“That evening I sat down with Lizzie and six other children in our cabin and gave a language lesson. These were indispensable. Safe movement through the world depended on mastery of language, fluency. ’Papa, why do we have to learn this?’ White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them. “
That’s a quote from chapter two of Percival Everett’s novel James. The speaker is Jim, slave friend to Huckleberry Finn. The lesson he’s giving is on a slave language that makes slave owners think slaves are less intelligent.
The novel begins with Jim running away after he learns that he is about to be sold and separated from his wife and daughter. He escapes to an island where he meets up with Huck who is running from his abusive father.
If you’ve read Huckleberry Finn, you will remember that this starts their dangerous journey by raft down the Mississippi River. Huck pretends to be Jim’s owner when they run into the two shysters, Duke and King. Huck and Jim become separated several times, and Jim escapes from several evil slave owners until he finally meets up with his wife and daughter and they head for asylum in the North.
Everett portrays Jim, or James, as an articulate, learned man who loves to read philosophical books and steals paper to write his own story. As the jacket says, “Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim’s agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before.”
If you’re looking for a way to expand your thinking about Twain’s Jim, then you must read James by Percival Everett.
