Huckleberry Finn’s adventures continue

Percival Everett’s James—longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize—is more than just a retelling of the classic from the fugitive slave, Jim’s perspective.

Vintage engraving of the scene from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn showing Jim narrating the story of Sollermun. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock 

Telling the tale from the other perspective has become a hoary literary tradition in itself. When studying works from the English canon, readers of colour, if not quite brainwashed or brain-dead, have always asked about the other point of view. How did Friday come up with ways to get the pesky Robinson Crusoe off his island? What did Bertha Antoinette Mason think of her marriage to Rochester? And in the case of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, why must Jim, a freed slave, unnecessarily suffer additional months of fear and bondage for the benefit of a white boy?

Percival Everett’s James, longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, is more than just Mark Twain’s classic novel told from the perspective of Jim (or “James”), but we cannot begin to discuss it without looking at the two works together. Huckleberry Finn is considered to define American literature as distinct from English literature, among other reasons for its use of the Southern dialect. It is also one of the most often challenged books in American public libraries, meaning that every now and then a member of the public demands that it be locked away from young readers. Unlike Twain’s other novels, it is always being taken off high school reading lists or being put back on, so it is perpetually in the news.

James

By Percival Everett

Pan Macmillan

Pages: 320

Price: Rs.750

Nowadays, Huckleberry Finn is considered offensive for its descriptions of Black people, but when it was first published, in 1884, it was considered offensive for its crudeness, much to the author’s glee. The public outcry would certainly improve sales, he wrote, and readers would then find nothing objectionable in it after all. That second statement was disingenuous—to offend society was almost Twain’s sacred calling, and Southerners certainly squirmed as he exposed their hypocrisy. If American racism could have been destroyed by a thousand satirical thrusts, then Twain was the man to achieve it. But it was hardier than that: a brutal war and years of destruction were required even to begin the task.

For Everett’s James and his fellow slaves on Judge Thatcher’s plantation, there are no benevolent slaveholders. There is no room for benevolence when a person buys, rapes, whips, and sells another. In both novels, the apparently harmless woman who attempts to civilise Huck Finn, Miss Watson, is the character who sets in motion the flight of her slave, Jim. Miss Watson is about to sell Jim away from his wife and daughter, to a trader from New Orleans, mainly because “eight hundred dollars is a lot of money”. Jim hopes to hide out on an island in the Mississippi river long enough to figure out how to flee to a free State along with his family.

Coincidentally, Huck Finn has chosen that same day to flee his abusive father, expertly staging his own death so that Pap will give up looking for him. Jim is presumed to have killed Huck, and because of this, Jim and Huck must work together if they are to escape their oppressors.

James: The relation between Huck Finn and James dominates Everett’s novel. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

It is not a simple matter for James to land in a free State. Gangs of slave hunters often captured freed men and sold them back into slavery. Whites in some free States turned over fugitives to the authorities. Any passing white man with malevolence enough could assert ownership over a Black man. There is also no way for Jim to come back and buy his family out, without the help of a white man. For all these reasons, the presence of Huck is a help as much as a burden to Jim at every stage in their flight, though they are mistaken in thinking Jim will be left alone if he is presumed to be owned by Huck.

War and the Mississippi

The relationship between the two dominates both novels. Everett is not the first writer to suggest that Huck Finn might have been Black. Whether Twain intended to imply that is immaterial. To the reader of today, Twain’s Huck is a sympathetic character in a way that his friend Tom Sawyer cannot be, because of his “blackish” situation. He is poor. His father holds him prisoner. There are white women out to civilise him.

All that brings him a few steps closer to his fellow fugitive and probably explains why Jim is protective of him. Everett’s James tells Huck that no matter what his blood might contain, he can live as a white to the end of his days. He teaches him that there is no romance or adventure in being a Black man in the American South, only danger, and on this understanding they must go their separate ways.

The war is an undercurrent in the story, first as rumour, then as a line of boy soldiers in Union Blue uniforms. Neither the soldiers nor the fugitives understand the war.

The other force that drives the story is far more elemental. It is the Mississippi river, which is death as well as life to James. It sucks him into its mud, it tangles him in fishing lines. It misleads him. It flows inexorably southwards, towards greater bondage. James’ flight is not a child’s game that ends in one safe perch but a struggle that may never end. He can hope but cannot be certain of freedom even after he has crossed a State border. His promised land lies further—in miles and in decades—than he, or his creator, could have imagined.

Latha Anantharaman is a writer and editor based in Palakkad, Kerala.