Reviewed by Roger Marheine

 

James by Percival Everett  (New York: Doubleday. 2024. 303 Pp.)

 

African-American author, Percival Everett, is widely known in literary circles for his prolific output numbering over twenty novels. However, none has achieved the widespread success of James: A Novel which reimagines Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  James has received considerable accolades–winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.  In addition to praise from the American literary establishment,  Everett is now working on a screen play of the novel for a Steven Spielberg film project.

Should Marxists read James?  Yes, absolutely if for no other reason than to take part in the national dialogue about the book.  Some of its imaginative passages are exhilarating. The protagonist, James exhibits singular heroic qualities.  Everett’s critique of capitalism’s role in chattel slavery, in some sections particularly,  is spot on.

However, if Everett were a Marxist, what might he have done differently?  James is a fiction based on another highly flawed fiction, but both are rooted in the historical period of slavery.   Everett’s character James is a marvelous creation; he achieves his goal militantly, but as an individual actor.  He has no allies except the young Huck who is a boy.  The mass, multiracial militancy that ultimately ended slavery is missing from the book.  Everett shows little trust in the efficacy of mass revolutionary movements. James is both bold and imaginative, but also a missed opportunity.

Historical Context: Our Times Can Benefit from Everett’s Text 

Well into the 1960s, Twain’s Huck was widely taught in high schools and colleges. It was prized by elite critics as a great, even the great American novel.  The work’s enduring prominence and historical limitations were finally challenged as a result of 1960s and 70s massive anti-racist activism. Everett’s  James channels the paradigm of activist history in which African-Americans are not simply “the other,”  but  vital activists for social justice.

Today, Everett’s text provides a counterpoint to recent historical and cultural trends that are quite frankly, fascistic.  Contemporary reactionary  “anti-woke” movements against The  1619 Project, prison abolition efforts and other historically accurate accounts of racism and slavery, have become ubiquitous in mass culture.  Banning progressive books in libraries nationwide has emerged as a routine form of censorship. Our current era features presidential advisors giving nazi salutes. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, a hastily established concept as a result of massive protests under the umbrella of Black Lives Matter, has been abruptly dismissed.  Now over sixty years of anti-racist activism and the prolific surge in artistic and literary equity are under siege.

James is a useful counterpoint to these recent reversals.

Twain’s Passive Jim versus Everett’s Militant James 

One of Everett’s most significant revisions of Twain’s work transforms Twain’s Jim, the relatively passive runaway slave, to James, a particularly intelligent, literate, militant resistance figure.  Twain’s title premises Huck as the young, well-intentioned protagonist whose adventures include protecting Jim, and Everett largely retains Huck’s character, especially in the early sections.  As the novel evolves, Everett’s James takes on heroic proportions in full command of the action as a multilayered protagonist whose first-person narration reveals a psychologically complex character.  Everett has created an imposing and dynamic figure—a force to be reckoned with. He bears no relation to Twain’s passive Jim.

Everett takes great care in developing James as both a thinker and an actor. In a number of episodes, James expresses contempt for slaves who passively accept their existence, or talk of a “good” master.   James is uncompromising in his critique of resignation to injustice by its victims, and essentially argues that lack of resistance is a failure of the imagination or a deficiency  of will.

Everett depicts his protagonist’s complex psychology.  To free his family from slavery, James must violently confront overseers and slaveowners.  Upon killing an overseer, he attempts to interpret his action:

I looked for voices in my dreams, trying to find some comprehension of what I had  done. Of course, at one level it was all too simple. I had enacted revenge. But for whom? For one act or many?  Against one man, many men or the world? I wondered if I should feel guilty.  Should I have felt some pride in my action? Had I done a brave thing?  Had I done an evil thing? Was it evil to kill evil?  The truth was that I didn’t care.  It was this apathy that left me wondering about myself….wondering what else I was capable of doing. It was not all together a bad feeling (284)

The passage is remarkable in its depiction of James’ consciousness.  It makes sense that James must learn how to interpret his just deeds, how to develop an analysis of necessary violence.

He will soon declare,  “I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night….I am your future. I am James” (302).  Everett’s does not equivocate. He emphasizes James’ militancy, especially in the book’s second half.  The book is refreshingly free of liberal platitudes.  Slavery will not be wished away, nor made illegal, nor somehow ended through moral persuasion.  Everett is quite clear on the necessity of violence as critical for abolition.

Rejecting Fictions

Everett employs James to satirize and expose numerous hypocrisies and injustices—cultural control mechanisms associated with maintaining injustice.

James elucidates the ideological function of religion as a hegemonic device and a rationale for unjust power.   Speaking to a young slave boy, he rejects monotheism and clarifies the function of organized religion: “There is no god child….Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient” (23).  James does not compromise on spirituality or institutional religion.

On justice, the rule of law, and the courts, James’ friend Luke clarifies how the burning of a black man by a lynch mob was rationalized:  “The worst part was that the judge told the grand jury that it was an act of the multitude and they couldn’t recommend any indictments. So if enough people do it, it’s not a crime” (27).  In our historical moment  when black men are incarcerated in staggering numbers, Everett dismisses vapid bromides about achieving justice in a racist society supposedly based on rule of law.

James grasps the role of performance and fiction, and Everett suggests that Twain’s lasting reputation is due to readers’ self-deception, a willingness to accept  falsehoods, especially if told humorously.  Huck and James encounter charlatans, the King and the Duke.  James thinks, “I shared a look with Huck. I suspected he suspected that the Duke and the King were liars, but he was transfixed by the adventure of it all” (108).  Everett casts a subtle shadow on Twain’s traditional admirers who overlooked Twain’s racial depictions.

Language and Resistance 

One of Everett’s most striking breaks from Twain, is his use of language.  James and his fellow slaves speak standard English to each other but use dialect when speaking to whites.  Dialect functions as the wearing of a verbal mask, a resistance tactic.  Everett thus expresses the duality of consciousness of an oppressed population.

Everett addressed language and its vulgarization and corruption in his earlier novel, Erasure (2003).  Accordingly, in James, he offers a scathing criticism of the corrupted art of minstrelsy with its convoluted racial representations.  In the novel’s minstrel section, James discovers a ‘Notebook’ of songs as he is recruited to play a role in a  traveling minstrel show.  James’ friend, Norman, a ‘black’ who  passes for ‘white,’ recruits James to sing in the show as a ‘white’ man made up in black face. The absurdity of racial identity is made clear.

Everett offers a nuanced view on censorship of the old racist art and literature, a much contested area in the humanities.  Censorship also relates to today’s movement to remove statues of racist leaders.   Regarding the Notebook of racist songs,  James states to Norman, “I thought about tearing out the songs and burning them, but they still would exist.  Those crackers would still sing them.  Better to know they exist. Don’t you think?” (203)    Everett suggests care should be taken when censoring offensive texts.

Notably, Everett does not call for censorship of Twain. Instead, his work asserts that anti-racist writers must combat degenerate art by creating historically accurate representations, progressive plot structure, and powerful symbolism.

Everett’s Historical Materialism:  A Critique of the Enlightenment and Capitalism

In one particularly compelling sequence, Everett addresses sexuality as commodity production, in which whole plantations were devoted to mating slave men and women to produce more human products—slave children to be sold. Everett thus probes not only the oppression of families being split up when some are sold ‘down the river,’ as an incidental act by  a slaveowner attempting to make a short-term profit. Rather, chattel slavery’s  profit motive led owners to the systematic breeding of slaves, to produce new labor, as commodified in the slave body.  It is one of Everett’s best sections.

He deepens his analysis of capitalism in a series of dream sequences in which James enters into dialogues with Enlightenment thinkers, particularly Voltaire and John Locke. The age of reason and celebration of rational inquiry emphasized freedoms but also provided the rationale for the pursuit of property.  In turn, racism served as the apology for capitalism’s brutal profit-making slave system.

For Everett, John Locke, is fundamentally hypocritical.  Locke’s articulation of liberatory ideas conflicts directly with his economic investments in the slave trade.

Everett utilizes Voltaire a bit differently.   James condemns Voltaire’s notion of equality when the French philosopher states: “It’s the capacity (italics in original) for becoming equal.” (49).  Implied, is that Africans and African-Americans must become European to be truly equal.

James challenges Voltaire by noting the French author Guillaume-Thomas Raynal who opposed slavery and condemned colonization—and thus was considerably more progressive than Voltaire.  Everett’s reference to Raynal who is not nearly as well-known as Voltaire shows Everett’s subtle intellectual endorsement of some Enlightenment thinking. The philosophy emerged as an ideological weapon of the rising capitalist class to challenge aristocratic cultural hegemony (e.g. “the divine right of kings”).  Enlightenment assertions of freedom and equality have merit, if practiced appropriately.  However, if freedom means the freedom to exploit the labor of others, and rational inquiry seeks only to enhance profit at whatever human cost, the theory fails to contribute to human emancipation, particularly emancipation from capitalism.

Late in the book, Everett utilizes a sophisticated and stunning use of Voltaire. He cites Voltaire’s fictional character, Cunegonde from Candide (1759), to affirm that slavery is  primarily a function of  global capitalism. In the dream sequence, the fictional Cunegonde declares to James, “You think [slaveowners] want you because you can carry a load. You think they want you because you can hammer a nail.   They want you because you’re money….You’re mortgaged Jim.  Like a farm, like a house. Really, the bank owns you….You’re part of the bank’s assets and so people all over the world are making money off your scarred black hide. Make sense? Nobody wants you free” (277).

James responds, “Somebody does. There’s a war” (277). Cunegonde provides Everett’s critique of racist society (Jim Crow) after the Civil War.  She tells James,  “Maybe you won’t be a slave, but you won’t be free” (277). The philosophical passages are Everett’s most compelling analytical material.

Equivocations and Uncertainties

Everett’s excellent economic critique of slavery as primarily rooted in the capitalist profit system, unfortunately,  conflicts with a passage in which James expresses equivocation. He wonders if slavery should be viewed more through the lens of culture and psychology rather than class:

I considered the northern stance against slavery.  How much of the desire to end the institution was fueled by a need to quell and subdue white guilt and pain?  Was it just too much to watch? Did it offend liberal sensibilities to live in a society that allowed that practice? I knew that whatever the cause of the war, freeing slaves was an incidental premise and would be an incidental result” (286).

The passage is ambiguous.  Marx had said that the American Civil War was the second American Revolution. (1)  James speaks of “white guilt and pain,” and that slavery would “offend liberal sensibilities.”  Unfortunately, James articulates a psychological analysis which trivializes the motivations of anti-racist whites. In fact, the Abolitionist Movement was one of the greatest movements for social justice in American history.  By 1860, there were 255,000 abolitionists in over 1400 different anti-slavery societies in the United States. Many abolitionists were white. (2) However, Everett, like Twain, exhibits no anti-racist adult whites (Huck is a boy).  In both novels, all adult whites either passively accept slavery or viciously support it.

Second, in a Pasadena interview (March, 2025), Everett stated that Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers who supported slavery were all representations of Thomas Jefferson, yet Jefferson is not included in the novel.   Why not?   Everett claimed that he did not think James would find books in Judge Thatcher’s library by Jefferson.  As a plot device, it would seem that Everett could have found a way for James to have encountered Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), the notoriously racist work.  Is it too harsh to assume Everett wanted to avoid the inconvenient truths about U.S. presidents and slavery? (3)  It is a missed opportunity.

Finally, James demonstrates extraordinary capabilities, as an individual actor, in a series of visceral scenes that ends in freeing his wife and daughter.   However, he shows minimal regard for freeing other slaves, and he encounters no larger movements (e.g. Underground Railroad or the Abolitionists). His quest is individualistic.  Everett shows no confidence in meaningful solidarity, and James leans toward Afro-Pessimism–black individuals make their way as best they can; the efficacy of collective struggle is an illusion.

Conclusion:  A Single Handed Resolution, But Not a Collective Class Struggle   

 James is a work of speculative fiction, a major revision of Twain’s text, and thus a fiction about a fiction, but one rooted in very specific historical circumstances of enormous importance—slavery and racism.  Poignant sections expose capitalist slavery’s brutalities, and significant passages clarify Enlightenment philosophical hypocrisies.  Everett is a serious thinker who exposes the dialectical contradiction between capitalism’s primary purpose (profit at whatever human cost) and its stated ideological claims (e.g. freedom and equality for all).

If James reads works of the European Enlightenment, might he have not also encountered abolitionist literature or that of underground activists?  Everett depicts no class unity between whites and blacks, slave and worker, despite Abolitionism being one of American history’s greatest liberation movements. Neither Twain nor Everett considers a collective militant opposition, which we know historically did occur–a massive multiracial and violent struggle that culminated in Emancipation.  James might have explored this vital historical truth. It is a missed opportunity.

Endnotes

  1. See Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich (2016). Zimmerman, Andrew (ed.). The Civil War in the United States (2nd) New York: International Publishers.  Marx had hailed the American Civil War (1861-65) as the second American Revolution. Lincoln, representing the northern industrial bourgeoisie, signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, a full two years after the war had started.   The proclamation led to a massive migration of former slaves and thus crippled plantation productivity.  As important, it led to the recruitment of approximately 200,000 former slaves to join the Union Army. Emancipation was an economic and military strategy for Lincoln’s class interests. Most importantly, massive numbers of whites opposed slavery, and many white workers died fighting to end it.
  1. See “Abolitionism.” britannica.com.
  1. See “U.S. Presidents: Number of Slaves Owned.” Statista.com.  At least twelve presidents owned slaves, and eight owned slaves while in office. Jefferson’s Notes was widely read and showed  him to be one of slavery’s most enthusiastic ideologues.  Over the course of his lifetime, he owned 600 slaves, more than three times as many as any other president.

 

–Roger Marheine taught English at Pasadena City College and is now retired. His interests include war culture and resistance literature.