JAMES by Percival Everett ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

"I hated the world that wouldn’t let me apply justice without the certain retaliation of injustice.”

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Blew through this in two days. I don’t think I’ve read a clearer book in message and execution before. I was nervous it might get bogged down trying to connect to Huckleberry Finn, but no. This side of the account was always there, waiting to be told. I’m glad it found Percival Everett to tell it.

As a white man, I struggle to find the value my opinion adds to a book about the black experience in the time of slavery, but here are my thoughts on this amazing book:

Being human is nuanced to a degree that seems to escape a lot of people. Things are rarely as simple as right and wrong or good and bad. Slavery in America — the kind that took place then and the kind that takes place now — isn’t that complicated, but the infrastructure of it is. Both the systems of oppression and of survival are built on navigating that subtlety.

My favorite part of the book shows the lengths slaves like James go to protect the White’s pride and cowardice, masking his intellect with stereotypical language, in its way both a humiliation and a power his overseers could never understand. Characters like James and Norman and others see right through “gentle” slave owners and “abolitionist” acquaintances for what they truly are: Whites who will always be on the other side of the whip. Huck begins to understand this trouble, fittingly just as he learns he may straddle the line of White and Black, and through his boyish innocence he sees James for what every other White character in the book could never see: another human.

The allusions to today are stifling, and I can’t help but imagine what our country and world would look like if we didn’t have this innate need to exploit one another. What cultures would still be alive? What advancements in peace would we enjoy? I also think about so many “kind” people I know in the Midwest that would argue to the death they aren’t racist or homophobic or classist and then vote for politicians and policies that say otherwise, and I wonder how much longer we will be stuck in this loop.