The portrayal of slavery in North American arts, literature and cinema has been contentious and polemical. The representation of slaves, for instance, in novels written by white authors not only continues to elicit critical (re)evaluation in contemporary light, but enslaved characters are also remarkably reinvented by writers of African American heritage. James (2024) is a glittering example where Percival Everett offers an illuminating perspective on the eponymous character who is known as Jim in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
Counted amongst the most memorable illustrations of American literature, the picaresque novels follow the mischievous and reckless adventures of the titular protagonists who are juvenile and white. In the first part of the duology, Jim is described as “the small coloured boy” whose marginal presence is barely noticeable in the novel. His sparse speech, cluttered with contractions and disjointed diction, is believed to represent the “slave dialect” of the time. When Tom tells him to swap whitewashing the fence with fetching water from the pump, Jim mumbles “Can’t, Mars Tom. Ole missis, she tole me I got to go an’ git dis water an’ not stop foolin’ roun’ wid anybody. She say she spec’ Mars Tom gwine to ax me to whitewash, an’ so she tole me go ’long an’ ’tend to my own business—she ’lowed she’d ’tend to de whitewashin”.
When “Miss Watson’s big nigger” Jim learns that his owner is going to sell him, he runs off from the plantation hoping to escape to Illinois, a free State. Jim chances upon Huckleberry Finn who is running away from his drunkard and abusive father. The duo band together and set on a meandering journey full of perilous adventures along the Mississippi river. They travel at night while hiding during the day, because, in addition to being a runaway slave, Jim is accused of Huck’s murder and there is a lucrative bounty on his head. Their uncommon companionship compels Huck Finn to deeply reflect on the legal and moral validity of Jim’s servitude, which the boy gives voice to in the first person in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But Jim is portrayed as a dim-witted ignorant slave who indulges in witchcrafts and lacks lucidity of thought and speech. Big Jim never grows up cognitively. “You can’t learn a nigger to argue,” Huck claims with an air of condescension. Such disparaging and stereotypical remarks, not least the (ab)use of the “N” word, abound in the novel.
In James Percival Everett turns Mark Twain’s depiction of Jim on its head. It is not so much the retelling of the adventures as the sublime reinvention of the character in a fresh light. In a notable departure, Everett hauls and hoists James front and centre of the narrative, giving him a firm and lucid voice with which he writes himself into being:
My name is James. I wish I could tell my story with a sense of history as much as industry. I was sold when I was born and then sold again. My mother’s mother was from someplace on the continent of Africa, I had been told or perhaps simply assumed. I cannot claim to any knowledge of that world or those people […] I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family […], a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.
Voice forms a prominent subject matter in James’s perspectival rendering of the adventures. Hitherto written about and sized up by whites (author and characters), James reclaims his voice and takes up the narrative reins in the language of his choosing, proficiently switching between slave diction and clear speech. If James babbles away incoherently, it is to play along white expectations. It is seldom his default speech. James insists that the mastery of language is indispensable for safe movement in the white man's world.
Giving language lessons to children, he explains, “white folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them”. The children learn to apply slave filter and situational translation when they are nearby whites. If the kitchen is on fire, they are instructed not to say “fire, fire” directly but cry “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere” and let the whites take lead in naming the trouble, finding a solution to it and feel superior to the “stupid” slaves. Their survival lessons also include self-effacing gestures and demeanours (such as, “don’t make eye contact”; “never speak first”) to humour inflated white superiority because any infractions to the heavily guarded master-slave relation is met with gratuitous and unspeakable violence.
“They enjoy the correction and thinking you’re stupid. Remember, the more they choose to not want to listen, the more we can say to one another around them,” James judiciously cautions his students. By taking the slaves for gormless nincompoops the whites are taken for a roundabout ride. It never occurs to them that they can be mocked by the slaves, which James describes as double irony.
James is industrious, erudite and caring. He steals himself into Judge Thatcher’s library to read books secretly. In his vivid dreams he converses with Voltaire, Rousseau and John Locke, taking them to task for their convoluted and problematic views on race and slavery. Cunégonde, the tormented female character in Candide by Voltaire, visits James in a dream to inform him that slavery is a global profitable enterprise in which banks own slaves as mortgaged assets. While on the run, James is preoccupied with the imminent threats his wife Sadie and their daughter Elizabeth face in the plantation, which counters the dominant image of the absentee Black husband and father. James reminds himself, “I couldn’t lose sight of my goal of freeing my family. What would freedom be without them?”. When James and Huck navigate the unremitting dangers on the Mississippi river, the whites—slave owners, bounty hunters and tricksters—pose the biggest threat to them than the raw forces of nature. The “adventures” from James’s perspective sounds like a cruel misnomer. He affirms, “there is no adventure in it, Huck”.
Twain’s Huck has a guilty conscience; he cannot reconcile with the fact that his friend Jim is Miss Watson’s property. It is his introspection and romantic thrill for adventures that drives Huck to heroically help Jim in escaping slavery. Jim’s liberation, in other words, is Huck the white boy’s moral burden. Despite Huck’s good-hearted approach to Jim, their relation is weighed down by white guilt. In marked contrast, Everett’s depiction of the duo is dialogic, engaging and mutually enriching. When Huck is confused by the conflict between the good and the lawful, James clarifies, “Good ain’t got nuttin’ to do wif da law. Law says I’m a slave.” James finds himself in a tight spot to rescue either Huck or Norman (who is James’s friend and is black) from drowning in the river. He makes the difficult decision to save Huck after which he reveals the troubling secret that he is in fact Huck’s biological father.
James is the hero of his story who escapes from slavery and returns to liberate his family. To a slave owner pointing a gun at him, James trains his pistol in turn and declaims, “I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night. […] I am a sign. I am your future. I am James.” The electrifying words cast James in a remarkably different light than Twain’s subdued Jim. Literature possesses the potency to etch enduring images of characters on the public mind. Everett’s James is a much-needed corrective which amplifies the voice of an unforgettable character of American literature.
Purnachandra Naik is an academic researcher interested in Dalit literature and African American literature
