Gulp Fiction, or Into The Missouri-verse: On Percival Everett’s “James”
Percival Everett | James: A Novel | Doubleday | March 2024 | 302 Pages
Catfish are omnivores. Mostly, they gobble worms, snakes, and shellfish, but are not averse to rodents and small fowl. They are the rare freshwater species of fish who can sustain an eat-or-be-eaten reciprocity with many of their predators. A single catfish can be bigger than a whole family of river otters. Mark Twain claims, “I have seen a Mississippi catfish that was more than six feet long, and weighed two hundred and fifty pounds.” He calls it “the river’s roaring demon.” Of course, you know, consider the source. But several confirmed catches from this decade have weighed over 120 pounds.
The catfish’s omnivorousness can be used against it. A diver stands chin-deep near an embankment, preferably someplace where catfish are likely to not only feed, but also spawn. Remaining otherwise perfectly still, the diver submerges an arm in the mud, then wiggles their fingers until they protrude from the soil, imitating as best they can a clew of worms emerging from the eroding earth. Just as the catfish bites down on this amuse-bouche, the diver punches into the fish’s open throat, and prepares for a fight to the death. As Burkhard Bilger puts it, “When clamped on your arm, catfish have an unfortunate tendency to bear down and spin.” A large, healthy, well-rested cat can easily drown even a strong swimmer.
An Irish trader described this method of “Leave No Trace” fishing as popular amongst the Chickasaw communities he followed in the 1740s. It remains one of the most environmentally friendly, but also most stigmatized, methods of fishing, outlawed in thirty-three states, including Ohio and, since 1919, Missouri, where the legislature has so far resisted organized campaigns for legalization. Practiced mostly by remote, marginalized populations, Mark Morgan suggests, in his study of the social hierarchies of fishing, “The Social Hierarchy of Fishing” (Human Dimensions of Wildlife, Vol. 11, No. 5) it may be viewed as “folk crime.”
What came to be known as dogging among the settler communities in Missouri and Kentucky is “scary business,” as the eponymous narrator of Percival Everett’s James acknowledges. But believing himself to be pursued by lynch-mobs, his fugitive status advertised on posters throughout the region, James can come up with no less-frightening means of feeding himself and his child. “It was a terrible feeling,” he says, upon successfully dogging his first cat, “made worse by the fact that when I pulled back I was also sucked forward, the mouth now surrounding my forearm.”
The catfish dives and twists, dragging James under. His life flashes. He sees the faces of fellow fugitives, lost in flight, and of the family whose freedom he plans to purchase or, failing that, to have an abolitionist “steal.” He has a hallucinatory conversation with John Locke. Not his first. But somehow he makes his way to shallow water, and collapses on the bank, face to face with the fifty-pound channel cat who must remain James’ appendage until Huckleberry Finn forces it to unclamp by beating the life out of it, rather incompetently, with a tree branch.
In 1996, scientists discovered what doggers had long known, that catfish slime contains “60 different proteins that are fundamental agents of wound healing in humans.” Anti-inflammatories, bacteria blockers, coagulants, and even “enzymes that accelerate cell division and the formation of new tissue.” The upside of tussling with a monster catfish is that, if you win, you can cure the inevitable cuts, abrasions, and punctures from the poisonous spines by salving them with the magic mucus of your vanquished foe.
Baptized in the belly of the beast, James withdraws what has recently become his writing hand and will soon become his gun hand. He has in rapid succession two entirely new affective experiences: satiation and rage. His hunger is finally quelled by an unprecedented abundance of meat. “I overate,” he says, “as I saw myself owing it to the fish.” And, post-prandium, for the first time in his life, he finds himself “too angry to entertain anyone else’s thoughts.” As he puts it, “It was certainly not a new emotion, but the range, the scope, the direction of it, was entirely novel and unfamiliar."
The river’s roaring demon has passed its healing tonics, its endurance, its omnivorousness, and its capacity for violence, as well as its flesh, into the red right hand of self-emancipated man. Emerging from the muddy waters, our narrator is transformed into a spirit of vengeance. As he will say in the novel’s climactic scene, subtly glossing The Fire Next Time, and unmistakably echoing Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules Winnfield in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction: “I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night. I am a sign. I am your future. I am James.”
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One way of depicting and defending Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, increasingly popular during the period of its hypercanonization which coincides with the Cold War, is as the slow moral epiphany of a white boy which mimics the (alleged) triumph of the United States over systemic racial oppression. The thrust of this popular reading, encountered by nearly everybody who set foot in a US school during the second half of the twentieth century, is succinctly summarized by the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, “Huck sees that Jim is a human being, and that Jim deserves to be free. Because of that, we know that Huck deserves our love. And so does America.”
This vapid, lazy, feckless interpretation of Twain’s novel is dispensed with almost instantly in Percival Everett’s James. Huck cannot discover James’ humanity nor the injustice of enslavement, because he intuitively recognizes both, and so Huck cannot become an avatar of young America heroically overcoming racial prejudice, entitled to the forgiveness, admiration, and even gratitude of the formerly enslaved. It is the first of the many critical controversies surrounding the source text which Everett is going to engage, and sometimes dispel, through his complex work of adaptation.
As Toni Morrison writes in the final lines of her 1996 introduction to the Oxford edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “For a hundred years, the argument that this novel is has been identified, reidentified, examined, waged and advanced. What it cannot be is dismissed.” For Morrison, Huckleberry Finn has become inextricable from its reception, from the mega-corpus of criticism which now surrounds it. Rather than bemoaning the harm critics have done in their ceaseless, often contradictory interpreting, Morrison makes the inextricability of the creative and critical acts the very definition of “classic literature.” The hypercanonical novel is like a monster catfish, omnivorous and impervious, metabolizing everything in its path, predators and all, a roaring river demon growing ever stronger.
Nowhere is the fusion of criticism and creative writing more literal than in the work of adaptation. In James, an adaptation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, every narrative choice Everett makes is always already a commentary upon Twain’s novel. And, as source text, it is evident that Everett accepts Morrison’s definition. He’s read the criticism. James will be many things to many readers, among them a series of position statements in Twain Studies which will be instantly recognizable to scholars in the field, but even to many who have read critical editions of the novel or encountered it as students through the pedagogical practice of “teaching the conflicts” as advocated by Gerald Graff. In several cases, questions raised by living critics become crucial catalysts for Everett’s narrative.
For example, in an essay for Harper’s in 1996, Jane Smiley questions the centrality of Huckleberry Finn in American life and letters. “There is more to be learned about the American character from its canonization than through its canonization,” she writes, and, in principle, I heartily agree. I have elsewhere described this process as “The Twain Doctrine.” Jonathan Arac lays out the specific role of Huck Finn in that process of indoctrination and “idolatry.” The novel “had first to be understood as literary, and then its literary value had to be nationalized.” This was a process of “subordinating literature to an America so conceived as to disarm political criticism.”
But Smiley’s essay still suffers from the “white boy redeemed” thesis which underwrote hypercanonization, not because she endorses it, but because the only alternative she imagines is a kind of photo-negative in which everything claimed by architects and acolytes of “The Twain Doctrine” is actually the inverse, and all the alternative interpretations which Smiley rightly says “were lost in the shuffle of propaganda” continue to be ignored. We are left with basically two choices: indoctrination or cancellation. Smiley says, in no uncertain terms, “The villain here is Mark Twain.”
Smiley’s argument hinges on what she sees as a gotcha moment which proves that “neither Huck nor Twain takes Jim’s desire for freedom at all seriously.” To her, they never adequately consider forgoing the romance of raft and river to simply cross over to the free state of Illinois from Jackson Island. “Twain’s moral failure,” Smiley says, “is never even to account for their choice to go down the river rather than across it.” Other critics have parried with Smiley’s essay in various ways, including disputing her claim that this potential choice is never accounted for (bounty hunters intercept Huck from the Illinois side) and historicizing why a fugitive might be lightning-focused on the juncture at Cairo (the fastest route to genuine abolitionist strongholds), but Everett eviscerates the very notion that something as fictive as a border can enclose something as real as enslavement.
James repeatedly finds himself on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River in Everett’s narrative. Early on, he asks another Black man, Old George, “So, I’m in a free state?” The ensuing zinger—“Boy, you’re in America”—is followed by a fuller explanation. “We’re in Illinois, true enough,” Old George says, “and Illinois is supposed to be a free state, true enough, but the white folks around here tell us we’re in Tennessee.” Another enslaved man, Josiah, adds, “What are we going to do? Take a map to the courts and say, ‘Look here - we’re actually free’?”
This epiphany permanently alters James’ worldview. “Free state, slave state. Ain’t no diff’ence one side ta other,” he later tells Huck. So long as enslavement exists in the so-called Border South, jurisdiction is just a fable. The law itself is merely an illusion, to be sustained by communities of enslavers at their whim, or lifted in favor of lashing and lynching.
In the midst of reading James, I revisited some chapters from Twain’s novel to prepare for an episode of Project Narrative with James Phelan (co-editor with Graff of a Bedford edition of Huck Finn which includes Smiley’s essay). I recognized that Everett’s answer to Smiley was not only fully reconcilable with the source text, but it was opening it up to me in new ways. In the episode, one can hear me channeling James as I explain how the conditioned disregard for law which the plantation system naturalizes leads directly to the feudalism(s) of the Grangferfords and Shepherdsons, who would rather murder each other in perpetuity, without fear of legal reprisal, than accept one ruling by a court on their property disputes. Everett does not dramatize the feud in James because his narrator is separated from Twain’s narrator during that episode, but James’ experience still provides a kind of commentary, or complement, which has the potential to shape interpretation of the source text.
During recording I realized what an achievement James is. I have read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn dozens of times. It is not a world one longs to return to necessarily—filled with trauma, anxiety, callousness, isolation, and death—but “boy, you’re in America.” It’s a rendering of the transbellum US, with all its aspirations, conflicts, delusions, energies, frauds, frontiers, lusts, rebellions, avarice and violence. When you really read it, all of it, not just the parts that superficially satisfy our wishes for liberal self-possession or national supremacy, you find that it is not mythic, but, to the contrary, it is lethal to myth. Huck is fed one ideological nostrum after another, only to be embittered by their utter failure to correspond to the world as he encounters it.
No other adaptation or sequel, including those written by Twain himself, has succeeded in transporting me back to this world, made me linger there anew and afresh, see it again through other eyes, nor, by far the most impressive accomplishment, rendered it in an equally compelling voice.
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Reimagining Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective is not an original idea in literary criticism or popular culture. John Peter Zavez self-published “a retelling [of] the story through Jim” as recently as 2019. It’s a recycled bit in stand-up comedy, most recently in Dave Chapelle’s newest Netflix special The Dreamer. The National Council of Teachers of English has even recommended it as an assignment for primary and secondary school students.
But as enticing as this premise is, how can it yield something which can stand shoulder to shoulder with the source text? Once the would-be adapter gets past the gimmick and the punchlines it sets up, they are left to reckon with the sobering task of reanimating the signature characters of a technical virtuouso. Mark Twain shits better sentences than most of us craft. And Percival Everett knows this. He is not cavalier about Mark Twain’s talent. He turned to Twain (and specifically Huck Finn) as a model when writing the conclusion to his first novel, and again for the epigram of his most successful, Erasure. When asked in 2005, “What writers, by and large, have been an inspiration to you?” Everett answered (among others) “Of course Mark Twain.” He is well aware of the challenge he has created for himself.
Foremost, however much more Everett can know about the inner life of a Black man living in America, Samuel Clemens undeniably spent more time listening to the voices of actual enslaved and self-emancipated peoples. Twain was obsessed with Black voices. From the moment he started conceiving of himself as a novelist, he was concerned with establishing his fluency in Black dialect, moving beyond the minstrelsy which had, undeniably, been influential on his early burlesque sketches.
In the Summer of 1874 he worked on “A True Story, Repeated Word For Word As I Heard It,” the first-person account of a Black woman—based on Mary Ann Cord, the cook at Quarry Farm, where Twain spent his summers—being separated from her children during a human auction and years later reunited with her youngest son, Henry Washington, who was also Twain’s barber. Washington emancipated himself and then enlisted in the Union Army as soon as Blacks were allowed to do so, specifically to seek out his mother. Twain told his editor, William Dean Howells, that the most important thing was to “get the dialect as nearly right as possible.” He would station himself outside the kitchen Cord ran and listen to her cadence. For weeks, he paced his octagonal study, trying to speak her words aloud and painstakingly transcribe their phonetics. Whatever verisimilitude his story might lack upon being published in Atlantic Monthly later that year, he was determined it would not be the result of “the writer’s carelessness.”
Twain succeeded, according to Ralph Ellison (another novelist whose work is alluded to in James), in finding “the spoken idiom of Negro Americans, its flexibility, its musicality, its rhythms, free-wheeling diction” by the time he wrote Huck Finn. David Bradley goes even further, to call it “a Black novel,” and marvels at how much closer he felt to a continuity of Black literary voices when reading Mark Twain than reading Twain’s Black contemporaries, like Frederick Douglass, who often felt the need to imitate European aesthetic principles in order to be taken seriously by white audiences. While there are many compelling critiques of Twain’s characterization of Jim, few deny Twain’s interest and immersion in transbellum Black dialects.
Can one tell Twain’s story from Jim’s perspective without creating a flimsy, second-hand imitation of Jim’s voice which dooms the experiment from the start?
Everett solves this problem ingeniously, by giving James not only two names, but two voices. There’s the dialect that Sam Clemens heard, the accuracy of which is never questioned, and then there’s another dialect, a secret dialect, which Black characters only speak to each other, which Sam Clemens, like all the other white scions of Hannibal, would have been wholly ignorant of. This secret dialect is the one the narrator favors for writing his memoir (James writing James), which (à la Douglass) is a literacy narrative in which the narrator gradually divulges his process of both acquiring literacy and using it to deliver the literary product the reader now holds in hand.
James is not only a member of this closed discourse community, but a master of it, entrusted to teach “language lessons” to the enslaved children of Hannibal. These lessons are designed to facilitate “safe[r] movement through the world” by observance of a series of rules, all predicated on the volatile sensitivity of enslavers. “The better they feel, the safer we are,” the children exclaim in unison at the close of a lesson.
Though the specifics of the closed discourse community described in James are, to my knowledge, unique to Everett’s novel, they are reconcilable with Black history, resembling to some degree the “hush harbors” and “underground telegraph” sustained by enslaved populations to share information and cultural practices which might be deemed threatening by enslavers. By this invention, Everett also invites a rich tradition of Black criticism and theory into the novel, including concepts like W.E.B. DuBois’s “double consciousness,” Henry Louis Gates’ “signifyin’,” and Robin D. G. Kelley’s “infrapolitics.” That cultural continuity with enslaved ancestors which Bradley longs for is strengthened, oriented specifically around literary, linguistic, and critical theory.
Without Huck’s knowledge, James retrieves writing utensils from the flooded house which also contains Pap Finn’s corpse, a body towards which the narrator feels his own distinct set of awkward affinities and animosities. Having already covertly taught himself to read with Judge Thatcher’s books, James now teaches himself to write. In his first 114-word text, he renounces his slave name, renounces the “condition” of enslavement, renounces the “fear and outrage” this condition is wont to provoke in him (a promise he cannot keep), and concludes, “But my interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on the page can mean anything at all. If they can have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning.”
For James, writing is not entirely unlike plunging that same fist into the maw of a Mississippi catfish: maddening, dangerous, hopeful, desperate, liberating, illicit magic.
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Hemingway tells us to simply stop. Quit. Ignore it. Forget it. Twain’s ending is “cheating.” What happens in the final twelve chapters of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not what makes it, as Hemingway claimed, “the best book we’ve had,” the origin of “all modern American literature.” Others have tried to reconcile Twain’s ending with white boy redeeming, a feat of “interpretive acrobatics” Peaches Henry calls it. Nobody sticks the landing. But the attempts are sometimes captivating. T. S. Eliot tried it once. Several, like Alfred Kazin, have argued that Twain needed to recreate Hannibal in Mississippi in order to complete Huck’s Homeric “journey home.”
Everett foregoes the symbolic return for the real one in his own final section, also twelve chapters long. James justly asks, “If one knows hell as home, then is returning to hell a homecoming?”
One of the things Hemingway asks us to forget is that, at the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain puts a bullet in Tom Sawyer. Sawyer’s infamous reappearance in the final section is a hijacking. The personification of pulpy adventure tries to reanimate the corpse of romanticism, which keeled over alongside Buck Grangerford hundreds of miles upriver. Sawyer parades it around, Weekend At Bernie’s style, a macabre puppet in full view of the gawking public. Twain’s hope, I think, was that once we got a whiff of Zombie Walter Scott, there could be no doubt: romanticism is dead. The South killed it. And Tom Sawyer deserves a dose of lead as well. But many readers just hold their noses and close their eyes. Or stop reading when Huck says he’ll go to hell.
Huck’s instantaneous resumption of his place as Sawyer’s sycophantic sidekick is a nauseating betrayal of both Jim and Huck’s own moral arc. But that’s the point. There are no heroes in antebellum Missouri. As Twain himself wrote, “There is not a single celebrated Southern name in any of the departments of human industry except those of war, murder, assassination, lynching, the duel, repudiation, and massacre.” The white boy’s commitment to emancipation and his own redemption is fleeting at best.
The hijacker in Everett’s novel is not Tom, but our narrator, who, baptized in catfish slime, has traded his stolen pencil for a stolen pistol, which he uses to steal more pencils, and to kidnap and kill. Even as he holds white characters at gunpoint, what they fear is his language. He no longer confines himself to the dialect which he mastered in order to bring comfort to white people. James (literally) breaks into their library to steal their literacy. Like Douglass and Venture Smith and Williams Wells Brown before him, whose narratives of emancipation he carries with him on his final mission—landing in what is likely Keokuk, the same Iowa town the Clemens family resettled in upon leaving Hannibal—James discovers that nothing so terrifies American aristocracy as equality of education.
I am choosing, in this review, to withhold many of the details of Everett’s final section, such that you, dear reader, may experience the electrification and catharsis of these chapters unspoiled. But, it suffices to say, Everett’s plot departs so far from Twain’s that the variation can no longer be explained merely by the discrepancy in the perspectives of the narrators. Welcome to the transbellum Missouri multiverse.
The fact is, there’s no way to kill the demon catfish which is Mark Twain’s hypercanonical novel, even if one were so inclined, which I don’t think Everett is. As Morrison argues, classic literature gulps up bodies of criticism, nourishing itself with even the most vitriolic critiques. The best a critic-dogger might hope to do, more even than I would’ve ever thought possible, is to put a fist in Huck Finn’s throat and leave it there, the two texts made permanent appendages of one another, so much that it ceases to be self-evident which is commenting on the other. Who is predator? And who prey?
I think that’s exactly what Percival Everett has done. James has locked Huck in a forever embrace, their destinies indissoluble. It reminds me of Baldwin’s prophecy: Race in the US must become either an embrace of lovers, prepared to “dare everything” in order to “change the history of the world” (“Call it progress,” Everett’s James says) or, like two boxers in a permanent clinch, we wait for “cosmic vengeance,” looking each other in the eyes as the lights go out. “I don’t really care,” James says to a fresh corpse. And he means it.
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Characterization of hand-fishing as “folk crime” is explored by Mark Morgan in “The Social Hierarchy of Fishing: Myth or Reality”, Human Dimensions of Wildlife (Vol. 11, No. 5, 2006).
Hypercanonization is a process described by Jonathan Arac in Huckleberry Finn As Idol and Target (U. Wisconsin, 1989).
“Teaching the conflicts” or “teaching the controversy” is a pedagogy Gerald Graff championed in the 1990s—including in Beyond The Culture Wars (W. W. Norton & Company, 1992)—often using Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a case study.