"I wrote myself into being": Everett’s “Reimagination” of Twain’s Huck Finn
I first knew about Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in grade eleven. It was a slim version with woodcut illustrations intended for much younger readers. I realized what I read was an abridged version years later, when I read the full novel in my master’s studies. The novel’s unconventional opening notice warned readers not to find a motive, a moral, and a plot in it. However, this humorous warning intrigued me to do just the opposite. The narrative follows the journey of a young white adolescent boy, Huck, and a runaway enslaved person, Jim, in the setting of the meandering Mississippi. When I joined the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2019 for my doctoral studies, I noticed that Mississippi is just a couple of hour’s drive from my university. In New Orleans, I walked down the steps at the river walk and dipped my finger into the murky water of the Mississippi. I felt a momentary transportation upstream into Huck and Jim’s world. Twain’s characters talked oftentimes about New Orleans but never sailed all the way down there. In March 2024, Percival Everett published his twenty-fourth novel James, in which Everett finds himself, after140 years, in conversation with Mark Twain.
Everett’s James “reimagines” one of the most quintessential American classics, Twain’s Huck Finn, a novel that, in Earnest Hemingway’s words, marked the beginning of all modern American literature. Everett’s narrator, Jim—who reinscribes himself as James—tells the story of the antebellum South in his amphibian escapade along the bends of the Mississippi. Everett’s twenty-fourth novel does more than replacing the narrative perspective of a playful and rebellious Huck who runs away from his abusive father and “civilizing missions” of his caretakers. Everett amplifies the tenuous agency of Twain’s Jim, allowing James to show readers what a teenage white boy could not perceive. James refashions his dynamic agency through his seamlessly signifying linguistic maneuvers, intellectual insight, graphic portrayal of the horrors of slavery, and fearsome revolting spirit.
The perspectival shift in James exposes the appropriation of Black artistry. After the opening minstrel song taken from the Daniel Decatur Emmet’s diary, the story begins with Jim waiting for the cornbread Miss Watson made using his wife Sadie’s recipe. Watson’s ‘refinement’ of the recipe results in unsavory bread. It shows an enslaver’s sense of superiority and their everyday attempt to appropriate black art and creativity. The appropriation of black artistry scales up exponentially in the Emmett’s caravan in which white artists performed as blacks to entertain the whites and make money. When Jim joins the team as a tenor, his black appearance looks too realistic to the white audience and thus puts Jim’s life at risk because they would not accept a colored person performing the roles whites were supposed to be doing. Everett’s characterization of Emmett, who claims to be liberal, underscores the critic of white liberals who endangered the lives of the enslaved.
Everett’s linguistic play is one of the defining features in James. Jim teaches his children how to code switch using a “slave filter” and to appear religious and superstitious knucklehead while interacting with the enslavers. Although it may seem unrealistic to imagine an antebellum enslaved person using standard English, it reveals another dimension of racism that would not imagine the possibility of equal human intellect in an enslaved individual. For instance, Judge Thatcher was dismayed more by James’ command of Standard English and literacy than any physical harm Jim might inflict.
Everett’s Jim is also an intellectual who debates philosophically with the Western scholars of the past. At the critical moments of his adventure, in a state of delirium or dream, Jim debates Voltaire, Rousseau, and John Locke on issues of slavery, freedom, and equality. Jim is also an avid reader and a keen writer who lacks a tool of writing. One of his friends, Young George steals a pencil and gives it to Jim so that he could write the story of the disenfranchised enslaveds like themselves. First thing Jim writes is “My name is James. ... With my pencil, I wrote myself into being.” But for Young George, this act of sponsoring a humble wooden tool of literacy puts his life in line. His master brutally whipped him in front of Jim and later lynched him on charges of stealing a pencil. The very art of James’s writing is indebted to Young George’s life. This poignant provenance of his pencil motivates Jim to transform from a fugitive to an abolitionist.
Jim is more than a fugitive enslaved—by dint of his action, he graduates into an agent and leader of freedom who uses his agency not just for himself and his family. In the narrative absence of Huck, Everett portrays the antebellum world Twain’s novel did not imagine. Jim runs away with the song diary of Emmett. Jim and his light-skinned friend Norman plan that the latter passes as white owner to sell and free Jim to make money. While fleeing from first buyer, Henderson, Jim rescues Sammy, who has been abused by her owner since she was little girl. When the slave catchers mortally shot Sammy, Jim says, “She was dead when I found her . . . She’s just died again, but this time she died free.” Jim vows never to be enslaved again.
Back to his hellish home in Hannibal, Jim is devasted to know his wife and daughter were sold to a slave-breeding farm. Jim strangles the overseer Henson, who had raped the women he enslaved. From Judge Thatcher, he gleans whereabout of his family and teaches him a lesson of what it means to works for other without free will. Like abolitionists who used ‘underground railroad,’ Jim follows his map, receives help from one black couple, and reaches Graham breeding farm in Edina, Missouri. Persuading other enslaveds to join his mission, Jim sets fire in the corn field, shots the owner of the farm, and frees all enslaves, including his family. They move north to a town in Iowa and upon inquired by Sheriff, Jim introduces himself as just “James”—a formidable self-defining act that draws the narrative arch of the novel to a closure.
Jim and Norman got on a side-wheeler ship sailing up the Mississippi. Taking advantage of his light skin, Norman joins the whites in the upper deck, while Jim remains in the dark engine room, where a Black man tirelessly feeds coals into the furnace. This symbolic Southern ship, propelled by the perpetual labor of a docile colored man, unexpectedly halts and wrecks—a powerful metaphor for the impending collapse of the antebellum South built on its “peculiar institution” of slavery.
Surviving the wreck in the freezing Mississippi water, Jim faces existential dilemma of saving Huck or Norman. He chooses Huck. When Huck asks why, Jim replies, “You are my son. And I am your father.” Everett’s Jim’s answer sharply contrasts with Twain’s, whose Jim simply uses endearing word like “honey” or “child” sometimes to address Huck. Everett’s Huck struggles to grapple with new unsettling information about his identity. Eventually, he decides to follow Jim. But Jim pragmatically encourages Huck to go back home and accept the protection offered by his white skin.
Everett agrees with Hemingway on the remarkableness of Twain’s novel for its exploration of an American youth’s “attempt to come to terms with contradictions of slavery.” Although progressive for his time, Twain’s style of satiric realism, offers only muted glimpses of Jim’s life in line. By conferring agency on Jim, Everett’s novel James illuminates the moments of horror Jim underwent and celebrates his daring assertion of freedom—an act of transformative self-fashioning by writing his existence into being as “James.”