Wednesday, Jan. 14 | 7:30 pm | Parish Hall -
Percival Everett’s Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning novel James is a companion to and fascinating adaptation of Mark Twain’s American classic, Huckleberry Finn. In Everett’s novel though the story is told from the perspective of a slave. Jim, the slave who escapes with Huck down the Mississippi, is renamed James by Everett and it is James who narrates this novel. Unbeknownst to whites, James has secretly taught himself to read and write and speak free of the dialect that was commonly used by slaves. The ability to write his own history is a powerful act of freedom for James who says with joy "that if his first written scratching…can mean anything at all…then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning.”
Everett’s story initially tracks the basic events that Twain covers (albeit from the very different perspective of a fugitive slave) but eventually James and Huck are separated and the story changes dramatically. We are introduced to the savagery of slavery in the words, emotions, helplessness, and torment of the slave himself. These events seem all the more powerful and disturbing because Everett (via James) presents them without sensational prose. It is if this is just an ordinary and unremarkable part of life. But, importantly, James is not a passive observer; he is a person with an overriding goal. His every action is aimed at obtaining his freedom and that of his wife, Sadie, and daughter, Lizzie.
Cathy O’Donnell will lead the discussion. I hope to see you there.
- Earle O'Donnell
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