Giving “James” a Voice: Percival Everett on His Reimagining of Huck Finn

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, SENIOR GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, now, our next guest is making a splash in popular culture. The work of Percival Everett was plunged into the spotlight when his novel, “Erasure,” hit the big screen in the movie adaptation, “American Fiction.”

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Look at what they publish. Look at what they expect us to write. I just want to rub their noses in it. Deadbeat dads, rappers, crack. You said you wanted black stuff. That’s black, right?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I see what you’re doing.

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GOLODRYGA: Biting satire of racial stereotypes in the literary world, “American Fiction” took home the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Well, now hard on the heels of its success, Everett is back with a new book, this time setting his sights on a deeper look at literature itself. “James” is a reimaging — re-imagining of “Huckleberry Finn,” usurping Mark Twain’s protagonist to put Jim, Huck’s enslaved sidekick at its center. Everett joins Walter Isaacson to discuss how he gave the iconic character a powerful new voice.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you very much. And, Percival Everett, welcome to the show.

PERCIVAL EVERETT, AUTHOR, “JAMES”: Well, thank you for having me.

ISAACSON: Your latest novel, you’ve done almost a couple of dozen of them, but this one is really powerful. It’s a retelling of the story of Huckleberry Finn, done from the eyes of Jim, the runaway slave, and it’s gotten amazing reviews. I think “The New York Times” said it should come bundled with the Mark Twain’s novel. Tell me, you think Mark Twain could have done it?

EVERETT: Well, Mark Twain was telling the story of Huck, of an adolescent, a white youth, that sensibly represents a young America, but he was not equipped to write Jim’s story. So, I — and I don’t fault him for this. That’s not the novel he set out to write, and a novel he was ill-equipped to write.

ISAACSON: You know, you — from the very title of the book, “James,” to the wonderful closing of the book, it’s all James, not Jim, even though the white people in the book call him Jim. I love the closing, because they asked him, are you the runaway Jim? He says, I am James, and then they say James what? And he says, just James. How important was that concept to you that he owned his name, James, like that?

EVERETT: Well, naming is an important business. We name our children. We name places that we get there first. It represents not only a certain power over the world through which we move, but it’s a marker of our agency.

ISAACSON: He’s the most literate of all characters I’ve read about. I mean, he sneaks into a library, I think, in order to read Rousseau and Voltaire channels, the great writers like that. And there’s a wonderful line in the book or passage, if you don’t mind me reading it, which is when he’s on the raft with Huckleberry Finn. And he wants to read, but he’s afraid of white people seeing him read, I think. And he says, I really wanted to read. Though Huckleberry was asleep, I could not chance his waking and discovering me with my face in an open book. And then I thought, how could he know I was actually reading? I could simply claim to be staring dumbly at the words and wondering what in the world they meant. How could he know? At that moment, the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got for them. That seems almost a theme of this book. Explain that to me.

EVERETT: Reading is perhaps the most subversive thing we can do. And it is simply because no one knows what the words are doing to us. No one can see how they come into us, what we bring to a text. Perhaps the second most subversive thing is writing, but reading is certainly subversive. And this is the reason that fascist regimes resort to burning books almost immediately. It’s a fear of not only literacy, but of information, knowledge, and control of the language. It’s an attempt to deny participation in the society, in the culture. You know, it persists now in a class way where there are many people who want as uneducated a voting body as they can have. Critical thought is important for a vibrant and progressive culture.

ISAACSON: There’s something very striking in the book, which is he’s so literate, as I say, he channels Rousseau and Voltaire and others. And yet, when he speaks to whites, he speaks in the dialect. He speaks in the dialect sort of exactly like Mark Twain did. And it’s weird because he kind of understands that he has to do that to sort of pretend not to be literate.

EVERETT: Well, yes, the slaves in the novel and no doubt in history had to comply with the expectations of behavior that whites had of them. Otherwise, they were threatening. So, in “James,” he actually instructs the children about not only what the language they called slaves, the language that the white people expect to hear, but the behavior and the — allowing their oppressors to feel superior to them.

ISAACSON: You think that’s still an issue today?

EVERETT: Well, it was an issue well into the 20th century, certainly, with Jim Crow and violence. And given certain circumstances with black youth dealing with police, you would expect people to worry about how they’re going to be treated by what they say. It’s sad, but probably true.

ISAACSON: There’s a scene where James joins a minstrel troop, and he ends up wearing blackface over whiteface to disguise himself as a white man passing as a black man. Tell me about this concept of shape-shifting and how — why you wove it in so thoroughly into this book.

EVERETT: At the beginning of the 20th century, anthropologists acknowledge that the notion of race and racial difference is not legitimate. It does not exist. However, in our culture, this construction, this bogus construction, continues to be a defining feature not only of people, but of the way we behave towards each other. So, I’m constantly fascinated by the fact that we have a construction that is, again, completely bogus, but it defines so much and is so powerful.

ISAACSON: In Mark Twain’s book, and correct me if you think I’m wrong here, he turns Jim’s suffering into sort of a noble virtue, that he becomes almost the magical negro, I think was the word that, you know, some famous critic used. And you don’t seem to do that. You seem to show that his suffering hardens him in a certain way. Is that right?

EVERETT: Yes, I certainly resist that trope of the magical negro, the inscrutable, mystic, the exotic. James is a real person.

ISAACSON: There’s a line when you’re doing that, you say, where does a slave put his anger? Why don’t you answer that for me if you could?

EVERETT: Well, much of the frustration that James feels is the fact that he must suppress his true feelings in order to navigate the world. He must suppress his true feelings and his true character to have his family safe. I think that was probably the most damaging and the most tragic feature of the institution of slavery.

ISAACSON: You say that James or Jim, as he’s called in the Mark Twain novel, has to suppress his true feelings. Let’s start with the Twain novel. Does Jim like Huck?

EVERETT: Well, yes. And Jim is protective of Huck. In fact, Jim is the only character that really surfaces as father figure for Huck in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

ISAACSON: And what about in your novel? What do you think James feels about Huck?

EVERETT: He’s — well, he certainly has protective feelings for no other reason than that Huck is a child. He’s a father, he has a daughter, and he feels that it’s his place as an adult man, even though the world is not viewing him as such to protect this youth.

ISAACSON: You said of Twain that his humor and his humanity affected me long before you even became a writer. Tell me how Mark Twain affected you.

EVERETT: Well, curiously, it wasn’t through Huck Finn, and certainly not through Tom Sawyer now, but I didn’t much have any affection for. But in life in the Mississippi and roughing it, Twain is ironic, and his humor arises from his irony through his observations about people. And he’s always generous with people. He’s never — he is sometimes harsh, but his affection for the people who are moving through the world that he’s writing about is always present, and I take that too hard.

ISAACSON: The most famous or greatest scene in Mark Twain’s version of Huckleberry Finn is that moment where Huck is thinking of writing a letter, turning in Jim. He knows Jim’s a runaway, and he knows — or Huck thinks he know, that’s he supposed to turn Jim in. I think he writes a letter. And then he tears it up. And he realizes, he says — well, I think his phrase is, you know, well, then, I’ll just go to hell and do it. In your book, do you have a similar sort of scene in which, ain’t I doing something wrong, Huck asks James? Am I supposed to know what good is? And James says, if you had to have rule that tell you what’s good, then you can’t be good. How did you address this, you know, world-famous scene of Huck deciding not to turn in Jim and then doing it in your own way like this?

EVERETT: Well, in order to write this novel, I had to, in a way, forget it. And my way of doing that was I read Huck Finn 15 times in row. I would finish it and start again. And that was to create a blur of story. I read it until I was sick of it, until like actually couldn’t recall anything clearly. Then I haven’t looked at it since then. Then, I started writing. And what I able to do with that exercise was the world became real to me and not the text. And so, the word generates the situation. That’s a pivotal moment in Huck Finn because it has to be. This is where these characters are being led. And likewise, as I inhabit this world, I had to come to some point like that myself. And because I wasn’t wed to the text, it was a function of the story that I was telling.

ISAACSON: Tell me how your own personal background played into your own heritage. I think starting with your grandfather winning a coin toss to go to Mahari Medical College, growing up in Texas, South Carolina. How did that influence your perspective?

EVERETT: Well, it helped that I’m familiar with the south. I grew up where the Civil War started, Columbia, in South Carolina. I don’t know if it affected me in a way that made the telling of the story easier, but I feel comfortable with some of the characters that I’ve had to write in this novel.

ISAACSON: You appear in some of your novels as yourself, even by name you appear as yourself as an English professor. Do you, in some ways, think you appear in this book as James?

EVERETT: Well, I think there’s a little bit of the writer and every character in a work. But no. As much as I might try to have fun in some works and show up and sort of make fun of myself, finally, it’s not me.

ISAACSON: You know, I’ve read Huckleberry Finn, maybe not as often as you have, but pretty often, and I always get a bit stymied, because I think it’s a pretty good book and then I get halfway through and it seems to kind of degenerate a bit. You know, Tom Sawyer appears, the plot sort of dwindles out. Did you have that same impression when you were at Huckleberry Finn and you’d take such a much stronger way to end the book?

EVERETT: Well, again, it being James’ story and the gravity of everything being amplified because of the danger present for him in the world that, turn as necessary. Twain’s novel, as much as I like it, and I have to back up and say that I didn’t write “James” to express some kind of dissatisfaction with Huckleberry Finn. If anything, I flatter myself by thinking that I’m in conversation with Twain with the story. But when Twain was writing it, he stopped in the middle and came back to it several years later. And you can feel that demarcation. You can feel that there’s a change in rhythm. And for any number of reasons, the novel might have suffered the switch. One of them being that it’s a mercenary move. Tom Sawyer was his money-making character in a previous book, and he was famous for needing money. But also, During the years of reconstruction, I think, as I’ve learned recently, Twain was no doubt moved by the spinning world in which the freed enslaved people must have found themselves in and the kind of terror they were facing. And if you look at it, I suppose the game that Tom Sawyer is subjecting James to is much like the world that the three (ph) blacks inhabited.

ISAACSON: You say you wrote this almost out of an homage to Mark Twain, but also out of a conversation, as if you’re having a conversation with Mark Twain. Tell me, what are you trying to say to explain back and forth? What is that conversation?

EVERETT: It was his business to tell the story of the white youth, and it is my business to tell the story of the black man. And again, I flatter myself to think that maybe we work together in some way to do that.

ISAACSON: It does make a perfect combination, as so many of the critics said. Do you kind of hope that maybe in the future a lot of people will read these two books together?

EVERETT: Of course. To have my work associated with Twain in any way, I think, is flattering. And also, I think — I don’t think one needs to read Huck Finn to read my novel, but I think it adds a layer of meaning that’s important.

ISAACSON: Percival Everett, thank you so much for joining us.

EVERETT: Thank you for having me. It’s been great.