James

by Percival Everett

Waiting is a big part of a slave’s life, waiting and waiting to wait some more. Waiting for demands. Waiting for food. Waiting for the ends of days. Waiting for the just and deserved Christian reward at the end of it all.

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

“Because they need to know everything before us. Because they need to name everything.”

Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.”

I suspected they were afraid we were laughing at them or else they simply hated the idea of us having a good time.

an epigenetic disposition to being miserable

as angry, but where does a slave put anger? We could be angry with one another; we were human. But the real source of our rage had to go without address, swallowed, repressed.

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.

At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.

I couldn’t stop reading long enough to make space in my head. I was like a man who had not eaten for a season and had then gorged himself until sick.

With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.

“Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ’em.”

“Are you all right?” Easter laughed. “What if I’m not? What’s going to change? What are you going to do about it? What would all right look like?” His point was well taken.

“It’s a horrible world. White people try to tell us that everything will be just fine when we go to heaven. My question is, Will they be there? If so, I might make other arrangements.” Easter laughed.

“You mean youse be abalishnists?” “I wouldn’t go that far. We ain’t working to get you free, we’re just working. We needed a tenor.”

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

You sayin’ you is makin’ a ’stinction ’tween chattel slavery ’n’ bonded slavery?”

I studied the lifeless body on the ground before me. “She was dead when I found her,” I said. “She’s just now died again, but this time she died free.”

“What should I be?” “Just keep living,”

White people often spent time admiring their survival of one thing or another. I imagined it was because so often they had no need to survive, but only to live.