Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James, which reimagines Mark Twain’s 1885 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is about Jim, a slave who runs away with the ambition to get enough money to purchase his wife and daughter from the white slave owners from whom he fled. While Twain’s original narrative privileged Huck’s point of view, James is narrated by Jim, who conceals his true intelligence whenever he is around white people.
Set in the American South before the Civil War, the novel begins similarly to Twain’s story, with Jim escaping from Miss Watson after discovering her plans to sell him. Jim promises his wife, Sadie, and daughter, Lizzie, that he will return for them. While hiding out, he encounters Huck, who has faked his own death to escape his abusive father. As the two travel down the Mississippi River, Jim becomes a moral guide to Huck, who questions the morality of slavery as he comes to know Jim more intimately. To appear subservient and non-threatening, Jim code-switches when speaking with Huck and other white people, using the ungrammatical vernacular white people expect of slaves. Jim uses his real voice with other black people because he does not have to appease them by seeming unintelligent. Jim and Huck encounter characters from Twain’s original novel, including the Duke and the King, conmen who sell Jim back into slavery. Jim is soon sold again to a white minstrel troupe who profits off racist caricatures by performing in blackface. Jim escapes the group alongside Norman, a white-passing former slave who has been part of the troupe and who also has plans to rescue his own wife from slavery. Posing as a white slave owner, Norman sells Jim to a sawmill owner, the plan being that Jim will escape and they will share the money. However, Jim’s escape results in the death of another runaway. Jim and Norman soon find themselves in the engine room of a paddleboat that explodes. Amidst the wreckage, Jim rescues Huck from drowning, choosing to save his life over Norman’s because Huck, though white-passing, is actually his biological son. The two return to Miss Watson’s plantation, where Jim learns that Sadie and Lizzie have been sold to a slave breeder in Missouri. Jim sets out without Huck. No longer careful, Jim kills a white overseer, abducts Judge Thatcher, and kills the slave breeder on his mission to be reunited with his family. The novel ends with Jim, Sadie, Lizzie, and two of the slaves from the breeding farm reaching the free state of Iowa.
Exploring themes of duality, language, survival, injustice, dehumanization, vengeance, and freedom, James also provides a modern commentary on one of the most significant novels in the American literary canon. By being both in conversation with and a critique of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, James adds depth and humanity to Twain’s at-times stereotypical and simplistic portrayal of Jim. This inventive retelling of a literary classic asks readers to consider the personal cost of slavery and the difficulty of maintaining one’s humanity in profoundly dehumanizing circumstances.
James became a bestseller upon the book’s March 2024 release and it is shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Universal Pictures has plans to adapt the novel into a feature film directed by Taika Waititi.
