Great American Misfire

On Percival Everett's 'James'

George Catlin, View on the Upper Mississippi, Beautiful Prairie Bluffs, 1835-1836, Oil on Canvas, Getty Images

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Percival Everett’s James is a novel that’s set on the eve of the Civil War, in a town in Missouri. It's told from the point of view of James, who is Black and who is an enslaved man. He and his wife and daughter are owned by a woman named Miss Watson, and he often has to do tasks for her like chopping wood and hauling chickenfeed. James has a wife and a daughter. They live in a cottage. It's not clear what this wife and daughter do with their time, but this family survives and they seem to love each other.

James, the protagonist of this book, is literate. He sneaks into the home of a man in the community, a Judge, and reads lots of classics. But he's learned to hide this knowledge. More generally, it's obvious both to him and to everyone in this community that Black people have to appear to be stupid. He gives a sort of class to local kids on how to seem stupid.

They were happy with themselves, and I let that feeling linger. “Let’s try some situational translations. Something extreme first. You’re walking down the street and you see that Mrs. Holiday’s kitchen is on fire. She’s standing in her yard, her back to her house, unaware. How do you tell her?”

“Fire, fire,” January said.

“Direct. And that’s almost correct,” I said.

The youngest of them, lean and tall five-year-old Rachel, said, “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere.”

“Perfect,” I said. “Why is that correct?”

Lizzie raised her hand. “Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.”

Generally speaking, in the beginning part of a novel, a character usually has some aspirations. Some stuff they want. These aspirations don’t form the real plot, but they keep us reading while we wait for the real plot to begin. Here, there’s none of that. He teaches this class, yes, and he has to do whatever tasks his owner sets him, but … what does he eat? His wife has food; where does it come from? His owner gives his wife some cornbread, but they decide it tastes terrible, so they don’t eat it. What do they eat instead?

A while back I read Solomon Northup’s book, Twelve Years A Slave. He was a Northerner who was captured and sold as a slave in the Deep South. Most slave narratives are about life in the border states. Northup’s book is one of the few that describe the contours of plantation slavery in the Deep South. I found it fascinating that, as he described it, owners didn’t provide much in the way of food for their slaves:

The weekly allowance of meal scarcely sufficed to satisfy us. It was customary with us, as it is with all in that region, where the allowance is exhausted before Saturday night, or is in such a state as to render it nauseous and disgusting, to hunt in the swamps for coon and opossum. This, however, must be done at night, after the day's work is accomplished.

Solomon Northup decides he doesn’t want to spend his life doing this, so he constructs a fish-trap that lets him feed himself without this nightly labor. That’s one benefit that he gets from his Northern sophistication — a thing he possesses that the enslaved people around him don’t. He is quite proud of this fish trap, which he proceeds to describe at length.

And justifiably so! Because he was able to eat relatively easily, without hunting all night, he was able to survive and eventually get word home and regain his freedom. That’s exactly why enslaved people were kept ignorant — so they couldn’t do things that would improve themselves and make them harder to manage.

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I don’t want to be churlish or dismissive of this novel, James. Obviously everyone is familiar with Twelve Years A Slave, because it’s also an Oscar-winning movie. I accept that Everett didn’t want to write a realist novel that took seriously how enslaved people might find food and survive.

Okay … but then what did he want to write?

Because it seems like the basic conceit is … let’s assume that slaves had a lot of depth.

And, great, that’s wonderful.

But what would that actually look like? Does it look like this? A world where we just have no idea how people really live? How they eat? What his wife and daughter do with their time all day? In this case, it seems like the style of this novel really militates against the author’s aims.

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Of course, in most books, you expect some feeling of everyday life at the beginning of the book — some sense that there is an actual world that is functioning here — but in this book that is unnecessary, because this book is fundamentally about some other book. We don’t really need to be that engaged in James’s life, because … really … we’re reading this book to see what it might have to say about the contents of a different book entirely.

That's because this novel, James, is a retelling of events in a different novel, Huckleberry Finn. The latter is a 19th century novel by Mark Twain. It's famous, but my sense is that it’s not necessarily assigned in schools or colleges that often these days.

Huckleberry Finn is a picaresque about the adventures of a young man, the titular Huck Finn, and his friend, the slave Jim. On a deeper level, this novel was about how America was becoming settled and civilized. Suddenly, in a more civilized America, people had questions like, "Who is this kid Huckleberry Finn? Is anyone taking care of him?" And these questions needed to be answered. In the old world, the answer was no — so Huck got abused by his dad, but ... he could also escape from him, into the wilds.

Huckleberry Finn, the 19th century novel, was about Huck. I read this novel twelve years ago on my own, because it was a classic, and I wanted to see what was in it.

This review is not about that novel. It's about James, which I read in 2024.

It's extremely difficult, in practice, to write about James without writing about Huckleberry Finn, but most readers of James will not have read Twain’s novel. Huckleberry Finn is not Pride and Prejudice or The Great Gatsby. I am thirty-nine, and I personally was not assigned Huckleberry Finn in school. Maybe there was a point when it was frequently assigned in high school. But that point is surely in the past. And that’s because ... the depiction of Jim in Huckleberry Finn strikes many readers as racist.

In the opening of this novel, James, the main character puts on a performance for Huckleberry Finn where he pretends to be dim-witted and afraid of witches:

I guess I jest gwyne set dese old bones down on dis heah porch and watch out for dat noise ’gin. Maybe dere be sum ol’ demon or witch out dere. I’m gwyne stay right heah where it be safe.

This snatch of dialogue is, to my ears, reminiscent of how Jim talked in the beginning of Huckleberry Finn. In Huckleberry Finn, Jim really did seem afraid that witches and demons might appear at any moment. Huckleberry Finn was published in 1882. It was written after slavery had ended! Well after books like Twelve Years A Slave were published. In the postbellum period there was a whole genre of humor, where the joke was that Black people were dimwitted, and … that was the joke. That’s what you were meant to laugh at.

In practice, what person in 2025 is going to assign that book? Do you really want to be the teacher standing up in front of a classroom trying to tell them that this is great literature?

Anyway, as a result of the racist elements of Huckleberry Finn, I suspect it is no longer assigned that often. Maybe colleges still assign it. Perhaps if you're an English major, and you specifically take some kind of course about 19th century American literature, you will be assigned this book. But I don't know if anyone is anxious to force people to read Huckleberry Finn.

This is not a referendum on literature. We all read. We all love books. The question is whether we love this specific book, Huckleberry Finn. This is not like, say, Merchant of Venice, where the depiction of Shylock has genuine power. The man is a conniving Jew who’s after a pound of flesh, but we still read the play precisely for its depiction of Shylock. He is the heart of the play.

Jim, in Huckleberry Finn, is not like that — his depiction seems lazy and racist. And that’s why people don’t necessarily teach or even defend the book these days. So the question is ... do we, the potential readers of Percival Everett’s book, James, really have strong feelings about this other book, Huckleberry Finn?

And in my case the answer is no. I assume that many readers of my generation feel the same.

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In James, the main character hears he is about to be sold — separated from his family— so he runs away. While he is on the run, he meets a white boy, Huckleberry Finn, who is on the run from his dad, whom everyone agrees is a useless drunk.

James and Huck have always been relatively friendly. Here’s the two of them in their pre-fugitive days:

I split some more wood and caught Huck staring at me.

“How you be lakin’ school?” [I said].

“I reckon you kin say I’m getting used to it.”

“I wouldn’t mind me sum learnin’.” I split a couple more logs.

“You know, you ain’t much darker ’n me.”

“I be dark nuff.”

“How come you’re a slave?”

“ ’Cause my mama was one”

James has a lot of control over how he speaks. When Huck and Tom are together, James uses his phony, afraid-of-ghosts dialect. But when James is alone with Huck, he speaks in a middle-register that is noticeably less dim-witted, and you can tell, because of that choice, that he is fond of Huck. He at various points says he is fond of Huck, but it’s really the relative lack of linguistic guardedness that shows it more than anything else. It’s a very carefully calibrated performance on the part of both James (the character) and Percival Everett (the author), and one of the things I enjoyed most about the book.

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Over time, Huck and James go through their adventures together. Some of the incidents are drawn from Huckleberry Finn. Others aren’t.

In the initial part of Huckleberry Finn, Jim is trying to reach a free state, Illinois, but eventually that becomes impossible, so they just float downriver on their raft. I think that aimless quality is captured here by James as well, where it doesn’t really seem like James has much of a concrete plan. He wants to maybe get some money and rescue his wife and daughter. But he’s smart enough to know that's dubious. He’s a fugitive. He can’t just show up with money and buy everyone’s freedom. How would that work?

He’s also pretty dubious about the idea of free states in general. At some point, he gets separated from Huck and washes up in what might be a free state. He asks some Black people:

“Where am I?” I asked.

“You’re in Illinois,” the old man said.

“So, I’m in a free state?”

The men laughed. “Boy, you’re in America,” a muscular man said.

The old man put down one of my books. “We’re in Illinois, true enough, and Illinois is supposedly a free state, true enough, but the white folks around here tell us we’re in Tennessee.”

“Maybe they believe it,” I said.

“What are we going to do?” the big man asked. “Take a map to the courts and say, ‘Look here—we’re actually free’?”

And then the novel just proceeds with its action. Which, okay … James exists in a world where all the Black people understand that there is no law, and white people are just in charge and can do whatever they want. I understand that.

But, given that we exist in this world, in the novel James, then … what? What do we do? How does James spend his life? In this world, it seems highly unlikely that he can ever reunite with his wife and daughter. He and his wife and daughter exist at the mercy of white people. For a while, they were allowed to be together. But … now the whites have decided that this can’t continue.

So … if the system of laws really doesn’t matter, then what happens? If there is no freedom, then there’s no buying your freedom. If there are no free states, then there’s no escaping north. In practice, this means Jim and his family can never be together again. He has to exist on the fringes.

And that’s what happens. The author forces him to live through some of the events of Huckleberry Finn. Eventually there’s a scheme where James hooks up with Norman, a white-passing Black person, who tries to sell James for money. The hope is that James will run away, and they’ll do it again, and eventually raise enough money that Norman can buy James’s wife and daughter.

But … the plan almost immediately fails when James tries to run away for the first time, and he gets pursued. People start shooting, which seems unrealistic even to Norman, who says, “They were shooting at us. You can’t work a dead slave. Why would they shoot?” (James replies, “They hate us, Norman.”)

Which might be true, but that’s the problem with this book. It’s so pessimistic that you can’t even do a scheme, because white people won’t behave logically according to their own financial incentives.

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Jim is separated from Huck for large sections of the book, which is sad, because the heart of the book is Huck’s slow realization that James has been hiding a part of himself from Huck this whole time:

Huck sat up.

“You don’t trust me, do you, Jim?”

“ ’Course I trusts ya, Huck. Why you say dat?”

“I was listening to you and Easter talkin’. You weren’t talkin’ like you talk to me.”

I said nothing.

“Why is that, Jim? I thought we was friends. I thought you trusted me.”

“I does trust you, Huck. Cain’t you see dat? I trusts you wif my life.”

“I’m going back to sleep,” the boy said. “Just one thing?”

“Yeah, Huck?”

“I understand why you talk the way you do.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean it makes sense.”

I studied his face. He was talking with his eyes closed, as much fighting sleep as losing to it. There was a lot of this in that face. “You be a smart boy, Huck.”

This is very moving stuff. But for most of the second half of the book, they’re not together. After they reunite, Huck pleads with James to provide some kind of vision for their future:

“What will you do when we get back to Hannibal?” Huck asked.

“If you don’t tell anybody I’m there, I’ll try to leave with Sadie and Lizzie. I’ll hide out and wait for the right time. I can’t get any money, and even if I did, a slave can’t buy slaves. I heard of slaves buying themselves. But I’m a runaway.”

“And you’ll leave me?” he asked.

“You’ll be okay.”

“What does that mean?”

“Like I said, you’ll be safe. Miss Watson loves you. They all love you. Even Judge Thatcher wants to take care of you.”

Huck fell quiet and stared off.

“What do you want? Do you want to be on the run with us? Do you want to pass as a slave? I can tell you that you don’t want that. Nobody wants that. There’s no adventure in it, Huck.”

Huck is definitely willing to be persuaded to help James, but … James doesn’t see a real relationship in the cards for the two of them. There is a spoiler here about Huck’s true parentage that most people can probably guess by about a third of the way into the book. Anyway it’s a bit of a disappointing choice, because the bond between them, which we can already see on the page, is the most genuine thing in the book. So to reduce it to blood just felt unnecessary.

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But if Huck and James can’t be together, then … what? What happens?

Well … James goes home, finds his wife and daughter have been sold, and then he murders some people to get them back. There are some cathartic moments, as when he confronts the Judge in the town, who isn’t a particularly bad guy, but who is a white guy and who is a symbol of authority. He explains to the Judge that in this moment he is the master. (The Judge is the dad of Becky Thatcher, from Tom Sawyer)

“Look at the way you’re working, Judge. Looks like you’re my slave for a little while.”

This offended him. “I’m no slave.”

“Do you want to be rowing?” I asked. “No,” I supplied his answer. “Are you getting paid for rowing? No. Are you rowing because you’re afraid of me and what I might do to you? Yes, Judge Thatcher.”

“I’m no slave.”

I pointed the barrel of the pistol at his face. “Row faster,” I said.

He did.

“Oh, yes, you’re a slave.”

The novel closes with James and his family reunited, fled north, free, and James able to speak for himself for the first time. But … how does this happen? Just because he is able now to murder people? Why couldn’t he have done that in the beginning? Do we think enslaved people were too stupid to know that they could attempt to murder their owners and run away? What am I meant to get out of this? The implication is that, in the meantime, the Civil War has begun, and under that chaos, James has escaped unnoticed, but that really feels like a cop-out given that James has been insisting from page one that merely legal freedom is meaningless.

The purpose of this book is to insist that Jim, a character in Huckleberry Finn, was under-imagined by Mark Twain. Great, that is true. I accept that. In response, James tries to imagine a world of masks and code-switching that would allow James to be mistaken for Jim.

This basic conceit provides some level of humor. But … not enough to justify a full novel. There are some good jokes, as when James is hired by a minstrel show to perform in blackface, but the actors in minstrel shows are all white, so they’re pretending he’s really a white person under the blackface makeup. But then a guy starts saying James’ wig looks too real.

That’s pretty funny. Maybe for some readers, the jokes are funny enough that this book suffices as an amusement.

But the core aim is not fulfilled. This book set out to humanize Jim — to imagine what it’s like to be an enslaved person who is participating in this picaresque story. There was definitely an option for James, the main character in James, to develop a relationship with Huck and to use that relationship to achieve some kind of freedom.

That is not the option this book chose. I understand that maybe the author didn’t believe that was authentic.

I’m not sure the humanity of enslaved people ever really needed to be rediscovered. Slave narratives are shot through with precisely that humanity — to discover it we only need to read the words of enslaved people themselves. But those narratives are also often packaged with comforting myths designed to appeal to white people. In Solomon Northup’s case, that myth was that northern industriousness would win out over southern sloth. In many other slave narratives, there is a deep Christian faith, and an abiding belief that the masters will meet their comeuppance in hell.

I understand that these myths might not be things that a modern author feels comfortable peddling. But … what else is there? I don’t know that it does any service to James to turn him into a killer or to insist that violence is the true answer to his problems. Not because violence is always unjustified, but because in his case violence seems plainly unworkable.

Within the world the book has constructed, where there is no law, where there are no free or slave states — in that world, it seems clear that violence cannot really offer a solution to James’s problems, because at the end of the day, he will still be outnumbered and outgunned. For James, in this novel, a resort to violence is the same as suicide — a desire to completely escape from the terms of his earthly existence.

But this is a world that Everett chose to construct, as an explicit counterpoint to Huckleberry Finn. This trap, where James has no believable options, is one the author created. Maybe Everett thinks it is more realistic, but if realism is the point, then the book should show us the scene where James gets killed. And if purveying a comfortable fantasy is the point, that fantasy should get built up in a more believable way, so I can invest more deeply in it and truly feel that catharsis.

The novel tries to have it both ways, saying this is naked reality at one moment, and then claiming it’s a fantasy at other moments.

I do not think many people will be reading this book in ten years, but Everett seems like an author who’s worked very hard, for a number of years, and it’s nice that he finally has a breakout hit. Most reviews of this novel seem to focus on his other books, of which there are apparently at least thirty. I’ve read one of these, Erasure, which was picked by my book club, and, for all its flaws, Erasure was a much superior novel. But just like this is not a review of Huckleberry Finn, it is also not a review of Erasure. It is a review of James, which is a novel that I think has failed to achieve its own aims.

Naomi Kanakia is the author of four novels and a non-fiction book about the classics What's So Great About The Great Books? that should hopefully be out in 2026 from Princeton University Press. She also writes a (somewhat) popular literary newsletter called Woman of Letters.