James

by Percival Everett

“Oh, he found some book off the shelves.” I laughed. “What I gone do wif a book?” She laughed, too.

Safe movement through the world depended on mastery of language, fluency.

Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.” “There must be something,” Virgil said. “I’m sorry, Virgil. You might be right. There might be some higher power, children, but it’s not their white God.

How strange a world, how strange an existence, that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality, that one’s equal must hold a station that allows airing of that argument, that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree.

I will not let myself, my mind, drown in fear and outrage. I will be outraged as a matter of course. But my interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on this page can mean anything at all. If they can have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning.

Once it was light, we went through the robbers’ booty, as Huck called it. The boy was highly excited by the adventure of it all. I admired that, was envious of it, to tell the truth, to be able to feel that in a world without fear of being hanged to death, or worse.

There were those slaves who claimed a distinction between good masters and cruel masters. Most of us considered such to be distinction without difference.

I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.

I could see that the business with the warring families had troubled him. Killing is hard to see up close. Especially for a child. To tell the truth, I hadn’t seen much killing myself, except that I lived with it daily, the threat, the promise of it. Seeing one lynching was to see ten. Seeing ten was to see a hundred, with that signature posture of death, the angle of the head, the crossing of the feet.

“You’re not holding the hammer square,” Easter said. “Sorry.” “If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not learning.”

I dropped the shoe into the quenching bucket. I had come to like the sound and the steam. I pounded it some more, the strikes reverberating through my arm and body, before sticking it back into the fire. “Heating and cooling it like that will harden the steel,” Easter said. “Metaphor,” I said. “That’s nearly all we have,” Easter said. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the pencil, showed it to Easter. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Young George stole it for me,” I said. “You can write.” It was not a question or an accusation, more a discovery, perhaps a call to duty. “I can write,” I said. “Then you had best write.” “I will,” I said.

I looked at one woman who might have been intrigued by me or taken with me, the entertainer. I saw the surface of her, merely the outer shell, and realized that she was mere surface all the way to her core.

A man who refused to own slaves but was not opposed to others owning slaves was still a slaver, to my thinking.

When people run, they forget terrain, they forget nature. I wondered how many snakes simply had just been startled by our rushing feet, too surprised to lash out, how many missteps had not led to plummets because the next step had come so quickly that we flew past the danger. And yet, with all that running, no place appeared like a new place. Perhaps that was the nature of escape.

All of those dead white faces, and none of them mattered a note to me, but Norman’s, with skin just like theirs, was the world.

“Just keep living,” I said. “Just remember, once they see you, or see me in you, you’ve been seen. I know you don’t understand. But you will one day.”

“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 looked 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 felt affection for me, if not actual love. He had always looked to me for protection, even when he thought he was trying to protect me.

Huck showed the excitement of a boy at the sight of our catch. I was reminded that he was just that, a boy. He could have gone through life without the knowledge I had given him and he would have been no worse off for it. But I understood at that moment that I had shared the truth with him for myself. I needed for him to have a choice.

“To fight in a war,” he said. “Can you imagine?” “Would that mean facing death every day and doing what other people tell you to do?” I asked. “I reckon.” “Yes, Huck, I can imagine.”

I hated the world that wouldn’t let me apply justice without the certain retaliation of injustice.

Had I done an evil thing? Was it evil to kill evil? The truth was that I didn’t care. It was this apathy that left me wondering about myself—not wondering why I didn’t feel anything or whether I was incapable of feeling, but wondering what else I was capable of doing. It was not an altogether bad feeling.

I knew that whatever the cause of their war, freeing slaves was an incidental premise and would be an incidental result.

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.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked. He pointed his gun at me. I pointed my pistol at him. “I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night,” I said. “I am a sign. I am your future. I am James.” I pulled back the hammer on my pistol.