The Brooklyn Rail

Anybody who writes about the sacred holy book of America, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, necessarily writes about the history of American literature and its modern development. Of this, Mr. Ernest Hemingway maintained in his (in)famous passage in Green Hills of Africa, Twain’s novel is the source. What this means, among other things, is that the literary history of our country is inextricably linked to Twain’s 1884 work as it is to no other book. There are, of course, books that are closely associated with the development of their country’s literature as well as Western literature. The Odyssey, Dante’s Commedia, and Joyce’s Ulysses are such books. It is hard, however, at least for me, to think of another single novel that is so organically, viscerally connected with its country’s literary history. So much so that the history of US literary criticism is equally connected to Twain’s most famous and read book despite, or maybe because it is not his best—which remains Pudd’nhead Wilson, his only one that is close to masterpiece status. One could understand the story of much of the development and history of literary criticism in the United States by studying the critical literature devoted to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The book is like the clock of American literary criticism. It dictates its chronology. It is there every single time a moment of contention or rupture or objection arises in the critical debate, which dialectically it triggers.

This explains, I think, also what Hemingway had in mind in 1935 when he quipped on the archetypal power of the novel, its generative potential. Right from its first publication in England and all the way to the present time, critics and public entities alike have sparred with it. Librarians and the NAACP wanted (some still want) to ban it. Van Wyck Brooks attacked Twain, both as a writer and as a person, whereas Bernard DeVoto, while rebuking Brooks, liking the book, and, good Italian kid that he was, affectionately calling him Mark, accused Twain of trying to make a quick buck (I have a feeling that Twain would have not been offended by this accusation). In 1948, Leslie Fiedler called Huck back to the raft to make a larger case about American literature and America itself, especially about the meaning and tragedies of the atomized loneliness of our social life in what remains the single most important essay written about our literature—and one of the greatest critical essays ever. In the late 1940s and 1950s, instead, Mr. T. S. Eliot and Mr. Lionel Trilling shoot the opening salvo of what became the most quarrelsome issue about the novel: the way it ends. Ever since, the battle over the end and, eventually, other issues, such as the language and Twain’s use of the N-word, has been raging, with the camp divided between those against, such as Leo Marx and Richard Poirier (albeit for different reasons), and those in favor, such as James Cox (albeit for different reasons than Eliot and Trilling). In 1996, Jane Smiley wrote in Harper’s that it was time to take the book away from the bedside table and replace it with Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The latter, she declared, she would rather have her children read despite the cruelty Mrs. Stowe depicted in it. Toni Morrison too confronted herself with the book more than once, including in her introduction to The Oxford Mark Twain edition of the 1884 novel edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who years before had published a study of the influence of African American speech in the genesis of the book titled Was Huck Black? More recently, Eric Lott, the foremost scholar of the minstrel show, argued that perhaps the time has come to put the book away for good, that Huck is at the end of the line and must step out of the raft once and for all, which might as well be less an evaluation of the book than an invitation to us to move from it and go forward.

Percival Everett, one of America’s most imaginative living fiction writers, has put an end to these critical debates by way of rewriting Twain’s novel onto his new book, strategically and programmatically titled James. This, of course, until a new one starts, which is why, as those able to read will realize, the book does not finish with the words “The End” as the original novel does. The reason for this critical achievement is that by re-writing the book, Everett re-imagined it and re-invented it and, by so doing, he saved Twain’s own novel too. To save a poet one must kill the poet. Among other things, Everett did exactly this, succeeding where others had not before him. He is not, in fact, the first one to attempt such a gigantic and demanding task. I am not thinking of those writers who rewrote the story under a different guise, like Saul Bellow did in Henderson The Rain King or the various spin-offs such as Greg Matthews’s The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Nancy Rawles’s My Jim, Jon Clinch’s Finn: A Novel, or Everett’s college mentor Robert Coover, who in 2017 published Huck Out West. Rather, in 1970, the late, esteemed literary critic John Seelye, a Professor of English at the University of Florida, published what he called The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: As Told By John Seelye, a fine and intelligent rewriting of the novel. Seelye ended the novel, I think, credibly, respecting both Twain’s achievements and history at once, with Huck alone on the raft after Jim has drowned because of his chains trying to get free once again, “lonesome” and miserable in the dark of the Mississippi night, and yet not caring at all if “the goddam sun never come up again.” However, Seelye re-told the novel from Huck’s point of view, deploying his own version of the vernacular and keeping the N-word in it, something he would be vilified for today, if he were lucky enough to find a publisher to print his book. Perhaps more importantly, his novelistic effort first and foremost aimed at addressing the literary establishment with the hope that they would give a critical break to Twain’s novel.

Everett, instead, wrote a brand-new book and, as the title itself tells us, did what Seelye could not do. This is (re)writing the novel from the point of view of Jim, who here becomes both the narrator and the main character of the book, therefore owning himself to begin with and making clear how crucial the connection is between language, storytelling, what at one point in the story he calls “the power of reading,” appropriation, and representation—one of the themes, if not the central theme of the book. “My name is James. I wish I could tell my story with a sense of history as much as industry … I am a man … a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written,” he warns the reader at the beginning of chapter 16, claiming his effort at gaining agency over his own self. It is not solely a question of capabilities, skills—a claim that he is able to read and write, to write his story and represent himself, that he is, indeed, intelligent, that he has intellectual faculties. Everybody is an intellectual, Antonio Gramsci taught us. Rather, the point here for Jim is to be able to use his intellect and use it critically, for the purpose of gaining freedom for himself and his family, and some of his fellow slaves. This he can only obtain by defeating what he makes a point to call “enemy” instead of “oppressor,” because the latter “necessarily presupposes a victim,” which he is not, as the end of the book certainly makes abundantly clear.

As important as the power of reading and writing is and was—and Frederick Douglass told us it was the biggest weapon a slave could acquire and the biggest fear of “the white so-called masters” as James puts it at one point—it could also be interpreted as a claim for autoreferential self-representation. While one should not discount the importance of such a claim, in and of itself this could turn into one more celebration of the self, of the individual who, at long last, has gained agency and, by the end of the book, achieved individual freedom. James accomplishes both things, but only because of what history embodies and with a different goal, which he makes clear in the rest of his previously quoted reflection, tellingly written in italics, “I was sold when I was born and then sold again. My mother’s mother was from someplace on the continent of Africa, I had been told or perhaps simply assumed. I cannot claim to any knowledge of that world or those people … I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves his family.” Unlike Jim, as he still is at this point in the book on the way to become James by the very end of it, on the way, that is, to a new, true self, James the narrator knows that slavery was in the first place a transnational system at the service of an economy of profit that subjugated human beings of black pigmentation and made them property and commodities. This is the reason why he is not free, as an ancestral female voice reminds him toward the end of the book, “You’re mortgaged, Jim. Like a farm, like a house. Really, the bank owns you. Miss Watson gets a bond, a piece of paper … You’re part of the bank’s asset and so people all over the world are making money off your scared black hide. Make sense? Nobody wants you free.” Because of this devaluing transformation, his historical memory and the knowledge of his world of origins has been severed irreparably, twice over actually, in the two transactions of which he was objects, or, better yet, that turned him from subject to object, no matter the effort of certain fan of genetic history or those who “can remember the clans of their ancestors, their name and the movements of their families through the wrinkles, trenches and chasms of the slave trade.” Consequently, the slave system created a culture that necessarily pretended not to see the other by way of, concomitantly, committing itself to celebrate and glorify individual success measured in property, dollars, “assets,” and justified it in the name of a self-serving version of Christianity. In turn, this resulted in the derision, devaluation, separation, and the invisibility of those who made that success possible with their exploited labor.

That explains why Everett starts the book not with a disclaimer like Twain does in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but with the lyrics of some minstrels show songs and, midway through the novel, adds an entire new episode to the plot, when Jim is bought by Daniel Decatur Emmett’s minstrel show company, the Virginia Minstrels, because he can sing and replace their “lost” tenor, an episode that among other things unmasks the liberal hypocrisy toward slavery and reminds the reader why it is every citizen’s duty to address it. “A man who refused to own slaves but was not opposed to others owning slaves was still a slaver, to my thinking,” James comments about Emmett. The addition of the minstrel show, which, incidentally, Mr. Clemens adored and used as a major source for Mr. Twain’s novel, formally, linguistically, and otherwise, should not surprise. After all, the minstrel show is the one cultural expression, popular as no other artistic form was in the 1840s, the historical time of Twain’s book, that exorcized the world of slavery and their subjects for white people and hided its realities. “It always pays to give white folks what they want,” James tells us in the opening page of the novel, before stepping “into the yard” and calling out “those little bastards,” Huck and Tom Sawyer, making clear whom the joke is on. Additionally, the minstrel show provides the novelist with the tool to unveil the cruel and violent world of slavery that produced it.

Everett tears apart that world, systematically, piece by piece, surgically and poetically at once. He unveils its contradictions, its hypocrisies, its lies. He dismantles the fable of America as the embodiment of freedom and God’s country that the white national(istic) rhetoric reifies. “There is no God, child,” James tells Rachel, a young Black child to whom he teaches how to read and write. “There’s religion but there’s no God of theirs,” where “theirs” refers to white Anglo-Saxon people, “Their religion tells that we will get our reward in the end. However, it apparently doesn’t say anything about their punishment.… There might be some higher power, children” he continues when another child, Virgil, says that there must be something, “but it’s not their white God. However, the more you talk about God and Jesus and heaven and hell, the better they feel.”

Twain’s irony becomes Everett’s serious content from the very beginning, when James and his fellow slaves “talked some about what happened to a runaway over at another farm. ‘Yeah, they beat him real good,’ Doris said.” Likewise, the terror of the original novel no longer takes the guise of the gothic that shaped “classic” American literature from Poe to Faulkner and their troubled and unsettling relationship with Blackness. Terror, in James, appears as the history-based and produced conditions that Jim and his fellow slaves suffer, physically as well as emotionally. This shift makes it possible for Everett to give us what Twain, liberal Calvinist that he was, no matter the geography of his residences—native southern Illinois; Buffalo, where he wrote a good chunk of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Europe; Elmira; or Connecticut—could not bring himself to do. Suffice here the powerful description of the sawmill where James and Norman, a fellow light-skinned Black member of the Virginia Minstrels who, like James, can pass as white, end up at the beginning of part two of the novel, a passage that for me recalls, however adapted to the time and place of the tale, the attempt at realism of William Attaway’s Blood On The Forge more than, say, Harding Davis’s Life in The Iron Mills. The sawmill, Everett writes, “was dirty, as sawmills always were. This one was a small, sad affair that smelled more like animal and human waste than sawdust. There were seven slaves working with axes and adzes and another two working a pit saw. A couple of men had enough missing fingers to justify being called one-handed.” In the sawmill, James does “some of the most miserable work I’d ever done, I was ankle-deep in mud, and possibly the waste of animals and people,” all the while terrified to lose a finger or a hand, which causes the ire of Henderson, the mill’s owner who the other slave-workers describe matter-of-factly as “fair” because he “beats us all the same, no more, no less,” including, now, James himself. “Come on out for your lashes” Henderson tells James, “I said nothing as Luke, with a hint of a grin on his now-ugly face, tied my hands with a hemp rope to a post. I said nothing as my shirt was ripped, by someone unidentified, from my body. I said nothing as the leather stung me, ripped me, burned me.”

This fictional gesture at historical realities is both a refusal to cover our past to make James fully human, and to build his new self accordingly. It is because of those realities that he tells Sammy, the woman he and Norman escape from the sawmill with, that he does not want “to be white. I don’t want to be one of them” and confesses to being “terrified” when Henderson and his men found them and shot at them before they managed to grab a log and get into the river, which consequently is no longer the safe place away from civilization, but another place of violence and death for Black Americans, one more part of prison-house America. In the river, Sammy, who Henderson’s men shot, “died again,” although “this time she died free,” James tells Norman. Death makes James feel, as any human being in his predicament would, “more fully the anger I had cultivated for twenty years or so.” In this way, these fictional gestures are historical realities and also become a gesture at history, the way Everett allows himself to expand the novel chronologically and include in it the Civil War, which provides the background for the concluding part three of the book.

The last section could be, if not a novel, a long short-story in and of itself. In it, Everett brings everything to a resolution, historically, poetically, and critically, beginning with the relationship between Jim and Huck, which displays what Jim values and serves to educate Huck, what he needs to do to change. Naturally, this section begins not on the river, but on land, on the beach where Jim dragged Norman’s dead body after the engine of the steamboat where they had managed to climb into blew, and the boat drowned, forcing him to make the decision to save Huck, who had ended up on the steamboat as well, instead of Norman. The reunion of the two is obviously necessary to bring the story home. But one realizes that Huck’s reappearance after a long hiatus in the story is due to the narrative shift. This is James’s story, not Huck’s, in the sense that the former is telling the story and as such it is Huck that belongs to James’s story, that makes Huck’s story possible rather than the other way around. When Huck asks him why he saved him instead of Norman, James tells him that he is his son, that he and his mother were children together, they were friends and had grown up. He could not save both Norman and his son. He had to make a decision and he saved his son. But he, not Huck, not anybody else, decided.

At the beginning of the book Huck had protected Jim from being accused of stealing. Later he had told the Duke and the King that he was his slave, again trying to protect him, however painfully saying that was given that Huck is James’s friend. But when James tries to make Huck see the world as it is for him, and thus for both, Huck cannot get there yet. Early in the story when Huck had asked James if he believed in God, he had replied, “sho nuff I does. If dere ain’t no God, den how we get this here wonderful life?” Now, however, with the Civil War looming and all the tragic events and deaths that even Huck witnessed, there’s no longer a place for irony. The minstrel show must end, the duplicity must finish, and so must Huck’s comfortable innocence. As Huck tells James that he is a liar, the latter makes clear that it’s time for responsibility and the truth. And the truth is that Huck is white and that James had protected him, not the other way around:

Belief has nothing to do with truth. Believe what you like. Believe I’m lying and move through the world as a white boy. Believe I’m telling the truth and move through the world as a white boy anyway. Either way, no difference.” I look at the boy’s face and I could see that he had feelings for me and that was the root of his anger. He had always had affection for me, if not actual love. He had always looked for me for protection, even when he thought he was trying to protect him.

It only makes sense that Huck replies crying out that James is a “liar,” that he is not his son, “I ain’t no nigger.”

As hurtful as the answer might appear, it represents the end of Huck’s innocence and, consequently, the last time he’ll utter that abominable white word. For the same reason, Huck can now say that James needs him if he wants to go back to Hannibal, free his family, and go north. This, James—who can agree with his own silence as he puts it beautifully at one point in the book, but who’s never been in the position to lie to himself—understands to be true. When the two reach Miss Watson’s house and find out that Sadie and Lizzie, James’s wife and daughter, have been sold, James sobs. Then, he looks to Huck, and realizes that “for the very first time in his life he was actually seeing me.” No wonder, then, that when James asks for Huck’s help and the latter replies that he’s “just a boy,” James can call him out, knowing that now he will understand: “You’re a man, Huck. You can find out who bought them and where they went.”

This is the end of Huck’s innocence, the reason why James is a watershed moment in our literary history. It is also the reason why James can go on and bring the story to its end, even venturing in the fantastic mode, a literary category that traditionally served writers to represent moments of ruptures, upcoming changes. Hence, the bilingualism that so far has been the distinguishing element of James’s dual identity, by which I mean his use of standard English and the slave speech (here’s a hint at the reason for America's opposition to languages other than English) disappears after James uses it two more times. Firstly, to fool the overseer, the “animal” that he witnessed raping one more female slave before James strangles him. Secondly, to kidnap Judge Thatcher, to whom he tells he “ain’t ‘cided, Massa,” meaning whether he’ll kill him or not, and then commenting, “I had never seen a white man filled with such fear. The remarkable truth, however, was that it was not the pistol, but my language, the fact that I didn’t conform to his expectations, that I could read, that had so disturbed and frightened him.” James does not conform to the Judge’s expectations just like he does not conform to the reader’s expectations. Because after learning from the Judge that his wife and daughter are in the town of Medina, west of the Mississippi, he manages to get there and frees some slaves, whom he calls “‘men’ quite deliberately. First because they were men, and second, because they needed to hear it.” Just like Huck, the slaves too are no longer boys, albeit for different reasons of course.

The point here is that for Huck to grow, leave behind his blinding innocence, and achieve adulthood and maturity, it is necessary that the world around him changes too, beginning with the end of the Other men’s devaluation as men. It is the precondition for James to achieve his new self and act accordingly, “My name is James,” he tells the other black men, “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.” Now, he can proceed and liberate his wife and daughter thanks to the help he received from Huck and some fellow slaves, women to begin with, in a scene that matches the fantastic mode and the western genre, where he sounds and acts like a Django-meets-James Bond character as he tells the overseer of the breeding house where his wife and daughter had been taken, “I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night … I am a sign. I am your future. I am James.” What makes this moment credible at the end of such a novel, unlike the hero of Tarantino’s awful film or the British spy, is the description of how James kills the overseer that follows:

The shot I fired rang through that valley like a cannon blast. It echoed, seemingly forever. All those with me stopped and watched the man receive the lead. His chest exploded red on his nightclothes. He did not fall like a tree. Nothing about him was that big. He merely fell, face-first, into a darkness none of us could see.

There is no satisfaction here, no vengeance, as there should not be. “He merely fell.” It is, simply put, the necessary moment before reaching freedom in Iowa, the moment in which Jim is no more. Because by killing the overseer, James killed Jim too and the world he inhabited for far too long.