The New Yorker Radio Hour - Percival Everett and the Reinvention of Mark Twain’s Jim

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

In a new novel, Percival Everett offers a radically different perspective on the classic story “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”  Everett tells the story of Jim, who is escaping slavery; he calls his book “James.”  “My Jim—he’s not simple,” Everett tells Julian Lucas. “The Jim that’s represented in Huck Finn is simple.”  Everett, whose 2001 novel “Erasure” was adapted as the Oscar-winning film “American Fiction,” restores Jim’s inner life as a father surviving enslavement, and forced to play along with the pranks of two white boys.  But like other Black authors, including Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed, Everett considers Twain’s original a central American text grappling with slavery.  “I imagine myself in a conversation with Twain doing this. And one of the things I think he and I would both agree on is that he doesn’t write Jim’s story because he’s not capable of writing Jim’s story—any more than I’m capable of writing Huck’s story.”  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The novelist Percival Everett has been getting a lot of attention lately, including a profile in The New Yorker. His novel, Erasure, was made into the film American Fiction, which just won an Oscar for its screenplay. And he has a new novel out. His 24th, staff writer Julian Lucas, is fascinated by Percival Everett's work. whether it's his novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, about a character who ends up stuck in the plot of basically every Sydney Poitier movie

or erasure about a black novelist so frustrated by the pigeonholing in the publishing industry that he writes an elaborate literary prank under a pseudonym. To read Percival Everett is always to grapple with the prejudices and the assumptions and the acts of imagination that we have to make in communicating with one another

through fiction and through art. And so when I saw that he was rewriting Huckleberry Finn, I knew that it would be an opportunity not just to read a great narrative, but also to read along with him one of the foundational stories in the American narrative. Everett's book is called James.

Here's Julian Lucas talking with Percival Everett. So I love how this novel begins. I mean, first of all, the title, because in Twain, we know this character as Jim, or, you know, sometimes as more derogatory epitets, but immediately he's announced as James. And the reframing you do is just so clear in the very first sentence. And I wonder if you could read for us the first page of the novel. See if I can get close here. Those little bastards were hiding up. The moon was not quite full, but bright,

and it was behind them so I could see them as plain as day, though it was deep night. Lightning bugs flashed against the black canvas. I waited at Miss Watson's kitchen door, rocked a loose stepboard with my foot, knew she was going to tell me to fix it tomorrow. I was waiting there for her to give me a pan of cornbread that she had made with Sadie's recipe.

Waiting as a big part of her, part of a slave's life, waiting and waiting to wait some more. Waiting for demands, waiting for food, waiting for the ends of days, waiting for the just and deserved Christian reward at the end of it all. Those white boys, Huck and Tom, watched me. They were always playing some kind of pretending game, where I was either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy. They hopped about out there with the chiggers, mosquitoes, and other biting bugs, but never

made any progress toward me. always pays to give white folks what they want. So I stepped into the yard and called out into the night. Who dat dare in that dark like that? What I love about this is you take a scene that in Twain is a kind of fun prank played by these two boys. And you immediately make us see it from the bitter, exhausted perspective of a grown man who has to play along with these children's games, essentially because he's a slave.

and you hear it immediately in those little bastards. How did you arrive at this voice for Jim? Well, I don't know. The first thing I did to start this was I read Huckleberry Finn 15 times in a row, and I would stop and just go right back to the beginning. And so until it became a blur. Until it, you know how when you say a word over and over, it finally sounds like nonsense?

Well, I needed it to become nonsense because I didn't want to merely regurgitate scenes. I needed to own the material, and that allowed me to own the material. So I was never saying what I thought Twain had said because I couldn't remember what Twain had said. I love that. It's almost a river-like reading experience.

You keep going back to the beginning. And I know you have a very high opinion of nonsense and of nonsense and have written essays on it. did you stop enjoying it after a while? I was sick of it. Did it affect your... Yes, I was sick of it. I wanted to be sick of it.

How many readings did it take to get sick of it? Oh, a couple. Once you've read something, you've read it, and I think after three or four, I was really tired of reading it, but I had to keep reading it. Do you feel like it's a voice that you found in the book? I mean, you know, when Jim talks to Huck

in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he's usually calling him child and honey in all these sweet affectionate names. Was there a kernel of the character you created sort of hidden in Twain's character

or did you kind of have to invent him whole cloth? You're right. He is not inclined to use the same kinds of terms of endearment that Jim uses in Huck Finn. But it's also because

there's a my gym is, he's not simple. The gym that's represented in Huck Finn is simple. And that's the part that Twain wasn't capable of writing. For Twain, a slave was a simple person. And by simple, I don't mean uncomplicated. I mean not terribly smart. One of the themes you've been most interested in throughout your career

is language miscommunication. You study the philosophy of language as a graduate student, and so many of your novels are interested in these kinds of misunderstandings and failures of language. What interests you about the way slavery-shaped communication? I can preface that with a complaint about a film, and that's 12 years of slave. when this black man who has been living as best friends and neighbors and co-workers with white America

is stolen away from his home and spirited down to a plantation in the south, he's thrown into a situation with slaves. And he can understand what they say. And that can't happen. he does not speak their language. People who are oppressed find a way to talk to each other that does not allow the oppressors to understand what they are saying. And he would be as lost as that slave owner would be

listening to the slaves talk to each other. And that, I was offended by that film because it cheated the enslaved people out of their humanity. The other thing about it is, is just the humor. People survive with humor in the most dire of straits and the picture of slavery that's painted

in literature and film. The people are all just, how would you put it, bleak? Whereas if they're surviving, they're surviving because of their strength and their irony. I'm glad you've been, brought up humor because

your work is really known for finding humor in unexpected places. Your novel The Trees is a very dark satire about the legacy of lynching in the U.S. And did you want this book to

be funny? Did you want it to be funny in the way that Twain's work is funny? Well, not funny in that way. And I think naturally I seek to employ humor as a disarming tool. I don't know how to be funny. If I try to write funny, I think I fail.

Again, the lessons I've learned from, the lesson I learned from Twain is that humor exists in the irony of the situation. I can't write jokes, but I can find the humor in the human condition. In your story, James isn't just running to freedom. He's also reading and writing about it. And throughout the book, he hallucinates these very funny debates

with philosophers like Voltaire and John Locke. And you put them in the middle of these really dramatic moments when he's been bitten by a rattlesnake and he's hallucinating or he's trying to catch a fish with his bare hands. I wonder if you would read one of these moments for us from page 48. I was in Judge Thasher's library, a place where I had spent many afternoons while he was out at work or hunting ducks. I could see books in front of me. I had read them secretly, but this time, in this fever dream, I was able to read without fear of being discovered.

I had wondered every time I sneaked in there what white people would do to a slave who had learned how to read. What would they do to a slave who had taught the other slaves to read? What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenous was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled? I was burning up with fever, fading in and out of consciousness, focusing and refocusing on Huck's face. Francois Marie-Aquette de Vulteer put a fat stick into a fire. His delicate fingers held the wood for what seemed like too long a time. I'm afraid there's no more wood, I said. Which is fine, because I am hot enough.

Too hot. That's Percival Everett, reading from his novel, James. We'll continue in a moment. To me, there's a kind of kismet in the fact that James, your appropriation of Twain, is coming out at the same time as American fiction, Cord Jefferson's adaptation of your novel Erasure. For our listeners, it stars Jeffrey Wright

as a very literary black novelist who is so fed up with stereotyping in the publishing industry that he writes a street novel under a pseudonym as an elaborate literary prank. So you wrote it in 2001 at the height of the vogue for urban lit. Do you think the story still has the same resonance in our post-Black Lives Matter era when at least for a moment a lot more attention

was given to African-American literature, I suppose it's a way of asking, do you think black writers are as confined now as then? Or is there just a different kind of confinement? Well, no, there's a much greater range of work available now, some really fine writers who've found places in the literary world. And so things have gotten better. A few months ago, I was,

I stayed up late, and I turned on the television at 3 a.m., and there was an Abbott and Costello movie. I don't remember the title of it. It was something like screams in Africa. And in it were all of these stereotypic black Africans wide-eyed and afraid of everything running around carrying stuff for white people. And I realized, well, yeah, we have more, but we haven't gotten rid of this baggage.

No one's The producers Or wherever you call The programmers of this network Saw no problem with erring this Had a slot Let's use this And it's that kind of insidious

insertion of The old stuff That caused so much damage to Black Psyche's That persists You know I was rereading Huck Finn for this, and it just struck me how wildly contemporary it still feels, you know, like Huck's abusive father sounds like a maga voter. He's so angry that he saw a rich black man

voting that he wants to overthrow the government. And I wonder if it was anything in what's going on in this country today that brought you back to the tax. and got you thinking about a story from Jim's perspective. Well, I think that is true, and I think it was unconscious more than anything else. The U.S. really hasn't changed in character all that much. And what defines us remains the same. You know, the interesting thing about Huck Finn is it's the first novel.

It's not that it's about slavery. It's about a man who was enslaved. You know, when you think of Stowe's novel or some of the slave narratives, they're about slavery. They're not about Americans, white Americans, experiencing the shame and the contradictions of the conditions of the condition of slavery. But here we have this young American, this youth, who's having to reconcile moving through the world as a free person the only father figure in the novel is property.

Exactly. And Huck's flight from home, his own search for adventure is the emphasis in Twain. And yet there's a much higher stakes story going on for Jim because this runaway,

it's a matter of life and death for him, even though it's more a matter of adventure and hijinks for Huck. So it's one thing to really love a writer as you love Twain. And it's another to actually

try to rewrite their most famous book. And I wonder, was there like a particular moment in the book that you realized Jim had more to say than Twain lets him? Or was it more, you know, this would be a great way to sneak on to the high school English syllabi? It was...

You know, first of all, I have to say that this novel doesn't come out of a dissatisfaction with the adventures of Puckleberry Finn. I imagine myself in a conversation with Twain doing this. And one of the things I think that he and I would both agree on is that he doesn't write Jim's story because he's not capable of writing Jim's story, anymore that I'm capable of writing Huck's story. In fairness to the novel, it has flawed. It is flawed in that. Twain stopped in the middle of it and then came back to it. And when he came back to it, I think there was some mercenary considerations at stake. And so it becomes more of an adventure.

Tom Sawyer comes back into the novel. And the tone of the novel changes. It's less an exploration of Huck's confusion about Jim and his condition and more of a pure adventure. And so I'm addressing that as well. I'm trying to get past that switch and tone that happens. But more importantly, I'm writing the novel that Twain could not. He was not equipped to do it.

Something I've always found so ironic about Huckleberry Finn is it's recurrently targeted by well-meaning anti-racists to either be redacted, to remove the N-word from it to cut it from syllabi entirely. And yet, there are few novels that have been more championed by the greatest African-American writers. It was so huge for Tony Morrison

and Ralph Ellison and Ishmael Reed recently wrote an essay, which is just a kind of rousing defense of the book and of Twain's insight. What do you make of this discrepancy in the way that it's been both condemned and celebrated. Well, it's condemned by people who don't read the book

and have a reaction to, and actually it's an excuse for them. You know, it's, you've got to be against something, I suppose. And apparently the word scares people. Quite frankly, if someone came into my study right now and shouted at me, you dirty N-word, word, I'd be just as offended as if they actually use that six-letter word that I just said.

It's all about intention and meaning. It behooves fascists to ban it because there is a proper and direct and interrogation of what it's like to live in a

world or slavery is really. And we're con men and hucksters are running rampant. It's an American story. And that honest depiction is probably what scares some people. Thank you so much. Certainly. The novelist Percival Everett. His new book is called James. Julian Lucas is a staff writer at The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Our Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts

with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Adam Howard, Calaliyah, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Mike Cutchman, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Deccan. And we had additional help this week from Alicia Zuckerman and Jared Paul. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.