James

 

James, by Percival Everett, is a great novel. The author has reimagined and updated The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, and rather than telling the story from Huck’s story, as it was told by Twain, Everett wrote from the perspective of Jim, the slave. Jim narrates the story and Everett created a well-educated and thoughtful man who is shackled, both figuratively and in reality, but the conditions of his slavehood. During this story, Huck fakes his own death to get away from his violent father. When Jim hears of his own impending sale to a slave owner in New Orleans, which would mean he was being ripped away from his wife and young daughter, he ran away. He and Huck made the adventure together, constantly looking after one another and developing a tight bond which was atypical of the times for any white boy and black slave. This led to their famous trip on a raft down the Mississippi River in which Jim was being sought not only as a runaway, but as the murderer of Huck.

 

I consumed this book in an audiobook format. The reader was the masterful Dominic Hoffman. I was entranced by his ability to change voices and the tempo of his delivery. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone giving this book less than a 5-star rating. It would have been in the early 60’s when I traveled with my family to Hannibal, Missouri, the home of Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain. This book refreshed my good memories of that trip. While Twain mostly avoided lengthy descriptions of the terror to which slaves were forced to endure by their masters, Everett does an excellent job of bringing such horrors to light.

 

I can’t rate this book any higher and it certainly gets my strong recommendation.