This piece was originally published on March 19. We are recirculating it in honor of his National Book Award win on November 20.
In February 2023, the news broke that Percival Everett would be publishing his 24th novel, James, a retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from enslaved Jim’s perspective, for an advance of more than $500,000. Some Everett devotees (myself included) wondered if, after years of inventive, philosophical, and absurdist work displaying a dizzying range — mute baby geniuses, nutty heist plots, post-westerns, and metacommentaries on race and publishing — he was finally selling out. After all, though Everett has increased in stature recently — he’s been a Pulitzer and Booker finalist for 2020’s Telephone and 2021’s The Trees, respectively, and his breakout, 2001’s Erasure, an incendiary publishing-world satire, was recently adapted into the comparatively defanged Oscar-winning film American Fiction — his books have not sold in great numbers. His subject matter can be eclectic. The cast of characters over his 35 books and counting includes an orphan named Not Sidney Poitier, a sociopathic rhino hunter who wants to turn the Grand Canyon into an amusement park, and, in multiple works, testy English professors named Percival Everett.
There’s also the matter of James’s great theme: a reinterpretation of the book that “all American literature comes from,†to quote Ernest Hemingway, a book that happens to tackle slavery. Slave narratives have long been one of the few Black stories the American public, historically speaking, has been interested in hearing. Was Everett attempting a highbrow version of what he satirized in Erasure, wherein the niche novelist deemed “not Black enough†for his obscure interests at last gives white people the “Black book†they want, a depiction of some legible Black misery that they can purchase, understand, and then congratulate themselves for having read?
Fortunately, the answer is “no.†James is far darker and more imaginative, tender, and sly than that, a testament to Everett’s ability to continually upset assumptions people might have about the kind of books he should write and how his characters, many of whom are Black, should behave. It’s in keeping with the scope of his work — formally adventurous, rangy yet unified, smart yet readable, funny, and subversive. His writing is often about getting free but not running away, and in James, that tension between freedom and bondage becomes literal.
Similar to Mark Twain’s picaresque, the book’s action kicks into gear when James — usually only white people call him Jim in Everett’s version — goes into hiding on an island after learning he will be sold downriver, away from his wife and daughter. There, he runs into Huck, who has faked his own death to flee his abusive father, Pap.
Much of Everett’s novel features James and Huck, and those around them, either plotting escape, evading capture, getting shipwrecked, or barely avoiding these fates. But that action-forward description only narrowly conveys what Everett is up to — as he’s said in interviews, the evil of slavery should be self-evident: “Like, am I supposed to say at the end of one of these works, ‘Oh yeah, slavery is bad’? Duh.â€
James is a quintessential Everettian protagonist: smart, measured, observant, and almost preternaturally capable. He can read and write. He can camp and fish and survive a rattlesnake bite. He can, we will learn, hit a target. Everett’s primary characters tend toward reluctant heroism but also, at times, vengeance, alongside streaks of misanthropy. (As the character of Percival Everett, professor of nonsense, in I Am Not Sidney Poitier puts it, “People … are worse than anybody.â€) And yet at the heart of the book are James’s powerful bonds with other people, his people: his wife, his daughter, fellow enslaved people, and, of course, Huck, with whom he has a special relationship that becomes central to the most dramatic act of the book. Faced with dangerous situations, some of which are absurd, some abject, James moves with intelligence and heart — as well as a quick understanding of what’s expected from him as a father, husband, friend, slave, and illicit writer and reader.
Everett gives James a newfound interiority as a deft and savvy code switcher. Among enslaved people, he speaks plain English. But when white people are around, he adopts “slave talk†as a survival tactic. Whereas Huckleberry Finn’s Jim seems to believe witches took his hat while he was sleeping, James knows it was Huck and Tom Sawyer pranking him and plays along because “those little bastards†expect him to be “either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy.†When he calls out into the dark, “Who dat dere in da dark lak dat?,†it’s an act for the boys.
This kind of performance — and attention to performance — on the level of language is trademark Everett. In Erasure, the narrator’s parody novel-within-a-novel is written in a grotesque caricature of Black vernacular. But Everett’s point isn’t that we should be laughing at this manner of speaking or behaving; it’s that we should question what kind of industry would reward such depictions under the guise of realism when they are actually the product of cynical authors — Black, yes, with vastly different life experiences (Erasure’s narrator, Thelonious “Monk†Ellison, went to Harvard; Juanita Mae Jenkins, the author of the novel he parodies, went to Oberlin) — cashing in on what the market wants. There is a distinction between education and intelligence in Everett’s work that’s worth noting more broadly, especially as conversations about American Fiction call out the film’s possible classism. In Everett’s books, being Black and educated doesn’t mean you’re any better. There’s a brief but key moment in Erasure when Monk chastises himself for assuming a high-school dropout with blue fingernails is “slow and stupidâ€; after talking to her about what she’s read, he realizes he “was the stupid one.†Everett’s characters, along with his targets, are often educated. But that doesn’t make them necessarily smart — or nice.
Niceties aren’t the point of James, either. Tucked into James’s narration are cutting asides, like shards of glass in between sentences. “It always pays to give white folks what they want, so I stepped into the yard and called out into the night,†James tells us on the first page. When asked by his daughter why they must speak the way he has instructed them to, he explains, “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them.†Nonetheless, James takes big risks when it comes to reading and writing. His request for a pencil will lead to dire consequences for the compatriot who obtains it for him. But the power of reading — “completely private,†he realizes, “completely free and, therefore, completely subversive†— is too great.
Jim’s recognition of this power enables him to teach others to read so they can have some freedom for themselves and write themselves “into being†as he does. “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us,†James tells a group of schoolchildren he is giving a language lesson. It’s a version of “the talkâ€: how to survive as a Black person in a society run by whites. “Don’t make eye contact,†recites one boy. “Never speak first,†offers a girl. The class moves on to situational responses — or “translations,†as James calls them. Suppose the master’s wife’s kitchen is on fire and she’s 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.â€
“Perfect,†I said. “Why is that correct?â€
Lizzie raised her hand. “Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.â€
“And why is that,†I asked.
February said, “Because they need to know everything before us. Because they need to name everything.â€
In Everett’s work, this resistance to “naming everything†is part of how he exercises freedom as an author. If his characters push against constraints in the worlds he builds for them, deploying language as a form of power, he’s doing the same thing as an author, resisting categorization by writing in ways that don’t make him easy to pin down and market as a Black writer. 2019’s The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843, Annotated From the Library of John C. Calhoun is a slim, satiric manual in verse that’s described by the publisher as “a guidebook for the American slaveholder.†In the margins is a running commentary by a fictionalized version of 19th-century South Carolina politician John C. Calhoun, best known for saying that slavery was “a positive good.†It’s a twisted, extremely uncomfortable yet darkly comic read, thanks to the juxtaposition between Thompson’s lofty, archaic tone (“This is my text on / the training of our black animalsâ€) and Calhoun’s scribbled asides, which range from vigorous agreement (“Yes!,†then “doubly yes!â€) to quibbles (“do not agreeâ€) to practical questions (egg-butt snaffles or circle?) to philosophical musings (“has there ever existed a wealthy society in which one portion did not live on the labor of another?â€). Neither Thompson’s instructions nor Calhoun’s notes are jokes. Rather, it’s Everett’s placement of the two characters in conversation with each other that reveals their essential absurdity and undermines them both as supposed authority figures.
Everett wields a radically different array of techniques in Erasure. What seems like a straightforward satire of the publishing industry includes allusions to failed novel ideas; an academic paper; a CV; imagined dialogues between artists Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg; untranslated passages in French and Latin; a whole subplot involving Monk’s adulterous father, his aging mother, his gay brother, and a lost sibling; and a novel-within-a-novel in the form of Fuck/My Pafology, a racist, pandering parody he dashes off as a fuck-you to the publishing world that ends up getting him more money and acclaim than he’s ever had. Everett’s genius with Erasure lies in showing us this unseemly process of publishing-industry sausage-making but also transcending it as the author of what actually is a full-throated, imaginative, and original work by a Black artist about the market expectations foisted on Black artists. Whereas Monk traps himself in a parody of his own devising, Everett indicts the very system that sustains him, then gets rewarded for it, which wins him the freedom to critique what he pleases.
James is one of Everett’s more conventional novels in terms of plot, but it still contains vintage Everett tricks. The book opens with song lyrics apparently from the notebook of Daniel Decatur Emmett, believed to be the real-life composer of “Dixie†and a founder of one of the first minstrel troupes. Midway through the novel, James is sold to Emmett, who forces him to perform with the troupe, albeit not as a slave but as an underpaid indentured servant. When James finally makes his escape, he takes Emmett’s notebook with him. James wants to use the notebook as the site for his own story, but he refuses to tear out Emmett’s songs. “Somehow,†he allows, “they were necessary to my story. But in this notebook I would reconstruct the story I had begun, the story I kept beginning, until I had a story.†His self-written book inside the notebook is, it turns out, the very one we are reading. It’s the kind of metafictional device that gets at the core of what Everett does so well: create richly imagined worlds where characters like James and Monk and Not Sidney can be so many hilarious, human, and contradictory things all at once. If we, the readers, will let them.