Review: Vivien Horler

James, by Percival Everett (Mantle/Pan Macmillan)

There are so many parallels in this book with South Africa’s history that the American writer Ann Patchett’s advice to every American to read it probably holds true for South Africans too.

It is a retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or perhaps it is more correct to say inspired by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, this time from the point of view of the slave, Jim.

Percival Everett is a prolific and respected black American author, whose book The Trees was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, and whose novel
Erasure was adapted into the film American Fiction. He is also a professor of English in California.

I don’t know how long ago I read Huckleberry Finn, probably some time in high school, and some of the details of the story were hazy.

But it is essentially the story of a young and ill-educated white boy in Missouri in the 1850s, who has staged his own death to get away from his abusive father, and of a runaway slave who flees his post because he hears his owner is about to sell him and break up his family.

The pair, now both in hiding, meet up by chance on an island in the Mississippi, and end up travelling south on the river, having a series of adventures, some amusing, some terrifying.

In Everett’s telling, Jim is a thoughtful man who has taught himself to read and write, thanks to time spent in Judge Thatcher’s library. He reads books of philosophy, but as this would be seen as subversive in a slave, has to keep this education hidden from any of the white people around him.

He speaks to them in the acceptable form of English slaves are supposed to use, but this is not his natural language. He gives slave children lessons on how to speak to whites. One child asks him why God set things up so that whites were masters and they were slaves.

Jim corrects him that while there is religion, there is no God. “Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.”

He then tells the children: “However, the more you talk about God and Jesus and heaven and hell, the better they feel.” The children respond: “And the better they feel, the safer we are.”

Jim orders February to translate: “Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’s safer we be.”

The day after Jim and Huck meet on the island, they realise the townsfolk are searching for Huck’s body. Jim is depressed – yesterday he was merely a runaway slave, today people will believe he is a runaway slave and a murderer, of a white child to boot.

After a terrible storm, Jim and Huck come across a house that has been washed away. They grab some food and clothes, and Jim finds books and ink.

Back on the island he fashions a pen nib from a stick, and writes that he will not allow his slavehood to define him. If the marks he is scratching on a piece of paper “can have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning”.

After several adventures on the island, including Jim being bitten by a rattlesnake, Huck sneaks back into town and discovers there is a $300 reward out for Jim. It’s time to go down the river.

And so they do, never knowing from one hour to another whether one or the other is about to be drowned or killed, or in Jim’s case, lynched.

At one point the pair get separated, and one of the more surreal moments in the story arrive – I don’t recall this being in the original. Jim links up with a group of all-white minstrels travelling from town to town, who need a tenor.  Jim has a fine voice and they take him on.

The minstrels perform in blackface, and while they know the white townsfolk will not accept a back singer, they figure if they disguise Jim’s colour with blackface, the audience won’t realise he’s black.

So here Jim is, a black man pretending to be a white man disguised as a black man. It gets weirder – it turns out one of the minstrels, Norman, is passing for white, but is actually a runaway slave too.

He is saving his earnings as a minstrel drummer to buy back his slave family, something Jim also wants to do.

After Jim’s first performance, which raises suspicions among the audience, he flees the minstrels, and so does Norman. Jim comes up with a plan for them both to make money – Norman can pose as Jim’s owner, sell him, and after a day or two the pair will meet up again to pull the same stunt somewhere else.

This does not go well.

I read up some crib notes on Huckleberry Finn to remind myself how it the novel ended. Everett’s version has a very different climax to that of Twain. Jim’s anger at being regarded as nothing but than property, kept tamped down all his life as a necessary condition of survival, begins to grow.

He is determined to get back to his family and then somehow get them all to a free state. But when he goes back to where he started, he discovers Sadie ad Lizzie have been sold on, to a slave-breeding farm.

Dear God – it had never occurred to me there were people who made a living breeding slaves for sale.

By now the American civil war has broken out. Jim finally reaches the farm where Sadie and Lizzie are. And I can’t say more.

This is a fine, riveting page-turner, but it is more than that. It is often funny, frequently compassionate, sometimes brutal. And it’s intensely thought-provoking. It is well worth reading.

• James was one of Exclusive Books’ top reads for April.