Everett (whose earlier novel Erasure was adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction) takes a defiantly different tack; rather than leaning away from the character’s stereotyped presentation, he leans into it.
In Twain’s telling, a mischievous white 13-year-old boy runs away from home with a Black man who is referred to as Jim—that is, when he is referred to by a name and not by a slur. Since the moment it was published in 1885, Huckleberry Finn has been widely criticized and banned, not just for its racist language and depictions of Black characters, Jim especially. In later decades, some have tried to rescue the work by editing out the racial epithets or—in the case of a 1955 TV adaptation—omitting the character entirely. Everett (whose earlier novel Erasure was adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction) takes a defiantly different tack; rather than leaning away from the character’s stereotyped presentation, he leans into it. In Everett’s telling, Jim, or James, as he christens himself, acts and speaks in a stereotyped way not out of ignorance but out of cunning self-protection: “White folks expect us to sound a certain way,” James explains, “and the better they feel, the safer we are.” While you don’t have to have read Huckleberry Finn to slip, fully, into James’s world, you will want to; the two books, like the two characters they are named for, are at their best in conversation with one another.