 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book about an unlikely friendship.
James, by Percival Everett. This was billed as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, the escaped slave. It's quite a bit more subversive than that, in a brilliant way. The first third of the book follows the plot of Huckleberry Finn: James flees to avoid being sold, and stumbles into Huck, who's running away from home. In Huckleberry Finn, they bond over being outsiders and runaways. In this book, it's a lot more complicated, and James only gradually trusts Huck with the truth about himself. They travel down the river, and fall in with a couple of traveling con men. The con men seize James and sell him the first chance they get. The second section diverges into what happened to James while he and Huck were separated. He's put to work at a dangerous sawmill, where accidental mutilations are treated as a fact of life. Later, he winds up in a minstrel troupe. There's a sort of Victor/Victoria vibe to this part: a Black man secretly pretending to be a White man overtly pretending to be a Black man. James doesn't know what to make of the minstrels. Their whole act is mocking Black people, yet they treat him like just another one of the guys - until he tries to leave. James and Huck are reunited in a riverboat accident. James has to choose between saving Huck or another friend, which serves as a warning that the final section of the book is about to take a much darker turn. All through the book, Everett shows the routine violence of slavery. Near the end, there's an excruciating scene where James witnesses an enslaved woman being raped by a White overseer, and knows he can't come out of hiding to save her. He's well aware that this has happened to his wife, and will happen to his daughter if it hasn't already. When James later takes violent revenge, he's nothing like the gentle, pious soul that we saw through Huck's eyes in Huckleberry Finn. In real life, of course, violence by enslaved people was rare because it guaranteed horrific punishment. So when wish-fulfillment scenes like this show up in James and other books by Black authors (Drapetomania, for instance), it's viscerally satisfying. A recurring theme is James needing to speak for himself, in his own voice. There's a wickedly funny scene near the beginning where James and his family speak grammatical English among themselves, but teach the children to speak in an exaggerated dialect, and they explain the rules for speaking with White people. (For instance, if "Mistress" is throwing water on a grease fire, they must suggest getting sand instead, while letting it appear to be her idea.) Later James gets hold of a pencil, and wants to write his thoughts in a notebook, even if he's not sure of what to say. The "Negro songs" performed by the minstrels are written by their White leader, and James finds them incomprehensible. And Huck is left behind at the end, because despite their friendship, this isn't his story - it's about James, and the man he chose to become.
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