Read This Award-Winning Book Club Book for a Heated Discussion

The most recent book I read for one of my book clubs had quite the year last year. It won the National Book Award for Fiction, the Kirkus Prize, and landed on countless best-books-of-the-year lists. It takes the story from one of the most quintessentially American books and rewrites it, in many ways correcting it.

Before my book club had voted on it as our March read, I have to confess that I’d had a mild start-and-stop moment with James by Percival Everett. It’s a retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that centers the character Jim, an enslaved man who hears he’s about to be sold, and therefore separated from his family, and tries to run away. When he first sets off, he hides out on a small island near where he lives. That’s where he runs into Huck Finn, who also has a mind to run away to escape his abusive father. The thing is, Huck has faked his death, and with Jim now gone, he realizes that the white people will think Jim had something to do with it.

A big part of the story that made me put the book down at first is also a big part of what distinguishes Twain’s Jim from Everett’s Jim, or James, rather. Within the first few pages, we see that there’s an exaggerated way that Black people speak in front of white folks so as to appear less intelligent and therefore less threatening. It’s essentially the way Black people were shown to speak in Twain’s book—and any other white person-written book from that time—but cranked up to 10. This all while Black people speak “normally” amongst each other. When they’re sure there are no white people around, they’re also considerably less incredulous and superstitious.

It felt like the juxtaposing of the two manners of speaking was saying that slave speak was for the ignorant, and while Black people did, in fact, speak it, it was only to quell white folks’ insecurity. This, to me, reeks of the attitude surrounding Ebonics—now called AAVE—that plagued my childhood. The idea that the dialect, accent, or language you speak tells of your intelligence is a goofy one, to say the least. But it also felt like one Everett was presenting. It made me think at first that James and the other Black people were communicated to readers as being intelligent through their “proper” speaking, but you can be intelligent and speak “proper” just as you can be intelligent and speak in “slave speak.” This all made me question the intended audience for the book.

But the book club deadline was quickly approaching, so I had to read through my side eyes.

Then I remembered something: Everett is a satirist. I don’t read much satire, and I hadn’t yet read anything by Everett before picking up James, so I’m not used to having to adjust in the way that I think is necessary for the genre. Once I made that adjustment—which just involved expecting things to be just a little extra for comedic and satirical effect—I wasn’t irked by the language thing as much. I don’t think my issues surrounding it are completely resolved, but adjusting my expectations certainly helped me get past some things in the beginning. Which is good, because the adventure they go on, my god.

As they journey towards an uncertain future, they get separated by nature, meet con men who call themselves royalty, see a grand revival, and come across a minstrel show—all while James is trying his best to avoid capture, which would mean certain death as a runaway. Somehow, Everett was able to wedge in many genuinely funny moments, even as he made the constant anxiety James felt palpable. I really never knew what was going to happen next. I cried, I cursed, I laughed, and I was absolutely, thoroughly pissed off. This is because there were so many obvious throughlines in the book that connect today’s attitudes surrounding race to those of the literal 1800s. It was both affirming and disheartening to see the birth of certain behaviors and narratives in this book—disheartening, specifically, because we still aren’t passed them.

Still, despite my critique, I loved this book. I loved how it represented different enslaved experiences and how it subverted long-held narratives surrounding Black people—one of my fellow book club members pointed out how there were so many different kinds of Black people, and they were all having a very human experience (whether you agreed with their decisions or not), but the white people were all very one-note. At times, they were even cartoonishly evil, though, to be fair, slave owners were also cartoonishly evil in real life. The book even has some things to say about performative activism, which I wasn’t expecting.

If you want a very intense discussion for your book club—or just want to read a book with immaculate prose, that’s as funny as it is heartwrenching, infuriating, and anxiety-inducing—James is it.

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