Percival Everett’s new novel imagines Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved sidekick, Jim. But to call James a retelling would be an injustice. Everett sends Mark Twain’s classic through the looking glass. What emerges is no longer a children’s book, but a blood-soaked historical novel stripped of all ornament. James conjures a vision of the antebellum South as a scene of pervasive terror. Everett recognizes that American slavery’s true history is not revealed in the movements of great armies or the speeches of politicians. Its realities lie in the details of life lived under conditions of unceasing brutality—the omnipresent whip, the daily interplay of dread and panic, the rage that can find no outlet.
James, in other words, is anything but a straight-ahead homage to a literary classic. Instead, Everett has a cultural homicide in view. He wishes to kill the Black stock character, entrenched in American fiction and film, whom the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah called “the Saint” in 1993 and, several years later, the director Spike Lee christened “the magical, mystical Negro.” James is best understood as a systematic dismantling of that shopworn staple, the Black man or woman who exists to rescue and morally enlighten a fallen but basically redeemable white protagonist. And Everett’s quarrel is not with this archetype alone. He takes aim at the ethics embodied by the magical Negro: the idea that oppression exalts, that suffering purifies the spirit. Everett’s counter-thesis is that oppression hardens; suffering sharpens. James cuts.
The trope of “the noble good-hearted black man or woman, friendly to whites,” in Appiah’s words, isn’t hard to recognize in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Its secondary hero is ennobled by a folksy wisdom and probity so unalloyed as to border on the supernatural. Jim is downtrodden but morally upright and ever ready to help. Published in the United States in 1885, Twain’s novel is a tale of boyish exploits, rich with comedy, that doubles as a tutorial against anti-Black racism. A quick refresher, given that high-school English (where Huckleberry Finn remains one of the most assigned novels in America) may be a dim memory: The plot features the plight of semi-orphaned Huck—who flees home to escape an abusive, whiskey-wet father—and Jim, who has run away from his owner, Miss Watson, after learning that she plans to sell him to slavers in New Orleans. Because the pair disappear at the same time, many assume that Jim has killed the boy; he becomes not merely a runaway slave but also a Black man who has murdered a white child. When Huck and Jim are forced to hide out on Jackson’s Island, they throw in their lot together, developing a father-son relationship as they head off, their raft precarious, down the Mississippi River. Along the way, Huck has a necessary moral awakening as his Black companion teaches him, directly and indirectly, about the evils of prejudice. As for Jim, the “happy slave” gets his happy ending—freedom.
