James

James, by Percival Everett

A Book Review

The novel, James, won the 2024 Kirkus Prize, the National Book Award for Fiction, and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Dwight Garner of the New York Times called it “Majestic”. The Atlantic called it “Genius”. These sources suggest that James is a piece of quality literature…but the sources lied. 

The book’s framework is a re-telling of the story of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of his fellow runaway, the slave, Jim, identified in the book as: James. It’s an intriguing concept that presents an opportunity. But the book’s shortcomings reveal themselves early, often, and decisively. 

Among the book’s problems is its regular inclusion of logical errors. Early in the book James and Huck fashion a modest raft, adding a lean-to for shelter. Shortly thereafter, James describes the exhausting work of bailing water, due to the waves from large river boats. How does anyone bail a raft?

James and Huck steal a bag of “booty” from some robbers. There were books among the treasures. “As to the monetary value of books I had no knowledge, but their intellectual value was immediately evident.” This quote from James makes little sense. Books would have been relatively rare, possessed mostly by the wealthy, as witnessed by James in the library of Judge Thatcher. But as for intellectual value, books have always ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. What would be the basis for James to judge that the books he was looking at had intellectual value? 

Later, James and Huck are talking about making wishes. James wonders to himself what Kierkegaard would decide if he could wish for anything. Kierkegaard? The book tells us that James learns to read by sneaking into Judge Thatcher’s library. Self-taught reading is very difficult. Doing so in occasional stolen minutes is probably not possible. Learning to read philosophical books in this way is even less likely. But the odds reach zero when we consider Kierkegaard, who died in 1855. His Danish works were not translated into other languages in his lifetime. They did not become available to the English-speaking world until the 1930s. James is set at the beginning of the American Civil War. James would never have seen a book written by Kierkegaard. 

In one scene James is in danger of drowning. He manages to get to shore. He is happy that his sack of books and paper remain strapped to his back. Imagine that: a drowning man not thinking to rid himself of a sack of books. 

James experiences “nostalgic terror”. People feel nostalgia for their past terrors?

In another scene, James, the protagonist, exhibits ironic hubris. “I looked at one woman…I saw the surface of her, merely the outer shell, and realized that she was mere surface all the way to her core.” (It’s amazing what a little superficial judgment can accomplish.) 

Some time later James runs for his life for two hours through the woods. He has no idea where he’s going. That’s no problem for his friend, Norman, though, who locates him the next morning. 

Later in the book James comments to Norman, “I know this river. I know the white people on it.” He lived his life in Hannibal, Missouri. He knew the river there and he knew the white people there, but Everett expects us to believe James is full of confidence about all of the Mississippi because he was acquainted with a mile or so of it.  

James knows there is a bounty out for him that identifies him by name. He meets the slave, Brock, in the boiler room of a steamboat. James is uncertain about whether Brock can be trusted but when Brock asks his name, he answers, “James”.

James asks about Brock’s master. Brock, answers: “Sometimes the boiler makes a noise, a bang-like.” The answer is a jarring non-sequitur, only explained as foreshadowing. “This boat is going to blow on the next page or so,” it seemed to say. Then it did. A steamboat, blown apart in the middle of the Mississippi seems like an opportunity for a chapter or two of high drama. Nope. Didn’t happen. Apparently its purpose was to arrange for Huck and James to reunite on the river’s shore. 

Huck talks James into hunting catfish by hand. Subsequently, James ends up in a tussle with a 50-pounder. The catfish has James’ hand in his mouth and James must fight for his life. So his mind wanders off to a philosophical debate with John Locke. Is he asking Locke’s permission to fight against the fish? To fight against slavery? Is this what people think about when in danger of drowning?

James is having a chat with Huck. “‘A father’s job is make sure his children are safe, right?’ I, in fact, had no idea what I or anyone else was supposed to do.” This human confession makes no sense in the context. Throughout the story James’ objective had been to get free and to free his family. This is a denial of his most important idea. 

James is traveling with Huck back to Hannibal. For no particular purpose in the story, he decides he wants to get back to the river because the creeks confuse him. (Not sure why they would be confusing, given that they would all be heading to the Mississippi.) But then he leads the way “due east through the dense brush”. Apparently his internal compass had reset itself (making it unnecessary for him to return to the river).

Back in Hannibal, overseer Hopkins rapes a black woman. James, fearful of making a bad situation worse, remains in hiding and has to witness the deed. Naturally, this fills him with frustration and rage. So what is the next event in the story? Hopkins takes a boat out for a drinking binge with some friends to the very island where James has gone to hide. Then the buddies leave Hopkins drunk and alone on the island. It’s revenge, a la deus ex machina.

James kidnaps Judge Thatcher. Their conversation turns to Hopkins. “I didn’t shoot him, though. I strangled him…I actually felt a little bad for him. I guess that’s the difference between you and me.” This self-praise is in stark contrast to his thoughts when he actually killed Hopkins. “‘That’s the best part of this—that I don’t care.’ And I didn’t care that he was dead and unable to hear those final words. He didn’t matter.”

Later, James receives instructions from a friend on how to shoot a pistol. Killing a person is not easy; it takes training and desensitization to overcome the resistance of the conscience. No matter, the first time James pulls a trigger he hits his man square in the chest.

Often it seems that Everett has no awareness of the words he’s just put on paper. It’s almost as if he’s had a posse of grad students independently write chapters and paragraphs, while a different not-overly-bright grad student patches the pieces together. It’s hard to believe this book was ever proof-read. 

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Everett makes a conscious decision about the dialog in this book that grates throughout. We begin with James who speaks with a “slave dialect” in the presence of white people but otherwise speaks as a man of learning. As it turns out, James is not the only educated black slave in the country. In another leap of fantasy, the story informs us that all black slaves spoke to one another with advanced English. Strangely, it is not the English of Lincoln or Frederick Douglass, or Walt Whitman. No, apparently the American black slave community spoke with a dialect they had prophetically gleaned from the 21st century. However likely it is that black slaves used deference as a strategy, this is a far cry from a grand conspiracy that hid black educational progress.    

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One theme of the book is James’ rejection of Christianity. Early in the book, when struggling on the Mississippi, Huck screams out to James, “You believe in Jesus.” James replies, “Sho, but maybe you be the one to ax him fo help? He don’t seem to pay no mind to the wishes of no slave.”

Of the books Jim possessed, “….the Bible itself was the least interesting of all. I could not enter it, did not want to enter it, and then understood that I recognized it as a tool of my enemy.”

This type of thinking may fit 21st century agnostics whose privileged lives have given them ample time to stew over the oppression of their ancestors, but does it represent the thinking of American slaves in 1861? Many white men used the Bible to “justify” the practice of slavery. But the harshest slavers tended to limit slave access to the Bible. But the Word got out. The majority of blacks identified as Christians in the 1860s. The story of Moses and the Israelites being delivered from Egyptian slavery was an obvious source of inspiration and hope. No doubt there were blacks like James, who identified Christianity with the oppressors, but when Everett puts James in this category he makes him an outlier. Thus, James does not represent the black community. He does not help us understand the mindset of the American black slave. This weakens the story.

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Everett wants to convince us that the lives of black slaves were cheap and were often taken from them. At one point James thinks about his friend, George, who had taken a beating for stealing a pencil. He learned later that George had been lynched. 

In another scene, James is severely whipped by a new master. His crime? He sawed too slowly and/or because the master liked to make an early impression on his slaves. It’s not difficult to imagine cruel masters but the man who beat and injured James had just paid $350 for him. Translated into 2026 dollars, this is nearly $7000. 

At one point James is talking with his friend, Norman, about his desire to buy his wife’s freedom. James didn’t know what the cost would be. Norman guessed $1000. It happens that a strong male could cost $1500 in 1861, which translates to nearly $60,000 today. While many whites did not value blacks on a human level, they did value them for their utility. Everett is inconsistent on this point but he does acknowledge it: in one situation James is surprised that white men were shooting at him. “You can’t work a dead slave.” 

Not to claim that lynchings ever make sense, a lynching over a pencil is too much to imagine (and, in fact, there is no record of any such lynching). You don’t kill your thousand-dollar slave over the loss of a 6-penny pencil. Slaves were slaves in America because whites could make money off of them. 

Slaves were killed, and they were killed for bad reasons, but this was not common. Approximately 400,000 slaves were brought to the United States. In 1860 there were 4,000,000 slaves. This explosion in numbers suggests strongly that slaves were cared for, at least for the sake of their investment value.

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My biggest complaint about James is that it is fundamentally a vehicle for racism. 

Early in the story Huck asks James to make a wish. James answers, “I reckon the genie be white. I ain’t got no need to wish fo sumptin’ dat ain’t gone happen.” For such a highly educated man, it’s strange James assumes the genie to be white (given their Arabic origin). More to the point, James implies that no white genie would ever respond favorably to a black slave.

Norman sees through James’ disguise and remarks, “You didn’t slip; I’se jest knows.” Then James says to the reader, “His accent was perfect. He was bilingual, fluent in a language no white person could master.” Here Everett proclaims the superior intelligence of blacks. 

In a later scene, Norman is about to leave the engine room to go to the upper decks of a steamboat. He is wearing ill-fitting clothes he’s pilfered from the luggage. Norman is nervous that he will run into the man who owned the clothes. James insists he has nothing to fear. “White people are vain. Those clothes look awful on you. He believes his clothes are beautiful.” Here we have a bit of racist omniscient psychology. We’re treated to a bit more of this a little later, after the steamboat is blown apart. Survivors are on the beach. James knows they are not going to follow him because they are too occupied with being survivors. “White people often spent time admiring their survival of one thing or another. I imagined it was because so often they had no need to survive, only to live.” Life expectancy in 1860 was 40-41 years. As it happens, the Civil War was about to push that life expectancy even lower. Life was not smooth sailing, even for whites in 1861. 

Thinking on the Civil War, James remarks, “I knew that whatever the cause of their war, freeing slaves was an incidental premise and would be an incidental result.” This is the false claim of revisionist historians, not the perspective of black slaves in 1861. No, the North did not enter the war in order to end slavery; northerners entered it to save the Union. But the states split over slavery. The North was determined to stop the expansion of slavery, while the South was convinced that this Northern strategy was a means to choke the Southern states into submission. In short, the war was only about slavery. 

As the war progressed and Lincoln released the Emancipation Proclamation, all ambiguities were tossed aside. When black men were given a chance to fight in the war, there was no question about which side they would fight for. Roughly 40,000 of them died fighting for the North. Neither should it be overlooked that over 700,000 white men died fighting the war, including northerners and southerners. Was this sufficient punishment for the sin of slavery? I don’t know, but it was certainly no light sentence. Racists need to call the issue of slavery incidental to the Civil War because to do otherwise requires being grateful for those who gave up their lives in order to free blacks.  

From page one to the end of the book there is not one sighting of a white person of good character. Everett earned some shock value by revealing that Huck Finn was James’ son. This revelation had no impact on the story but it enabled Everett to maintain the sympathetic version of Huck imagined by Mark Twain. Huck is okay because he actually is black. 

It is clear that Everett considers white people to be a lower quality being than blacks. He doesn’t seem to realize that it was this sort of dehumanization that “justified” slavery of blacks in the first place. He is angry about the horrible treatment of black people by white people in America’s history. But whites, too, can be angry about how white people treated blacks in American history. He doesn’t want to forgive. But no one needs him to forgive. There is no one alive today who took part in or suffered through America’s long bout with slavery. No one is guilty of the sins of others who happen to look similar. No one has the right to blame people for the sins of others who look similar to the guilty. This is the judgment known as prejudice. 

Everett is tuned into white guilt. At one point in the story Huck tries to pull a joke on James. James didn’t enjoy being teased. “I acted like he hurt my feelings. White people love feeling guilty.” Everett returns to this theme later in the story when Huck and James are talking about the war. “How much of the desire to end [slavery] was fueled by a need to quell and subdue white guilt and pain?” It’s a cynical view of guilt, as if the only reason a person would make a behavioral correction is in order to escape guilt’s nagging. He seems to not understand that guilt, working properly, is revealing the difference between what a person’s behavior is and what it ought to be. We don’t change in order to avoid feeling guilty; we change in order to stop being guilty.  

It’s hard to not be cynical in return, observing that Everett has written a book that panders to white guilt, that elicits patronizing awards, and that causes large numbers of white guilt-ridden people to buy and maybe even read a crappy book so they can gush about how wonderful it is and prove they aren’t racist. From this perspective, James appears to be an exercise in exploitation. 

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Everett had an idea and it should have been a good one. He could have produced a book that was internally logical. He could have written a book that transported readers back to Missouri in the 1860s. He could have written a book that revealed the experiences of a black slave, and that plumbed the depths of that slave’s mind. That slave would have needed to think with a simplified vocabulary, though—an idea that Everett obviously found repugnant. But seemingly simple people can and do have profound insights into human nature and into the purposes of life. I don’t think Everett understands this. 

What should have been an important book is actually a logically sloppy, historically confused, racist propaganda piece aimed at the wallets of whites who “love feeling guilty”.