Those white boys, Huck and Tom, watched me. They were always playing some kind of pretending game where I was either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy. They hopped about out there with the chiggers, mosquitoes and other biting bugs, but never made any progress toward me. It always pays to give white folks what they want, so I stepped into the yard and called out into the night, “Who dat dere in da dark lak dat?”
In this passage, taken from the opening chapter of James, Percival Everett introduces the reader to the disjunction between Jim's eloquent first-person narration and the uneducated voice he affects around white people. The first paragraphs of the book establish that Jim is an observant, intelligent person; these paragraphs are in strange contrast with the first words that come out of Jim's mouth in dialogue: “Who dat dere in da dark lak dat?” As the reader will come to understand, Jim's comment that "it always pays to give white folks what they want" refers not only to his willingness to pretend he doesn't notice Huck and Tom watching, but also to giving them the "slave voice" white people expect of black people.
“But what are you going to say when she asks you about it?” I asked.
Lizzie cleared her throat. “Miss Watson, dat sum conebread lak I neva before et.”
“Try ‘dat be,’ ” I said. “That would be the correct incorrect grammar.”
Everett builds on the motif of enslaved people code-switching between their true voices and their affected slave voices when Jim returns to his shack and coaches his daughter, Lizzie, to speak improperly. In this situationally ironic moment, Everett inverts the typical scenario of a parent instructing a child to use correct grammar by showing how Jim wants Lizzie to appear less educated than she is when speaking with their white owner. Passages like this convey the satirical nature of Everett's retelling of Mark Twain's classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which, for all its virtues, has been criticized for portraying black characters as childlike and gullible. In Everett's novel, black characters merely present themselves as naive.
That evening I sat down with Lizzie and six other children in our cabin and gave a language lesson. These were indispensable. Safe movement through the world depended on mastery of language, fluency. The young ones sat on the packed-dirt floor and I was on one of our two homemade stools. The hole in the roof pulled the smoke from the fire that burned in the middle of the shack.
“Papa, why do we have to learn this?”
“White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” I said. “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior.’"
While the code-switching in the first chapter of James may confuse some readers, in Chapter 2 Everett reveals that Jim routinely gives language lessons to the children enslaved on Miss Watson's property. Rather than being an arbitrary choice to present oneself as naive and uneducated, speaking improperly around white people is a survival strategy for the slaves. Jim explains that their safety depends on white people continuing to believe they are superior to black people; if enslaved people were to shatter this illusion, white people would punish them violently. With this revelation, Everett shows how enslaved people in the antebellum South must constantly cope with the unstable and fragile egos of the white people who lord their power over them.
For the first time in my life, I had paper and ink. I was beside myself. I found a straight stick and shaved it to a point and scratched a groove on one side. I put the paper on my lap, dipped my stick into the ink and wrote the alphabet. I printed letters as I had seen them in books, slowly, clumsily. Then I wrote my first words. I wanted to be certain that they were mine and not some I had read from a book in the judge’s library. I wrote: I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name.
Having fled Miss Watson's property to avoid being sold off and separated from his wife and daughter, Jim takes refuge on nearby Jackson Island. When he finds paper and ink in a house that floats by on the flooded river, Jim is "beside himself" with excitement: Although he has taught himself to read in secret, he has never had the opportunity to write. In this passage, Jim fashions a pen nib out of a stick and puts down his first-ever written words. He writes that he is "called Jim" because it is the name his owners gave him at birth—not the same as the name he will choose for himself once he is officially emancipated from slavery.
“Why you holdin’ them books?” Huck asked.
“Dey feels good,” I said.
“That’s funny. How kin a book feel good?” He grabbed the Rousseau and thumbed through it. “It ain’t even got pictures.”
“I likes the weight of ’em,” I said.
Huck stared at me for a long few seconds. “I guess I don’t understand niggers,” he said.
Somehow that word seemed strange coming out of Huck’s mouth. I think he heard it, too, because we shared an awkward silence.
In this exchange, Huck questions Jim's decision to take books he finds in the robbers' bounty. Still concealing his literacy from Huck, Jim pretends that his motivation lies in a reason other than his desire to read. Huck concludes that he doesn't understand Jim, using the racial epithet that is repeated over two hundred times in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. However, Jim comments that the word sounds peculiar when spoken by Huck, who, through his conversations with Jim, is grappling with the values instilled in him during his upbringing as a white child in a white supremacist society.
I really wanted to read. Though Huck was asleep, I could not chance his waking and discovering me with my face in an open book. Then I thought, How could he know that I was actually reading? I could simply claim to be staring dumbly at the letters and words, wondering what in the world they meant. How could he know? At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them.
In this passage, Jim works through his anxiety about continuing to appear illiterate around Huck. As a white child, Huck has the power to end Jim's life, either intentionally or unintentionally if he were to expose the secret that Jim can read. However, Jim realizes that reading is a private affair, occurring entirely within his own mind. Even if Huck saw him reading, Jim could pretend he was merely trying to make out the meanings of the words. Jim understands then that reading—something slaves are forbidden to do—carries immense power because it allows a person to forge and sharpen their own ideas within the privacy of their own minds, thereby making the person an independent thinker who is more difficult to control.
A short man offered me a tin cup of brown liquid. I had never tasted, but only smelled, coffee. I nodded and took it. These white men scared me. They scared me because they weren’t invested in my being afraid of them.
Soon after the King and the Duke loan Jim to the blacksmith to labor in Easter's place, the blacksmith sells Jim to the Virginia Minstrels—a group of white men who perform racist songs in blackface. Although the group's leader, Daniel Decateur Emmett, purchased Jim, Jim is surprised to be treated well by the white men in the group. In this passage, Jim has coffee for the first time in his life—a gesture that shows the men trying to treat Jim as an equal. In an instance of situational irony, Jim is frightened by the men not because they are trying to make him feel fear, but because they don't convey the same insecurity that motivates other white men to instill fear in black people.
Maybe because I was tired of the slave voice. Maybe because I hated myself for having lost my friend. Maybe because the lie was burning through me. Because of all of those reasons, I said, “Because, Huck, and I hope you hear this without thinking I’m crazy or joking, you are my son.”
Huck shot out a short laugh. “What?”
“You are my son. And I am your father.”
“Why are you talking like that?”
“Are you referring to my diction or my content?”
“What? What’s content?”
“Never mind that. Your mother and I were little children together. We were friends. And we grew up. And. And you’re my son.”
Toward the end of the novel, Jim rescues Huck from drowning following a paddleboat explosion. On the bank of the river, Huck questions why Jim saved him over his friend, Norman, who was also calling out for Jim's help. In this exchange, Jim reaches a breaking point and finally drops the "slave voice" he has been faking for Huck's benefit to confess that he is Huck's father. Huck is perplexed by the surreal moment as he struggles to assimilate the fact that Jim is an eloquent, intelligent person, and that he (i.e. Huck) is partially black. In this crucial scene, the reader also understands why so many secondary characters have commented on the odd connection they perceived between Jim and Huck.
I had never seen a white man filled with such fear. The remarkable truth, however, was that it was not the pistol, but my language, the fact that I didn’t conform to his expectations, that I could read, that had so disturbed and frightened him.
When Jim returns to Miss Watson's property to discover that his wife and daughter have been sold, he becomes hellbent on reuniting with them. To find out where they were taken, Jim breaks into Judge Thatcher's home and searches his study for the bill of sale. When Thatcher wakes up, Jim uses the pistol he stole from overseer Hopkins to hold the judge at gunpoint and coerce his cooperation in helping Jim locate Sadie and Lizzie. In this passage, Jim comments on the irony of Thatcher being afraid not so much of the gun as of the fact that Jim no longer speaks in his slave voice. By revealing that he is highly intelligent, Jim shatters the judge's racist illusions about the inferiority of black people, which slave owners needed to perpetuate so that they could justify the inhumane practice of slavery.
Sadie, Lizzie and I made it north to a town we were told was in Iowa. Morris and Buck remained with us. The white people didn’t seem happy to see us, but there was a war on. It had something to do with us. The local sheriff met us in the street and regarded us suspiciously.
“Runaways?” he asked.
“We are,” I said.
“Any of you named Nigger Jim?”
I pointed to each of us. “Sadie, Lizzie, Morris, Buck.”
“And who are you?”
“I am James.”
“James what?”
“Just James.”
In the short, final chapter of James, Jim and the other escapees reach the free state of Iowa, where slavery is not legal. The sheriff correctly identifies them as runaway slaves, and questions whether any of them is "Nigger Jim," presumably because word has gotten out about Jim's murders of Hopkins and Graham, and his kidnapping of Judge Thatcher. Rather than confess, Jim identifies himself as James, the name he chose for himself when he began writing his story by pencil. With this open ending, Everett leaves the reader to wonder whether Jim will get away with the crimes he committed on his quest to free himself and his family, or if he will face punishment, therefore not finding freedom even in a so-called free state.
