Dem/them; Jim/James

Percival Everett’s James has just won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. It was previously short listed for the Booker.  We read it for our book group last month. The novel is a reimaging of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s (James’) perspective and is a searing critique of racism and conventions in the depiction of African Americans in literature.  Our book club convener, David Gilbey, summarised our response to Everett’s device of having his characters use 'double language' i.e. speaking one way amongst themselves and another in response to or within the hearing of white Southerners:  

We discussed James' 'double language, some of us thinking it was overdone, others thinking it was nicely sustained… James …  teach(es) and reinforce(s) his children's understanding of the roles they needed to play to survive and to communicate meaningfully with other blacks in different instances

and indeed schools his children in ‘masking’ effectively in front of their masters to sustain an illusion of ignorance and deference.

I was the dissenter in our group thinking that the instances in the book where James draws the reader’s attention to this masquerade were too numerous and not handled particularly subtly. James’ subterfuge is established from the outset when Everett recreates a scene from Twain’s novel where Tom and Huck take Jim’s hat and hang it on a tree limb (a nail in the reworking) certain he will attribute its movement to witches.

“Lak I say, I first found my hat on a nail. ‘I ain’t put dat dere’ I say to mysef. ‘How dat hat get dere?’ I knew ‘twas witches what done it.  I ain’t seen ‘em, but it was dem.  And one dem witches, the one that took my hat, she sent me all da way down to N’Orlins. Can you believe dat?” My change in diction alerted the rest (his fellow slaves) to the white boys’ presence.  So, my performance for the story became a frame for the story. My story became less of a tale as the real game became the display for the boys.(Page 13, James)

In Huckleberry Finn Jim profits in reputation by recounting this story to his credulous peers. It is designed to illustrate his and their superstitious, naive natures. However, while Tom and Huck have duped Jim they are not immune to superstition either; a few pages prior Huck indulges in a complex ritual to ward off the bad luck that may attend him after accidentally killing a spider.

Everett brings twenty first century sophistication and a political agenda by not only shifting the agency so that his protagonist is now outwitting the boys but elevating James to the status of a highly (self) educated man who can quip about the difference between proleptic irony and dramatic irony and conduct debates on social inequality (especially slavery) and hypocrisy with the likes of Voltaire and Locke.

While I could enter into the general spirit of Everett’s revisionist narrative I found it heavy handed and preachy in places and was unable to suspend disbelief in the face of James’ learnedness and atheism which seemed more like a projection of Everett’s own characteristics than the credible recreation of a literary character.  For me the novel was strongest when it dealt with the picaresque flow of events,  the emotional impact of slavery itself and the actions of the various opportunists, villains and beneficiaries James encounters among them  Emmett, the King and Bilgewater  and Judge Thatcher. For a book challenging stereotypes I found the tropes of the doomed young girl, Sammy, rescued from rape and slavery only to drown in the Mississippi and the ‘yes, Huck I am your father’ revelation cloying and a bit cheap.  Not to mention the abruptness and somewhat improbably heroic sounding ‘I am James’, ‘Just James’ that end of the book.

Percival Everett has an impressive body of work and I caught the adaptation of his novel Erasure (filmed as American Fiction) a few months back. That too deals with the question of authentic African American language and characterisation in literature but perhaps because of its contemporary setting and many subplots I found it more satisfying than James.

I am no expert on what earns a work a prestigious literary award but I would hazard the suggestion that in this case the stature of the author and the mission he undertook to reclaim Huckleberry Finn and purge it of racism for a modern enlightened readership may have weighed significantly in the judges’ minds.