You Should Read JAMES by Percival Everett

Teaching Huck Finn was as much fun as getting my kids to clean their rooms, which is why I'm so thrilled about JAMES.

When I finish reading a book, there are two fool-proof signs I liked it.¹ 

One: I spend the next week starting all my conversations with “You should read…”

Two: I immediately start planning how to incorporate some aspect of the book into my classroom.

Percival Everett’s latest, James, checked both of those boxes. (See text messages below for proof.)

In full transparency, I was skeptical of James. I couldn’t have given you a good reason. I’ve never read a book by Everett, so I didn’t have a bad experience to blame, and I loved American Fiction, which was based on his novel Erasure. But James is a retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and, well, let’s just say I have some complicated feelings about Huck Finn. I wrote recently about my decision to stop teaching Of Mice and Men a few years ago, in part because of an experience in my past when I disregarded a student’s concerns about the n-word.² The n-word appears in Twain’s novel as well, but that’s not the only cause of my ambivalence. I spent my first four years in the classroom teaching Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and it was about as much fun as getting my kids to clean their rooms. (See photos below for proof.)

We teach Twain as an exemplar of many literary skills, including humor, satire, characterization, and dialect. The dialect that makes Huck Finn who he is, however, was often too big a barrier to comprehension for my students. For example, here’s what Jim says when Huck and Tom sneak up on him: “Say, who is you? Whar is you? Dog my cats ef I didn’ hear sumf’n. Well, I know what I’s gwyne to do: I’s gwyne to set down here and listen tell I hears it agin.” We spent so much time parsing what was going on that we hardly got around to discussing how it was presented and why it mattered.³ Even when I shifted gears and started teaching chapters as stand-alone texts with additional scaffolding, many of the teenagers in my class struggled—which is why I am thrilled about Everett’s take on Jim’s story in James. 

Rewriting the story from Jim’s perspective, Everett undermines Twain’s Huck as a narrator right away. In the first line of the novel, Jim notices Huck and Tom Sawyer sneaking up on him:

“Those little bastards were hiding out in there in the tall grass.”

Never in Twain’s time would Jim’s enslaved character have been able to voice that thought about two white boys. Therein lies the genius of Everett’s premise: James is all about what Jim has to say—and how he says it. 

In the second chapter, Jim sits down with his daughter and other enslaved children to “[give] a language lesson” because “[s]afe movement through the world depend[s] on mastery of language, fluency.” In Everett’s reimagining, slaves speak grammatically “correct” English amongst themselves. The language lessons are to teach the children to speak incorrectly around white people. As Jim explains:

“Let them work to understand you. Mumble sometimes so they can have the satisfaction of telling you not to mumble. They enjoy the correction and thinking you’re stupid. Remember, the more they choose to not want to listen, the more we can say to one another around them.”

That line both chilled and cheered me. This is the book I want to teach, I thought. The scene reminded me of John McWhorter’s Words on the Move. In the introduction to that book McWhorter, a linguistics professor, argues that language constantly evolves: “One of the hardest notions for a human being to shake is that a language is something that is, when it is actually something always becoming.” Additionally, language is also employed as a gatekeeper because speaking “correctly” reflects on your character—as Jim well knows. 

Throughout his travels on and off the Mississippi River, Jim must be cautious to speak in the appropriate vernacular. After being bit by a snake, he hallucinates a conversation with Voltaire. When he returns to consciousness, Huck says, “You sho talk funny in yer sleep. . . . What does hierarchy mean? . . . Are you possessed, Jim?”

Jim scrambles to cover for himself by using his “slave” speak again: “A snake is da devil, ain’t he. I hopes he din’t put no demons in my blood.” As he pretends to sleep, he reflects: 

“I was afraid to sleep again for fear of Huck coming back and hearing my thoughts without their passing through my slave filter. I was even more afraid of further unproductive, imagined conversations with Voltaire, Rousseau and Locke about slavery, race and, of all things, albinism. How strange a world, a 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.”

Along his journey, Jim finds a pencil and begins to write his story, one that is particularly his—and Everett’s. One thing I loved about this book was that although I knew the bones of Twain’s story, I was still surprised by the twists of Jim’s journey in James. Everett’s quick pacing pulled me through the book in two days, and he landed a magic feat of an ending that felt at once inevitable and unpredictable.

Another Parnassus First Editions pick! Ann Patchett and I should be friends.

While I don’t know that I’ll get the book through the full approval process with my board of education this year, I’m planning a side-by-side lesson with excerpts from James and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for this fall. I’ll share that when it’s done, but in the meantime, (if you teach!) you can check out my three-tiered before-during-after reading task cards for characterization, which uses a couple quotes from James.

Whether you’re in a classroom this fall or not, you should read James.

1. Okay, there are actually three signs. The third is that I dream of attending a reading by the author but instead of getting a book signed, I give the author a jar of pickles. Min Jin Lee had that effect on me after I read Pachinko, and the dream turned into a story that turned into a novel draft, which has nothing to do with Min Jin Lee but a lot to do with pickles! It also explores the fine line between wanting to be a mother and wanting to want to be a mother; the dangerous slide of self-care into selfishness; and the need to understand why something happens when sometimes all life gives us is the how. (Anyone know a literary agent interested in this??)

2. This is a much larger conversation than I cover here, but here’s my general reasoning: Teaching a “classic” that uses harmful language can be effective if the goal of the unit is to understand historical context (although I’d argue for using nonfiction primary texts in that case). But if we’re reading a “classic” that uses harmful language as a means for teaching elements of fiction (plot, characterization, symbolism, imagery, figurative language, etc.), there’s no justification for not using a more updated, accessible, and inclusive text.

3. This three-step process is how I teach literary analysis. Layer 1 = WHAT (summarize what happens in the text). Layer 2 = HOW (analyze how the language is used and other choices the author makes). Layer 3 = SO WHAT (evaluate the author’s choices and extend your thinking beyond the text).