Percival Everett, _James_

 QUITE A FEW Black American novelist have set novels during the slavery era, but they typically do not write them in the straight literary realism mode typical of most historical fiction. That is, there is usually some kind of curveball, some kind of changeup, something utterly un-Michener-esque. 

Consider a few examples. Toni Morrison's Beloved: ghosts and the supernatural. Octavia Butler's Kindred: time travel. Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad: alternative-universe history. Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale: the plot takes its template from a Buddhist fable. Edward Jones's The Known World is stylistically mainstream, but the twist there is that it is about a Black owner of Black slaves. 

Percival Everett has now turned his hand to the novel of American enslavement, and he too has a trick pitch for us. Deft post-modernist that he is, he retells Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, the runaway slave with whom Huck takes a raft down the Mississippi River.

Everett is not the first writer to do this, actually; "Rivers," a short story in John Keene's collection Counternarratives, also took up Huckleberry Finn from Jim's perspective, with a surprising conclusion in which Jim, who had joined the Union Army, ended up on a battlefield facing Huck, who had joined the Confederate Army. (There's also a Robert Coover take, which I haven't read, so I don't know whether or how he deals with Jim.)

That Jim becomes James in Everett's novel is part of one of the novel's more effective conceits. The way Jim and the other Blacks speak in Huckleberry Finn (or in Uncle Tom's Cabin or any other white writer's attempt at southern Black vernacular) turns out to be a ruse, a manner of speech they adopt whenever white people are around so as to keep white anxiety tamped down. Among themselves, they speak in standard American English. 

Everett's James is a much more complex proposition than Twain's Jim, it's almost needless to say, much more mindful of how to manage both his escape and Huck and desperate to get his wife and daughter free. He is a reader, a thinker, and a writer, the novel written with a pencil he obtained at a terrible cost to the  fellow slave who found it for him, in a notebook he lifted from Dan Emmett, the blackface vaudevillian who wrote "Dixie."

Everett dispenses utterly with Twain's ending, in which Jim winds up at the mercy of Tom Sawyer's pulp-fed imagination--an ending whose aesthetic and moral flaws Toni Morrison took a sledgehammer to in Playing in the Dark. Instead, James winds up in a face-to-face with the man who enslaved him, with a highly satisfactory outcome.

James was published by Doubleday, which I guess means the critical praise given to The Trees and to the film based on Erasure (Oscar nominee American Fiction) has made Everett welcome in the big-time publishing world. Good for him, I thought, but I was deeply gladdened  to see that in his acknowledgements he gives an eloquent shout-out to his longtime publisher Graywolf.  Long may you run, Graywolf. You may have lost one great writer to the bigtime world, but I bet you know where to find some more.