Percival Everett reread Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 15 times before reimagining the classic in his newest novel, James. “Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere,” writes literary critic Roland Barthes. Everett is sure to have read Barthes, an expert in semiotic theory, writing a baby–savant character in the novel Glyph. Everett’s James from the titular enslaved person’s perspective echoes Barthes’ sentiment, in a retelling in which a radically different story plays out.
From reading Voltaire and debating with John Locke in dream sequences, James, an escaped enslaved person from Hannibal, Mo., is surely more emotionally complex than Jim was in Twain’s novel. James cares deeply about Huck Finn, a white boy, and uses his intellect in fascinating and unexpected ways to save both himself and Huck on numerous occasions as they run away from home for different reasons. We also learn of James and other enslaved peoples’ mastery of their own dialect, which entails speaking obsequiously to white people, so as not to garner unwanted attention and be viewed as threatening. When on their own, however, the enslaved people speak Standard American English, grasping the intricacies of conversation fully.
This literary code–switching is almost the reversal of what we see today. It’s not SAE that would most threaten white America, but rather African American Vernacular English. There are numerous examples of cops feeling threatened by a suspect’s way of speaking; for instance, many view the arrest of Sandra Bland, a Black woman pulled over for failing to signal a lane change, a result of her “Black expression” being perceived as threatening by the arresting officer. While Bland was ostensibly speaking SAE, tone and emotion can play a factor in perception. Bland later died by suicide in jail. Other more common examples include how speaking AAVE can impact testimonies in trial settings, learning in schools, and success in professional environments. Code–switching remains a survival tactic of Black existence in the United States, not just a historical phenomenon during slavery.
Everett deliberately changes Twain’s vernacular to include these nuances, explicitly relaying how enslaved people would speak to make white people feel better. If they did not, Everett makes clear that the consequences could be fatal. Twain’s masterful rendering of vernacular English is one of the reasons the book remains a time–honored classic and a window into antebellum 19th–century America. Twain writes in an explanatory note enumerating the different dialects expressed, which include “the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary ‘Pike County’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this last.” Only through many rereadings is it possible to distinguish between each of these dialects. Everett exploits Twain’s mastery, turning it on its head, to support the demographic that gets the least nuanced treatment: enslaved people. In fact, as early as 1957 and more explicitly in 1982, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called for the removal of Huckleberry Finn from the classroom due to its treatment of Black characters.
Everett’s language is not the only time he appeals to modern sensibilities while simultaneously keeping a fidelity to Huckleberry Finn. In the original, Jim would spend large chunks of the narrative simply waiting by a raft, or in the woods. Twain would develop Huckleberry’s adventures, leaving Jim as an auxiliary character. In James, these swaths are instead colored with exciting and terrifying adventures of the escaped enslaved person. The hard truths that serve as the backdrop to the happy satirical experience of Huckleberry Finn for the white reader, and the truths that in fact allow for such an experience (at the behest of characters like Jim), are illuminated in the process.
During some of these tribulations, white–passing individuals—those who can claim ancestry from Africans brought over on slave ships, but appear white to the eye—emerge. Norman, an escaped enslaved person who has phenotypically white features, acts as James’s owner, because an enslaved person without an owner is soon to be caught. They dream up schemes of raising money to buy their families, some of which include Norman selling James into slavery and then later helping him escape. When Norman eventually dies in a boat crash, it’s because James was confronted with a hellish philosophical choice: to save his friend, or Huck Finn. He chooses Huck Finn, revealing to the white boy that he was not in fact white, as he had been led to believe his whole life. Rather, Huck Finn was James’s son, and “Pap Finn” was merely his stepfather.
A feminist rendering of the Trojan War. A Jane Eyre prequel from the perspective of a Creole heiress. A modern retelling of Frankenstein in a cryonics facility, featuring a transgender physician and an AI expert. Albert Camus’ The Stranger from the perspective of the brother of “the Arab.” Modern reimaginings of classics are becoming classics themselves.
A common move in all of these novels is to undermine the power hierarchy of the original, subverting the racist, sexist, and xenophobic gaze and giving back a voice to marginalized characters. By focusing on these characters, the author is effectively saying that a different story is possible and that the stories we know and love are not immune to a critical lens.
In a way, this corresponds to what Barthes has already noted. Without rereading—and rewriting, for that matter—we are doomed to read the same story everywhere. Instead of intellectualizing a story, analyzing its language, structure, and context, with all due fidelity to the original author–turned–saint, writers are being creatively irreverent. And the readers are here for this iconoclasm.
Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, a modernization of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, was named one of the ten best books of 2022. The popular social media website Goodreads has a list of over 1,000 classic retellings, accompanied by ratings of each work. There are even lists of retellings specific to one work: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier has 12 renditions (and counting).
One would be misled, however, to view reimaginings as simply “retellings.” It is not the same story being retold. Authors are bringing their own creative flair and literary genius to the table. One of the best parts about reading James and Huckleberry Finn side by side wasn’t the twists that Everett made to the original narrative, but rather the altogether novel augmentations that seem to come out of nowhere. For example, James is bought by a minstrel group that performs in blackface for white folk. The problem is that James is already Black; he must live in fear that his mask will not be seen as too authentic, that his skin and hair underneath are seen as merely good props, and that his code–switching is impeccable. Given the recent awareness brought to the problematic nature of minstrel shows, Everett throws a highly successful curveball, drawing out the intricacies of what it means to present a certain way, and how others react to that presentation.
As readers grapple with the sometimes shocking frequency of the n–word in Twain’s version, it is hard to reread the classic without some sort of remedy for this linguistic violence. James provides a remedy, but also a new narrative in its own right. This story, as it turns out, is mostly about storytelling itself, and the power of having one’s own story.
In Huckleberry Finn, it is not Jim who can read, but Huckleberry. In Everett’s James, the roles are reversed: James is a prolific reader and aspiring writer. He has read everything from European classics to narratives by enslaved people, and aches to get his own story in writing. It is not a wish for him but a necessity. “My interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on this page can mean anything at all. If they can have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning,” writes James. He risks his life and the lives of others to procure books, a notebook, and a pencil (indeed, an enslaved person is lynched over the stolen pencil). To the white public, it is not the fact that James has murdered that is the most concerning—it is his intelligence, manner of speaking, and ability to read and write.
Everett moves the narrative up to the Civil War, making the issue of slavery even more at the forefront of the minds of non–Black people. It is noted that no matter the good intentions of the Union, the freeing of enslaved people is only an “incidental premise and would be an incidental result.” This cold cynicism looks good on James: he turns into a cool runaway, finding no qualms with upsetting white people and risking life and limb in the process. For James, no life is better than enslaved abuse, and clawing words out from the abyss of language is better than perpetually waiting for an opportunity to speak.
Reading becomes the ultimate private affair and step to freedom, where no one can tell if the linguistic signs have any meaning to the reader, where enslaved people in particular can feel an autonomous power hitherto unexperienced, perhaps save the subversive code–switching with each other. Writing becomes an actualization inseparable from this freedom garnered by reading and is the fulfillment of this freedom in a new modality. It is in this sense that as soon as James—stolen property himself—writes “My name is James” on a stolen notebook; etching laboriously with a stolen nub of a pencil, he steals back himself and his agency. He reclaims himself regardless of the “enlightened” racism of Locke and Voltaire, from the white people who know him as Jim, from the prejudices of the reader, and from Twain himself.
