Percival Everett's James
A Story of Double Consciousness and Dignity
I received Percival Everett’s latest book, James, for Christmas. It’s a compelling read for a number of reasons. I really enjoyed the Jeffrey Wright movie, American Fiction, which based on Everett’s Erasure.
The title character of James is the enslaved Jim, who was the property of Miss Watson (the Widow Douglas’ sister). In a manner not unlike Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead (another of my favorite movies), it tells the Huckleberry Finn story from Jim’s perspective. It provides his backstory, explores his thinking on events, and tells the story of what happened when Huck’s and Jim’s stories separate.
The story picks up in the second chapter of Huckleberry Finn1, when Huck and Tom Sawyer are playing tricks on a resting Jim. Jim plays along with the boys and we read his slave dialect. Here is how Twain explains the dialect of both Jim and Huck in the front matter of his book.
In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guesswork, but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
We learn a number of significant facts in the second chapter of James. First, Jim speaks normal English when not in the presence of white people as do others in his slave community. Second, Jim can not only read and write, but has read a number of Enlightenment thinkers while in Judge Douglass’ library. Third, he has a wife and daughter and is deeply concerned about how the chattel slave economy is likely to separate the family. Fourth, he is a leader who is teaching his community how to properly fit into the expectations of the white world.
When reading this, I found myself remembering James Michener’s The Covenant, a compelling story of South Africa. Early in his massive tome that covered centuries, he describes the early civilization in Zimbabwe and how it was years beyond what was going on in Europe at the time. It was a real-life Wakanda without the Vibranium. But the default assumptions of those later European settlers was that these were uneducated savages.
Jim is constantly managing the conflict between who he knows himself to be with what he must be to survive. He experiences what W.E.B. DuBois called “double-consciousness”.
[T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa; he does not wish to bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he believes — foolishly, perhaps, but fervently — that Negro blood has yet a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without losing the opportunity of self-development.
This describes Jim’s struggle throughout the book. He must be constantly on guard to not fall out of dialect, to hide his notebook and pencil, and to always show proper deference to the most disreputable white folks (like the Duke and the Dauphin).
As Jim is struggling to survive during his non-Huck time, he is trying to make enough money to get back home to rescue his family and lead them to freedom. He takes on what work he can get while constantly worrying he will be found out and sold if not killed.2
One of these jobs involves a conception of race so extreme that it borders on what you could call “triple consciousness”. A traveling minstrel group overhears Jim singing and says they will pay him to travel with the group. One member of the group is actually a light-skinned black who is passing. Yet for every performance, he puts on blackface so he can pretend to be what the audience wants.
For Jim, the transformation is even more complicated. They have to put one some white color, especially around his eyes, and then put blackface over his black skin so that he doesn’t upset the crowd. Jim winds up in possession of the group leader’s notebook with the minstrel songs in it. That Everett includes these songs in the front matter of James suggests that this was especially problematic for Jim.
Jim’s story is a struggle for dignity, for recognition on his own terms. It is hard work and not without pain. In the end, he and the family make it to free Iowa. He tells the people who confront them that he doesn’t know anyone named n***** Jim, but that his name is James.
While not a book about contemporary racial identity, it did cause me to think a lot about the assumptions we make in society. How often do people comment that a certain person of color is “well-spoken” or “mathematically adept” or “properly behaved”. The man James would ask us to examine our default assumptions. Why should we be surprised? The other person didn’t change for us. They just weren’t adhering to our preconceptions. And that’s our problem, not their’s.
I’m not sure I’ve ever read all of Huckleberry Finn. Mostly I didn’t want to given what I knew about how Jim was portrayed. But I did get an online copy from the library so I could compare.
Jim runs away after Huck’s feigned death because he is sure that everyone would blame him for the murder and he would be sold or hanged.