James

by Percival Everett

I didn’t express my thoughts to him, but I knew I could run. I could always run. But running and escaping were not the same thing.

“What’s the story with you and your boy? Did you teach him how to pass?” “What?” “How to pass,” Easter said. “Pass? Easter, that boy’s whiter than Wiley.”

“If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not learning.”

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 cocked my head like a dog, hearing him. It would have been easy enough to understand him as mocking me, but somehow he sounded more like he was practicing, or even trying to make me feel comfortable, which was at once evidence of some sort of kindness and terribly offensive. Not to mention that he, though loquacious, was hardly fluent.

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.

“Suh, I’s tryin’ to unnerstan’. You sayin’ you is makin’ a ’stinction ’tween chattel slavery ’n’ bonded slavery?” I didn’t think I’d meant to actually ask that question out loud, but I must have, because I said it in proper and appropriate slave diction. Emmett looked at me askance. “Would you mind repeating that?” “I reckon I would,” I said.

“I want you to sell me.” “What?” “I want you to be my white owner. I want you to sell me. I escape and we do it again. We save the money and you show up and buy my family. Then you take your money and go buy your wife.” “Are you insane?” “No. However, I did get the idea from an insane person. Tell me what’s wrong with the plan?”

I kicked myself for falling into the trap the slavers would have set for me, for me to think that there was magic in that old black woman. That moment of near-gullibility made me question my judgment about other things. For a second I wondered whether Norman was in fact black and a slave. Perhaps he was an insane white man who fancied he was black. Unlikely, of course, stranger than most things I could imagine, but not impossible.

I had not torn out Emmett’s songs—somehow they were necessary to my story. But in this notebook I would reconstruct the story I had begun, the story I kept beginning, until I had a story.

“I thought about tearing out his songs and burning them, but they would still exist. Those crackers would still sing them. Better to know they exist. Don’t you think?”

“What did you do?” Norman asked. “What did I do? I’m a slave, Norman. I inhaled when I should have exhaled. What did I do?”

“You can be what you want to be. You, especially. You can be white or black. Nobody will question you.” “What should I be?”

“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.”

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.”

“Why you needs a gun, Overseer Hopkins, suh? You ’fraid I gonna shoot ya?” “Nigger, is you crazy?” “Which answer would frighten you more?” “What?” “It’s actually a simple question, Hopkins. Which would frighten you more? A slave who is crazy or a slave who is sane and sees you clearly?”

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?

“Nigger, you are in more trouble than you can imagine,” he said. “Why on earth would you think that I can’t imagine the trouble I’m in?