James: A Novel

By Percival Everett

Doubleday-Penguin Random House/March 2024

Reviewed by Graham Fraser

August 25, 2024

For years, I have thought that Donald Trump resembled the King in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The King was a showman, a con man, and a swindler who claimed to be “the pore disappeared Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette.”

Twain’s book is largely out of fashion now, in no small part because it includes more than 200 uses of the n-word. In a world in which a distinguished CBC broadcaster was suspended for mentioning the word in a reference to the well-known title of a Pierre Vallières book at a staff meeting, it is difficult to imagine Twain’s book being assigned to any class, though a first edition is still advertised online for $15,000.

In Twain’s story, Huck Finn has escaped from the confines of his adoptive home and the clutches of his father, the town drunk. After faking his own death, he sets off down the Mississippi on a raft with Jim, a runaway slave. Twain paints a vivid portrait of pre-Civil War 19th century America: a slave-owning South, marked by deadly feuds, lawless vengeance, religious fervour, kind hospitality and people constantly on the move.

In Percival Everett’s James, the story is retold from the vantage point of the runaway slave whom Huck, and Twain’s readers, knew as Jim. Everett’s device is to have James speak standard English when conversing with fellow slaves and only use the mannered argot of Twain’s Jim — and countless other Black stereotypes — when speaking, eyes down and shuffling, to white people. As The Guardian‘s Anthony Cummins put it, “In James, Jim’s speech, like that of every black character in the novel, is a calculated code-switching put-on.”

The result is a powerful retelling of a classic American story through the eyes of a character whom Twain, as a white author, had depicted as naive, credulous, illiterate and subservient. In contrast, Everett’s James is shrewd, sceptical and highly literate — and has an even deeper bond with Huck.

The King and the Duke are more cruelly racist in Everett’s retelling of the story, in keeping with a version that gives voice to the character whose life is relentlessly defined by racism.

While some of the plot points are the same, there are differences in what occurs when Huck and James are separated in their flight down the Mississippi. Twain had sidestepped much of the brutality of slavery; Everett does not — reminding readers that slaves were chained, whipped, raped and lynched. Although he fills in the dark omissions from the original, Everett is not attacking Twain; as he writes in his acknowledgements, “his humour and humanity affected me long before I became a writer.” Everett’s own talent for social satire is well-established; his 2001 novel Erasure became the Oscar-winning film American Fiction. His 2022 novel The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker, and this one has already made the longlist.

Twain’s account of the King, and his younger sidekick the Duke (“I am the rightful Duke of Bridgewater; and here am I, forlorn, torn from my high estate, hunted of men, despised by the cold world, ragged, worn, heart-broken, and degraded to the companionship of felons on a raft!”) has a particular resonance now. The King and the Duke move from town to town, performing bastardized chunks of Shakespeare, claiming to be pirates who’ve found religion and impersonating the relatives of a recently deceased wealthy man. (The King did not, like his contemporary counterpart, sell steaks, university degrees or casinos).

My analogy did not quite work when Trump was president; Mike Pence did not have the soaring hypocrisy of the King or the Duke when they posed as religious converts, but JD Vance, with his shifting loyalties, newfound faith and histrionic renunciation of the elite he has joined seems much closer to what Twain was satirizing.

The King and the Duke are more cruelly racist in Everett’s retelling of the story, in keeping with a version that gives voice to the character whose life is relentlessly defined by racism. They are more benevolent characters in Twain’s version, scamming their credulous audiences before hitting the road and heading for the next town before word catches up with them.

But Twain told the story of their fate in a way that has stayed with me since I first had the book read to me as a child and echoed with me throughout the Trump years. After they cheated an audience once too often, the King and the Duke were tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. It remains to be seen if Trump’s tall tales, fabrications and lies will lead to his suffering a modern version of the same fate.

Graham Fraser was Washington Bureau Chief for The Globe and Mail from 1993-1997.