The Other Side

James a novel by Percival Everett.  Doubleday.  303 pp.  $28.00 *****

I won’t say that Percival Everett is as great a writer as Mark Twain, but I do think he’s as much of an American original.  The world (including me) has finally caught up with him, but he’s been writing novels for years, and found a publisher for all of them, something that a number of us envy.  He’s a verbally inventive, entirely off the wall writer, as we can judge by just a few of his titles: A History of the African American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond as Told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid, The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair, Abstraktion und Einfuhlung, and, especially, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell.  The “Also By” page of this novel includes 33 titles, and he mentions in his acknowledgements that for 29 years he has worked with a single editor at Greywolf Press (though for this novel he has switched to a new person, at Doubleday).  That’s known as heaven.  No writer could ask for more.

It’s strange to say, but in some ways James sounded like his most conventional novel; he’d taken the basic situation from an existing classic and told it from another point of view, that of the slave who traveled down the river in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Whereas Huck Finn gives us an idyllic vision of life in 19^th century America, James gives us the other side, in all its brutality.  It’s a necessary and important corrective.

The first correction James makes concerns language, which Twain had taken such pains to duplicate.  The language we hear Jim using with white people, even Huck, is the way slaves talked to their masters, sounding halting, slow, and stupid.  With one another they have a completely different way of speaking, to the point where they sound like midwestern college professors.  I’m not sure the difference was quite that stark.  But Everett is letting us know that blacks have one way of talking in front of whites—even today—and another way among themselves.

Another corrective is for the situation the novels describe.  Twain’s title is at least on the surface a boy’s adventure story—isn’t this great! Sailing on a raft down the Mississippi!—but for Jim the whole thing is deadly serious; he’s risking his life and that of his family and people he knows.  He does so because the blithering idiot Miss Watson was planning to sell him down the river, literally; her willful ignorance about what she was doing is no less racist for all that.  Jim’s plan is to get free somehow and buy freedom for his wife and daughter, but he’s on a deeply perilous journey, where one false move could get him lynched.  He has to humor Huck to some extent, though Huck is coming to a gradual realization of what’s up.  Jim understands that Huck’s basic nature is good, but he’s been a battered abused child and isn’t terribly dependable.  (One of the book’s most touching passages is when Jim tells Huck that he remembers Huck’s mother, a woman Huck has no memory of.)

James lets us know also that Jim is also intelligent, not only with the street smarts that many slaves (necessarily) have, the way they can see through the lives and true motives of white people, but he is also literate, spent some time reading in Judge Thatcher’s library (and once got beaten for that), and has an inkling that he also wants to write, to record the truth of his life.  He’s got the writer’s itch (as his creator obviously does).  It’s part of his humanity.

James shows us some truths that Huckleberry Finn doesn’t see.  The Duke and the Dolphin (Dauphin), for instance, are comic figures in the original, dishonest rascals who will do themselves in eventually.  For Jim they’re deadly dangerous, dishonest drunken rednecks who not only feel superior to him, but wouldn’t hesitate to use him, to sell him for cold hard cash (though they don’t own him).  There’s a reward on his head, and these men have seen the posters.  They also have a scheme for selling Jim, helping him escape, then going off to another town to sell him again, and while that’s just one more preposterous scheme for them, for Jim it’s constantly perilous.  These men are older than Huck and don’t give a damn for his wishes.

It’s in confronting these two men that James breaks free of Huck Finn.  For one thing, even in the original novel, there’s a lot of time when Huck is apart from Jim and doesn’t know what he’s doing.  Jim fills him in later, but who knows if he’s being honest?  He’s essentially, necessarily, leading a double life.  Eventually Everett also begins to alter scenes that Huck appears in, changing not just the viewpoint but what actually happens.  The boy’s adventure story gives way to a serious novel about the life of a slave.  I suspect that a similar thing happened to Twain in the writing.  He intended another boy’s adventure story, after the huge success of Tom Sawyer, but once Jim entered the picture he was writing something far more serious and never quite caught up to it.  (The older author, the one whose publication was largely posthumous, might have given us a much different book.)

Once Everett began to break with Twain, he changed the narrative completely.  It’s no longer Oh Isn’t This Great Sailing Down the Mississippi; it’s The Life of a Slave in America.  Period.  Any white man can do anything he wants to you, and you’ve got to take it.  You’ve got to act as if he’s smarter, even if he’s the biggest moron on earth, and a complete turd.  You never know how the next white man is going to treat you, but it’s not going to be good.  (Even the sainted Judge Thatcher turns out to be a spiteful racist.)  And there’s no escape.

The difference between reading Huck Finn and James is the difference between watching the 1974 film version of Huckleberry Finn, a musical starring Paul Winfield, then watching “Twelve Years a Slave.”  That’s the work of art that James most reminded me of.

It would be criminal, literally, to reveal the plot details that Everett comes up with.  They’re startling, yet in every way seem emotionally on target.  The ending, though abrupt, also seems just right, and somehow satisfying.  In an interview that I read before reading the book, Everett said that Twain could not have told the story from Jim’s point of view, he didn’t have the capacity, and when I first read that I objected: couldn’t a great artist[1] imagine any reality?  But now that I’ve read Everett’s novel, I agree.  A white man couldn’t imagine himself into this.  He needs to have had the experience of a black man in America.

But this novel also impresses me with Percival Everett’s reach, which I had underestimated, only having read a couple of his comic novels.  This is beyond even a superb satire like Erasure.  I need to explore more of his work.

[1] I actually think Mark Twain was a great artist, stifled to some extent by the time and place where he lived, also by his own wish to be commercially successful, also by the literary establishment that surrounded him and looked down on him.  But again, we get a better idea of what he might have done by reading his posthumous work.