Sadly, 30 years ago some parents were trying to keep “Huckleberry Finn” away from the children. Because of Jim. Or, more specifically, because of the word Twain’s characters most often use to refer to him. Those who criticize Twain’s use of that epithet have always struck me as wanting his book to have been set in a later time, which, given the plot, it couldn’t have been. In his 1996 book “Dark Witness,” Ralph Wiley, the late Southern-born Black writer, captured my thoughts perfectly. “There is not one usage of ‘n----r’ in ‘Huck Finn’ that I consider inauthentic,” Wiley wrote, “and I am hard to please that way.”
Even so, Everett telling the story from Jim’s perspective means his character gets to reveal how he thinks of himself. In a pivotal scene, after the title character has stopped pretending that he doesn’t know grammar and doesn’t know how to make his subjects and verbs agree, he tells Huck plainly, “I’m not a n----r.”
It’s sad, but somehow fitting, that a great American novel that argues for the humanity of those who’d been held as chattel is a mostly comedic odyssey, in which an uneducated and naïve white boy is the center, and the Black husband and father running for freedom is the secondary character. But Twain told the story he could tell. Everett puts the people in the most peril in the center of the story. The people being systematically exploited, the people being chained, the people being whipped, the people being raped. His decision is not unlike, say, putting the plight of enslaved Africans in the center of the story of America.
In a March 9 MSNBC column, professor Koritha Mitchell pointed out how important it was to Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs that they be credited for having written the story of their lives. That is, they did not want readers to hold the false belief that they’d merely told their story to a writer. Why? Because the ability to write a narrative undercuts the argument that Africans were subhuman and, therefore, deserving of enslavement. Even those who could accept that Douglass and Jacobs were capable of the high-order thinking that writing requires likely saw them as exceptions. In “James,” Everett pushes us to see them as the norm.
