James

by Percival Everett

“Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.” “And why is that?” I asked. February said, “Because they need to know everything before us. Because they need to name everything.”

“Here we is chewin’ on dis terrbul bacon, me a runaway and you a dead boy. You know dey gone think I da one dat kilt you.” “I never thought of that,” Huck said. “I never dreamed I could git you into trouble. Why would you want to kill me?” “Dat don’t matter none to white folks.” “I don’t like white folks,” he said. “And I is one.” “Sho look lak one.”

I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name. In the religious preachings of my white captors I am a victim of the Curse of Ham. The white so-called masters cannot embrace their cruelty and greed, but must look to that lying Dominican friar for religious justification. 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.

DEEP IN THE NIGHT from deep in the forest, I heard the barking and howling of hounds. I pulled myself into an even tighter ball atop the tree roots that had become my bed. There was a mama raccoon that lived in the tree. She had taken to walking past me nonchalantly in the darkness. Tonight she stayed in the tree, high above me, listening to the dogs. We were both animals and we didn’t know which of us was the prey. We accepted that we both were. I considered running, leaving my raccoon friend, but in which direction does one run from lightning?

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

THE SHOE NOW FORMED, I held it with long tongs. I appreciated what strength Easter must have had in his hands. 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 had stood and listened to this transaction and never once was I asked for either opinion or desire. I was the horse that I was, just an animal, just property, nothing but a thing, but apparently I was a horse, a thing, that could sing.

“She’s been shot,” I said. “Good Lord,” Norman said. “She’s dead.” “We should have left her where she was,” Norman said. “At least she’d be a live slave. Not just another dead runaway.” 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.”