Do you think you know the story of Huck Finn? Think again. In this marvelous book by Percival Everett, the adventure is turned on its head and you find yourself reading a totally different story that seems to come tumbling out from between the lines of Twain’s. It’s still an adventure story, in which a boy called Huck and a slave he calls Jim run away by floating down the Mississippi river and get into all sorts of trouble, but this time the point of view belongs to James. The pair become true friends, they look out for each other, care for each other, discuss ideas and try to see the other’s point of view, but the world is different when the one telling the story is a piece of property which needs to be returned to its owner.
It’s a farce and very clever, although I found myself often alarmed at the achingly serious jokes about race that pepper the script. One running gag is the bi-lingualism the blacks use to help the white folk think they still have the upper hand – the black community, in reality, all being self-educated and well spoken. This is James teaching the children to speak black:
“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. So, let’s pause to review some of the basics.”
“Don’t make eye contact,” a boy said.
“Right, Virgil.”
“Never speak first,” a girl said.
“That’s correct, February,” I said.
Lizzie looked at the other children and then back to me. “Never address any subject directly when talking to another slave,” she said.
“What do we call that?” I asked.
Together they said, “Signifying.”
“Excellent.”
They were happy with themselves, and I let that feeling linger. “Let’s try some situational translations. Something extreme first. You’re walking down the street and you see that Mrs. Holiday’s kitchen is on fire. She’s standing in her yard, her back to her house, unaware. How do you tell her?”
“Fire, fire,” January said.
“Direct. And that’s almost correct,” I said.
The youngest of them, lean and tall five-year-old Rachel, said, “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere.”
“Perfect,” I said. “Why is that correct?”
Lizzie raised her hand. “Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.”
“And why is that?” I asked.
February said, “Because they need to know everything before us. Because they need to name everything.”
“Good, good. You all are really sharp today. Okay, let’s imagine now that it’s a grease fire. She’s left bacon unattended on the stove. Mrs. Holiday is about to throw water on it. What do you say? Rachel?” Rachel paused.
“Missums, that water gone make it wurs!”
“Of course, that’s true, but what’s the problem with that?”
Virgil said, “You’re telling her she’s doing the wrong thing.”
I nodded. “So, what should you say?”
Lizzie looked at the ceiling and spoke while thinking it through. “Would you like for me to get some sand?”
“Correct approach, but you didn’t translate it.”
She nodded. “Oh, Lawd, missums ma’am, you wan fo me to gets some sand?”
“Good.”
I’m laughing at the humour, but slightly hesitantly, with a bit of an: is is OK to laugh at this? nervousness. So much dark humour is situation and relationship dependent and, being a kiwi, I’m just not American enough to understand the complexities here. Perhaps every country’s racism has its own ironies. Here we have slaves portrayed as pastiches of the elite and well-educated white men beneath the very noses of their less intellectual owners. Does a slave need to be so erudite as to debate the difference between ‘proleptic irony or dramatic irony‘ and appreciate ‘Voltaire’s notion of tolerance regarding religious difference‘ for us, the readers, to accept him as intelligent? The whites are played for fools while the blacks help them maintain their illusion of power, and yet it is not an illusion – the blacks are hunted and sold and raped and shot just like history tells us. So why give the slaves such an impotent power? They are still the ones suffering.
The story is about racism, of course – it always was – and the American history of slavery does resonate in many ways with our own colonial history here in New Zealand, and must hold a mirror to other persecutions all over the world. “I considered the northern white stance against slavery. How much of the desire to end the institution was fueled by a need to quell and subdue white guilt and pain? Was it just too much to watch? Did it offend Christian sensibilities to live in a society that allowed that practice? I knew that whatever the cause of their war, freeing slaves was an incidental premise and would be an incidental result.“
I’d seriously recommend reading some reviews of James by American writers and academics (here’s a good one in the Chicago review of books) to unravel how this works in the context of the current understanding of race relations in the States. I wonder how we will read James in the future, as the way we continue to make sense of this period of history evolves?
This all makes the book sound very heavy and miserable and the amazing thing is that it really is not. Well it is, but it is also an extraordinarily compelling adventure story with a plot that flows as fast as the Mississippi river and a charismatic hero in James who romps through the pages with an eye for the absurd and a beautiful humanity. The relationship between him and Huckleberry Finn, once again, is classic.
I enjoyed this far more than Twain’s version. It’s important to look back at Twain, but very good to move on with Everett.
Cristina Sanders' blog 