Presented by Susan Ardito on November 14, 2025
Present Agnès ,Beth, Betsy, Denise, Jennifer, Kerryn, Katharine, Murielle, Pat, Peggy, Reese (Sealia’s dog) Sealia ,Susan A., Wendy
Since Susan had sent out a brief biography of Percival Everett, she began by asking how many of us in the the book group had read Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the book on which James is based. A little more than half of the group admitted to having read Twain. Susan said that until recently she had never finished it. When she came across the book years ago, she was looking for adventures featuring girls rather than boys. In preparation for the discussion of James, she listened to it and appreciated it.
Susan then read a quote from Percival Everett: “Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the source of my novel. I hope that I have written the novel that Twain did not and also could not have written. I do not view the work as a corrective, but rather I see myself in conversation with Twain.” Everett also said: “The book will do what it does in the world. I’m a novelist and artist and I want to represent the world as I see it.”
There followed a discussion of the book’s relation to Twain’s novel. For Betsy James is not a homage to Twain. He uses Twain’s novel to write his own book. Sealia listened to audio book of Huck Finn ; she found that was an easier way to deal with Twain’s use of accents. Then she read James. Approaching the books in that way allowed a positive reading of James. She agreed that it’s a conversation with Twain. Everett is neither copying Twain nor rewriting Huck Finn. James is Everett’s own book. Beth felt that James is a book Twain couldn’t have written and Peggy and Denise agreed. They loved the language lesson in the book where James teaches the younger slaves how to placate the white people by using various deviant versions of English.
Mariannick spoke of her difficulty with the slave dialect and other variations on English. But she persevered and came to love the book. Wendy remarked that the work took on a new dimension in the audio version, beautifully read by Dominic Hoffman. When reading the book silently, Wendy heard it in her own voice, so that the jump from the narrator’s normal voice to his slave accent was ludicrous. Dominic Hoffman reads in a cultured Afro American voice and slides easily into James’s slave dialect.
Katharine mentioned that some critics described the book as “ferociously funny.” Personally, she did not find it funny, only ferocious. Wendy thought that for black readers the novel would be very funny when Everett was lampooning white racism, whereas white readers might feel painfully guilty. Everett’s earlier novel Trees had savagely mocked white racists.
Everett had voiced his hope that none of his readers would think his novel is about slavery. Beth thinks it’s about the experience of slavery. The slaves learn to be careful not to appear threatening to whites. They are afraid all the time. She liked the way that James learned to be angry. Slaves were not supposed to have feelings, above all rage, but James discovers his anger and owns it by the end of the novel. Katharine asked whether this anger justifies the final part where James murders the white man who rapes a young slave girl. He is taking revenge on the rapist, but she argues that that’s not justice. Justice should be left to the law. The act may be moral but it is not legal. Wendy pointed out that at the time, raping a slave was not illegal, although of course it is immoral. So taking the law into his own hands is the only way James can have justice. However, Pat did not feel James was just in killing the owner of the Graham farm. Katharine accepted that the murder is a form of self defence because James life is threatened. The murder is the climax of the novel. Readers want the rapist to be punished. The explosion of violence at the end reminded Wendy of the film Django Unchained. The turning of tables on the oppressors and our lack of sympathy for them allows us to cheer on acts that we would normally condemn. After all, James is not a realistic character any more than Twain’s Jim. Betsy compared him to the heroes of the Uncle Remus stories—like Brer Rabbit he tricks the oppressors.
We discussed the drowning of Norman Brown, James's companion from the minstrel show. James has a difficult choice. He can only save one person, so he lets his friend die and saves Huck. Why save the white boy? Of course Huck is his son, so the blood tie is strong. Also, as Sealia pointed out, Norman Brown’s inability to swim and his fear of water have prepared us for the dramatic irony of this scene.
We talked about the code switching in the novel. James has a very erudite form of discourse. How? He has learned to read on his own by perusing the books in the Judge’s library. His being able to read Locke does not seem credible for Beth. Wendy cautioned against measuring James against realistic depictions of slaves. The book is a satire and the characters have to be exaggerated. Susan talked about old films where the black characters are caricatures (Stepin Fetchit, Buckwheat). Everett is responding to this tradition of caricature by having James be a philosopher who has to act out the expected behaviour of a slave. We brought up the moment when James takes Judge Thatcher hostage and remarks that not it is not the pistol he holds but his language that frightens him.
Susan then asked about the novel’s symbolism. What does the river symbolise? Agnès loved the different names it’s given and the different ways in which it’s described. Beth pointed out that this is geographically accurate because the river is huge and the communities living near its banks are very different. We talked about how the river symbolises time. You can’t stop the flow. You can’t go back. You can’t change what’s past. So it represents both life and death. It’s an agent of death and a bringer of life. It can bring hope, salvation, and rescue or danger and despair. Susan concluded that the mighty Mississippi is the ultimate equalizer. It can make you or break you regardless of skin color or wealth, as we saw many times throughout the novel.
The other highly symbolic object we discussed was the pencil that young George steals for James. This episode was terrifying and historically grounded. Slaves were forbidden by law to read or write. For James it means life (writing his life) for young George it brings death. Yet George knows the risks and willingly takes them. He wants James to write and as he’s being whipped he mouths the word “Run!” James is under the obligation to write after this sacrifice. The episode also explains how the book got to be written. Wendy found that the structure of the book was very clever, beginning as it does with the minstrel songs. We are reading the very text that James wrote on the songbook he has stolen from Everett. The songbook with its blank pages can be placed with the river and the pencil as the signs of freedom.
For Sealia the episodes of the pencil and the breeding farm allow Everett to get rid of claim that some white slave owners are nice. Young George steals only a stub of a pencil, not even a whole object, and it costs his life. There is no way you can you say it’s okay.
Murielle asked about black face and minstrel show. This episode allows Everett to play with layers of pretending. There’s an amusing complexity in James having to whiten his face and then put on blackface to perform in the show. This points out that race is a construction, a set of roles and rules, rather than being biologically determined.
What do we make of the revelation of fatherhood? Wendy said that in grad school when she studied Huck Finn, an article that was causing a lot of discussion was entitled, “Was Huck black?” The argument was that the character was based on a young black acquaintance of Twain’s. Perhaps Everett was thinking of that. For Sealia, it’s a literary answer to the question of why Jim (in both Twain’s book and James) keeps saving Huck. Norman Brown, the very light-skinned slave who was passing for white, would have been more useful to James. For Beth Huck was poor white trash and thus on a par with slaves, which would explain the way they connect. Wendy thought that Everett was also playing with a trope of romance—the long lost child and the recognition scene. It also creates a nice dramatic irony.
We talked about how the Duke and King are different in James from in Twain’s novel. That can be explained by the fact that Twain has them described by Huck who is more taken in by their nonsense and has more sympathy with their play-acting because he sees it as an adventure. James immediately sees them for what they are and understands the danger they present.
The ending is seen by some readers as too sudden or abrupt. What did we think? Wendy loved the last words of the novel, when James announces that he is “Just James.’ He refuses to give a last name. Why? One answer is that he doesn’t want two names like a white person. Another is that he refuses a patronymic. Since he doesn’t know his father, it is quite likely a slave owner. He is fathering himself at the end when he gives himself a name.
Otherwise, we all agreed that after James leaves Huck the events happen very fast. Wendy wondered how they got to Iowa so quickly. The journey isn’t dealt with in detail. He frees his family from the breeder farm and then they arrive in Iowa. One comment was that this is cinematic; there is a quick-action sequence and a cut to the resolution. Peggy wondered how far it was from Edina, Missouri to Iowa. Back home, she looked it up and found that Edina is just on the border with Iowa. So the short hop from one state to another isn’t unrealistic.
Susan then asked whether there was the possibility of equality.
Beth read a pertinent quote from the novel: “How strange a world, how strange an existence, that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality, that one’s equal must hold a station that allows airing of that argument, that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree.” This meditation on the strangeness of a country that preaches equality but doesn’t grant it to everyone prompted Susan to pose another question: Is there a happy ending? We felt that a happy ending would be impossible given the era in which the book is set.
Susan then read one last quote by Everett, giving his verdict on Twain’s Huckleberry Finn: It "is a novel about America as an adolescent coming to terms with the most defining features of its landscape, which is race. And it is a flawed novel.” We agreed that the ending of Huck Finn is unsatisfactory because Tom Sawyer and Huck play with the imprisoned Jim even though they know that he has been freed.
Pat said she would like Twain to come back and say what he thought of Everett’s novel. Betsy felt that he would admire the truth of this book since he himself always skewered hypocrites. Peggy joked that he would call it “an interesting effort but not nearly as good as his own.”
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