James

by Percival Everett

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 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.

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

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.

“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.”

I recognized it as a tool of my enemy. I chose the word enemy, and still do, as oppressor necessarily supposes a victim.

“Tell your story,” he said. “What do you mean, Young George? Tell my story? How do you suggest I tell my story?” He looked at his feet. I did, too. They were bare, his toes grabbing the wet grass. He looked at my face. “Use your ears,” he 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.

“You know, dull tools are much more dangerous than sharp ones.”

But he would not be able to pass through the throng of white people on the decks above us—though they could never identify him as black, they would see him as something worse, a very poor white person.

I wondered if he was angry. I wondered if I had ever not been angry.

“A father’s job is make sure his children are safe, right?” I felt bad offering such platitudes. I, in fact, had no idea what I or anyone else was supposed to do.

You think they want you because you can carry a load. You think they want you because you can hammer a nail. They want you because you’re money.” “What?” “You’re mortgaged, Jim. Like a farm, like a house. Really, the bank owns you. Miss Watson gets a bond, a piece of paper that say what you’re worth, and you just keep living in this condition. Living. You’re a part of the bank’s assets and so people all over the world are making money off your scarred black hide. Make sense? Nobody wants you free.”

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? 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.