Tell the Story With Your Ears
A review of 'James' by Percival Everett — a novel born from listening.
Young George — who James meets in Illinois where the infamous rivalry between the white families of Grangerfords and Shepherdsons plays out, and who steals a pencil for James to write with — tells him,
“Tell the story with your ears. Listen.”
Percival Everett’s Booker-nominated James (2024) is a novel born from this listening. It is storytelling with one’s ears — a record of brutal punishment for speaking in the tongue of white people, for reading, for daring to narrate one’s story, and for engaging with words; and a record of putting pen to paper regardless.
In this profound retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) — “the original Great American Novel” about the ‘adventures’ of Huck and Jim on the Mississippi River — James listens and tells his story.
He wants to be certain that his first words are his own. He writes,
“I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name… my interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on this page can mean anything at all. If they can have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning.”
In a later entry, he writes,
“My name is James. I wish I could tell my story with a sense of history as much as industry.”
James — who is the missing ‘Jim’ of large parts of Huckleberry Finn — is written in by Everett in this retelling.
James recognises the power of language and how safe movement through the world depends on its mastery, on fluency. This, for a slave, means code-switching. While narrating the story of how witches sent him to New Orleans — a cover-up for the joke that Tom Sawyer and Huck play on him — James changes his diction to alert the others in the kitchen of the white boys’ presence. He remarks,
“So, my performance for the boys became a frame for my story.”
The performative is also part of Tom’s storytelling, but James’ storytelling is unlike Tom’s. Tom, as Twain writes in Huckleberry Finn, would “call it an adventure”. As a counter-view, James says of Huck at one point —
“The boy was highly excited by the adventure of it all. I admired that, was envious of it… to be able to feel that in a world without fear of being hanged to death, or worse.”
James’ storytelling is also unlike Huck’s storytelling or rather Twain’s storytelling of Huck’s ‘moral conundrum’ at possibly aiding a ‘runaway slave’ who then becomes his friend. There is far too much at stake for James — his life and freedom and that of his wife and child, not to mention the burden of listening and telling, of “waiting for some tear in the invisible [historical] curtain.”
James has read what the ‘great’ thinkers have to say about him, and how they justify the institution of slavery, through the books at Judge Thatcher’s library — another kind of storytelling in the novel that James must counter. He has imagined conversations with the likes of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Locke, and says,
“How strange a world, how strange an existence, that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality… that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree.”
His story is an attempt to make this argument for himself —
“…I wrote to catch up with my own story, wondering all the while if that was even possible.”
Ann Patchett sums it up beautifully, in my opinion —
“Percival Everett delivers a powerful, necessary corrective to both literature and history.”
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