[I read this 2024 novel in three sections, writing about each section before reading on. So far I have read one section. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
Part 1, Chapters 1-21
This is a smoothly scathing retelling of Huckleberry Finn. Everett has reinvented Jim, the runaway slave in the novel, as a knowingly erudite first-person narrator. It doesn’t matter that his style is impossibly sophisticated, because Everett never pretends this is anything but a fiction. He sticks closely not only to Mark Twain’s episodic, quest-like form, but also to the parade of impossible characters and situations. James’s status as a slave is realistic but, whenever Huck is nearby, the adventures are a string of tall tales.
I think Percival Everett is my favourite author just now. This is the third of his novels I’ve read recently, and although he never does the same thing twice he’s always dazzling. The Trees is a dark mixture of screwball comedy and rightful anger. Erasure, fizzing with just as many ideas, is a different kind of satire. James is different again.
The first chapter has James and others act out the novel’s main conceit. It’s night-time, and James overhears Huck with Tom Sawyer planning a raid on the kitchen. They see James, but he pretends to be asleep.. He’s playing the game, presenting to the white folks the persona they have invented for Blacks: superstitious, slow, and childishly naïve. They play a little trick on him, telling each other that ‘Jim’ will think it was a witch who made his hat appear on the nail above his head. Minutes later as he is talking in perfect English to other slaves, his friend Albert warns him white folks are close. ‘Lak I say, I furst found my hat up on a nail. “I ain’t put dat dere,” I say to mysef. “How dat hat git dere?” And I knew ’twas witches what done it. I ain’t seen ’em, but it was dem.’
In the next chapter James gives his family what he calls a language lesson. ‘These were indispensable. Safe movement through the world depended on mastery of language, fluency.’ When they ask why, he reminds them. ‘White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them. … The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us.’ This is also Everett spelling out the same lesson to the reader, starting with behaviour rules—‘Never make eye contact … Never speak first’—right down to direct ‘situational’ translations, as James calls them, from standard English. If a slave sees a fire, the correct response is not ‘Fire, fire!’ as one child suggests, but ‘“Lawdy, missum! Looky dere.’ When he asks why, the children tell him: ‘Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.’ Why? ‘Because they need to know everything before us. Because they need to name everything.’
And we’re only in the second chapter. I guess one reason Everett decided to explain all this at the start was so that he wouldn’t need to keep explaining later. The behaviour and language codes are established, and throughout all the chapters I’ve read so far James rarely puts a foot wrong. Twice, in fever dreams—James has been bitten by a rattlesnake—Huck overhears his true speech patterns. And when James once becomes too relaxed, as he explains ruefully to himself, he responds ironically with the remark, ‘Hysterical,’ and Huck is immediately on to him.
The other reason is probably that Everett wanted to tell us in advance what he was going to spend a lot of the novel showing to us, out in the world. We understand the process of doublethink and doublespeak that James constantly has to go through—and we understand how, in order to survive, the Blacks have to present themselves as incapable of sensible thinking. In a typical Everett narrative conceit, James’s fever dreams allow some of the great philosophers to voice their prejudices in person. How about Voltaire? ‘I think we are all equal, regardless of colour, language or habit. … However … climate and geography can be significant factors in determining human development. It’s not that your features make you unequal, it’s that they are signs of biological differences, things that have helped you survive in those hot, desolate places. It’s those factors that stop you from achieving the more perfect human form found in Europe.’
These dream conversations also show us how far James has come in his self-teaching. He has spent a lot of time secretly in Judge Thatcher’s library, a place we’ve seen him denying any interest in for reasons that white folks would take for granted. It seems that sometimes their prejudices can be turned to advantage…. But Everett never lets us forget how precarious a slave’s existence is. To find wood to to keep his family warm during a cold spell he has to resort to subterfuges, but that’s nothing. The family, he learns, is to be split up—he is to be sold down the river, literally, in New Orleans.
This is when the odyssey, if that’s what it is, begins. To start with, he doesn’t intend to run far. He decides hide almost in plain sight, on a nearby island in the river. But—what are the chances?—he does it on the same day that Huck has faked his own death in order to escape from his bullying father. He has to let Huck work out how bad this looks for a runaway slave—he’ll be the prime suspect. But nobody will be searching nearby, and they stay for the time being. And we get James’s version of Huck’s adventures, from foraging for food and fishing to the rainstorm that almost floods them out. There’s the house floating down the river, temporarily snagged on something so they hastily board to take supplies and clothes.
Huck’s return to the shore dressed as a girl seems almost sensible in this version. Not only does it give James a chance to hear news of his family, there are other possible benefits. He had salvaged paper and ink from the house, but only now that he is alone can Everett have him set out in writing—by mimicking the letters in the books he’s read—his own sense of who he is. It’s a pivotal moment for him, and for the novel. ‘I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name. / In the religious preachings of my white captors I am a victim of the Curse of Ham. … But I will not let this condition define me. I will not let myself, my mind, drown in fear and outrage. I will be outraged as a matter of course. But 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.’
If this novel is a ‘what if?’ thought experiment—and what is it, if not that?—then this is the crux of it. An uneducated slave, transformed into an erudite thinker, can begin to define his own oppression…
…but at a more mundane level, James can think of other, more pragmatic benefits deriving from Huck’s absence. Huck might be found out, and he might be blamed for helping James to escape… but the heat would be off James for the supposed murder. And, if Huck does return, he might bring news from home. His reasoning is completely unsentimental. There is a growing mutual regard, but there are definite limits. He will always be a slave, and Huck will always be able to regard his own freedom as a right. James might have become a de facto philosopher, but he’s still a slave.
It’s his slave status that defines the parameters of his adventures from now on. He and Huck have to leave the island, Huck having been followed as he returned, and the journey begins. Everett broadly follows the story of Huckleberry Finn, but it only as a tall-tale scaffolding for James’s day-by-day, or even minute-by-minute navigation through a danger-strewn world. In the original novel, Jim was a supporting player while Huck, almost a Candide figure, learned about the absurdities of the American South. Now it’s the other way around. The adventure with the thieves on the half-capsized paddle-boat is no longer an episode in an adventure yarn, but a chance for James to show us how precarious his life is—and for him to be able to take some books he’d seen in Judge Thatcher’s library. How to persuade Huck he really wants them while not admitting his own literacy?
‘“Why you holdin’ them books?” Huck asked. “Dey feels good,” I said. “That’s funny. How kin a book feel good?” He grabbed the Rousseau and thumbed through it. “It ain’t even got pictures.” “I likes the weight of ’em,” I said. Huck stared at me for a long few seconds. “I guess I don’t understand niggers,” he said.’
James hasn’t met any white men yet, but in these first chapters when he is only with Huck, the reader is constantly seeing the behaviour and language codes reinforced. Meanwhile, James keeps reminding Huck that he is a slave, and while they can look after one another they can’t really be friends. This is hard for Huck, but when they do finally come across two white men, having been caught unawares—James is rueful about having become too relaxed—it’s Huck who saves him. He has thrown a tarpaulin over James, asleep in plain sight, and the men don’t notice Huck isn’t alone at first. Then they do, and when they start asking questions Huck has to think fast. What would make them leave him alone? ‘“That there is my sick uncle,” Huck said. “Oh, yeah?” I felt something snag the raft, maybe a hook, maybe a hand. “Yeah,” Huck said. “I bring him out for air every day. He’s got the smallpox.” The raft was let go.’
They are safe, but things happen faster now. That night, after they are separated when a steamboat piles into their raft, James spends some time in the grittier world of Black people’s lived experience. He reaches the shore with his precious books and, exhausted, falls asleep. Luckily, the voices he hears in the morning belong to four Black men, and they tell him he is in Illinois. ‘So, I’m in a free state?’ he asks, but the men laugh. ‘Boy, you’re in America.’ The whites pretend they are in Tennessee, and there’s nothing the Blacks can about it. James sees this in action when one of the men, Young George, steals a pencil for him. Later, as the threat of dogs makes him leave his camping spot, he passes by the scene of a sadistic-sounding whipping. Young George is being punished for the theft of the pencil…
…which makes the piece James has started writing all the more resonant. ‘My name is James. I wish I could tell my story with a sense of history as much as industry. I was sold when I was born… […] I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.’ There’s the crux of it. This isn’t some edited, over-elaborated version, like the one by ‘Venture Smith’ that he has been reading. This is the plain truth, as a slave writes it.
By chance, he hears Huck’s voice. He’s been off on his Montagues and Capulets adventure with the warring families, and it’s all coming to a bloody climax. With Huck are four other white people, including the star-crossed lovers, and what comes next isn’t pretty. ‘“Ima gonna fill you fulla lead, Grangerford.” “Have at, you lily-livered sheep-fucker!”’ Despite Huck’s shouted warnings, following a short gunfight all four are dead. Huck and James run and, again by chance, they find their canoe, which had been stolen before. That’s why they had been on a fragile, clumsy raft when the steamboat bore down on them, and having the canoe back is a godsend. Except it’s getting light, and James has a choice to make. Setting out on the river in broad daylight seems crazy, but staying is impossible: ‘Dead white people in the vicinity of a black man never worked out well for the black man.’
Meanwhile, James has been ‘thinking aloud,’ and has let his guard slip a little. In the stress of the moment he’d forgotten the language codes, and Huck is curious. ‘“Jim … Why you talking so funny?” “Whatchu be meanin’?” I was panicking inside. “You were talkin’—I don’t know—you didn’t sound like no slave.”’ James asks him, ‘How do a slave sound?’—as if he hadn’t made a lifelong study of it. And he is careful to use the code from now on.
Next, and finally for now: their misadventures with the Duke of Bridgewater and the King of France. This is pretty close to the original version, except for the crucial difference of the point of view. The white men’s easy assumption of ownership is as in the original—one of them tries to sell James as soon as he meets another white man—but an easy sense of superiority isn’t all. A tramp through the woods suddenly becomes harrowing for James. The rope scars on a tree show its purpose, and he thinks back to Young George’s whipping—but for a white man it’s different. It’s the King who says, ‘“I love walkin’ on a country road. … There’s just somethin’ about it, the air, the openness.’
And there are other distressing reminders for James of who he is in this world. He becomes a prop in the King’s act, as a cannibal from Borneo, and his provenance is doubted and discussed. The King gives him new names, almost at random. Being talked about, being given new names… welcome to the slave market, folks. But the real threat is the ‘Wanted’ sign they see in a shop window as he and Huck escape from the men in the uproar following the performance. Is James the ‘runaway’ it describes? He says to Huck, ‘I’se afraid it be me. Even if’n it not, it look a whol lot lak me.’ And Huck reads out to him, as if he hadn’t already seen it, that there’s a three-hundred-dollar reward for him. This is Illinois, but so? James has really had it brought home to him, ‘Boy, you’re in America.’
The rest of Part 1, Chapters 22-32, and all of Part 2
Long before the end of Part 1, James is separated from Huck for a hundred pages. The King and the Duke, inevitably, have caught up with them, and intend to sell Jim. But they are forced to leave him with another white man after the Duke whips the man’s slave. When the slave has recovered enough to do his blacksmithing work, Jim will be returned. Maybe. The Duke and the King take Huck away with them, leaving James to be given a crash course in the work. As he hammers metal in the almost unbearable heat, the other slave sings and James joins in… which becomes the next part of the story. Most of the episodes that follow focus on one after another of the horrors of slavery, and of the impossibility at that time of any engagement with white people. Some seem kind, and might even believe they are, but… I’ll let you guess for now whether they really are or not.
I had left off reading with James and Huck having escaped from the fraudsters. But they don’t have a chance of staying free, because they still can’t travel in daylight while the two men can. The Duke and the King, Bilgewater and Dolphin as they call one another, are like a worn-out comedy duo, with the Duke sometimes erupting into bad pastiches of actorly speeches. Nobody’s laughing, because really they’re just like all the other white men, treating inferior or minors like Huck with easy contempt, and slaves like vermin. The Duke gives Jim a bloody whipping across his thighs until the King stops him. ‘Don’t tear him up too much. We gotta be able to sell him. We cain’t get a dime fer him if’n he’s torn all asunder.” From then on, they lie at their ease while Huck and James catch fish and do all the chores.
But, later, how does the Duke come to be whipping the slave of another man? Does it matter? It’s a show of white superiority, and the Duke is too careless to realise that to render another man’s property unfit for work might lead to tricky consequences. The other slave is Easter, the blacksmith, and he had shown Jim and Huck too much kindness. He had been forced to fit shackles on Jim for the night, and had shown them both where to sleep comfortably and where he’d left the spare key. When the Duke finds them he is about to give Jim a worse whipping despite his not running, and lashes out at Easter. But he’s old, and bleeds a lot—which is when the owner arrives. He’s too robust for them, and all they can do is make a defiant exit, taunting Huck as they take him with them. Yep.
This whole incident, and the time spent with the fraudsters before this, all fit into Everett’s bigger scheme. From the start we’ve learnt how slaves are always ranked zero in any pecking-order. That’s the easy part. Now, Everett is more interested in nuances—isn’t it sometimes more subtle than blind racism? Wiley, Easter’s owner, seems to be genuinely horrified by the whipping. He seems to have a more civilised approach than most but it’s still all about exploitation. Easter works long hours in the heat, and Wiley’s biggest concern is to find a replacement. And Easter tells him about a death he’s heard about, of a slave lynched for stealing a pencil. When, eventually, Jim tells him he had stolen it for him, Easter is astonished but, somehow, hopeful. ‘“I can write,” I said. “Then you had best write.” “I will,” I said.’
The next man Jim encounters appears to be at the extreme liberal end of the white people spectrum. He’s the leader of a minstrel show—none of them have ever heard of such a thing—and he’s interested in Jim’s singing. It happens that his tenor has disappeared without warning, and Jim would fill the gap. The man—‘My name is Daniel Decatur Emmett’—speaks to Wiley and, having explained what he means by ‘blackface’, negotiates a sale. ‘Nobody will know. We’ll put bootblack on his face, too. He ain’t black enough as he is, anyway. Well?’ It’s an archetypal Everett scene, with Wiley and the two Black men as bemused as one another by the absurdity of it. But it gets better if we spot the real person Everett has slipped into the story. Emmett wrote what later became the anthem of the South, Dixie—which he has in a notebook, and sings in a later chapter.
It gets better still as Emmett introduces himself to Jim personally. ‘He then did something that was stranger than anything I had yet seen. The sight of it froze Wiley and Easter. Daniel Decatur Emmett extended his hand to me as if to shake. I looked at his hand and then to Wiley and then to Easter.’ After some moments of horrified incomprehension, he looks into Emmett’s face. ‘He was open and weirdly nonthreatening. I reached out and shook his hand.’ After he leads Jim away, Everett stacks up the absurdities, farcical situations that only horrify Jim more and more. There’s the finding of the costume and blacking-up, every step disguising this Black man as the caricature presented in these shows. Then there are the songs, pastiches in a version of the self-abasing dialect the slaves themselves invented. (Some of these, ‘From the notebook of Daniel Decatur Emmett,’ appear as mocking epigraphs before the novel.) Most of the singers and players seem to treat Jim as just another singer, and it’s dreadfully disturbing.
I suspect Everett enjoyed writing these minstrel show chapters. We’ve already had the farcical/scary idea of Jim being effectively disguised as a white entertainer by wearing blackface—he even has his feet blacked for the first performance—and now Everett plays variations on the theme of ‘passing’ for white. The drummer, Norman, has the best disguise of all—he’s a slave, he tells Jim, but he looks so white nobody ever guesses. Jim knows he’s telling the truth because he can slip into ‘slave talk’ if he wants, and no white man can ever do this. They talk about the absurdity of the whites. Norman tells Jim they do the cakewalk. ‘But that’s how we make fun of them,’ says Jim. ‘Yes, but … it’s lost on them. It’s never occurred to them that we might find them mockable,’ and Jim’s summing up serves for the whole situation. ‘Double irony.’
Jim is in a vulnerable position after the show. A young white woman had been staring intently at him since before it even started, and he wonders whether she suspects something. He’s terrified when she comes up to him as he is left alone on the stage, unable to mix with the white audience alongside the others. Everett winds up Jim’s acute sense of dread, and he gives one-word replies until, desperate, he feels forced to tells her he’s married. Her father appears, a local big noise, and tells her to stop. But he’s fascinated by Jim too, marvelling at his authentic appearance, especially the hair… which is when Emmett comes up to lies about why Jim’s wig looks so good—they only have one, and he’s the only one it fits. The man is thoroughly fooled, boasting about how he can smell a slave at 50 yards, and spot one from half a mile away. But Jim isn’t laughing, and by the time Norman tells him they need to clear up back at the camp, Jim is open with him. ‘Norman, you can pass. But look at me. They can’t keep me made up like this all the time. It doesn’t make any sense, my being here. I need to run.’
By now, Norman is a real ally. They realise they both dream of earning enough money for the same reason—to buy freedom for their families. And Jim’s first long day isn’t over yet. Asleep on his bedroll, he is woken by the same white man who was bothering him after the show. The man is touching his hair—and it’s only after Jim shouts out the ‘racially neutral “Lawdy! Oh, Lawdy!”’ that Emmett comes rushing in. He gets rid of the man by saying he might tell his daughter that he goes around touching strange men in their sleep, but they realise the man must be suspicious. Emmett realises if Jim’s identity is discovered, they will all be in trouble. They pack up and leave.
But Jim doesn’t trust Emmett, who keeps telling him he is just like everyone else in the show. ‘I quite frankly didn’t believe him when he told me I wasn’t his slave, having just watched him pay money for me. In fact, he had in his possession a bill of sale.… Not a bill of hire, but a bill of sale.’ Emmett has just reassured him he will be paid, although ‘at nigger rates.’ And Jim will have to pay off the money Emmett paid for him—i.e. the earnings from his first 200 performances. And they don’t perform every night—so how long will he be ‘bonded’ (Jim’s word)? He gets no answer. When they reach the next town, Jim is told to stay in the camp because it’s such a lawless place. Emmett realises Jim couldn’t possibly perform there safely, and they leave the camp, in full makeup. Picking up Emmett’s notebook, Jim runs. Which is where Part 1 ends.
There had been a darkly comic element to the minstrel show chapters at the end of Part 1, but there isn’t much comedy in Part 2. Norman has followed Jim, who has a moment of dread before he realises who it is that has found his hiding-place. He tells Jim about them all coming back to find him gone: ‘all of a sudden Emmett sounded like every slaver I ever met. He was cursing darkies and yelling about how he was going to get a bully and beat you just before he hanged you from a oak.’ Which sets the tone for most of Part 2. Everett is bringing the reader back to the horrific realities of slavery, and that’s where we’re staying.
It doesn’t stop Jim and Norman finding some bitter humour in the ironies of their lives. As soon as Norman arrives he explains why he ran. ‘“It was too much. Do you know what it’s like to pass for white.” I cocked my head. “As a matter of fact, just recently I passed for white so I could pass for black.” “Exhausting, isn’t it?”’ Next day, before the horrors really start, a silly joke of Norman’s tickles Jim and he laughs. Then ‘Norman laughed and soon we were laughing like two children. It felt good. It wasn’t that anything was so funny, but we needed to laugh.’ It’s the laughter of desperation.
And there’s desperation in their plan to make money through what sounds like an old trick: Norman will pose as a slave-owner, he will sell Jim, and Jim will escape. Then they will do it again. And again…. If only it were so easy. Every encounter with whites is nerve-jangling, even in the little town they reach that has a ‘constable’ instead of a sheriff. Before they speak to him to him, first woman they meet accuses Jim of ‘looking’ at her. Norman has to pretend Jim is simple-minded, and when she sees Jim whispering, Norman has to make up a story about him only being capable of mumbling nonsense. ‘But he’s strong….’ Maybe he is, but the woman doesn’t need a slave.
The constable is suspicious too, and now Jim’s supposed simple-mindedness accounts for why he’s carrying his shoes instead of wearing them….
After more failures it’s obvious they are getting nowhere, and soon they are hungry and losing faith in their plan. The constable has told them about a sawmill where slaves are used, so they try their luck there. The owner, a man called Henderson, is interested. Jim is subjected to the routine humiliation of being examined and felt, like a horse. Then Norman has to be at the top of his ‘passing for white’ game in order to stop Henderson from beating down the price too far and, not for the first time, Jim wonders whether Norman really is a slave. What if he’s always tricking gullible slaves, and is about to disappear with the money? Whatever, Jim is left alone with the owner, and is put to work.
The sawmill is a hell on earth. Conditions are foul, and the saws they use are dangerously blunt. Every Black man in the place has lost several fingers, except his little partner Sammy, silhouetted working above him on a plank above a pit. Sammy holds the other end of their saw, and typically, it’s inadequate, with ‘spots of rust and buckles.’ So it’s ‘some of the hardest, most miserable work I’d ever done. I was ankle-deep in mud, and possibly the waste of animals and people. It reeked something awful,’ Sammy seems to have little strength, and Jim almost has to do the work of two men. After half a day of this, having had nothing at all to eat, he realises Henderson has come over. He tells him he’s too slow—which is when Jim discovers why every slave in the place has terrible scars. Henderson, he finds out later, whips every new slave for the first couple of days to show them who’s boss. Now, it’s Jim’s turn.
‘I said nothing as my shirt was ripped, by someone unidentified, from my body. I said nothing as the leather stung me, ripped me, burned me. Before I passed out, I was surprised by the realization that my flowing blood did not at all cool the burning of the wounds.’ He doesn’t wake until night, in terrible pain, and it’s Sammy who tells him this is how Henderson always beats new men into submission. By now, Jim has realised that in these conditions there is no honour among slaves. Luke, and old slave who seems to be Henderson’s personal helper, would definitely raise the alarm if Jim were to try and leave. It was probably Luke who ripped the shirt from his back. Jim wonders if they are all like this. Can Sammy be trusted?
It turns out he can be. Or, rather, she can, because Jim discovers she’s a girl when she shows him her own scars. She thinks she was probably born there, has never been out of the place, and has been raped by Henderson for as long as she can remember. Jim sees his own daughter in her face as she talks, and decides he must take her with him. Luckily old Luke, stationed outside the sleeping-place, is asleep, and Sammy helps Jim navigate a route through the compound. She also knows the direction of the town outside which he had agreed to meet his ’friend,’ as he tells Sammy.
They leave the compound, and make their escape. It’s as terrifying as anything Jim has been through as they find the right direction through the woods. Sammy has told Jim that Henderson has a dog, and they know that as soon as Luke wakes up they will be followed. But for now, there is no sound of barking…. But Norman isn’t at the meeting-place, and Jim’s doubts return. He leaves Sammy for a few minutes, while he finds a vantage point to spy on the road out of the town. Norman isn’t there—which is when he hears Sammy’s screams. Jim rushes back and brings a man down, but it’s Noman. She had no idea who he was, of course, and it takes some time to explain about his whiteness. Norman was in the town buying some hard tack and dried meat, and has also brought a length of rope.
But running a full pelt with the rags of his shirt chafing has wounds has done terrible things to Jim’s back. He’s close to passing out, but is conscious enough to tell the others about the [? Plant] that has xxx properties. They find some, and make a poultice with mud from the river. Is it Sammy, who applies it? Whatever, it’s definitely she who has also gathered some edible plants. also Sami who realises that this food, which he’s gone, she’s gathered. Quote. This is the first meal since a single potato he and Norman shared before the Henderson chapters, and now he passes out entirely.
When he comes to, they know they have to leave. The river is the only viable way out, and they will use the rope and branches they can gather to build a raft to get to the other side. They make their way towards the river and start to bind the branches… which is when they hear the dogs. They realise there’s no time to build a proper raft, so they launch out into the river with what they have, because the shooting has started. One of the voices they can hear is Henderson’s and, now holding on to individual branches, they start to make their way across. It’s like clinging on to flotsam, with rifle fire in their ears. it’s horrifying… but Jim survives, and Norman—a non-swimmer—is still clinging on. So is Sammy, but she isn’t moving. It’s when they manage to struggle to the other side that they realise she’s been shot
There isn’t really time to talk about whether Jim had been right to bring her at all. When Norman suggests it, Jim doesn’t feel bad about it. He says she was already dead at Henderson’s, and it doesn’t sound glib as he says it. And even though neither of them believes in the white man’s religion, they bury her anyway, knowing that the river will claim her soon enough, ‘as it will claim all of us.’ [?] Norman says some words over the shallow grave. [quote] It feels like enough.
They might be safe from Henderson for now, but they need to put some real distance between them and him. Soon, they’re able to steal a skiff, despite Norman’s misgivings. By now, Jim is a long way beyond worrying about any kind of conventional. What are they going to do to him? Why should he care? And they start to paddle, downstream, because they have no real choice if they want to get away. And it’s from now on that Part 2 moves into a different kind of narrative. There are still the conventions of realistic fiction, but Everett is moving a long way from the kind of realism of the Henderson chapters. It’s more like the far-fetched adventures of Huck Finn….
Jim, who knows about these steamers, hopes the paddle is at the back. It isn’t. It has side paddles they can’t avoid, and they can’t jump because Norman can’t swim. Luckily, of course, there’s a convenient rope and, after the necessary nods to life-threatening jeopardy and narrow escapes, they are just about able to hang on to some ropes that are hanging there. As the skiff is broken to splinters by the paddle, they hear voices either cheering or fretting about the poor occupants…. Before the skiff. You know, by the paddles. They climb on board the lowest deck and find themselves in the hot, noisy engine room.
It becomes a set-piece scene. With its mighty furnace, the room is a kind of hell. And the Lord of the Inferno is Brock, a slave, who sees Jim first. He can’t be there, he tells him, he’s got to get out. Now. And then he sees Norman. Brock is in the whirl of embarrassed confusion we’ve seen so often, full of apologies—but as insistent as he dares that they have to leave. But he can’t stay away from the furnace and Norman is planning to go up on deck anyway. But in his ruined clothes he will never be able to pass for the kind of prosperous white man who would be on a paddle steamer. Jim asks him where the cabin trunks are kept and, despite his growing suspicions that ‘somethin’ ain’t right here,’ xxx tells them. The trunks are heaped up, almost randomly and, among the ball gowns they finally find some ill-fitting clothes for Norman. Jim tells him the owner won’t recognise them on him because they look ugly. Any white man will be too vain to imagine such clothes could possibly be his own.
After Norman has gone, Jim is alone with xxx. Jim wonders if s, he ever leaves the place, and it seems not. His food is brought to the door, possibly by Carey, the owner. Or possibly, Brock is fantasising. He has no sense of any reality beyond the imperatives of the furnace, the bells and, at the end of the journey, the safe stowage of the next load of coal. Does he ever sleep? Only between shovelfuls, he says. But by now, Brock has got Jim shovelling coal too, despite the dreadful pain he’s in. He soon has to rest, and some food arrives. But Brock’s monomania makes him oblivious to the needs even of another slave, and he gives nothing to Jim. Bells ring, and the show has to go on. Has to.
Then Norman comes back, with strange news. There are all sorts of people upstairs, including Emmett and his minstrels. They, and a whole boatload of others, are heading north in some haste, because it seems there’s going to be a war, something about the southern states and their refusal to accept any changes in the slavery laws. Perhaps the war has already started… but whatever the truth, the voyage must go on. But something strange is happening in the engine room. Shovelling as hard as ever, responding to the bells. There are strange noises, and the engine is obviously under some kind of strain. For the first time ever, seven bells are rung, and Brock has no idea what it means. And yet only xxx seems to have any control here—Jim even doubts the existence of anyone more responsible on board. Is the whole thing run by slaves?
There are now terrible groaning sounds, a rivet bursts from a pipe and, just missing Norman, embeds itself in the plate behind him. A few inches to one side or other and it would have killed him. What on Earth is going on? [Quote. Final seconds] And that’s the last we see of the inside of the steamer. It’s an overtly symbolic moment when this boat without a captain, carrying on for no reason that anybody knows of, is blown to pieces. The next thing Jim knows is that he’s adrift again, surrounded by passengers also clinging to flotsam or floating, lifeless. He calls out for Norman, sees him, and promises he won’t let him drown. But then he hears another voice—guess whose. [quote] And that’s where Part 2 ends.
Part 3—to the end
I love this book. One of Everett’s favourite things is to bring on unexpected shifts in genre. Maybe he wants to remind us that whatever universe we thought we were in, we were wrong. For more or less the first half of the novel, we’re presented with what is essentially a variation of Mark Twain’s original novel. Jim’s narration gives it an attitude-challenging spin, but we still get more or less the same unlikely escapes and far-fetched characters. In Part 2, we’re in the world of real slave life. Injuries are life-changing, Black lives are cheap, and some slaves survive, ingloriously, by collaborating with the oppressors. Part 3 is something else again, that favourite genre among a certain white audience, the righteous vigilante plot. James—he isn’t ever going to be Jim again—is able to focus his anger, deal out some well-deserved punishment, and rescue his family for ever. It’s no more plausible than the tall-tale world of Huckleberry Finn ever was, and that doesn’t matter one bit. It’s a glorious fantasy.
In fact, James doesn’t simply morph into the Angel of Death, as he identifies himself to a slave owner with a shotgun. The man is about to shoot him in Chapter 11, but James shoots him first…. But that’s later. After the paddle-steamer explodes, James rescues Huck rather than Norman—because, reader, Huck is his son. He begins to explain a few truths, having decided to use his own voice with him from now on. He drops the slave language altogether, except when trying to disorientate white people he meets later and, with both this and the news about his own parentage, Huck is completely confused. And it gets worse. Jim can read and write, and is a completely different person from the one he’s always appeared to be. ‘You’ve been lying to me this whole time? You been lying to me my whole life?’ He’s angry—until James tells him that the body he saw in the house being washed downstream was his pappy. Huck always hated him.
In his childish way, Huck accepts who he is. But his questioning, and James’s answers, only serve to point out the meaninglessness of it all. Huck is angry again—‘You’ve been lying to me my whole life. About everything. Why should I believe anything you tell me?’—but James spells out the absurd reality. ‘Belief has nothing to do with truth. Believe what you like. Believe I’m lying and move through the world as a white boy. Believe I’m telling the truth and move through the world as a white boy anyway. Either way, no difference.’
A foray down to the beach failing to discover whether Norman had survived—Huck thinks he saw him drown—almost gets James into real trouble. He sees the notebook, picks it up from near a drowned white woman, and suddenly people are sure they saw him ‘touching’ her. He remembers a boy being hanged for just looking at a white woman, then used as target practice—but ironically, it’s Emmett who saves him. ‘He’s not robbing her, he’s robbing me!’ Luckily, Jim is faster over the terrain, and he and Huck are soon on their way back to Hannibal.
It’s Huck who insists they stay together, and they find a well-used track north. They encounter Union soldiers—it really does look like there’s a war coming—although they don’t know yet which side wears blue. And, after days, they reach Hannibal. James says he’s fulfilled his duty as a father—Huck will be safe now. Then, exhausted, James goes to his own shack in the slave compound, to find it has new occupants. By now, he’s already decided to try and manage his own anger, but it isn’t anger that hits him first. His wife and daughter have been sold, and he is overcome with grief. Despite their terror regarding the possible consequences, the couple living in his old place give him food and let him sleep before the fire. At least the smell of green wood is familiar.
He hasn’t had one of his satirical philosophy dreams for a while, but now a character from Candide pops up and offers up Voltaire’s most famous line: ‘Nous devons cultiver notre jardin.’ Part of the joke is that James doesn’t understand French, but he knows what she means. The speaker is Cunégonde, and when she tells him that hope is nothing but a lie, he reminds her that against all the odds she reappears at the end of the novel. Maybe this is Everett’s reminder to us that all these characters are in a novel too, so anything might happen if the author wants it to.
Meanwhile James’s radicalisation, which started a long time ago, really starts to accelerate next day. Finding out that his loved ones have been sold is bad enough, on top of all those terrible experiences he’s had on his travels. Then, in the morning, Hopkins the overseer comes to rape the woman of the house. James, in hiding, can do nothing, and his anger only rises further. What to do? He doesn’t know where his wife and daughter are, so… he decides to make his way to a safe place—Jackson Island again. Huck will guess that’s where he is, won’t he?
Yes he will, but not yet. And before he does, Everett presents James with a gift of an opportunity. Hopkins is with some buddies, having rowed over to the island to get drunk. And they leave him, sleeping it off, where James can find him, with his gun on the ground next to him. You couldn’t make it up—but we aren’t making any strong objections, because we’re enjoying Hopkins’s mortification too much. James now has the gun, and has his other arm around Hopkins’s neck as he lists his crimes. ‘“Tell me, what part of raping Katie did you enjoy? Her soft brown skin? Her sweet smell?” I tightened my grip. “Her palpable fear? Yes, that was it. Her fear. You liked her crying like that, didn’t you? You can tell me.”’
Later, he muses on his own motives for eventually strangling the man. ‘On one level it was all too simple. I had exacted revenge. But for whom? For one act, or many? Against one man, many men or the world? I wondered if I should feel guilty. Should I have felt some pride in my action? Had I done a brave thing? Had I done an evil thing? Was it evil to kill evil? The truth was that I didn’t care.’ And as readers, we remember another waking philosophical dream, when James nearly drowned tricking and catching a huge catfish by hand. John Locke has suddenly appeared. ‘You, again. Have you come to continue your defence of condoning slavery?’ No, he isn’t, but James talks to him about the nature of his struggle with white society. Locke tells him his race have lost a war, but he has a reply. ‘If I am in a war, then I have the right to fight back. That follows, doesn’t it? I have a right, perhaps a duty, to kill my enemy. … My enemy is those who would kill me. Am I correct, John?’ But ‘John’ has no reply to this. ‘Well, now.’
Finally, Huck can make an escape to the island during the church service. He tells James he overheard Hopkins—oh, the irony—mention that James’s wife and daughter had been taken to ‘The Graham farm.’ But that’s all he heard, and James finds himself regretting not having asked some questions before killing Hopkins. But he knows that Judge Thatcher must have administered the sale, and decides to raid his desk in the library. And, when the judge surprises him there, he doesn’t make the same mistake he made with Hopkins. He doesn’t let his anger get the better of him, instead taking complete control.
Now, and in the remaining three or four chapters, James doesn’t put a foot wrong. The judge sounds exactly like all the other slave-owners James has met—‘Boy, they’re gonna lynch you every day but Tuesday’—but soon James is having a fine time completely discombobulating him. Thatcher simply can’t believe that he is having a conversation with this slave he thought he knew. ‘It was not the pistol, but my language, the fact that I didn’t conform to his expectations, that I could read, that had so disturbed and frightened him.’ And he makes Thatcher tell him where the Graham farm is, and to show him on a map.
It takes time for James to get him to realise the truth of the situation. Thatcher tries the old formulas—‘After all I’ve done for you. I fed you all those years. I put a roof over your head. Gave you clothes’—which, of course, James scorns. Or he tries scare tactics again. ‘Nigger, you are in more trouble than you can imagine.’ And this time, James is utterly contemptuous. ‘Why on earth would you think that I can’t imagine the trouble I’m in? After you’ve tortured me and eviscerated me and emasculated me and left me to burn slowly to death, is there something else you’ll do to me? Tell me, Judge Thatcher, what is there that I can’t imagine?’ Yep, he can make speeches now. And while he has the judge row him upstream he points out some truths in a perfect little exchange. He asks, ‘Do you want to be rowing? No. Are you getting paid for rowing? No. Are you rowing because you’re afraid of me and what I might do to you? Yes, Judge Thatcher.’ The judge insists he’s no slave, but ‘I pointed the barrel of the pistol at his face. “Row faster,” I said. He did. “Oh, yes, you’re a slave.”’
Are we nearly there yet? Definitely, as Everett compensates for James’s lack of any plan by dropping happy chances in his way. The first man he meets is a friendly slave, who feels him and tells him where to find the Graham farm—‘a bad place,’ where slaves are bred like cattle. At the farm that night, he meets four huge slaves, and asks all their names. The tinder-like dryness of the harvested cornfield nearby has given James an idea. One of the men will easily be able to put the overseer out of action, and the others will round up the rest of the slaves. James uses the matches he’s taken from the judge’s desk, and uses one to set fire to the field. The slaves are escaping before the alarm is raised, and… James sees ‘a woman I could not take my eyes off.’ It’s Sadie, of course, and soon Lizzie follows her. Could it be a more perfect reunion? James, the hero, rescues not only his family but every slave there who can make their way north. Before that, he’s shot the dreadful owner, and started a fire that will burn down the whole place.
‘As happens, with the frightened and unprepared, we scattered. Some of us would be caught. Some of us would be killed. Probably some of us would go crawling back.’ Yes, but not James, his family, and at least two of the four big men. They reach a safe state, and a safe town, and answer a white man’s questions.
‘“Runaways?” he asked.
“We are,” I said.
“Any of you named Nigger Jim?”
I pointed to each of us. “Sadie, Lizzie, Morris, Buck.”
“And who are you?”
“I am James.”
“James what?”
“Just James.”’
As a potential nickname, it has a much better ring to it than the white man’s alternative.
We can read it for you wholesale 