Ed. — From the Sunday, Oct. 20, print edition.
VIRGINIA BEACH — A decade or so ago, I read aloud to my two young children to settle them down before they went to sleep. I remember sitting in the rocking chair in the room they shared to read from Mark Twain’s classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It didn’t take long for me to realize that it was a tough one to read aloud because of the dialect of the time and its casual denigration of the character Jim, a slave.
Twain may have been a genius at capturing the rhythms of the speech. Nevertheless, I felt obliged to make my own edits as I read aloud so my girls could hopefully enjoy the spirit of the adventure – and what an adventure it was – without normalizing the troubling racism.
Nearly 140 years after the original was published by Twain, contemporary novelist Percival Everett has revisited the story in his retelling, James, which was nominated for both the 2024 Booker and Pulitzer prizes, among other accolades. In Everett’s version, the character of Jim is recast as the main character, James, not to be anybody’s sidekick. He reclaims his voice as the tale is told from his point of view. Readers listen in on James’s conversations with other Black people and then hear how he code-switches when interacting with white characters, which provides nuance and complexity to James as Everett tackles the challenges of the original dialect.
The novel opens with the handwritten manuscript of the notebook of Daniel Decatur Emmett. This was puzzling to me when I began the novel, because I didn’t know who Everett was and I was, once again, confronted with a white man’s version of an African American dialect. We are introduced to Emmett about halfway through the story when James is sold into a traveling minstrel show, led by Emmett, to perform as a black man posing as a white man painted as a black man. When James escapes, he keeps the notebook and uses it to write his own story with a pencil that cost another slave his life. Language, words, the question of who narrates the story – these are all at the heart of Everett’s take on this classic tale.
And yet, like the original, this novel is an adventure. I found it difficult to put down as one episode tumbled into another, and characters as colorful as when they were first introduced by Twain entered the story to send us in new directions. It is often laugh-out-loud funny but then suddenly harrowing because the stakes couldn’t be higher for this slave on the run. Everett keeps to Twain’s fundamentals as we float with James and Huck down the great Mississippi river in the antebellum south and meet most of the same characters, albeit in a new light.
Percival Everett is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California who has written several novels. His 2001 novel, Erasure, was the basis of the 2023 Oscar-nominated film American Fiction. Incidentally, he was a featured guest at the 38th annual Old Dominion University Literary Festival in 2015.
Doucette is a marketing manager for a technology firm. She lives in Back Bay.
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