Percival Everett: Novel “James”: Anti-Racist Expulsion

Hardly any book in recent years has sparked such debates in the American cultural scene as Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The novel, first published in 1884, in which the titular young Huck sails down the Mississippi with the escaped slave Jim, is Mark Twain’s most successful book. While some see substantial criticism of slavery in the novel, which is set in the southern states of the 1830s, many consider the book to be deeply racist. It is always pointed out that the word “nigger” appears more than 200 times in the text. There is now even an edition that does not use the N-word. Some people may be reminded of the debates surrounding Astrid Lindgren’s “Pippi Longstocking”. But the entire portrayal of Jim in Mark Twain’s novel as a character who can hardly speak, let alone act, who has to rely entirely on Huckleberry Finn as the young white Jack of all trades and is loyal to him, represents the racist one, despite explicit criticism of slavery Interpersonal hierarchy is hardly questioned, but is continually reproduced.

But could Twain’s classic, which is often celebrated as one of America’s first modern novels, be told differently? Now Percival Everett has dared to approach the material, edited it radically and, with “James,” is presenting an extraordinary and empowering book. For 68-year-old Percival Everett, whose racism-critical zombie story “The Trees” (2021) recently earned him a nomination for the renowned Booker Prize and whose novel “Erased” (2001) was nominated for five Oscars as a film adaptation “American Fiction”. , “James” is the 24th novel of his writing career, in which he has repeatedly dealt with the political, social and cultural self-image of black communities. While Everett had previously remained loyal to his independent publisher Graywolf Press, the Doubleday publishing house has reportedly secured the rights to his racism-critical Twain adaptation for $500,000, which will be published in the USA at the same time as the German edition, but there in the features sections in advance has already received plenty of attention. Because Everett’s story, told from the perspective of the slave Jim, differs significantly from Twain’s novel.

It starts with the language. In Twain’s original, Jim can barely speak in his slave slang. Jim and other slaves also use this slang in “James,” but when there are no white people around, they speak normally. “Mumble something, it gives them the satisfaction of telling you not to mumble. They enjoy correcting you and thinking you’re stupid,” Jim explains to his daughter Sadie. Jim can also read and write and, without anyone being allowed to know, spends time in the library of Judge Thatcher, the neighbor of Huck’s foster mother, where he reads primarily Voltaire, but also Locke, and repeatedly learns about the racist attitudes of philosophers the Enlightenment annoys. When Jim and Huck, who comes from a humble background and is terrified of his beating and suddenly reappearing father, escape together, Jim is the cool head of this enterprise and not the timid, passive appendage like in Twain’s novel. Although Everett adopts many motifs and characters from the original, at some point he takes a complete turn with his plot and develops his very own story of Jim’s escape.

The friends Huck and Jim are eventually separated from each other during their journey down the Mississippi and Jim, among other things, works as a minstrel singer for a troupe of white men who blacken their faces with shoe polish and supposedly caricature the singing and dancing of black slaves. But these would-be critics of slave society ultimately turn out to be the worst racists of all. Jim’s work in a sawmill – which also appears in Twain – becomes a nightmare of racist violence and exploitation, including flogging and the rape of a young girl. In contrast to Twain’s book, slavery is presented here in a disturbing way as a disgusting and brutal system of rule. At times this is almost reminiscent of films like “Django Unchained” or “Emancipation”. But it all ultimately leads to an amazingly empowering finale that has absolutely nothing of the harmless-seeming happy ending in Twain’s novel, where Jim is given freedom at the end. In Percival Everett’s “James” nothing is given for free. Although Huck stands in solidarity with Jim, the enslaved Jim has to fight to the extreme for his freedom in this novel. Many others who help him escape along the way die.

“James” tells a truly disturbing, tragic and at times extremely brutal story, which nevertheless has irony and does justice to the social subject of this odyssey instead of dressing it up with regional-historical bon mots from the southern universe. It is always about the question of how being black is defined, which social and cultural codes are an integral part of oppressive rule and slavery. Because on his way Jim meets black people several times who are not considered black; So pass as white or “pass” as it is called in American English. Being black and being a slave, Jim notes, are created through the whip and through racist social and cultural attributions. At the end of the story, Jim develops the kind of agency that Twain simply doesn’t have for this character. In this respect, this great book, exciting to the last page and very surprising in the finale, is like an overdue expulsion of the racist legacy in Mark Twain’s work.

Percival Everett: »James«, Hanser-Verlag, 336 pages, hardcover, €26.

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