After selling the film rights to his first novel, Suder (1983), Percival Everett lamented that the filmmaker’s project had little in common with the book he had produced. “Why did you buy this novel from me?” Everett wondered. “You could have written this and no one would have recognized it as my work.” The film version never materialized, for reasons he could only guess: anti-intellectualism, “economic censorship” and market forces that make it difficult for stories by black writers to be appreciated on their own terms. Fast-forward to 2023—when one of his novels finally was adapted for the screen—and American Fiction removes Everett’s novel Erasure (2001) from its original context and updates it for a contemporary audience. Just one example of Everett’s increasing visibility over the past decade, the film’s relative success—a critical darling, with an Oscar for best adapted screenplay on the mantle—marks a surprising turn for Everett. It also suggests a drastically different relationship to mass media from the one Everett lamented some thirty years ago, leaving his most dedicated readers to wonder exactly who or what has changed.
Everett’s fiction has been at odds with prevailing conceptions of race for most of his career, but Erasure stands out for its representation of the commercial fiction market as one that solicits demeaning performances of racial difference from black writers. At the outset, the novel’s protagonist, Monk Ellison, has earned little attention with his fiction, largely because of its experimental quality and lack of concern with race. He is also constantly confronted with the popularity of a novel called We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, which earns praise from mainstream publishers and critics for its stereotypical representations of black urban characters. Pressed for cash, Monk sends his own “street” novel off to publishers, and though he hates it, the book becomes a hit. He poses as his formerly incarcerated, stereotypically “black” alias Stagg R. Leigh in order to promote the book, becoming that which he despises.
Erasure satirizes the televisualization of American literary culture ushered in by Oprah’s Book Club and parodies the black urban fiction that became a mass-market phenomenon in the 1990s. But it also calls up and questions a countervailing anti-commercialism that was given clearest expression by Jonathan Franzen in his 1996 complaint that “much of contemporary fiction’s vitality now resides in the black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, and women’s communities, which have moved into the structures left behind by the departing straight white male.” Indeed, “white males” occupy nearly all of the imagined conversations that Monk holds in his head between scenes (with Mark Rothko and Alain Resnais, Ernst Barlach and Paul Klee, James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, Ernst Kirchner and Max Klinger, as well as single appearances by Hegel, Foucault and Duchamp)—conversations that make for a stark contrast with his often contemptuous judgments of the contemporary denizens of what Franzen called the multicultural “inner city of fiction.”
Minus Everett’s allusions to turn-of-the-century antagonisms between the rising tide of literary multiculturalism and defenders of Great Books, American Fiction bears little of the complexity of its source material. Monk’s resistance to commercial fiction is flattened into a desire to see more respectable images of black people circulating in popular art and culture. And in place of scrutinizing Monk’s misjudgment of the readers of the “inner city of fiction,” the film inserts an argument with the author of We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, who defends the “research” that went into the writing of her novel and convinces Monk to “give the market what it wants.” These distinctions between Erasure and its adaptation shine a light on Everett’s late-career recalibration—which has been marked by a shift from literary experimentation and abstraction to more conventional plots and structures. In one sense, this can be taken as a softening of Everett’s early alienation from the mainstream fiction market. But it has also corresponded with an intensification of his novels’ manifest concern with politics and history—from Trump’s border policies in the novel Telephone (2020) to the lynchings of Emmett Till, Philando Castile and many non-black men of color in The Trees (2021). Taken together, the sum of Everett’s recent fiction implies a more pointed set of aims and interests than what his more obscure aestheticism could have accommodated. If what we’ve been reading indicates something other than a compromise of artistic integrity—or to put it more crudely, a classic case of “selling out”—then what else might we make of this reorientation?
Everett’s latest novel might show us where to start. Not long after American Fiction made it around the film-festival circuit, Everett published James (2024), breaking from his longtime indie press Graywolf, to which he’d been fiercely loyal, for Doubleday, a prestige corporate publisher with the budget to reach a much larger share of American readers. With his new novel, Everett makes his most direct and ambitious attempt yet to address the history of American racism by adapting and inverting one of the most contentious yet canonical American novels, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Here Everett veers even further from the conceptually dense, academic brand of fiction that had long been his signature to confront the deadly serious violence of chattel slavery and blackface minstrelsy. While these social structures linger in the background of Twain’s novel, they’re foregrounded explicitly in Everett’s rewriting of the story, in which the enslaved character Jim provides a first-person account of his journey to freedom.
By making Jim the narrator of Huck Finn, Everett has entered into a decades-long debate over the status of Twain’s embattled novel, while at the same time wading into present disputes over how we ought to understand and teach the history of slavery and racism in America. James therefore marks another significant turn in Everett’s literary career and political evolution (it topped Obama’s summer reading list this year). The novel, conspicuously, demands to be read against the backdrop of today’s wars on “wokeness”—which have included attempts to ban discussions of books with racial themes in schools in states like Florida and Texas, classics like Huck Finn among them. If James is Everett’s most substantial intervention into the culture wars yet, it’s because the novel does not just satirize the politics of racial representation but penetrates to their very root.
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Twain and his canonical novel have turned up on either side of several different culture wars since its original publication in 1884. Published in the racially violent aftermath of American Reconstruction—and during a subsequent period of racial terror and disenfranchisement, often referred to as “the Nadir” of American race relations—Huck Finn sold well despite Massachusetts’s Concord Library issuing its first-ever book ban within a month of the novel’s publication in 1885 on the grounds that it was “absolutely immoral in its tone” and contained “but very little humor.” And yet, black literary figures such as Sterling Allen Brown praised Twain for offering “the best example in nineteenth century fiction of the average Negro slave … clinging to his hope for freedom” in the NAACP magazine The Crisis, a gesture echoed by Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois, who both became members of the Mark Twain Society.
“Unlike the nineteenth-century white readers and censors like the Public Library of Concord, Massachusetts, that condemned [Huckleberry Finn],” literary critic Bernard Bell wrote in 1985, “many modern-day black readers are less offended by the vulgarity and delinquency of Huck, the rebellious teenaged narrator-protagonist, than by the minstrel image of Miss Watson’s runaway slave, Jim.” Going even further, Twain biographers have quoted his journals with condemnatory admissions that have made it easy to take Jim’s characterization as emblematic of Twain’s affinity for the art of blackface minstrelsy. As late as 1906, Twain mourned the loss of “the real nigger show—the genuine nigger show, the extravagant nigger show—the show which to me had no peer and whose peer has not yet arrived, in my experience.” “To my mind,” Twain mused, “it was a thoroughly delightful thing, and a most competent laughter-compeller and I am sorry it is gone.”
Is Huck Finn racist? Decades of ambivalence about the novel’s capitulation to anti-black racism came to a head in the 1990s, with literary scholars such as Jonathan Arac contending that Huck Finn reinforces “racist structures in our society.” Despite its status as “the most taught novel, the most taught long work, and the most taught piece of American literature” during that decade—foreshadowing Disney’s live-action adaption in 1993—black parents succeeded in having the book removed from several high school English curricula until “more sensitive approaches” to teaching it could be established. Under these conditions, the question of how to read Twain’s novel beckoned both literary criticism and public debate. But however knee-jerk they might have been, these alienated readers’ negative judgments of the novel weren’t entirely unwarranted. To be sure, Huck Finn debases its black supporting character in ways that are difficult to defend. “Historical context” can only partially excuse the fact that Twain confines Jim to a studied slave dialect that cements his subordination to the novel’s child protagonist. At the same time, the fact that Huck holds Jim’s fate in his hands is precisely what has attracted readings of Huck Finn as an anti-slavery, anti-racist novel—particularly his famous declaration that he’d rather “go to hell” than reveal Jim’s whereabouts to his enslaver.
For good reason, then, ambivalent readings of the novel—and especially of Jim as a minstrel figure—extend as far back as Ralph Ellison’s mid-century essays “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity” (1953) and “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” (1958), both of which remain foundational to its reception. In the very same sentence where Ellison claims that “Twain fitted him into the outlines of the minstrel tradition,” he also suggests that “it is from behind this stereotype mask that we see Jim’s dignity and human capacity—and Twain’s complexity—emerge.” If this reading suggests an attempt to salvage the aspects of Huck Finn that remain worthy of attention, it also lines up with similarly two-sided interpretations, many of which would seem to rebut the outright rejection of the novel in favor of thinking critically about what it might illuminate for its readers. Pushing against then-common complaints about the inconsistencies between Jim’s wittier, somewhat confrontational characterization at earlier moments in the novel versus the subservience he puts on by the novel’s end, literary historian Forest G. Robinson suggested in 1988 that Jim realizes the racially coded risk of any public social engagement that might threaten his white interlocutors’ imagined superiority. But given his uncertainty about Huck’s standing in this antebellum racial order, Jim articulates concerns for his safety by exaggerating his superstitiousness. As Robinson has it, “Jim takes refuge in the stereotype, in the mask, of the smiling, superstitious, utterly harmless black ‘yes-man.’” It is this very proposition that Everett establishes as the central conceit in James.
The plot of Everett’s novel tracks loosely with that of Twain’s original. Jim determines to flee Hannibal, Missouri after his wife overhears Judge Thatcher and the Widow Douglass’s plans to sell Jim away to New Orleans. Without a clear plan as to where he will run—and how he will eventually free his wife and child—Jim initially camps out on Jackson Island, alone. But then Huck shows up, having faked his death in order to escape the abuse of his recently returned Pap. Now an escaped slave and Huck’s alleged murderer, Jim heads south on the Mississippi River, in the opposite direction slave catchers might expect him to run. He fails to dissuade Huck from coming with him.
Jim hides the fact of his intelligence—and his increasing literacy—by speaking in the slave dialect to which he is limited throughout all of the original Huck Finn. Narrating from his point of view, Jim confides his rationale for deploying an exaggerated dialect when in the presence of Huck, Judge Thatcher and virtually any free white person who might suspect his capacity to engage them as a social equal. James begins where Huck Finn does, with Huck and Tom Sawyer’s harassment of Jim in the thick of the night. But this time, he explains Huck Finn’s opening scene to his fellow enslaved characters, while cuing his readers in on how switches in his speech work as a protective mechanism:
“Lak I say, I furst found my hat up on a nail. ‘I ain’t put dat dere,’ I say to myself. ‘How dat hat git dere?’ And I knew ’twas witches what done it. I ain’t seen ’em, but it was dem. And one dem witches, the one what took my hat, she sent me all da way down to N’Orlins. Can you believe dat?” My change in diction alerted the rest to the white boys’ presence. So, my performance for the boys became a frame for my story. My story became less of a tale as the real game became the display for the boys.
Jim is forced to keep up his minstrel act as he and Huck escape down the Mississippi together, suppressing his intellect as well as the critical discoveries he makes—including the dead body of Huck’s Pap. This tension between Jim’s withholding of crucial knowledge and the threat of his being discovered resurfaces over the course of their adventure. Jim “slips up” in several instances, using standard English that attracts Huck’s increasing curiosity about the sentience that may be lurking below his dialect speech.
Everett aims for more than the recovery of Jim’s dignity and his insurgent machinations with this maneuver. The neo-slave narrative opens onto historical fiction when we learn that Jim pens parts of the story we’re reading in a notebook he commandeers from Daniel Decatur Emmet, the real life founder and conductor of the Virginia Minstrels. One of the earliest minstrel troupes to book blackface performances in the nineteenth-century United States, they acquire Jim as a result of a plot to sell Jim into slavery. Jim changes hands from one slave owner to Emmet, who promises to pay Jim as if he were a free man. But as expected, the boot black and wool wigs used to make the white minstrels look like slaves don’t work the same on Jim, who needs to be made to look like a white man in blackface. After an incredulous audience member—in awe of Jim’s authentic dress-up—tracks him down to pick at his real black hair and skin, Jim realizes the danger Emmet has put him in.
It’s in this way that Everett moves from the figurative or symbolic associations of minstrelsy in Huck Finn that have troubled generations of readers to the literal representation of blackface minstrelsy in his own novel. James’s humor comes through most clearly during the minstrelsy scenes, when the members of the troupe suspend the racial dynamics at play in so many of Jim’s earlier encounters with white characters. When Jim is introduced to the troupe, “all of the men leaned toward a common point and hummed a chord that sounded quite lovely.” Indeed, Jim’s stint with the minstrels is one way Everett destabilizes fixed categories of black and white, enslaved and free. The novel is far less focused on representing the historical fact of the troupe’s perpetuation of racial terror than on using it to produce ironic moments of surprise. This is why Jim’s efforts to clarify his status among the minstrels only confuse the rules of racial engagement even further: “Suh, I’s tryin’ to unnerstan’. You sayin’ you is makin’ a ’stinction ’tween chattel slavery ’n’ bonded slavery?” While this break in character allows Everett to signal the irrelevance of these historical categorizations, its more immediate function is to cash out on the comedic effect of Emmet’s response. “Emmet looked at me askance. ‘Would you mind repeating that?’” he says, in a dialogic double take.
At the crux of James’s axes of moral judgment is the contrast between the sensibilities of enslaved characters who, like Jim, maintain a fiction of docility versus the authentic subservience of those who have internalized their inferiority. These antagonists are given away not just by the sincerity of their self-effacing minstrel performance, but also by the singularity of their capitulation to the governing racial order. This is how, for instance, the novel reaches its climax on the Big Muddy riverboat. After Jim and his fellow black minstrel escapee Norman climb aboard, they’re confronted by Brock, an enslaved man who shovels coal into the ship’s furnace and claims that the ship’s white captain Corey could come down at any minute. He also sings a minstrel tune of his own apparent making:
I’se a slave in dis boat,
Hoo Ya Hoo Ya!
I’se a slave in dis boat,
I makes da boat go. […]
Massa Corey bring me cone bread,
Hoo Ya Hoo Ya!
Massa Corey bring me cone bread,
He makes da boat go.
Brock’s work song lends evidence to the unsettling hunch that his minstrel performance is completely sincere—and all the more sinister in light of his opposition to Jim’s escape plot. Jim’s subsequent realization that in fact there may be no Master Corey—that “maybe he’s in that furnace” and Brock is solely in charge of the riverboat—is a dark one. Even in the absence of an actual slave master, Brock’s song reproduces the fiction of his own subordination. But Brock’s internalized minstrel act also underscores the novel’s resistance to concrete conceptions of racial identity. Rather than maintain fixed and constricting notions of race, Everett draws hard ethical fault lines between perpetuators of enslavement and those who choose freedom. Instead of assuming moral mandates based on the fact of black identification, the novel’s characters manipulate the potential meanings of blackness. In the end, Brock’s antagonism both disallows easy conflations of blackness with resistance and moves the novel toward the riverboat explosion where Jim finds himself at a maximally consequential crossroads.
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What sets James apart from Everett’s other philosophical novels is that even the most minor of its protagonist’s choices are accompanied by detailed argumentative reasoning. Jim’s constant calculations speak to the impossibly absurd logic of enslavement even as they bolster his efforts to outmaneuver them. No roads are taken on a whim. After the Old Muddy catches fire, Jim must choose between saving either Norman—a white-passing black man—or Huck, who has been posing as Jim’s master throughout most of the novel. But Everett turns the tables on these racial categorizations when, after saving Huck, Jim confesses that Huck is his son. This revelation is foreshadowed earlier in the novel: when Jim admits that he knew Huck’s mother before the boy was born, though he refuses to comment on whether she was pretty; the fact that both he and Huck have widow’s peaks. The former detail underscores both Jim’s discretion and his keen awareness of the dangers of transgressing racial divisions; the latter just how indeterminate the racial markers are that carry so much social consequence for black men like him.
While James takes its meditations on the violent character of racial subordination seriously, it synthesizes them into a larger aesthetic vision predicated not on any prescriptive political claims but on the liberatory potential of art and self-authorship. Jim succeeds in taking revenge against masters and overseers, leading a collective slave revolt and finally escaping to freedom. But his self-realization materializes less in these heroic actions than in his writing. While the success of his overtly insurgent activities is far from certain—they leave a trail of death and destruction in their wake—the political and philosophical significance of his project of self-narrativization is much less ambiguous. Renaming himself James—not just a non-diminutive version of Jim, but a name that means “supplanter” at its origins—in the novel’s final lines, he fulfills the ambitions already evident in his first written words: “I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name … 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.” It is this struggle over meaning that ultimately underwrites the novel, a struggle that is shaped decisively by Jim’s thinking about the complicity of Western democratic ideals with historical processes of dispossession and dehumanization—and which inspires him to engage in self-study and the creative act of autobiography in the first place.
Jim’s discovery of Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance, Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality and The Narrative of the Life and Ventures of Venture, A Native of Africa, on a raft he and Huck commandeer from riverboat robbers spark both a reflection on the historical contradictions implied by these titles and his curiosity about the creative potential of literature. Having “never read a novel before,” he mulls over the meaning of Venture Smith, a freed slave, telling his own life story. He dreams of asking Voltaire and John Locke directly, “How do you explain slavery? Why are my people subjected to it, treated with such cruelty?”—questions they return with non-answers and literal shrugs. Where their abstractions fall short, Jim begins to think through the problems for himself and proposes his own answers:
“Let me try this,” I said. “You have a notion, like Raynal, of natural liberties, and we all have them by virtue of our being human. But when those liberties are put under societal and cultural pressure, they become civil liberties, and those are contingent on hierarchy and situation. Am I close?”
Voltaire was scribbling on paper. “That was good, that was good. Say all of that again.”
At another point, Locke boasts of his “complex and multifaceted” views on slavery, which prompts Jim to challenge him in a witty tête-à-tête. They’re “convoluted and multifarious,” he counters, exposing the philosopher’s self-congratulatory nuanced stance.
“Well reasoned and complicated.”
“Entangled and problematic.”
“Sophisticated and intricate.”
“Labyrinthine and Daedalean.”
“Oh, well played, my dark friend.”
It’s through these dialogic dream sequences that Everett shows Jim grappling with the way canonical claims to universality have depended on ethical indifference to historical injustice. In this way, the novel calls back to Monk Ellison’s internal dialogues with canonical Western thinkers in Erasure. This time, however, the stakes of these debates are less literary than they are political and existential.
In Erasure, Everett contrasts Monk’s intellectualized internal dialogues with his failed encounters with the readers of the “inner city fiction” he looks down upon. At one point, Monk meets a single black mother at his sister’s health clinic. After she explains her experience reading Jean Toomer’s Cane, Monk is shocked to learn that she hasn’t attended college, then dismayed by his own prejudice: “I felt an inch tall because I had expected this young woman with the blue fingernails to be a certain way, to be slow and stupid, but she was neither. I was the stupid one.” This exchange, which exposes the entanglement of Monk’s humanism and high artistic pretensions with his internalized hostility toward other black characters, is one of only a few instances in which the novel issues unambiguous ethical judgment. It flips the script on Monk’s belief in his ideological independence from the structures of social difference that have saturated the literary market and demonstrates the degree to which he is compromised in his claims to aesthetic disinterest and political neutrality.
Unlike Monk Ellison—and the many artists and intellectuals who populate much of Everett’s fiction—Jim comes to canonical works as a truly blank slate. Unclouded by cachet, impervious to the anxiety of influence, he is driven to engage with them not only out of curiosity or ambition but by necessity, from the very start. Confronting these colonial texts is far from an academic exercise for Jim; it is a means of actively interpreting his own experience and the materially precarious conditions that he can’t help but see as their logical extensions. This is why Jim feels compelled to produce his own narrative of self-realization—because the esteemed accounts of what it means to be human and self-possessed are insufficient.
It’s easy to dismiss influential works that normalize racial epithets, trade in racist stereotypes or universalize white humanity as a threshold into political virtue. But with James, Everett pushes past the poles of critique and indignation that have fueled the canon wars and the ongoing outrage cycles over school curricula. Everett’s reworking of Twain’s famous story suggests that addition rather than subtraction might be one answer to the question of how to engage with politically precarious literary works. Indeed, his novel takes the very category of the “foundational” text and unmoors it, alerting us to the constant maintenance that is required to prolong systems of domination. Above all, he shows us how funny it is—though not in a way its original audience could have appreciated—that the site at which racial subordination is imagined most vividly is where it also threatens to crack up and fall apart.
Art credit: Felandus Thames, I’m Neutral, 2010. Inkjet print, acrylic and rock salt on museum board. Collection of Bernard I. Lumpkin & Carmine D. Boccuzzi. Photo by Will Lytch. Courtesy of the artist.
After selling the film rights to his first novel, Suder (1983), Percival Everett lamented that the filmmaker’s project had little in common with the book he had produced. “Why did you buy this novel from me?” Everett wondered. “You could have written this and no one would have recognized it as my work.” The film version never materialized, for reasons he could only guess: anti-intellectualism, “economic censorship” and market forces that make it difficult for stories by black writers to be appreciated on their own terms. Fast-forward to 2023—when one of his novels finally was adapted for the screen—and American Fiction removes Everett’s novel Erasure (2001) from its original context and updates it for a contemporary audience. Just one example of Everett’s increasing visibility over the past decade, the film’s relative success—a critical darling, with an Oscar for best adapted screenplay on the mantle—marks a surprising turn for Everett. It also suggests a drastically different relationship to mass media from the one Everett lamented some thirty years ago, leaving his most dedicated readers to wonder exactly who or what has changed.
Everett’s fiction has been at odds with prevailing conceptions of race for most of his career, but Erasure stands out for its representation of the commercial fiction market as one that solicits demeaning performances of racial difference from black writers. At the outset, the novel’s protagonist, Monk Ellison, has earned little attention with his fiction, largely because of its experimental quality and lack of concern with race. He is also constantly confronted with the popularity of a novel called We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, which earns praise from mainstream publishers and critics for its stereotypical representations of black urban characters. Pressed for cash, Monk sends his own “street” novel off to publishers, and though he hates it, the book becomes a hit. He poses as his formerly incarcerated, stereotypically “black” alias Stagg R. Leigh in order to promote the book, becoming that which he despises.
Erasure satirizes the televisualization of American literary culture ushered in by Oprah’s Book Club and parodies the black urban fiction that became a mass-market phenomenon in the 1990s. But it also calls up and questions a countervailing anti-commercialism that was given clearest expression by Jonathan Franzen in his 1996 complaint that “much of contemporary fiction’s vitality now resides in the black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, and women’s communities, which have moved into the structures left behind by the departing straight white male.” Indeed, “white males” occupy nearly all of the imagined conversations that Monk holds in his head between scenes (with Mark Rothko and Alain Resnais, Ernst Barlach and Paul Klee, James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, Ernst Kirchner and Max Klinger, as well as single appearances by Hegel, Foucault and Duchamp)—conversations that make for a stark contrast with his often contemptuous judgments of the contemporary denizens of what Franzen called the multicultural “inner city of fiction.”
Minus Everett’s allusions to turn-of-the-century antagonisms between the rising tide of literary multiculturalism and defenders of Great Books, American Fiction bears little of the complexity of its source material. Monk’s resistance to commercial fiction is flattened into a desire to see more respectable images of black people circulating in popular art and culture. And in place of scrutinizing Monk’s misjudgment of the readers of the “inner city of fiction,” the film inserts an argument with the author of We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, who defends the “research” that went into the writing of her novel and convinces Monk to “give the market what it wants.” These distinctions between Erasure and its adaptation shine a light on Everett’s late-career recalibration—which has been marked by a shift from literary experimentation and abstraction to more conventional plots and structures. In one sense, this can be taken as a softening of Everett’s early alienation from the mainstream fiction market. But it has also corresponded with an intensification of his novels’ manifest concern with politics and history—from Trump’s border policies in the novel Telephone (2020) to the lynchings of Emmett Till, Philando Castile and many non-black men of color in The Trees (2021). Taken together, the sum of Everett’s recent fiction implies a more pointed set of aims and interests than what his more obscure aestheticism could have accommodated. If what we’ve been reading indicates something other than a compromise of artistic integrity—or to put it more crudely, a classic case of “selling out”—then what else might we make of this reorientation?
Everett’s latest novel might show us where to start. Not long after American Fiction made it around the film-festival circuit, Everett published James (2024), breaking from his longtime indie press Graywolf, to which he’d been fiercely loyal, for Doubleday, a prestige corporate publisher with the budget to reach a much larger share of American readers. With his new novel, Everett makes his most direct and ambitious attempt yet to address the history of American racism by adapting and inverting one of the most contentious yet canonical American novels, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Here Everett veers even further from the conceptually dense, academic brand of fiction that had long been his signature to confront the deadly serious violence of chattel slavery and blackface minstrelsy. While these social structures linger in the background of Twain’s novel, they’re foregrounded explicitly in Everett’s rewriting of the story, in which the enslaved character Jim provides a first-person account of his journey to freedom.
By making Jim the narrator of Huck Finn, Everett has entered into a decades-long debate over the status of Twain’s embattled novel, while at the same time wading into present disputes over how we ought to understand and teach the history of slavery and racism in America. James therefore marks another significant turn in Everett’s literary career and political evolution (it topped Obama’s summer reading list this year). The novel, conspicuously, demands to be read against the backdrop of today’s wars on “wokeness”—which have included attempts to ban discussions of books with racial themes in schools in states like Florida and Texas, classics like Huck Finn among them. If James is Everett’s most substantial intervention into the culture wars yet, it’s because the novel does not just satirize the politics of racial representation but penetrates to their very root.
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Twain and his canonical novel have turned up on either side of several different culture wars since its original publication in 1884. Published in the racially violent aftermath of American Reconstruction—and during a subsequent period of racial terror and disenfranchisement, often referred to as “the Nadir” of American race relations—Huck Finn sold well despite Massachusetts’s Concord Library issuing its first-ever book ban within a month of the novel’s publication in 1885 on the grounds that it was “absolutely immoral in its tone” and contained “but very little humor.” And yet, black literary figures such as Sterling Allen Brown praised Twain for offering “the best example in nineteenth century fiction of the average Negro slave … clinging to his hope for freedom” in the NAACP magazine The Crisis, a gesture echoed by Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois, who both became members of the Mark Twain Society.
“Unlike the nineteenth-century white readers and censors like the Public Library of Concord, Massachusetts, that condemned [Huckleberry Finn],” literary critic Bernard Bell wrote in 1985, “many modern-day black readers are less offended by the vulgarity and delinquency of Huck, the rebellious teenaged narrator-protagonist, than by the minstrel image of Miss Watson’s runaway slave, Jim.” Going even further, Twain biographers have quoted his journals with condemnatory admissions that have made it easy to take Jim’s characterization as emblematic of Twain’s affinity for the art of blackface minstrelsy. As late as 1906, Twain mourned the loss of “the real nigger show—the genuine nigger show, the extravagant nigger show—the show which to me had no peer and whose peer has not yet arrived, in my experience.” “To my mind,” Twain mused, “it was a thoroughly delightful thing, and a most competent laughter-compeller and I am sorry it is gone.”
Is Huck Finn racist? Decades of ambivalence about the novel’s capitulation to anti-black racism came to a head in the 1990s, with literary scholars such as Jonathan Arac contending that Huck Finn reinforces “racist structures in our society.” Despite its status as “the most taught novel, the most taught long work, and the most taught piece of American literature” during that decade—foreshadowing Disney’s live-action adaption in 1993—black parents succeeded in having the book removed from several high school English curricula until “more sensitive approaches” to teaching it could be established. Under these conditions, the question of how to read Twain’s novel beckoned both literary criticism and public debate. But however knee-jerk they might have been, these alienated readers’ negative judgments of the novel weren’t entirely unwarranted. To be sure, Huck Finn debases its black supporting character in ways that are difficult to defend. “Historical context” can only partially excuse the fact that Twain confines Jim to a studied slave dialect that cements his subordination to the novel’s child protagonist. At the same time, the fact that Huck holds Jim’s fate in his hands is precisely what has attracted readings of Huck Finn as an anti-slavery, anti-racist novel—particularly his famous declaration that he’d rather “go to hell” than reveal Jim’s whereabouts to his enslaver.
For good reason, then, ambivalent readings of the novel—and especially of Jim as a minstrel figure—extend as far back as Ralph Ellison’s mid-century essays “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity” (1953) and “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” (1958), both of which remain foundational to its reception. In the very same sentence where Ellison claims that “Twain fitted him into the outlines of the minstrel tradition,” he also suggests that “it is from behind this stereotype mask that we see Jim’s dignity and human capacity—and Twain’s complexity—emerge.” If this reading suggests an attempt to salvage the aspects of Huck Finn that remain worthy of attention, it also lines up with similarly two-sided interpretations, many of which would seem to rebut the outright rejection of the novel in favor of thinking critically about what it might illuminate for its readers. Pushing against then-common complaints about the inconsistencies between Jim’s wittier, somewhat confrontational characterization at earlier moments in the novel versus the subservience he puts on by the novel’s end, literary historian Forest G. Robinson suggested in 1988 that Jim realizes the racially coded risk of any public social engagement that might threaten his white interlocutors’ imagined superiority. But given his uncertainty about Huck’s standing in this antebellum racial order, Jim articulates concerns for his safety by exaggerating his superstitiousness. As Robinson has it, “Jim takes refuge in the stereotype, in the mask, of the smiling, superstitious, utterly harmless black ‘yes-man.’” It is this very proposition that Everett establishes as the central conceit in James.
The plot of Everett’s novel tracks loosely with that of Twain’s original. Jim determines to flee Hannibal, Missouri after his wife overhears Judge Thatcher and the Widow Douglass’s plans to sell Jim away to New Orleans. Without a clear plan as to where he will run—and how he will eventually free his wife and child—Jim initially camps out on Jackson Island, alone. But then Huck shows up, having faked his death in order to escape the abuse of his recently returned Pap. Now an escaped slave and Huck’s alleged murderer, Jim heads south on the Mississippi River, in the opposite direction slave catchers might expect him to run. He fails to dissuade Huck from coming with him.
Jim hides the fact of his intelligence—and his increasing literacy—by speaking in the slave dialect to which he is limited throughout all of the original Huck Finn. Narrating from his point of view, Jim confides his rationale for deploying an exaggerated dialect when in the presence of Huck, Judge Thatcher and virtually any free white person who might suspect his capacity to engage them as a social equal. James begins where Huck Finn does, with Huck and Tom Sawyer’s harassment of Jim in the thick of the night. But this time, he explains Huck Finn’s opening scene to his fellow enslaved characters, while cuing his readers in on how switches in his speech work as a protective mechanism:
Jim is forced to keep up his minstrel act as he and Huck escape down the Mississippi together, suppressing his intellect as well as the critical discoveries he makes—including the dead body of Huck’s Pap. This tension between Jim’s withholding of crucial knowledge and the threat of his being discovered resurfaces over the course of their adventure. Jim “slips up” in several instances, using standard English that attracts Huck’s increasing curiosity about the sentience that may be lurking below his dialect speech.
Everett aims for more than the recovery of Jim’s dignity and his insurgent machinations with this maneuver. The neo-slave narrative opens onto historical fiction when we learn that Jim pens parts of the story we’re reading in a notebook he commandeers from Daniel Decatur Emmet, the real life founder and conductor of the Virginia Minstrels. One of the earliest minstrel troupes to book blackface performances in the nineteenth-century United States, they acquire Jim as a result of a plot to sell Jim into slavery. Jim changes hands from one slave owner to Emmet, who promises to pay Jim as if he were a free man. But as expected, the boot black and wool wigs used to make the white minstrels look like slaves don’t work the same on Jim, who needs to be made to look like a white man in blackface. After an incredulous audience member—in awe of Jim’s authentic dress-up—tracks him down to pick at his real black hair and skin, Jim realizes the danger Emmet has put him in.
It’s in this way that Everett moves from the figurative or symbolic associations of minstrelsy in Huck Finn that have troubled generations of readers to the literal representation of blackface minstrelsy in his own novel. James’s humor comes through most clearly during the minstrelsy scenes, when the members of the troupe suspend the racial dynamics at play in so many of Jim’s earlier encounters with white characters. When Jim is introduced to the troupe, “all of the men leaned toward a common point and hummed a chord that sounded quite lovely.” Indeed, Jim’s stint with the minstrels is one way Everett destabilizes fixed categories of black and white, enslaved and free. The novel is far less focused on representing the historical fact of the troupe’s perpetuation of racial terror than on using it to produce ironic moments of surprise. This is why Jim’s efforts to clarify his status among the minstrels only confuse the rules of racial engagement even further: “Suh, I’s tryin’ to unnerstan’. You sayin’ you is makin’ a ’stinction ’tween chattel slavery ’n’ bonded slavery?” While this break in character allows Everett to signal the irrelevance of these historical categorizations, its more immediate function is to cash out on the comedic effect of Emmet’s response. “Emmet looked at me askance. ‘Would you mind repeating that?’” he says, in a dialogic double take.
At the crux of James’s axes of moral judgment is the contrast between the sensibilities of enslaved characters who, like Jim, maintain a fiction of docility versus the authentic subservience of those who have internalized their inferiority. These antagonists are given away not just by the sincerity of their self-effacing minstrel performance, but also by the singularity of their capitulation to the governing racial order. This is how, for instance, the novel reaches its climax on the Big Muddy riverboat. After Jim and his fellow black minstrel escapee Norman climb aboard, they’re confronted by Brock, an enslaved man who shovels coal into the ship’s furnace and claims that the ship’s white captain Corey could come down at any minute. He also sings a minstrel tune of his own apparent making:
Brock’s work song lends evidence to the unsettling hunch that his minstrel performance is completely sincere—and all the more sinister in light of his opposition to Jim’s escape plot. Jim’s subsequent realization that in fact there may be no Master Corey—that “maybe he’s in that furnace” and Brock is solely in charge of the riverboat—is a dark one. Even in the absence of an actual slave master, Brock’s song reproduces the fiction of his own subordination. But Brock’s internalized minstrel act also underscores the novel’s resistance to concrete conceptions of racial identity. Rather than maintain fixed and constricting notions of race, Everett draws hard ethical fault lines between perpetuators of enslavement and those who choose freedom. Instead of assuming moral mandates based on the fact of black identification, the novel’s characters manipulate the potential meanings of blackness. In the end, Brock’s antagonism both disallows easy conflations of blackness with resistance and moves the novel toward the riverboat explosion where Jim finds himself at a maximally consequential crossroads.
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What sets James apart from Everett’s other philosophical novels is that even the most minor of its protagonist’s choices are accompanied by detailed argumentative reasoning. Jim’s constant calculations speak to the impossibly absurd logic of enslavement even as they bolster his efforts to outmaneuver them. No roads are taken on a whim. After the Old Muddy catches fire, Jim must choose between saving either Norman—a white-passing black man—or Huck, who has been posing as Jim’s master throughout most of the novel. But Everett turns the tables on these racial categorizations when, after saving Huck, Jim confesses that Huck is his son. This revelation is foreshadowed earlier in the novel: when Jim admits that he knew Huck’s mother before the boy was born, though he refuses to comment on whether she was pretty; the fact that both he and Huck have widow’s peaks. The former detail underscores both Jim’s discretion and his keen awareness of the dangers of transgressing racial divisions; the latter just how indeterminate the racial markers are that carry so much social consequence for black men like him.
While James takes its meditations on the violent character of racial subordination seriously, it synthesizes them into a larger aesthetic vision predicated not on any prescriptive political claims but on the liberatory potential of art and self-authorship. Jim succeeds in taking revenge against masters and overseers, leading a collective slave revolt and finally escaping to freedom. But his self-realization materializes less in these heroic actions than in his writing. While the success of his overtly insurgent activities is far from certain—they leave a trail of death and destruction in their wake—the political and philosophical significance of his project of self-narrativization is much less ambiguous. Renaming himself James—not just a non-diminutive version of Jim, but a name that means “supplanter” at its origins—in the novel’s final lines, he fulfills the ambitions already evident in his first written words: “I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name … 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.” It is this struggle over meaning that ultimately underwrites the novel, a struggle that is shaped decisively by Jim’s thinking about the complicity of Western democratic ideals with historical processes of dispossession and dehumanization—and which inspires him to engage in self-study and the creative act of autobiography in the first place.
Jim’s discovery of Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance, Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality and The Narrative of the Life and Ventures of Venture, A Native of Africa, on a raft he and Huck commandeer from riverboat robbers spark both a reflection on the historical contradictions implied by these titles and his curiosity about the creative potential of literature. Having “never read a novel before,” he mulls over the meaning of Venture Smith, a freed slave, telling his own life story. He dreams of asking Voltaire and John Locke directly, “How do you explain slavery? Why are my people subjected to it, treated with such cruelty?”—questions they return with non-answers and literal shrugs. Where their abstractions fall short, Jim begins to think through the problems for himself and proposes his own answers:
At another point, Locke boasts of his “complex and multifaceted” views on slavery, which prompts Jim to challenge him in a witty tête-à-tête. They’re “convoluted and multifarious,” he counters, exposing the philosopher’s self-congratulatory nuanced stance.
It’s through these dialogic dream sequences that Everett shows Jim grappling with the way canonical claims to universality have depended on ethical indifference to historical injustice. In this way, the novel calls back to Monk Ellison’s internal dialogues with canonical Western thinkers in Erasure. This time, however, the stakes of these debates are less literary than they are political and existential.
In Erasure, Everett contrasts Monk’s intellectualized internal dialogues with his failed encounters with the readers of the “inner city fiction” he looks down upon. At one point, Monk meets a single black mother at his sister’s health clinic. After she explains her experience reading Jean Toomer’s Cane, Monk is shocked to learn that she hasn’t attended college, then dismayed by his own prejudice: “I felt an inch tall because I had expected this young woman with the blue fingernails to be a certain way, to be slow and stupid, but she was neither. I was the stupid one.” This exchange, which exposes the entanglement of Monk’s humanism and high artistic pretensions with his internalized hostility toward other black characters, is one of only a few instances in which the novel issues unambiguous ethical judgment. It flips the script on Monk’s belief in his ideological independence from the structures of social difference that have saturated the literary market and demonstrates the degree to which he is compromised in his claims to aesthetic disinterest and political neutrality.
Unlike Monk Ellison—and the many artists and intellectuals who populate much of Everett’s fiction—Jim comes to canonical works as a truly blank slate. Unclouded by cachet, impervious to the anxiety of influence, he is driven to engage with them not only out of curiosity or ambition but by necessity, from the very start. Confronting these colonial texts is far from an academic exercise for Jim; it is a means of actively interpreting his own experience and the materially precarious conditions that he can’t help but see as their logical extensions. This is why Jim feels compelled to produce his own narrative of self-realization—because the esteemed accounts of what it means to be human and self-possessed are insufficient.
It’s easy to dismiss influential works that normalize racial epithets, trade in racist stereotypes or universalize white humanity as a threshold into political virtue. But with James, Everett pushes past the poles of critique and indignation that have fueled the canon wars and the ongoing outrage cycles over school curricula. Everett’s reworking of Twain’s famous story suggests that addition rather than subtraction might be one answer to the question of how to engage with politically precarious literary works. Indeed, his novel takes the very category of the “foundational” text and unmoors it, alerting us to the constant maintenance that is required to prolong systems of domination. Above all, he shows us how funny it is—though not in a way its original audience could have appreciated—that the site at which racial subordination is imagined most vividly is where it also threatens to crack up and fall apart.
Art credit: Felandus Thames, I’m Neutral, 2010. Inkjet print, acrylic and rock salt on museum board. Collection of Bernard I. Lumpkin & Carmine D. Boccuzzi. Photo by Will Lytch. Courtesy of the artist.
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