James, by Percival Everett, is the stuff of Indiana Jones

Mantle, £20

“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter.” So begins Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which the eponymous hero is allowed to tell his own story. Huck Finn is perhaps the most famous and critically celebrated of all literary sequels.

Some folk – myself included – would even go so far as to say it is the origin of modern American literature, the moment when American writers began to cast aside the often restrictive influence of European literature and found its own voice and, in its author Mark Twain, a champion worth cheering.

It takes courage, therefore, to do what Percival Everett has done in his latest novel. James, we are told, is a “reimagining” of Huck Finn, but it is much more than that. While it follows to a certain degree the narrative of Twain’s masterpiece, it frequently veers off course, like the mighty Mississippi in spate.

Here, the pen – or, more accurately, the pencil – has been given to Jim, as we first know him. Having taught himself to read and write by sneaking into Judge Thatcher’s library, Jim is much more intelligent than his fellow slaves and those who lord over him. In his dreams he converses with Voltaire and John Locke and has read Rousseau’s Treatise on Tolerance as well as memoirs by other slaves. As such, he is a threat to his so-called masters.

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He is also somewhat older than he appears to be in Twain’s novel. Old enough at least to have a wife and child and perhaps to be the father of a teenager. His owner is Miss Watson who, as Huck says, has “got Jesus Christ on the brain.”

Slavery, need we be reminded, was excused by countless avowed Christians who used the Bible to justify it. To them, black people were not human beings, merely chattels to be bought and sold – and whipped, raped and strung up – as if it was their God-given right.

“White people try to tell us that everything will be just fine when we go to heaven,” a fellow slave who goes by the name of Easter, tells Jim. “My question is, Will they be there? If so, I might make other arrangements.”

Change, however, is coming, albeit at a glacial pace. The year is 1861, which marked the outbreak of the American Civil War when the southern states left its northern counterparts over their determination to abolish slavery.

In Hannibal, Missouri, though, home to Huck and Jim, that is an unimaginable prospect. In this ignorant and inglorious backwater, “There was nothing that irritated white men more than a couple of slaves laughing.”

When Jim discovers that he is to be separated from his wife and daughter and sold to a man in New Orleans, he decides to make a run for it. Soon he is joined by Huck who has improvised his own death in order to escape the drunken and abusive man he knows as his father. The Mississippi, they hope, will carry them to safety and freedom, whereafter James intends to find the means to be reunited with his family.

Mark Twain (Image: free)

The journey is the stuff of Indiana Jones and makes for a thrilling read. The river, seemingly so benign, is a gravy-coloured graveyard to many, including a boat called ‘Walter Scott’, of whom Jim, for all his reading, has never heard.

Scott, Mark Twain quite seriously reckoned, was responsible for the civil war because of the malign effect his “Middle-Age” romances had “in making Southern character”. Later, Huck and Jim alight on a hell hole called Edina where slavers breed slaves as they might turkeys for Thanksgiving. It may be the kind of homage the Scottish capital would rather not have but it is a reminder of slavery’s serpentine roots.

Everett, though, is adept at alluding to the trade’s evil without ever feeling the need dwell luridly on it. All whites are complicit, even elderly women who otherwise wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Slavery has infected every aspect of southern life.

In this society black people may be seen but are never heard. A black man may not talk to a white women, may not even look her in the eye. A young boy is flogged and hanged for stealing the pencil which Jim will use to bear witness. A fifteen year-old girl is routinely raped. When a black man is burned alive a judge tells the grand jury that his killers can’t be indicted because there were several of them: “So if enough people do it, it’s not a crime.”

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That pertains, too, to slavery. Without slaves society was unable to function. Everett’s novel abounds in satire and irony, most deliciously when Jim encounters Daniel Decatur Emmett, who composed ‘Dixie’, the South’s unofficial anthem. In need of a tenor for his troupe, the infamous Virginia Minstrels, for which white performers had their faces painted black, Emmett enlists Jim, though he too must be camouflaged. “The new thing,” he’s told, “is white folks painting themselves and making fun of us to entertain each other.”

Language – its power, potency and politicization – is the means by which Jim will become James. As Jim, he is a slave talker, a user of “suhs and yeowzas”, which he must employ in the presence of whites. With his own people, though, he is known as James and speaks plain English. Occasionally, he slips from one language into another, which is enough of an excuse for whites to abuse him. If he is to survive he must watch his tongue.

It is a situation worthy of Kafka and one that shows Everett to be a writer of immense stature. Like Kafka, he is capable at once of being scarily funny and chillingly serious. To my chagrin, James is the first of his more than twenty novels I have read. It will not be the last; eight have recently been released in paperback. Last year his novel Erasure was filmed as American Fiction. It seems that at the age of 67, Perceval Everett, who is himself of slave ancestry, is finally receiving the recognition he so obviously deserves.