Not Another Reboot

It’s hard not to notice all the reboots in our popular culture. Sequels, prequels, origin stories, and updates to books, films, adaptations, musicals and music are everywhere and sometimes I wonder if there are not new ideas, but just a marketplace intent on making money by sticking with something that has already been financially successful.

Then again, some ideas need an update. Every time I quote or read primary sources from the past, there are terms, ideas, assumptions that are, at worst, racist/classist/homophobic/sexist, etc. and at best, outdated. Mark Twain penned Huckleberry Finn in 1884 and used the vernacular of his day to create the 1840s setting for his novel.

Huck Finn is attempting to live a respectable life in Saint Petersburg, MO (a slave state), adopted by the Widow Douglas, but when his father comes back to town and reclaims his son, Huck is subjected to drunken beatings and abuse. Huck decides to escape and fakes his death by killing a pig and using the blood to make a memorable crime scene. While hiding on an island on the Mississippi River, Huck encounters Jim, a slave from Saint Petersburg, who is escaping from his owner after hearing her plans to sell him to a terrible new owner down the river and separating him from his wife and daughter. Many adventures follow, complicated by the appearance of Huck, a white boy that people are searching for, and an escaped slave, Jim, who has a price on his head.

Percival Everett wrote the novel, James, in the voice of Jim. The story follows Jim, a slave, as he escapes but also tries to figure out how to reunite with his family and save them from slavery. The twist is that Jim finds Huckleberry Finn following him. But in Everett’s novel, Jim’s name is James, and Jim uses his real name, James, as his claim to humanity and his own identity. This is not some adventure for James, and every event is dangerous. “I was as much scared as angry, but where does a slave put anger? We could be angry with one another; we were human. But the real sources of our rage had to go without address, swallowed, repressed. They were going to rip my family apart and send me to New Orleans, where I would be even farther from freedom and would probably never see my family again.”

James inhabits a world full of dualities and nuance that he must constantly read and understand correctly in order to survive. James must speak and act one way around white people, and another way around other slaves.

I loved all the historical gems throughout the novel, including the Virigina Minstrels traveling minstrel show, but the real gift of the story was the code switching that James must do. In Judge Thatcher’s library, James notes, “I had wondered every time I sneaked in there what white people would do to a slave who had learned how to read. What would they do to a slave who had taught the other slaves to read? What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenuse was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled?” James writes his story, and understands he can be killed for having a pencil on his person.

As James is educating the children how to read and write, but also how to speak like a slave so that the white people felt better, he reminds them:
“There might be some higher power, children, but it’s not their white God. However, the more you talk about God and Jesus and heaven and hell, the better they feel,”
The children said together, “And the better they feel, the safer we are.”
“February, translate that.”
“Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.”
“Nice.”

Percival Everett’s James is not a reboot. It is an original novel that stands on its own brilliance.

Photo by Pete Nuij on Unsplash