My name is James. I'm going to get my family. You can come with me or you can stay here. You can come and try freedom or you can stay here. You can die with me trying to find freedom or you can stay here and be dead anyway. My name is James.
In a eureka moment of fiction, Percival Everett gives Jim a narrative voice in the story of Huck Finn.
James
This is Jim's story, though Huck is in it. Spurred to action after hearing a rumour he will soon be sold, James runs from pillar to post, frying pan to fire in a world that saw Black American slaves as less than human, subjecting them to terrible abuse.
Seeking anonymity and freedom, James dices with death on the mighty Mississippi, finding notoriety instead as word spreads about his misdeeds, committed while standing up for the rights of the people he meets. There are many ironies in this book: when Jim speaks to most people, he's using what Everett calls a 'slave filter' - another language they used when around their 'masas'. It's a pidgin English designed to make their masters feel superior while only revealing understandings and book learning amongst themselves.
"White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don't disappoint them," I said. "The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say 'when they don't feel superior."
"What if they don't understand?" Lizzie asked. "That's okay. Let them work to understand you. Mumble sometimes so they can have the satisfaction of telling you not to mumble. 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."
At one point James joins a troupe performing the abhorrent practise of blackface and is painted to look like a white man pretending to be a black man. (Daniel Emmett, the leader of the troupe, is a real person in history, credited with the 'Dixie' song.)
"They even do the cakewalk."
"But that's how we make fun of them," I said.
"Yes, but they don't get that – it's lost on them. It's never occurred to them that we might find them mockable."
"Double irony, I said. "That is amusing. Can one irony negate another, one cancel out the other?"
Reminiscent of Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Water Dancer, James is a brilliant testimony to the shocking treatment of people before the abolition of slavery in the American South, told through an adventure across Missouri. It's a powerful addendum to the works of Mark Twain.
Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Fiction (2024), a finalist for the National Book Award 2024, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize (winners announced 12 November), James is gaining a huge following becoming a must-read for fans of Tom Sawyer and those who want to hear the voices of those left out in the whitewash of history.
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