Point Quote Comment

Words by J. Patrick Armstrong

Re-reading Huckleberry Finn as an adult in the 2020s is a mixed experience. There is still that childlike pleasure in Huck’s escape from the churchy schoolhouse nitpicking of Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, intense relief at Huck’s outsmarting of his repulsive, drunken, abusive father, and even envious admiration for his shunning of civilisation for the call of the wild and the pull of the Mississippi. Indeed, such is the power of Mark Twain’s writing (at least in the early parts of the novel) it’s hard not to agree with Huck when he tells us,

“there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.” P.136

Sedentary 2020s readers, with their tech gadgetry at their fingertips, might find themselves nodding in agreement, even though they have most likely never been near a raft, and their closest river is most probably a public health hazard. All the same, we are captivated by the primitivist excitement of escapades we’ll never embark upon.

By the end of the novel, however, the contemporary reader may well feel frustration at Tom Sawyer’s shenanigans to make Jim’s rescue and escape the stuff of nineteenth-century European adventure fiction, replete with tunnels, coded messages, sawn-off bed-legs and even a coat-of-arms for a slave, the (dramatic) irony of which seems lost on Tom. We even find ourselves on the side of Aunt Polly when she asks him (with some justification), “Then what on earth did you want to set him [Jim] free for, seeing he was already free?” “Well, that is a question, I must say,” replies Tom, “and just like women! Why, I wanted the adventure of it” (p. 334). What could have taken one night sees poor Jim’s emancipation turned into a dangerous Dumasian farce in which Tom himself is shot and wounded.   

The freedom and ease of the raft, the sheer “adventure” of rescue and escape, are flipped into terrifying matters of life and imminent death in Percival Everrett’s stunning twenty-first-century retelling of the story from Jim’s point of view, James. Throughout the novel, the river is only marginally safer for James because “the land is where white people live” (p. 95). With the first-person narration shifting to James, the white reader gets a sense (albeit a safe one) of the sheer terror of the runaway slave, the constant threat of discovery and violent death, the absolute requirement for “one carefully measured step at a time” (p. 95) to avoid torture and murder for acting, speaking or doing anything beyond what is expected of a black man in the antebellum south.

Late in the novel, when he kidnaps Judge Thatcher at gunpoint to find out where his wife and daughter have been sold and shipped to, the judge warns James, “N*****, you are in more trouble than you can imagine,” to which James replies,

“Why on earth would you think that I can’t imagine the trouble I’m in? After you’ve tortured me and eviscerated me and emasculated me and left me to burn slowly to death, is there something else you’ll do me?” P.290

Among the many brilliant and quotable moments, this one, for me, stands out. Judge Thatcher doubly dismisses James’s humanity with the N-word and the presumption that he is too stupid to understand his predicament when, throughout the novel, the threat of capture, torture and execution is constant and palpable. James’s response shows his articulate understanding of the “trouble” he is in, as well as being metonymic of the (en)forced mindset of every slave: the imminent threat of torture and/or death without reason or justification or due process of any kind. The freedom and adventure of Huck and Tom find their opposites in Jim becoming James: terror, desperation and the likelihood that he may be chained, tortured or murdered at any moment.

This terror, akin to Cora’s in Underground Railroad, is only increased by James’s erudition and articulation, which he hides from the white population of the novel, but which slips out throughout (causing white suspicion and consternation whenever it is (over)heard) and takes over at the end. It’s possibly the novel’s masterstroke, and the ultimate rebuttal to not only Twain’s depiction of Jim, but (more importantly) white America’s historical representation of black people as superstitious, eye-rolling half-wits, prone to panic and nonsensical babble. Early on, Jim gives his family a lesson and warning on how to speak to white people based on their presumptions and expectations. When asked by his daughter why, Jim explains,

“White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them.” P.21

The device works on two levels, confusing and terrifying the white characters of the novel (who are either baffled or frightened or angry when they hear Jim’s real speech), and deeply unsettling white readers by forcing them to review and reconsider their own complicit consumption of black stereotyping (or plain omission) throughout a large swathe of twentieth-century literature, television and film. It is another reason why Everett’s novel is simultaneously exhilarating, terrifying and poignant, and should become, I would argue, a compulsory supplement to any study of Twain’s nineteenth-century classic or any course in contemporary American literature.  

• Percival Everett, James (NY: Doubleday, 2024).
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Amazon Kindle Edition, 2023).