Angelus News | September 6, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 18

humorous observer of men and events.
Jim, the runaway slave who shares the
adventures of the outcast boy, was “the
submissive sufferer from them; and
they are equal in dignity.”
I don’t know if Everett had Eliot’s
words in mind when he wrote his
novel “James,” but his work brilliantly
turns that perception of Jim, the slave,
inside out. In Twain’s book, Jim is a
noble soul who suffers from the cruelty
of slavery and its enormous injustice as
a kind of holy innocent, wise but also
superstitious and vulnerable.
In Everett’s book, the slightly renamed
“James” is a Voltairean atheist
who disguises his intelligence for fear
of white punishment, even speaking
a dialect only in the presence of the
“massas,” but capable of commenting
on both proleptic and dramatic irony.
Everett relies on these ironies to craft
a novel that shadows some of Twain’s
original plot but also fearlessly changes
its direction in many respects.
Like Eliot, I had never read “Tom
Sawyer” or “Huckleberry Finn” as
a child. So, when I first read that
“James” had been nominated for
Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize, I decided
to read the two originals before
trying Everett. I found James a very
creative sequel to Twain’s books.
Everett makes the slave Jim a
clandestine intellectual, iconoclastic
and even atheistic. It is Jim as Twain
AMAZON
himself, who styled himself an atheist.
Jim has secretly taught himself to read
and write and speaks perfect grammar
except when he talks to white people.
He teaches his children how to
speak “slave” to their masters. He has
dreamlike encounters with Voltaire,
whose “Candide” he read, and with
John Locke the philosopher. The irony
in the novel flows like the mighty Mississippi
River, which is the constant
backdrop to the two main characters as
they fight for their survival in a world
that conspires against justice and truth.
The book’s presentation of the white
culture is heavy-going sometimes. “After
being cruel, the most notable white
attribute was gullibility,” Jim comments
at one point. But at another, he
says: “Bad as whites were, they had no
monopoly on duplicity, dishonestly
or perfidy,” something not readily
apparent from the novel, except for the
boy Huck, whom the author makes
exceptional in another way I will not
spoil for you.
I was also taken aback by James’
dismissal of Christianity in the book
and his rejection of the Bible. Everett
is obviously an unbeliever, like Twain
himself, but some of his theological
commentary reminded me of the
Marcusian wannabe Marxist radicals
of the ’60s. Ironically, while I was
reading and disapproving of some of
the ideas of the book, I came across
an article about Archbishop Augustine
Akubeze of Benin City in Nigeria, and
his criticism of the presentation of “the
white man’s God” that some missionaries
had given to Christianity. Such
portrayals underscore the modern
need to be introduced to true Christianity,
free of some cultural accretions
that contradicted its message, like the
justification of slavery by people who
claimed to be Christians.
The ending of the original “Huckleberry
Finn” has disappointed critics in
the past. Tom Sawyer appears suddenly
to insist on rescuing Jim from his captivity
with tropes from the great escapes
of adventure literature, especially inspired
by Dumas’ “The Count of Monte
Cristo.” Everett’s ending is not as
“I hope that I have written the novel that Twain
did not and also could not have written,” said Percival
Everett in an interview with the Booker Prize
Foundation.
tedious but is also problematic for me:
We know that Huck has the money to
buy Jim and his family freedom, but
somehow that is completely overlooked
and not regarded as a possibility.
Still, for me the experience of reading
“James” was an example of what Francis
means by the value of “imaginative
fiction.” In my seminary library we had
a painting on the ceiling that included
an oval with the words Litteratura,
Speculum Vitae (“Literature, Mirror
of Life” in Latin). In his letter, Francis
takes the visual metaphor a step further
by quoting French writer Marcel
Proust, who said literature is not a mirror
but more like a telescope, making
what is far away seem close by.
That is not a bad description of what
Everett does in presenting a different
view of the world that Twain had
painted before him. “James’ ” subtlety
in some sections is a marvel of creative
writing (which reading Twain’s
originals made me appreciate more). I
will never think the same again about
Twain’s achievement in “Huckleberry
Finn” or about the dark reality of
slavery that was its background.
T. S. Eliot said Twain never grew up
and remained a boy his whole life.
Because of the intensity of his writing,
and its anger, I wonder if Everett was
ever just a boy. Both writers stretch
us and can make us grow. Which is
always, as the Holy Father insists in his
letter, a grace.
Msgr. Richard Antall is pastor of
Holy Name Church in Cleveland,
Ohio, and the author of several books,
including the novel “The X-mas Files”
(Atmosphere Press, $17.99). He served
as a missionary priest in El Salvador for
more than 20 years.
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