When readers of Percival Everett’s James first encounter the title character’s daughter, James is teaching her and the other six children in his cabin how to speak the crude dialect that whites expect to hear from the mouths of slaves. Is Lizzie reading her father’s lips? That’s a question some readers may ask, remembering how in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jim tells Huck that his daughter lost her hearing to scarlet fever.
Maybe Lizzie—called Lizbeth in Mark Twain’s novel—recovered her hearing. Otherwise, what accounts for the discrepancy? Whatever the answer may be, the variances in James’ and Huck’s stories don’t end there. In Huckleberry Finn, Jim is bitten on the leg by a rattlesnake; in James, he is bitten on the hand. In Huckleberry Finn, Huck keeps two men from discovering Jim by telling the men that the hidden man with whom he is travelling is his father, who has smallpox. Perhaps to assuage their guilt for abandoning a boy whose father lies ill with a contagious disease, the two men each give Huck twenty dollars, half of which he gives to Jim. In James, it’s Huck’s uncle whom he says has smallpox, and one of the men gives Huck ten dollars.
Those inconsistencies are secondary to the grave dangers faced by the runaway slave, but they demonstrate the primary role of point of view in fiction and prompt readers to meditate on the nature of narrative itself. Though published eighty-five years before William H. Gass coined the term metafiction, Huckleberry Finn (1885)—like Don Quixote, Part II (1615) and Tristram Shandy (1759)—departs from novelistic convention, identifying its central figure as a character in a book. In conventional fiction, characters don’t know they are characters, but in Huckleberry Finn, Huck identifies himself as a character in the first sentence and credits Twain in the second:
“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly” (32).
In contrast, Everett’s Jim doesn’t refer to his character-turned-writer status initially. Instead, one-third of the way into the novel, readers learn that the words Jim has penned—or, more accurately, penciled—are the words they are reading. In Chapter 15, Jim recounts how reading—which he taught himself to do by studying the books in Judge Thatcher’s library—leaves him dissatisfied; the words that he needs to see on the page are the ones he will put there himself:
I read and I read, but I found what I needed was to write. I needed that pencil. I could not keep track of my thoughts. I could not follow my own reasoning after a while. This was perhaps because I couldn’t stop reading long enough to make space in my head. I was like a man who had not eaten for a season and then gorged himself until sick. And my books, once read, were not what I wanted, not what I needed. The so-called self-related story of Venture Smith became infuriating the more I examined the work, wondering how a five-year-old could have remembered so much detail that made such neat sense. I had already come to understand the tidiness of lies, the lesson learned from the stories told by white people seeking to justify my circumstance. (89-90)
Jim receives the pencil he needs from a slave called Young George, who is brutally whipped for stealing the pencil from his master. When Young George hands Jim the pencil, he says to him, “Tell your story” (91).
But with pencil finally in hand, Jim still lacks paper. How he acquires the pages he needs requires some backstory:
After the King and the Duke discover that the blacksmith-slave, Easter, has unlocked the shackle on Jim’s leg, the Duke whips Easter, rendering him unable to work. When Wiley, Easter’s owner, sees that the Duke has damaged his property, he confiscates Jim from the King and the Duke and forces him to forge the horseshoes that Easter is too weak to make. As the wounded Easter guides Jim through the process of pumping the bellows, he tells Jim that there’s been a lynching up the river: A slave was hanged for stealing a pencil.
While Jim is still forging his first horseshoe, his new owner, Wiley, returns and asks him to sing while he works. Jim’s singing is overheard by the members of a travelling minstrel show, the Virginia Minstrels, whose owner, Daniel Decatur Emmett, buys Jim to serve as the group’s replacement tenor. Fearing that an audience member will realize that he is a runaway slave rather than a white man in blackface, Jim sneaks away from the minstrel show, taking Emmett’s leather journal with him.
Jim’s reason for stealing the journal is practical: he needs paper. But taking Emmett’s pages into his own hands is also a vital act of revision. What was once a collection of compositions born of blackface minstrelsy will become an account of escaping the slave-holding South, a region whose moral failing was enabled and perpetuated in part by the grotesquerie of the blackface tradition. Notably, the epigraph for James consists of lyrics penned by Daniel Decatur Emmett, who is not merely a character in the novel but the real-life leader of the first blackface minstrel troupe and the composer of “Dixie.” By composing his story on the pages that follow the lyrics of “Old Zip Coon,” Everett’s Jim is both literally and figuratively rewriting the book.
In the journal, Jim writes of himself as “a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written” (93). That distinction may account for the recollections of his that differ from Huck’s; Jim’s primary interest isn’t writing his own story but reclaiming the story of thousands of other fugitive slaves. And perhaps he restored Lizzie’s hearing so she could hear that story, one that he could finally tell in his own words.
Works Cited
Everett, Percival. James. Doubleday, 2024.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. 2nd ed. ,edited by Gerald Graff and James Phelan, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004.
Jane Lucas 