Percival Everett Wins National Book Award

Congratulations to Percival Everett for deservedly winning the National Book Award fiction prize for his novel, James. Here’s what I wrote about the book earlier this year.

James (Percival Everett)

Daniel Decatur Emmett may not be as familiar a name these days as D.W. Griffith, but he was similarly a game changer in the field of entertainment. Despite the contentions of the Birth of Nation auteur’s latter-day apologists, the pioneering, racist filmmaker was responsible for making the formerly ragtag Ku Klux Klan a modern institution, and Emmett’s brand of show business likewise had an outsize role in oppression in America. Minstrelsy may have preceded him, but it was Emmett, the P.T. Barnum of burnt cork, who founded, in 1859, the Virginia Minstrels, the first troupe wholly dedicated to the grotesque form. He was the impresario who took the deeply insulting caricatures, which had been a small part of variety stage shows, and made it the whole show. In that same year, he also composed the song “I Wish I Was in Dixie,” which would become a battle hymn of the South during the Civil War. That he was born and raised in Ohio was of little importance—there was a market to exploit and one that wasn’t confined to the ass-end side of the Mason-Dixon line. More than 80 years later, there were still minstrel shows being performed in public school assemblies in New York City, that supposedly liberal bastion, except for those semesters when “American Indians” did a “rain dance” for the children. These cheap entertainments ingrained in the national consciousness pernicious beliefs about the intelligence and deportment of Black Americans. Emmett ultimately died in 1904 in impecunious circumstances despite his brilliant career, and it was another 14 years before money was raised to place a tombstone on his unmarked grave. The inscription declared that his former Confederate fight song “now thrills the hearts of the reunited nation.” You don’t say.

Some of Emmett’s lyrics serve as the epigram for James, Percival Everett’s masterful reimagining of Mark Twain’s classic 1884 satire, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the entertainer also appears as one of the picaros who play a key role in the retelling. Everett uses his satire to not only implicate slavers and racist profiteers, but also, tacitly, Twain himself, who was a staunch abolitionist, a friend of Frederick Douglass, and someone who had more in common with Emmett than you might imagine. That’s not primarily because of the 200-plus uses of the N-word that appear in his vernacular novel about a white boy and a runaway slave trying to escape from so-called civilization aboard a raft in the Mississippi. Mainly it’s because Twain, who knew the former slave Douglass could orate or write as well as anyone in the country, created in the character of Jim the ugliest stereotype possible of slaves. Jim didn’t need to be Douglass, but he was stripped of all native wit, all basic intelligence, benighted enough that even children could easily make sport of him. Twain meant to help, to urge white Americans to see the error of their ways, but he still did some harm—it was still a minstrel show. Everett wrote this novel as a riposte, to give Jim a new voice, to turn him into James.

In Everett’s telling, James is himself a proprietor of sorts of a minstrel show. The slave has learned to read and write by sneaking into Judge Thatcher’s library by night. Apart from freedom, books are his passion—they’re another kind of liberty, and Voltaire is a particular favorite. But no one can know, as it would enrage white folks, so he speaks in fractured English as is expected of him, being sure to say “'cessity” instead of “necessity,” for instance. This deception will help keep him safe—or safer, at least. He secretly teaches the slave children on the plantation how to read but also schools them in how to torture their sentences when speaking in public. “White folks expect us to speak a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” he tells his young daughter, Lizzie, when she puzzles over the need for the duplicity.

As in Twain’s tale, James decides to run off when he learns that Miss Watson is to sell him to another plantation, permanently separating him from his wife and daughter, which coincides with Huck Finn also making a break for it to dodge his cruel, alcoholic father “Pap,” who is forever lurking on the periphery of the boy’s life, always ready to unleash his violent fury on him. Huck is basically a good if imperfect child on all matters, including the matter of race, knowing instinctually he’s been born into a bizarre and unjust world. At any rate, he’s certainly better than his friend, that relentless little shit Tom Sawyer, who cares more about entertaining himself than the welfare of others. When James and Huck happen across each other on nearby Jackson’s Island after their coincidental escapes, the man knows he’s doubly screwed. Not only is he wanted for being a runaway slave, but he’s likely also wanted for kidnapping the boy, maybe even for murdering him. If he’s captured, it’s death by fire or noose.

The pair embark on numerous adventures on the Big Muddy, trying to stay ahead of pursuers as they make their way by canoe and raft, dodging steamboats. Familiar Twain characters, like the dangerous grifters the King and the Duke, appear, complicating matters even further. James refuses to allow Huck to deposit him in Illinois, a free state, because he wants to rescue his wife and daughter. He’s also often concerned about leaving Huck to fend for himself, though the two are sometimes separated by circumstance only to fortuitously find one another yet again. Everett plays much of their hardships for the bleakest of laughs.

During a raucous scene of a religious revival in which the King and the Duke are trying to con a large crowd out of their money, the King decides to favor those assembled with a recitation of a Shakespearean passage he’s committed to memory. Unfortunately for him, it’s a Shylock soliloquy from The Merchant of Venice, and the crowd, believing him to be Jewish, is ready to riot. In another, Daniel Decatur Emmett purchases James from a man who’s temporarily taken possession of him, noticing that the escaped slave has a perfect tenor voice, something his minstrel troupe lacks after their resident tenor departed unannounced. Black performers aren’t allowed to perform in auditoriums, so James has to smear bootblack on his face before each performance. He gets help in doing so from the group’s attendant, Norman, who’s a very light-skinned Black man who’s successfully passed. As they walk down the street together, ten white men in blackface, a Black man in blackface and a Black man who’s passing for white, the runaway slave is overwhelmed by the scene. “Never has a situation seemed more absurd, surreal and ridiculous,” James says of the motley group, though he may as well be talking about the history of race in America.

Everett departs from Twain’s plotting in numerous ways. He moves forward the timeline of the narrative decades so that the action occurs on the eve of the Civil War, which eventually impacts the course of events. There’s a bold and completely believable revisionist reveal about the James-Huck relationship—the more you think about it, the more sense it makes. The so-called noble white characters receive a rewrite, with Judge Thatcher, for instance, the “decent slave owner,” being put in his proper perspective. When you’re owned, whipped or raped by another, degrees of etiquette matter little.

All the while, James clings to a stub of pencil he’s acquired, hoping to write the story of his life, desperately trying to not slip up around white people, even Huck, when he speaks, continuing his life-preserving ruse that he’s illiterate and no threat. When he’s dreaming or if he’s delusional from a snakebite, he debates aloud John Locke about ethics and such in his own voice, but he does all he can to sustain the lie. In the aftermath of the King and the Duke pretending to be pirates to separate some listeners from their money, Huck says to James, “They had to know them was lies, but they wanted to believe. What do you make of that?” James, in his false, practiced diction, answers: “Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares 'em.”•