Summary
James is a retelling of Mark Twain’s 1885 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Narrated in the first person and told in the past tense, James tells the story from the perspective of Jim, a young man who is enslaved as a general laborer on Miss Watson’s property.
The story opens with the novel’s protagonist and narrator, Jim, standing on the porch of his owner, Miss Watson. It is evening, and he is waiting for her to give him some cornbread. Jim sees Miss Watson’s nephew Huckleberry Finn and his friend Tom Sawyer watching him from the tall grass. Jim knows the mischievous white boys are always treating him like their plaything, so he goes along with their game and pretends to fall asleep. He listens to the boys discussing tying him up. Tom repeatedly refers to Jim as a “nigger” while loudly devising a plan to do something to him with a candle stolen from Miss Watson’s kitchen. Before he can, Miss Watson comes outside, scaring off the boys, and gives Jim his cornbread. She asks Jim if he has been in Judge Thatcher’s library because a book was taken off the shelf. Jim jokes that there’s nothing he could do with a book. Miss Watson laughs, reassured that her slave is illiterate.
Jim brings the cornbread, which is Miss Watson’s version of Sadie’s recipe, back to Sadie, his wife, and Lizzie, their nine-year-old daughter, in their shack. Sadie softly kisses James on the lips; her hands are rough from working the fields. Lizzie doesn’t like Miss Watson’s bad cooking, but James reminds her to pretend that she loves the bread if Miss Watson asks. He coaches her to say “dat be” instead of “dat sum conebread lak I neva before et,” explaining “dat be” is the “correct incorrect grammar.” Albert comes by and brings James out to the fire to chat with other enslaved men. When he notices Tom and Huck watching from the woods, James puts on his affected slave vernacular and says he dreamt about being a free man in New Orleans. The next day, Jim is repairing a loose board on the porch when Huck tells him his concerns about the amount of power Tom is exercising over their gang. Miss Watson asks Jim to look out for Huck because his father, an abusive alcoholic, is rumored to be back in town.
That evening, Jim gives a language lesson to Lizzie and six other children. He comments that mastery of language is a necessary survival tool; they can use language to ensure white folks continue to feel superior and thus maintain their own safety. He explains to the children that they must always make white people feel good, such as when pretending to believe in their white God, because “the better they feel, the safer we are.” The next day, Huck asks Jim if he believes in God. Jim lies and says he does. Huck says he thinks praying is just done to appease the people who want you to pray, like Miss Watson. After Huck walks away, Jim and Luke discuss a freed slave named McIntosh who was lynched after he got into an altercation with a police officer. Judge Lawless ruled that none of the murderers were guilty because there were too many of them to say who was responsible. The men shake their heads over the absurd injustice.
It snows in the spring, meaning Jim has to collect wood for Miss Watson. He secretly fells small trees for the slaves to also have firewood. While Jim is stacking Miss Watson’s wood, Huck asks Jim, who is light-skinned, why he is a slave if his father was likely a white man. Jim says it only matters that one of his parents is colored. Huck expresses concern about his father’s return. To reassure him, Jim pulls a ball of mule hair from his pocket and pretends it is magic and can talk. He says the hair ball says Huck is going to be safe. As Jim walks home, Luke chats with him about how Jim is worried about Huck’s abusive father. Luke says it’s white people’s business and that there is something strange about Jim’s concern for Huck. Jim laments that he’s a slave and so can’t help Huck out of his “heap of trouble.”
One day Sadie tells Jim that she overheard Miss Watson talking to Judge Thatcher: they are going to sell Jim to a man in New Orleans. Jim gathers some food in a cloth bundle and says he is going to hide out on Jackson Island; he says they’ll think he ran north. He promises to come back for Sadie and Lizzie, and swears them to secrecy. Even though it is the middle of the day, he slips into the woods and then waits in the woods until dusk, at which point he crosses the river on a log. He snags a trotline with three catfish on it and brings them with him to the island. Though freezing, he won’t risk a fire, so he covers himself in leaves and sleeps until morning. The next day, Huck rustles out of the bushes covered in blood. Huck explains that he faked his own death using pig’s blood so that his father, Judge Thatcher, and Miss Watson will believe he’s dead. Jim knows that the coincidence of his disappearance will lead them to assume he (Jim) killed Huck. He asks Huck to go back, but Huck says his father will kill him if he does. Jim lights a fire using the bottom of a glass bottle that he found ages ago; the round glass focuses the sun’s rays on some moss and twigs. They cook and eat the catfish. The sound of a cannon firing from a ferryboat catches their attention. Jim and Huck see the ferryboat with Judge Thatcher and Tom Sawyer’s aunt Polly on it. Jim explains they are firing cannonballs into the water to make any dead bodies float to the surface. For the first time, Jim slips up linguistically: he says “hilarious” in a sarcastic manner in front of Huck. Jim knows he has to keep Huck alive if he wants to stay alive himself.
Jim and Huck find a cave on the island in which it is safe to light fires. They survive on blackberries, gooseberries, and more catfish they catch on their trotline. Huck often asks questions about slavery, wondering how it is that one person can own another. Jim says it’s a good question. When a heavy rain falls, swelling the river, a house floats by. They use Huck’s canoe to inspect the temporarily stalled house, finding bacon, clothes, ink, and papers. Jim also finds a dead white man, which he does not let Huck see, commanding Huck to get back in the canoe. They get out just before the current pushes the house onward. On the island, Jim tells Huck he had never seen the man before and so doesn’t know who it was. A rattlesnake bites Jim’s hand. He slices open the wound and sucks out blood, then puts mud on it and ties it up with a rag.
While delirious, Jim recalls all the times he secretly read Judge Thatcher’s books, and how he taught other slaves to read. He hallucinates that he is speaking with Voltaire, who says that he believes all men are equal, although Africans like Jim have an inferiority that can be educated out of them. He frustrates Jim with his hypocrisy. When Jim awakes, Huck asks about the complicated words Jim said in his sleep. Jim feigns ignorance and says he must be possessed. Over a couple days, Jim recovers from his sickness. He catches a rabbit in a trap. Worried about his family, Jim convinces Huck to pay them a visit while posing as a girl in the dress they found in the floating house. When Huck paddles away, Jim retreats to the cave and excitedly writes with a sharpened stick. It is the first time he has ever had ink and paper. He writes that he will not let the condition of being a slave define him.
Alone on the island, Jim ties branches together to make a raft. He reflects to himself that Huck’s father, Pap, was the dead man in the house. He isn’t sure why he withheld the information from Huck. Huck eventually returns, whispering that they must leave because there are men nearby and Huck isn’t sure if the men are following him. They gather their meager belongings, get to the canoe, and lie down. Huck says a woman told him that there are bounties out on both Jim’s and Pap’s head because they’re both suspected of Huck’s murder. He only saw Jim’s wife and daughter from a distance, but they looked sad.
Jim and Huck make their way down the Mississippi River for a few days, traveling by night and foraging for food during the day. Huck wonders why Jim doesn’t want to just cross the river to Illinois and become a free man. Jim thinks to himself that it won’t truly free him to go there, and he’d be farther from his family. He needs money. During a storm, Jim and Huck come upon a riverboat, the Walter Scott, which has crashed. They get onboard and discover there is a band of robbers already there. After their own canoe drifts off, Jim and Huck escape the men by taking their skiff. They continue down the river. Among the robbers’ stash of stolen goods Jim finds several books: Voltaire’s Treatise on Violence, Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, and an autobiographical account of Venture Smith, The Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But Resident Above Sixty Years in the United States of America, which details Smith becoming enslaved in Guinea and later finding freedom in America. Huck is confused when Jim wants to keep the books. Jim says he can learn how to read with them.
Analysis
In the opening chapters of James, Percival Everett introduces several of the novel’s major themes: duality, self-expression, survival, dehumanization, institutional violence, and freedom. In the first paragraphs, Everett establishes the theme of duality by contrasting the thoughtful, intelligent narration of Jim—who in Mark Twain’s original novel was portrayed as uneducated, ineloquent, and gullible—with the affected “slave voice” Jim uses when speaking aloud to white people. This disjunction puts a question in the reader’s mind: If Jim can express himself eloquently, why does he choose to hide this fact?
An answer to that question arises as the first chapter continues and Everett builds on the theme of duality. When speaking to other enslaved people, Jim talks plainly and without the “slave” affectation; however, when the slaves realize Huck and Tom are watching them from the bushes, Jim code-switches to sound ignorant again. Jim also coaches his daughter, Lizzie, on how to speak with the “correct incorrect grammar” when she speaks to their master, Miss Watson. By presenting themselves as intellectually inferior in the way the slave masters presume, the slave characters conform to the dehumanizing system into which they have been born.
While the reader may initially interpret the slaves’ dual identities as merely a satirical sendup of Twain’s original novel and the stereotypical depictions therein, Everett shows how Jim and other slaves prop up white people’s delusions about their superiority as a survival strategy. As Jim explains to the enslaved children he teaches to speak improperly, they are safest when white people—who have fragile egos that must be coddled—feel good about themselves. For slaves with no human rights, legally sanctioned physical violence is a constant threat to their wellbeing.
Everett introduces the novel’s major conflict when Jim learns from Sadie that Miss Watson is going to sell him to a man in New Orleans—without Sadie and Lizzie joining. With this development, Everett shows how the institutionally violent practice of slavery further dehumanized enslaved people by breaking up their family units, treating individuals as commodities, not complex human beings with emotional needs. The theme of freedom arises as Jim immediately decides to run away rather than be legally separated from his wife and daughter.
However, in an instance of situational irony, Jim learns that Huck has also gone on the run. In Huck’s case, he has faked his own death in order to get away from the violent abuse of his alcoholic father, Pap Finn. What’s worse for Jim is that the alignment of events means people might assume Jim killed Huck. For this reason, Jim reasons that he has to keep Huck alive if he wants to prove his innocence and avoid an even worse punishment than he will get for escaping. In this way, Everett complicates Jim’s relationship to survival, conveying that Jim’s fate is tied to Huck’s. Everett also hints at the paternal feelings Jim has toward Huck, whom he protects from seeing Pap’s dead body in the house that floats by their hideout. While it may seem that Jim merely puts up with Huck, who has always been for some reason drawn to Jim, the full extent of their relationship will become apparent toward the end of the book.
