Olivia: Alright Jackson, I’ve got a game for you. Five-word book review. The book is Percival Everett’s James. You go first. Jackson: Oh, easy. He thinks, therefore I'm terrified. Olivia: That is… alarmingly accurate. Okay, my turn. Twain's sidekick becomes the hero. Jackson: I like that. It’s a little more hopeful than mine. Yours sounds like an inspirational poster; mine sounds like the tagline for a horror movie. Which, having read it, feels about right. Olivia: It’s both, and that’s the genius of it. Today we are diving headfirst into the masterpiece that is James: A Novel by Percival L. Everett. And to understand the weight of this book, you have to know who Everett is. He’s not just a novelist; he’s a Distinguished Professor of English, and his great-grandmother was enslaved. Jackson: Wow. Okay, that changes the frame immediately. This isn't just a clever literary exercise for him. This is personal history. This is ancestral. Olivia: Exactly. He’s not just playing in Twain’s sandbox; he’s excavating it. He’s looking for the bones buried underneath. The book was massively acclaimed, winning both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, because it does something so audacious. It suggests that the Jim we all met in Huckleberry Finn… was a character playing a character. Jackson: A performance? You’re saying the simple, superstitious man on the raft was all an act? Olivia: A life-saving, soul-crushing act. And that is the first, and maybe most profound, revelation of this book: the sheer, exhausting performance of identity required to survive in a world that wants to kill you.

Jackson: That’s a huge claim to make about one of literature's most famous characters. How does Everett even begin to make that believable? Olivia: He shows us, he doesn't just tell us. Early in the novel, we see Jim in the slave quarters, but he’s not the man from Twain’s story. This Jim is a philosopher, a teacher. There's this incredible scene where he's teaching the enslaved children language. But he's not teaching them proper English. He's teaching them how to perform "slave talk." Jackson: Wait, he’s teaching them how to sound uneducated on purpose? Olivia: Precisely. He tells his own daughter to use incorrect grammar, to say "is" instead of "are," because he knows that for a white person, a grammatically correct sentence from a Black child is not a sign of intelligence. It's a sign of insolence. It’s a threat. He’s teaching them a survival mechanism. Jackson: It’s like extreme code-switching, but the consequence for getting it wrong isn't just awkwardness, it's the whip. Or worse. Olivia: Exactly. And Jim is the master of it. Internally, his narration is dense, philosophical, and beautiful. He’s reading Voltaire and John Locke in secret. But the moment a white person appears, his language flattens, his posture stoops. He becomes the caricature they expect. He makes himself small to stay alive. Jackson: The psychological toll of that must be immense. To constantly hold two versions of yourself in your head. Olivia: It’s crushing. And we see it even more clearly through another character, Norman. He's a member of a minstrel troupe that Jim is forced to join, and he’s a Black man who is so light-skinned he can pass for white. He spends his days as a white man, then puts on blackface at night to perform as a caricature of a Black man for a white audience. Jackson: Oh, the layers of that are just dizzying. He’s a Black man, pretending to be a white man, pretending to be a Black man. That’s a prison made of identity. Olivia: And Norman is exhausted by it. He tells Jim, "Do you know what it’s like to pass for white?" He confesses that the hardest part is not just the fear of being discovered, but the sheer effort of the performance. It’s a constant, draining act. This is where the book really pushes back on some of the criticism it received. Jackson: I was going to ask about that. Some reviews mentioned that Jim’s high-level literacy and philosophical knowledge felt a bit anachronistic or unexplained. How does the book handle that? Olivia: That’s the brilliant part—it doesn’t. Everett deliberately gives no backstory for Jim’s education. There's no kind white benefactor who taught him to read. To explain it would be to fall into a "white savior" trope. Instead, the book presents his intellect as inherent. It simply is. The question isn't "How did this slave become so smart?" The book’s question is, "How did this brilliant man survive pretending to be a fool?" It completely reframes our perspective. Jackson: So his intelligence is the default, and the ignorance is the performance. That’s a powerful reversal. But like you said, that kind of pressure, that constant performance, has to lead somewhere. It can’t just be sustained forever. Olivia: It can't. And that pressure cooker is exactly what leads to the book's brutal, shocking, and transformative second act. The performance ends, and the warrior is born.

Jackson: A warrior? That feels like a massive leap from the Jim we know, even the secret philosopher Jim. What could possibly trigger that kind of change? Olivia: The book argues that slavery isn't a social condition; it's a "state of war." And that idea is forged in one of the most incredible sequences I've ever read. Jim and Huck are on the run, and they're starving. Jim tries a dangerous method of hand-fishing called 'dogging,' where he sticks his arm into an underwater hole to lure a catfish. Jackson: That sounds like a terrible idea. Olivia: It is. A massive catfish clamps down on his arm and pulls him underwater. As he's drowning in the muddy Mississippi, time stretches, and he has this vivid, fever-dream hallucination. He finds himself in a debate with the philosopher John Locke. Jackson: He’s debating a long-dead Enlightenment philosopher while drowning. Of course he is. What do they talk about? Olivia: Locke tells him, "Imagine it all as a state of war. You have been conquered, and so as long as the war continues, you shall be a slave." And Jim, fighting for his life, has this epiphany. He argues back, "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." In that moment, his struggle is no longer about passive endurance. It’s about active combat. Jackson: Wow. So he's literally drowning and in that moment he finds a philosophical justification for violence. He's not just a runaway anymore; he's a soldier. Olivia: A soldier in a war of one. And this new philosophy is immediately put to the test. He returns to his old plantation in secret, trying to find news of his wife and daughter who were sold away. While hiding, he witnesses the overseer, a man named Hopkins, brutally rape an enslaved woman named Katie. Jackson: Oh man. Olivia: And Jim is paralyzed. He describes wanting to rush out and snap the man's neck, but he knows it would mean his own death and likely the death of others. He sees his wife, Sadie, and his daughter, Lizzie, in Katie's face. The horror and the helplessness are absolute. But something shifts inside him. He says, "I was befriending my anger, learning not only how to feel it, but perhaps how to use it." Jackson: He’s weaponizing his own rage. Olivia: And he uses it with chilling precision. A few days later, he finds Hopkins drunk and passed out alone on an island. Jim doesn't act in a fit of passion. It's cold. It's calculated. He wakes Hopkins up, disarms him, and tells him exactly who he is and why this is happening. He strangles him, and as he does it, he reflects not on guilt or pride, but on a profound apathy. He thinks, "It’s not your fear... It’s the fact that I don’t really care." Jackson: Whoa. So he goes from philosopher to assassin. Is the book justifying murder? That's a dark path. Olivia: It's not justifying it so much as it's contextualizing it. Later, when Jim confronts the plantation owner who bought his family, he declares, "I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night." The book forces you to sit with an uncomfortable question: in a "state of war" against an institution as evil as slavery, what does justice look like? It might not be clean. It might look like a man's hands around an overseer's throat. Jackson: This is so much heavier than a trip down the Mississippi on a raft. He's become this avenging angel, but what was the original goal? You mentioned his family. That was the whole point, right? Olivia: That was always the point. And that's where the book delivers its most stunning, heart-wrenching, and world-altering twist.

Jackson: More stunning than a philosophical debate while drowning? I’m ready. Olivia: The transformation into a warrior is just the means to an end. The end was always his wife, Sadie, and his daughter, Lizzie. But his journey gets tangled up in a catastrophic event. He and Norman, the man who passes for white, are on a steamboat that explodes. It's chaos. Jim is thrown into the freezing river. Jackson: Okay, another near-death experience. Olivia: But this one is different. He's in the water, and he hears two people calling his name, both drowning, both equidistant from him. One is his friend, Norman. The other… is Huck Finn. He can only save one. Jackson: Oh, that's an impossible choice. His friend who shares his struggle, or the boy he's been protecting. Olivia: He saves Huck. And when a confused Huck asks him why, why he chose him over his friend, Jim, exhausted and grieving, finally tells the truth. He says, "Because, Huck... you are my son. And I am your father." Jackson: Hold on. Wait. Jim is Huck's FATHER? That changes... everything. The whole book, the original book! The dynamic, the power, the responsibility. It’s not a runaway slave and a white boy. It’s a father protecting his son, who doesn't even know his own identity. Olivia: It completely redefines one of American literature's most iconic relationships. And it raises the stakes to an impossible level. Jim's fight is now not just for his wife and daughter, but for the son who the world sees as white, a son he has to protect by letting him believe a lie. Jackson: My mind is officially blown. So how does it end? Does he find his family? What happens to this new, radicalized James? Olivia: He becomes a leader. Fueled by this purpose, he is no longer just one man. He finds the 'breeder' farm where his family was sold—a place designed for the sole purpose of producing more slaves. He finds other enslaved men shackled to a post and frees them. He doesn't just ask them to run; he calls them 'men' and inspires them to fight. Jackson: He starts a rebellion. Olivia: A full-blown rebellion. He orchestrates a plan, sets a cornfield on fire as a diversion, and in the chaos, he finds Sadie and Lizzie. It’s this beautiful, frantic reunion in the middle of fire and smoke. And then the plantation owner appears with a shotgun. Jim confronts him, pistol in hand, and declares, "I am James." He shoots the owner dead. Jackson: He gets them. He actually wins. Olivia: He wins his family. They escape north. But the final victory, the true moment of freedom, is smaller and quieter. They reach Iowa, a free state, and are immediately met with suspicion by the local sheriff. The sheriff asks, "Any of you named Nigger Jim?" And Jim, standing with his family, points to his wife, his daughter, his friends. Then the sheriff asks, "And who are you?" And he replies, with all the weight of his journey behind him, "I am James." The sheriff asks, "James what?" And he says, "Just James." Jackson: Chills. That's it right there. He's not property anymore. He's not a caricature. He's not even just a father or a husband. He is himself. He has named himself.

Olivia: Exactly. That's the whole journey. The performance of a false identity gives way to the transformation into a warrior, all in service of the ultimate goal: reclaiming his family and, finally, his own name. Percival Everett didn't just give a minor character a backstory. He deconstructed an American myth. Jackson: He took the story of Huckleberry Finn, which is so often framed as a white boy's moral awakening, and revealed the epic, tragic, and heroic story that was happening just off-camera the whole time. Olivia: He shows us that the real hero of that story was the man who had to pretend not to be one. The intellectual who had to play the fool. The father who had to act the friend. He forces us to look at our foundational stories and ask who was silenced, who was flattened, and what genius was we refused to see. Jackson: It makes you wonder, doesn't it? How many other 'Jims' are hidden in our history, their true, brilliant, and revolutionary stories never told because no one thought to let them speak for themselves? Olivia: That is the question that lingers long after you finish the last page. It’s a powerful, essential book. We’d love to hear what you all think. Does this reimagining change how you see the original Huckleberry Finn? Let us know your thoughts on our social channels. Jackson: It’s a conversation worth having. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.