By Declan Fry
FICTION
James
Percival Everett
Mantle, $34.99
Percival Everett is prolific: 24 novels, 10 collections of poetry and short fiction, a children’s book. Of the 35 titles he has published, I have personally read the following number: zero.
I mean, I have read The Trees. And Erasure. Dr No. I Am Not Sidney Poitier. But I never quite felt as though I read them. Not for nothing is Everett’s Poitier title prefaced by negation: there is a mystery to his refusals and retellings, his satires and retrievals. From obliteration, something that never previously existed – and which might never exist again – is born.
Percival Everett’s James is a tremendously funny novel.Credit: Getty
James recreates Twain’s famous 1884 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s point of view. Adopting the voice of the runaway slave who joins Huck on his perilous journey along the Mississippi River, he turns Twain’s tale into the story of a slave’s act of self-creation.
James by Percival Everett.
In the antebellum South, black lives are thwarted before they can begin. Slaveholders feast upon the brains of the living black. Manufacturing death in life, they are impervious both to shame and to being stopped – unless you can manage a direct hit to their prefrontal cortex (something a slave attempts at their peril).
Lifting the veil of white ignorance is liable to get you into trouble: when Jim/James and his friends are relaxing, James hears white men watching them from the bushes and code-switches from standard English to a kind of parody of black speech designed to placate his fugitive white audience. “I thinks I hears one dem demons in the bushes right naw. Somebody gives me a torch so I kin set dis brush alight. Witches and demons don’t lak no fires burnin’ all round ’em.”
The joke is serious, and so is the threat. The white boys are witches. The violence and human waste of the plantation, whose contemporary manifestation is the carceral system, embodies a kind of sorcery. It renders viable the equation: to be white is to be human.
To escape masters whose mastery is predicated on being fooled, the slaves play dumb not because of a desire to exclude but to protect one’s community. James fakes it to make it, shielding both himself and Huck, the white boy who recognises, however fleetingly, the violence of race and segregation.
For Everett, double negatives negate nothing. (Little wonder that his last novel, Dr No, features a professor whose name, Wala Kitu, adopts the words for “nothing” in Tagalog and Swahili, respectively.) James instructs the children of the corn during one of his language lessons, “Never address any subject directly when talking to another slave.” The negation of enslavement might be, if not erased, then at least ameliorated. Because when the white population does not feel superior it is the slave, not they, who suffer. Code-switching is survival. As Nine Inch Nails sang: “I have found you can find happiness in slavery.”
Just as Everett reverses zombification and brings Jim to life, his code-switchers and language players rearrange grammar, making light work of correct and incorrect, the false economies of either/or. At one point, Jim invites his daughter Lizzie to “Try ?dat be’ [...] That would be the correct incorrect grammar.”
“[W]e must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble,” Lizzie observes – including the trouble they most fear naming. Because, as African-American abolitionist and escaped slave Frederick Douglass understood, to be black and literate is to become monstrous, a Frankenstein’s creature who has escaped the necromancy of white wizards and violation occultists for liberation, book in hand. (Tellingly, Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic arrived a few decades before Twain’s/Jim’s story, and not too long after the advent of slavery in the United States.)
Real zombies, it seems, never realise that they are undead. The greater trick is to accept them for what they seem to be, rather than realising their endless storytelling potential. Little wonder Everett is so prolific: he invites readers to imagine things otherwise; to see language, narrative, character not as stable but tricky, especially where the mastery of the slaveholders imprisons both slave and slaveholder alike.
James is a tremendously funny novel, and Everett never segregates things; even his minor characters (to paraphrase Leonard Cohen) are the major lift. They reveal. They speak. They refuse the silence of living death.
At one point James wonders, “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?” Near the end of Everett’s masterful satire he provides, by way of affirmation, his own answer: “I would reconstruct the story I had begun, the story I kept beginning, until I had a story.”
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