A Bloody Retelling of Huckleberry Finn

Percival Everett transforms Mark Twain’ classic.

- Tyler Austin Harper

Percival Everett's new novel imagines Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck's enslaved sidekick, Jim. But to call James a retelling would be an injustice. Everett sends Mark Twain's classic through the Looking Glass. What emerges is no longer a children's book, but a blood-soaked historical novel stripped of all ornament. James conjures a vision of the antebellum South as a scene of pervasive terror. Everett recognizes that American slavery's true history is not revealed in the movements of great armies or the speeches of politicians. Its realities lie in the details of life lived under conditions of unceasing brutality-the omnipresent whip, the daily interplay of dread and panic, the rage that can find no outlet.

James, in other words, is anything but a straightahead homage to a literary classic. Instead, Everett has a cultural homicide in view. He wishes to kill the Black stock character, entrenched in American fiction and film, whom the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah called "the Saint" in 1993 and, several years later, the director Spike Lee christened "the magical, mystical Negro." James is best understood as a systematic dismantling of that shopworn staple, the Black man or woman who exists to rescue and morally enlighten a fallen but basically redeemable white protagonist.

And Everett's quarrel is not with this archetype alone.

He takes aim at the ethics embodied by the magical Negro: the idea that oppression exalts, that suffering purifies the spirit. Everett's counter-thesis is that oppression hardens; suffering sharpens. James cuts.

The trope of "the noble good-hearted black man or woman, friendly to whites," in Appiah's words, isn't hard to recognize in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Its secondary hero is ennobled by a folksy wisdom and probity so unalloyed as to border on the supernatural.