James

by Percival Everett

They enjoy the correction and thinking you’re stupid. Remember, the more they choose to not want to listen, the more we can say to one another around them.”

“There is no God, child. There’s religion but there’s no God of theirs. Their religion tells that we will get our reward in the end. However, it apparently doesn’t say anything about their punishment. But when we’re around them, we believe in God. Oh, Lawdy Lawd, we’s be believin’. Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.”

“Wanna know what I thinks?” Huck looked at me. “I thinks praying is for the people round you what wants you to pray.

Luke chuckled. “So, when we see him staggering around later acting the fool, will that be an example of proleptic irony or dramatic irony?” “Could be both.” “Now that would be ironic.”

But the real source of our rage had to go without address, swallowed, repressed.

One thing was certain: I had to make sure Huck didn’t become the corpse they were looking for. More to the point, I had to make certain I didn’t become the corpse they were looking for.

“If’n dey is, den dey ain’t no good part. Da rest o’ nature don’ hardly talk to no human peoples anymo. Maybe it try from time to time, but peoples don’ listen. Anyway, gone be a big rain.”

I was serious about the rain. I could feel it in my joints.

I had wondered every time I sneaked in there what white people would do to a slave who had learned how to read. What would they do to a slave who had taught the other slaves to read? What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenuse was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled?

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.

But I will not let this condition define me. 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.

I had thought of it, but somehow it just seemed like I’d be that much farther from family. Slavery didn’t recognize imaginary borders. I needed money.

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.

And books. I had to hide my excitement about the discovery of books. As to the monetary value of books I had no knowledge, but their intellectual value was immediately evident.

Somehow that word seemed strange coming out of Huck’s mouth. I think he heard it, too, because we shared an awkward silence.

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.

He was enjoying himself and that was all right with me. It always made life easier when white folks could laugh at a poor slave now and again.

I acted like he’d hurt my feelings. White people love feeling guilty.

It could have been my turn to experience a bit of guilt, having toyed with the boy’s feelings, and he being too young to actually understand the problem with his behavior, but I chose not to. When you are a slave, you claim choice where you can.

Ain’t I doin’ wrong, though?” Huck said. He was troubled. “How am I s’posed to know what good is?” “Way I sees it is dis. If’n ya gots to hab a rule to tells ya wha’s good, if’n ya gots to hab good ’splained to ya, den ya cain’t be good. If’n ya need sum kinda God to tells ya right from wrong, den you won’t never know.” “But the law says…” “Good ain’t got nuttin’ to do wif da law. Law says I’m a slave.” We drifted on, our silence becoming quieter.

“We’re in Illinois, true enough, and Illinois is supposedly a free state, true enough, but the white folks around here tell us we’re in Tennessee.”

And so, after these books, the Bible itself was the least interesting of all. I could not enter it, did not want to enter it, and then understood that I recognized it as a tool of my enemy. I chose the word enemy, and still do, as oppressor necessarily supposes a victim.

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

After being cruel, the most notable white attribute was gullibility.

Huck sidled up close to me. A strange reaction, because I was the one person who could offer him no protection.

“I kin see how much you miss yer family and yet I don’t think about it. I forget that you feel things jest like I feel. I know you love them.” “Thank you, Huck.”

“I do, but, Huck, I’m a slave. You don’t neber forget dat. I ain’t no nigger, but I is a slave.”

He ain’t worth much dead. They cain’t lynch you but once, but we kin sell you a bunch of times.”

It was sad that the sight of them caused me to relax, as if that picture were the reality that was normal.

“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.

“Here with Wiley or here in hell?” “Hell.” “I don’t remember much of my home, but I remember the ship. I remember the abuse. I remember the splashing. You?” “Born in hell. Sold before my mother could hold me.”

“Heating and cooling it like that will harden the steel,” Easter said. “Metaphor,” I said. “That’s nearly all we have,” Easter said.

He then did something that was stranger than anything I had yet seen. The sight of it froze Wiley and Easter. Daniel Decatur Emmett extended his hand to me as if to shake.

These white men scared me. They scared me because they weren’t invested in my being afraid of them.

I was, in no understated way, overwhelmed by their kindness and deferential treatment.

I made eye contact with a couple of people in the crowd and the way they looked at me was different from any contact I had ever had with white people. They were open to me, but what I saw, looking into them, was hardly impressive. They sought to share this moment of mocking me,

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

“We came back and found you gone and all of a sudden Emmett sounded like every slaver I ever met. He was cursing darkies and yelling about how he was going to get a bully and beat you just before he hanged you from a oak.”

Norman Brown might sell me once and take off for the hills, never to be seen again. But he might just as well have done that if he were a black man. Bad as whites were, they had no monopoly on duplicity, dishonesty or perfidy.

“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?”

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.

“Belief has nothing to do with truth. Believe what you like.

But I understood at that moment that I had shared the truth with him for myself. I needed for him to have a choice.

“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 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.

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.