James

by Percival Everett

My change in diction alerted the rest to the white boys’ presence.

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.

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.

understood the concept of fiction. It wasn’t so unlike religion, or history,

had already come to understand the tidiness of lies, the lesson learned from the stories told by white people seeking to justify my circumstance.

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

I ain’t no nigger, but I is a slave.”

But running and escaping were not the same thing.

It was a nostalgic terror that I felt.

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

They sought to share this moment of mocking me,

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 might be the reason, but it’s not your fault.”

The first strike came as a surprise, not because I didn’t know it was coming, but because I could feel the tinge of pleasure attached to its delivery.

Free person, he can be where he wants to be. The only place we can ever be is in slavery.”

“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.”

I hated the world that wouldn’t let me apply justice without the certain retaliation of injustice.