The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, and James, by Percival Everett
The first two books I read in 2025 were the classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I read in university and have not returned to in at least 35 years, maybe longer, and James, Percival Everett’s retelling of that story from the perspective of Jim, the escaping enslaved man who shares Huck Finn’s picaresque journey down the Mississippi by raft.
First: the original. Huckleberry Finn is in many ways a hard read for a twenty-first century reader, not just because of the ubiquitous use of the n-word but because of the never-questioned assumption that Jim and few other Black characters in the story are less intelligent, less capable, and less motivated than white characters — even though Jim has seized agency in his own life by running away. The novel is a pointed critique of the racism that Huck has been born into, forcing Huck to accept that helping Jim escape is the more moral action though his society has told him that “stealing” an enslaved person from a white person is theft. However, Mark Twain was, like all of us, a person of his times, and even as he was critiquing and interrogating racism, he was also accepting and perpetrating it. Within this framework, Huckleberry Finn is still quite an engaging read and an interesting character study and social satire — until the last few chapters when Tom Sawyer shows up, Twain obviously feels he needs to bring back his most popular character with all the Tom Sawyer hijinks, and the whole plot gets derailed.
The recent novel James by Black American writer Percival Everett flips the story and tells it from “Jim’s” — James’s — point of view, undermining Twain’s and Huck’s assumptions about Black intelligence and ability. In Everett’s retelling, the qualities that define the enslaved Black people in Huck Finn’s world as stupid and lazy — including the “Negro dialect” that Twain renders both painstakingly and painfully — are cloaks consciously put on to pacify white people and keep them from being alarmed, since white people get dangerous when they are alarmed. It’s in the interests of enslaved people, as James teaches those around him, to pretend to be dumber and less capable than they are, as long as their lives depend on the capricious whims of white enslavers.
Once James escapes and the story gets moving, there’s the familiar pleasure of hearing a different perspective on a well-known story. Everett sticks to Twain’s plotline for some parts of the novel and goes in entirely different directions in other parts (the entire ending deviates from the original novel, which given how bad the ending of the original is, can only be an improvement). If I wanted anything different from James, it was simply more — I wanted the novel to be longer, to give us more of James’s backstory and more of a hint of his future. There’s one particular piece of backstory revealed in the novel which, while believable, absolutely demands (for me) more explanation and perhaps some flashbacks to put it into context — but I’ll say no more for fear of spoilers.
Rereading Huck Finn and then reading James was an enjoyable and thought-provoking experience.
