American history through another lens

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Many people are afraid to view the stories of our society from a different perspective. Just take a look at the phony fervor behind DEI and the numerous attempts to conceal the obvious reality that dominant, white guys in the US haven’t always treated others fairly. It appears that these once formidable people are simply unable to hear the truth.

However, I’ve always enjoyed being pulled or dragged to a different viewpoint; to witness a more expansive and optimistic world when yet another benefactor takes off yet another pair of blinders I was unaware I was wearing.

Last year, Percival Everett reimagined Mark Twain’s 1884 classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in his novel James. Though his name is James in the new book, he wrote it from the viewpoint of Jim, the fugitive slave at the heart of the first one.

I was fortunate to read James just in time to have a news excuse to go on about it, as Black History Month seeks to spotlight underrepresented viewpoints. However, it’s only relevant since it’s February. At a time when such gifts are in danger, it also demonstrates to terrible force how essential writing and literacy are to freedom.

Everett vehemently refrains from attempting to denounce Twain with James. In the acknowledgements, he really gives Mr. Clemens this compliment: His compassion and sense of humor influenced me long before I became a writer. Hell for my much anticipated lunch with Mark Twain, heaven for the weather.

Instead, Everett wants to concentrate people’s attention a little more directly on reality by using a story that is embedded in American society. Twain himself would have adored that, I’m sure.

One of the books I’ve read at least thirty times is Huckleberry Finn. Due in part to the riverine epic’s powerful resonance with a child who grew up along and then along the Ohio, the book was first picked up as a boy and quickly became a summers favorite. What everyone adores about the book is something I also adore. It’s a fantastic story, delivered with a great deal of humor and in accents that show off Twain’s remarkable command of the language.

The broader significance, however, is simultaneously both ennobling and gloomy.

Although there has undoubtedly been some regress in the past, as Dr. King stated, the moral universe’s arc eventually bends in the direction of justice. That indicates, if nothing else, that the majority of white Americans and most likely all Americans were far more racist in 1884 than they are today. The nation hadn’t even officially abolished slavery for 20 years. Additionally, the unofficial form of Jim Crow was still in use and would remain so for at least another 80 years despite all of its horrifying manifestations.

Nevertheless, Huckleberry Finn was well welcomed by the general public when it was first published. While some picky critics denounced it as offensive, the general public embraced it.

This is true even though the book only has two genuinely likeable characters: a white trash youngster and a slave he is assisting in escaping. The majority of the others are occasionally crooked, greedy, hypocritical, absurd, or all of those. The majority of Twain’s readers failed to understand that Huckleberry Finn was a serious critique of society.

His serious unhappiness in later life is claimed to have been exacerbated by his ability to ridicule Americans in public and get away with it. However, it also led critic and writer Alistair Cooke to refer to Twain as the American Voltaire in a talk I went to years ago.

Thus, Everett ventured into very deep waters when he attempted to encourage Huckleberry Finn to take another step toward the truth.

He begins by demonstrating that James views Huck and Tom Sawyer as annoying young brats he must make fun of, whereas Twain has them pulling adorable practical jokes on an unsuspecting Jim. Because he is totally at their mercy, it is one of the numerous tiresome ways that Everett James must fit into white prejudices about Black people.

After they’ve fled, James tells Huck, “There are no such things as rights,” but not before revealing to him that he was speaking in a slave dialect because he knows that if the wrong white people hear his actual, more appropriate speech, he will be tortured or possibly killed.

James was an autodidact, something that slaves were not permitted to be, unlike Jim. He entered Judge Thatcher’s vast library covertly, trained himself to read, read a great deal, learnt how to talk properly, and—most importantly—learned how to write.

Although some slaves may not have been literate, they defy the step-and-fetch-it stereotype that white civilization imposes on them and speak soberly, rationally, and frequently cynically when they are with trusted peers throughout the book.

However, James saw literacy as a necessary means of achieving freedom.

James salvages a stack of books from a riverboat crash when they are on the run, before he has revealed himself to Huck. James worried about what to do if Huck wakes up and finds him reading while he’s asleep.

James describes how the power of reading became evident and tangible to him at that very time. No one could control the words or know what I took away from them if I could see them. They couldn’t even tell whether I was reading them, hearing them out, or understanding them. Since it was entirely secret and unrestricted, it was subversive in every way.

The freedom to write is perhaps more potent. James receives a pencil stub stolen for him by a valued slave friend. Young George, the friend, is aware of the tool’s potential when used by someone with skill. Young George, who has been brutally flogged for the crime, gives James a wink as he and Huck run into the forest out of sight of the white people.

Throughout the remainder of the story, James keeps that modest stub in his pocket as a valuable tool for managing his own story.

“I wrote myself into being with my pencil,” he claims.

At a time when social media driven by logarithms is drowning out public discourse, those pictures seemed particularly pertinent to me. The mound of bullshit being shoveled by digital billionaires who appear to be finding the democracy that brought them such wealth inconvenient is stifling knowledge, facts, and independent voices.

For James, a pencil stub represented the strength of independence. In a same vein, Halik Kochanski claimed in her 2022 book Resistance that underground newspapers provided resisters with a sense of identity, unity, and purpose, which in turn fueled civilian attempts to overthrow Hitler and his henchmen. It’s unclear if contemporary pens will continue to have this kind of impact.

In significant part, Everett transforms Jim into James by educating him so that he may recognize the full potential of freedom despite being repeatedly denied it. In several other significant ways, Everett diverges from the Twain story. However, the book is an engaging narrative that I believe people should read for themselves rather than being a preachy diatribe. I therefore don’t want to reveal some of its shocking conclusions.

One significant change that, in my opinion, doesn’t require a spoiler warning is that Everett gives Huck a sense of innocence that Twain doesn’t. Given that Everett attempts to eliminate any nostalgia for a repulsive time period that Twain might have created in his readers, that may appear ironic. However, Huck’s guilt-ridden thoughts that he had to be the lowest kind of white person to assist a slave in escaping are no longer present in James.

Twain may have used that to highlight the hypocrisy of antebellum Missouri’s racial views. However, Everett appears to be illustrating in James that racism is a sin that young Huck has not yet fully comprehended.

At one point, Huck tells James, “I can see how much you miss your family, but I don’t think about it.” I forget that you experience the same emotions that I do. You adore them, I know that.

Additionally, Everett delves much more deeply than Twain did into the brutality of slavery.

Jim and Huck are placed together with two charlatans who are considered by Twain as relatively likeable scoundrels. James presents what is probably a much more accurate rendition, one that would not have been accepted by an audience in 1884.

According to Everett, the Duke and the King saw James’ potential worth right away, either from his sale as a slave or from the potential reward they could receive if they captured him. At one point, they beat James so severely that it briefly lamed him while they held him as a captive. That won Huck’s enduring animosity from the cold-blooded, ungrateful bastards.

In an even more harrowing scene, Everett describes James being hidden by a slave couple in a cabin on the Widow Douglas s place. While Katie s husband is gone, the sadistic overseer, Hopkins, enters the cabin and tells Katie to hike up her skirt, and casually rapes her. From his hiding place, James is forced to watch in silence and think about how many times this has happened to his beloved wife because he knows that if he kills Hopkins in that setting, terror would rain down on every slave in the place.

Think this depiction is over the top? Read Ty Seidule sRobert E. Lee and Me. The West Point historian writes that not only was the rape of slave women routine in the old South, masters often sold their own resultant children off into further slavery. Southern honor indeed. To me it seems blindingly obvious why white racists were so obsessed with the idea of Black men raping white women as theylynched Blacks in their thousands. White men had been raping powerless Black women for centuries, so in the lynch mobs fevered minds, Black men naturally would want to do the same.

In James, Everett neither copies Twain nor does he try to reject the earlier work. Instead, he takes it the next logical step and brings it into an era when, troubled as it is, one can tell more truth about this past than one could in Twain s day.

Twain would have loved his successor s demonstration of the absurdity of race in American culture as he described James s brief participation in a blackface minstrel band.

There we were, twelve of us, marching down the main street that separated the free side of town from the slave side, ten white men in blackface, one Black man passing for white and painted black, and me, a light-brown Black man painted black in such a way as to appear like a white man passing for Black.

No wonder James was exhausted.

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