal. And I’ll admit, it’s damn hard, and very jarring to see the “N” word on every page of a book you’re reading with modern teens. Twain makes us deal with it by not shying away from how his characters, and the humans they were drawn from, might have actually spoken. For that reason, the book has grown more and more controversial and harder and harder to teach. Some believe it’s downright racist.
But it’s always tricky to cast our modern understanding on a work created almost a hundred and fifty years ago. We seek to hold past creators to modern standards, and though they may often deserve our scrutiny, in forcing our current paradigms upon them, we risk blinding ourselves to what they may have been working through in the first place. Their intention becomes muddled.
I personally feel confident that Twain (at least mostly) believed he was presenting a complex, three-dimensional character in Jim. The problem is that Twain’s vision and capacity may have been inherently limited. Twain himself admits he grew up seeing no huge problem with slavery, and it was only later in life that he gained empathy and understanding, and started to see the inherent evil in slavery and the humanity of Black people. As a result, he wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a satire about the cruelty of slavery and the violent hypocrisy of the American South. It’s a brutally honest, funny, but also a deeply flawed book, largely because of its final act, which is pretty ridiculous, and threatens to undo much of the moral gusto developed through the first two thirds.
Now, 140 years after Huck Finn was published comes Everett’s searing re-examination of a book and characters we thought we knew so well. This is risky, high wire territory. Huck Finn is an American classic, an established part of the cannon, and messing with it is a huge artistic risk. But Everett more than justifies the chance he’s taken.
By presenting the plot of Huck Finn through Jim’s perspective, and allowing Jim to break off from Huck and assert his own humanity separate from Huck’s gaze, James forces us to re-engage with Twain’s classic in way we never expected. It forces us to admit our own blindness, and our own complicity, in the limited way that Huck and his world are able to see Jim. It forces us to deal with Twain’s own shortcomings and blind spots in the way he characterizes Jim, and through Jim, the hearts and minds of those trapped in bondage. For me, someone who always thought he knew Huck Finn inside and out, and always believed in and defended its moral stature, the effect was devastating.
I’ll admit it. James kind of messed me up. And, for the first time in a long time, it made me wish I was still a teacher so that I could read Huck Finn with my students, and then read James immediately after. The experience would have been awesome.
Okay.
This is the end of Part I. Part II coming soon. Y’all come back now.
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Brilliantly detailed for a deeper understanding of Huck Finn and Jim. James is now on my TBR list :)
Thank you for sharing this. I cannot wait to read about Jim.