A Bloody Retelling of <em>Huckleberry Finn</em>

Percival Everett’s new novel imagines Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved sidekick, Jim. But to call James a retelling would be an injustice. Everett sends Mark Twain’s classic through the looking glass. What emerges is no longer a children’s book, but a blood-soaked historical novel stripped of all ornament. James conjures a vision of the antebellum South as a scene of pervasive terror. Everett recognizes that American slavery’s true history is not revealed in the movements of great armies or the speeches of politicians. Its realities lie in the details of life lived under conditions of unceasing brutality—the omnipresent whip, the daily interplay of dread and panic, the rage that can find no outlet.

James, in other words, is anything but a straight-ahead homage to a literary classic. Instead, Everett has a cultural homicide in view. He wishes to kill the Black stock character, entrenched in American fiction and film, whom the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah called “the Saint” in 1993 and, several years later, the director Spike Lee christened “the magical, mystical Negro.” James is best understood as a systematic dismantling of that shopworn staple, the Black man or woman who exists to rescue and morally enlighten a fallen but basically redeemable white protagonist. And Everett’s quarrel is not with this archetype alone. He takes aim at the ethics embodied by the magical Negro: the idea that oppression exalts, that suffering purifies the spirit. Everett’s counter-thesis is that oppression hardens; suffering sharpens. James cuts.

The trope of “the noble good-hearted black man or woman, friendly to whites,” in Appiah’s words, isn’t hard to recognize in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Its secondary hero is ennobled by a folksy wisdom and probity so unalloyed as to border on the supernatural. Jim is downtrodden but morally upright and ever ready to help. Published in the United States in 1885, Twain’s novel is a tale of boyish exploits, rich with comedy, that doubles as a tutorial against anti-Black racism. A quick refresher, given that high-school English (where Huckleberry Finn remains one of the most assigned novels in America) may be a dim memory: The plot features the plight of semi-orphaned Huck—who flees home to escape an abusive, whiskey-wet father—and Jim, who has run away from his owner, Miss Watson, after learning that she plans to sell him to slavers in New Orleans. Because the pair disappear at the same time, many assume that Jim has killed the boy; he becomes not merely a runaway slave but also a Black man who has murdered a white child. When Huck and Jim are forced to hide out on Jackson’s Island, they throw in their lot together, developing a father-son relationship as they head off, their raft precarious, down the Mississippi River. Along the way, Huck has a necessary moral awakening as his Black companion teaches him, directly and indirectly, about the evils of prejudice. As for Jim, the “happy slave” gets his happy ending—freedom.

The kindly, obliging, superstitious Jim of Huckleberry Finn, the ur–magical Negro, carries with him an enchanted hair ball (allegedly from the stomach of an ox) that he believes holds prophetic powers. Everett’s updated character is James’s first-person narrator, and his predecessor’s alter ego in salient ways: He is a writer and storyteller, compassionate but also calculating, by turns reasonable and ruthless. Most notable, James has a head full of books. When he is bitten by a rattlesnake in an early scene on the island, he is visited by a ghost of the Enlightenment. Voltaire comes to him in a fever to quarrel about equality and the perfect human form. The setting for this febrile dream is the local judge’s library, the same study where James once read in secret. “What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenuse was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled?” he wonders in his delirium.

[From the May 1876 issue: The adventures of Mark Twain]

Over the course of the novel, this hypothetical is reconstituted on new terms: What would a slave do who knew what irony meant and how retribution is spelled? That question could not be posed to Twain’s Jim, because he doesn’t possess knowledge of this sort, and because the defining feature of the magical Negro is his inability to think in terms of his self-interest. The answer that Everett’s James arrives at, by contrast, is righteous and terrible. We are introduced to a character whose fear and repressed anger are buoyed by a kind of comedic detachment. Yet this black humor is pared away, page by page, as James suffers indignity after indignity. With each twist of the Mississippi, his rage grows until it threatens to flood its banks. The novel never loses its sense of humor, but the laughs become manic.

“Where does a slave put anger?” Everett’s protagonist muses near the beginning of the novel. Confronted with the torn families, the rapes, the whippings, the intractable obstacles to freedom, the routine humiliations both major and minor, James reflects on the wrath of those in bondage: “The real source of our rage had to go without address, swallowed, repressed.” The magic of Twain’s Jim is his ability to sanitize this repression, not to simply hide it but to turn it into virtue. The dark magic of James is his discovery that he can refuse to do either.

Everett’s interest in the magical Negro should come as no surprise, given his well-established obsession with racial pigeonholing, with the ways that race is rehearsed for white eyes. Earlier novels such as Erasure—recently made into the feature film American Fiction—explore how American Blackness is as much a media-generated caricature as it is a coherent identity. Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, Erasure’s protagonist, is an Ivy League–educated writer who must pantomime a “ghetto” persona to make himself legible to publishers. Everett’s James also performs a kind of racial burlesque: He wears Twain’s Jim like a mask.

Whereas Jim speaks in the demotic dialect of an illiterate slave, James code-switches. When he talks to white folks, he adopts the heavy southern lilt of Twain’s character. When he talks to fellow enslaved people, he and they speak in the refined English of the educated elite. This linguistic skulduggery is an inspired gag, the kind of farce at which Everett excels: Huck, whose own English is hardly polished, catches James out in occasional slipups, for example, and the effect is deftly comic. The first time it happens—they’re watching a small cannon on a boat firing balls into the river—rattles them both, and James scrambles to recover:

“Why they doin’ that, Jim?”

“Dey’s tryin’ to get yo dead body to float up to the top o’ da water.”

“Be funny if some other body float up,” he said.

“Hilarious,” I said.

“What?” He looked at me.

“I say da ‘he harry us.’ ”

“What’s that mean?”

“What? Looky naw,” I said.

At the same time, the fluency and philosophical bent that James conceals is an uncomfortable reminder that nothing is feared so much as an educated Black man.

This unease about Black learning is embedded in Twain’s original. Before the slaver-dodging trip down the Mississippi, Huck is tormented by his cruel sot of a father, a man prone to slurred invectives against the “govment.” During one particularly bad bender, “Pap” Finn rages against the recent appearance of a freed Black man. “There was a free nigger there, from Ohio; a mulatter, most as white as a white man,” he seethes. “They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything.” The elder Finn is portrayed as a racist and an irredeemable scoundrel, yet the novel quietly echoes Pap’s anxiety about “uppity” Black people: Jim’s virtuousness is bound up with the aw-shucks sagacity of the illiterate, a patient wisdom that inspires sacrifice in the magical Negro rather than ambition. Jim’s selfless impulses—not his reflective powers—are what prove crucial to his ultimate fate. Everett’s diagnosis in James is that this gentleness is the deadly guarantee of servitude. Freedom can be won only through books, and blood.

Ultimately, Twain’s Jim is like a half-finished sculpture of a Black man: On the river with Huck, he’s often vibrantly human, and at other times he’s crudely hewn, reduced to stereotype—the popular white culture’s notion of the “Negro.” The genius of James is to take this submerged tension in Huckleberry Finn and force it to the surface. Everett does this by dramatizing what scholars have noted are minstrel-show elements that Twain, an avowed minstrel enthusiast, tacitly drew on for the novel’s structure and for some of the Huck-Jim routines. A kind of minstrel logic—a caricatured performance of Blackness that obscures both the violence of slavery and the moral deformation it invites—is revealed at the core of the magical-Negro archetype.

[Read: When great art happens to bad people]

Almost exactly midway through James, Everett diverges from Twain’s plot in a telling fashion. After he is separated from the “king” and “duke”—the pair of aspirationally royal confidence men who are the primary antagonists of Huckleberry Finn—James finds himself embedded with a minstrel troupe. The scene is pure Everett, and features a series of mind-bending and darkly comic riffs on racial performativity: At one point, James wears both blackface and whiteface to disguise himself as a white man playing a Black man so that he is not lynched by a racist mob.

The bit brilliantly reprises Everett’s enduring fixation on the way that Black Americans—whether modern-day novelists or 19th-century slaves—are compelled to perform not racial authenticity (whatever that may mean), but rather racial authenticity as filtered through the coarsely caricatured expectations of white people. But these scenes, in which James temporarily becomes the magical Negro in bootblack makeup, don’t simply lampoon the strange doubling of identity that the “art form” of minstrelsy rests on. They also mark a firm and final departure from Twain’s original text. From here on out, the two novels go their separate ways, down very different branches of the muddy Mississippi.

The final sections of Huckleberry Finn concern the efforts of Huck, now joined by his friend Tom Sawyer, to free Jim from bondage. The plan is bumbling, of course, and in the escape, Tom is wounded. Rather than seek his freedom, and knowing that the cost of this choice may be his life, Jim attends to Tom. He is recaptured, only to be freed in the end by the smiling fates—namely, the will of the recently departed Miss Watson. True to type, the magical Negro is cosmically rewarded for selfless devotion to the nice (or in the case of Tom, actually not quite so nice) white person. This resolution reestablishes the ethical premise of the magical-Negro trope: that saintly Black sacrifice, inspired by Black suffering, will be rewarded in the end.

Everett’s version drives toward no such cozy ending. As the chapters unfold, James is transformed into neither a Black saint nor a Black sinner. He claims some higher ground. If Twain’s Jim is a Christlike figure, James belongs to the Jewish Bible: He is not so much morally ambiguous as morally opaque. And as his rage builds, his ethics become inscrutable, not least to himself. After temporarily losing Huck to the king and duke, James encounters a succession of other slaves in his odyssey to reunite with his wife and child—a runaway in the minstrel troupe passing as white; a teenager who has been molested by her owner since childhood; a tragicomic man who tends a steamship’s boiler and never leaves the hull. They are evocative and well drawn, but they’re also chess pieces that advance Everett’s rejection of the magical Negro.

[Read: American Fiction is more than a racial satire]

Perhaps none more so than Brock, the boiler man, whose brief but remarkable appearance is the kindling that finally sets the novel ablaze. In the course of James’s encounter with the steamship attendant, James realizes that the master Brock keeps evoking is long since dead and that the faithful slave persists in his servitude because he enjoys it. Everett’s boiler man is a magical Negro shorn of the magic. Exhibiting the mindless desire to please, he lacks the capacity to turn his subjugation into compassion or earthy acuity. Instead, Brock has been seized by the delusion that his role gives him agency and ownership—“It’s my engine. I keep it going.” The presence of James, a runaway hunting his freedom, throws him into a fit of agitation. When we last see Brock, he is feverishly loading coal into the hopper as the boiler, soon screaming and shaking, grows ever hotter. And as his furious labor reaches its inevitable finale, the novel accelerates along with him.

Some readers may be troubled by James’s pacing—indeed, the book does not so much end as explode—but the frantic momentum isn’t a narrative failure; it’s crucial to the novel’s imaginative enterprise. Everett does not invert the magical Negro, giving us a lazy mirror image: James the indignant rationalist versus Brock and his irrational drudgery. Nor is James merely a repudiation of Jim and his spiritually attuned generosity. Rather, the novel dispenses with these terms entirely. Reason is nowhere to be found within the plantation or outside it. Slavery has exiled logic from the world. At last, amid the plot’s violent crescendo, James makes no claim to any higher principle or enlightened strategy: “I knew that the best thing would be to wait and watch and to be patient, to strike when everything was right. However, I was not patient. And I knew that things would never be right.”

When Appiah says that the saintlike characters in white films are, “to varying degrees, on the side of the angels,” he certainly means the better angels. Everett has a different angel in mind. In the throes of the novel’s bitter conclusion, James has a message for the slaver standing in front of him: “I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night.” (To which the slaver responds, a signature Everett touch, “What in tarnation?”) The magical Negro who ceaselessly transmutes humiliation into honor and wretchedness into down-home wisdom does not survive the encounter. The price of the novel’s final moments is James’s goodness. The prize is his dignity.

This article appears in the April 2024 print edition with the headline “A Bloody Retelling of Huckleberry Finn.”