David Remnick: The Novelist Percival Everett has been getting a lot of attention lately, including a profile in The New Yorker. His novel Erasure was made into the film American Fiction, which just won an Oscar for its screenplay, and he has a new novel out, his 24th. Staff writer Julian Lucas is fascinated by Percival Everett's work.

Julian Lucas: Whether it's his novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, about a character who ends up stuck in the plot of basically every Sidney Poitier movie, or Erasure about a Black novelist so frustrated by the pigeonholing in the publishing industry that he writes an elaborate literary prank under a pseudonym. To read Percival Everett is always to grapple with the prejudices and the assumptions and the acts of imagination that we have to make in communicating with one another through fiction and through art.

When I saw that he was rewriting Huckleberry Finn, I knew that it would be an opportunity not just to read a great narrative, but also to read along with him, one of the foundational stories in the American narrative

David Remnick: Everett's book is called James. Here's Julian Lucas talking with Percival Everett.

Julian Lucas: I love how this novel begins. First of all, the title, because in Twain, we know this character as Jim or sometimes as more derogatory epithets, but immediately, he's announced as James. The reframing you do is just so clear in the very first sentence. I wonder if you could read for us the first page of the novel.

Percival Everett: See if I can get closer. Those little bastards were hiding up. The moon was not quite full, but bright, and it was behind them, so I could see them as plain as day, though it was deep night. Lightning bugs flashed against the black canvas. I waited at Ms. Watson's kitchen door, rocked a loose stepboard with my foot, knew she was going to tell me to fix it tomorrow.

I was waiting there for her to give me a pan of cornbread that she had made with Sadie's recipe. Waiting is a big part of a slave's life. Waiting and waiting to wait some more. Waiting for demands, waiting for food, waiting for the ends of days, waiting for the just and deserved Christian reward at the end of it all. Those white boys, Huck and Tom, watched me. They were always playing some kind of pretending game, where I was either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy.

They hopped about out there with the chiggers, mosquitoes, and other biting bugs, but never made any progress toward me. It always pays to give white folks what they want, so I stepped into the yard and called out into the night. "Who dat dere in da dark lak dat?"

Julian Lucas: What I love about this is, you take a scene that in Twain is a kind of fun prank played by these two boys. You immediately make us see it from the bitter exhausted perspective of a grown man who has to play along with these children's games, essentially, because he's a slave. You hear it immediately in those little bastards. How did you arrive at this voice for Jim?

Percival Everett: I don't know. The first thing I did to start this was I read Huckleberry Finn 15 times in a row. I would stop and just go right back to the beginning until it became a blur. You know how when you say a word over and over, it finally sounds like nonsense. I needed it to become nonsense because I didn't want to merely regurgitate scenes. I needed to own the material, and that allowed me to own the material. I was never saying what I thought Twain had said because I couldn't remember what Twain had said.

Julian Lucas: I love that. It's almost a river-like reading experience. You keep going back to the beginning. I know you have a very high opinion of nonsense and have written essays on it. Did you stop enjoying it after a while?

Percival Everett: I was sick of it.

Julian Lucas: Did it affect your--?

Percival Everett: Yes. I was sick of it. I wanted to be sick of it.

Julian Lucas: How many readings did it take to get sick of it?

Percival Everett: A couple. Once you've read something and you've read it. I think after three or four, I was really tired of reading it, but I had to keep reading it.

Julian Lucas: Do you feel like it's a voice that you found in the book? When Jim talks to Huck in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he's usually calling him Child and Honey in all these sweet affection names. Was there a kernel of the character you created sort of hidden in Twain's character, or did you have to invent him whole cloth?

Percival Everett: You're right. He is not inclined to use the same kinds of terms of endearment that Jim uses in Huck Finn. It's also because my Jim is not simple. The Jim that's represented in Huck Finn is simple, and that's the part that Twain wasn't capable of writing. For Twain, a slave was a simple person. By simple, I don't mean uncomplicated, I mean not terribly smart.

Julian Lucas: One of the themes you've been most interested in throughout your career is language miscommunication. You study the philosophy of language as a graduate student, and so many of your novels are interested in these kinds of misunderstandings and failures of language. What interests you about the way slavery shaped communication?

Percival Everett: I can preface that with a complaint about a film. That's 12 Years a Slave. When this Black man who has been living as best friends and neighbors and coworkers with white America is stolen away from his home and spirited down to a plantation in the south, he's thrown into a situation with slaves. He can understand what they say. That can't happen. He does not speak their language. People who are oppressed find a way to talk to each other that does not allow the oppressors to understand what they are saying.

He would be as lost as that slave owner would be listening to the slaves talk to each other. I was offended by that film because it cheated the enslaved people out of their humanity. The other thing about it is just the humor. People survive with humor in the most dire of straits. The picture of slavery that's painted in literature and film, the people are all just, how would you put it, bleak. Whereas if they're surviving, they're surviving because of their strength and their irony.

Julian Lucas: I'm glad you brought up humor because your work is really known for finding humor in unexpected places. Your novel The Trees is a very dark satire about the legacy of lynching in the US. Did you want this book to be funny? Did you want it to be funny in the way that Twain's work is funny?

Percival Everett: Not funny in that way. I think naturally I seek to employ humor as a disarming tool. I don't know how to be funny. If I try to write funny, I think I'd fail. Again, the lessons I learned from Twain is that humor exist in the irony of the situation. I can't write jokes, but I can find the humor in the human condition

Julian Lucas: In your story, James isn't just running to freedom. He's also reading and writing about it. Throughout the book, he hallucinates these very funny debates with philosophers like Voltaire and John Locke. You put them in the middle of these really dramatic moments when he's been bitten by a rattlesnake and he's hallucinating, or he's trying to catch a fish with his bare hands. I wonder if you would read one of these moments for us from page 48.

Percival Everett: I was in Judge Thatcher's library, a place where I had spent many afternoons while he was out at work or hunting ducks. I could see books in front of me. I had read them secretly, but this time in this fever dream, I was able to read without fear of being discovered. Ed wondered every time I sneaked in there, what white people would do to a slave who had learned how to read. What would they do to a slave who had taught the other slaves to read? What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenuse was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled. I was burning up with fever, fading in and out of consciousness, focusing and refocusing on Huck's face. François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire put a fat stick into a fire. His delicate fingers held the wood for what seemed like too long a time. "I'm afraid there's no more wood," I said, which is fine because I am hot enough, too hot.

Julian Lucas: To me, there's a kismet in the fact that James, your appropriation of Twain, is coming out at the same time as American Fiction, Cord Jefferson's adaptation of your novel Erasure. For our listeners, it stars Jeffrey Wright as a very literary Black novelist who is so fed up with stereotyping in the publishing industry that he writes a street novel under a pseudonym as an elaborate literary prank. You wrote it in 2001 at the height of the vogue for Urban Lit. Do you think the story still has the same resonance in our post-Black Lives Matter era, when at least for a moment, a lot more attention was given to African American literature? I suppose it's a way of asking, do you think Black writers are as confined now as then, or is there just a different kind of confinement?

Percival Everett: No, there's a much greater range of work available now. Some really fine writers who have found places in the literary world, and so things have gotten better. A few months ago, I stayed up late and I turned on the television at 3:00 AM and there was an Abbott and Costello movie, I don't remember the title of it. It was something like Screams in Africa. In it, were all of these stereotypical Black Africans wide-eyed and afraid of everything, running around carrying stuff for white people. I realized, "Well, yes, we have more, but we haven't gotten rid of this baggage."

The producers or whatever you call the people who are the programmers of this network saw no problem with airing this. "Had a slot, let's use this." It's that kind of insidious insertion of the old stuff that caused so much damage to Black psyches that persists.

Julian Lucas: I was rereading Huck Finn for this, and it just struck me how wildly contemporary it still feels, like Huck's abusive father sounds like a MAGA voter. He's so angry that he saw a rich Black man voting that he wants to overthrow the government. I wonder if it was anything in what's going on in this country today that brought you back to the text and got you thinking about a story from Jim's perspective.

Percival Everett: Well, I think that is true, and I think it was unconscious more than anything else. The US really hasn't changed in character all that much. What defines this remains the same. The interesting thing about Huck Finn is it's the first novel-- It's not that it's about slavery, it's about a man who was enslaved. When you think of Stow's novel or some of the slave narratives, they're about slavery. They're not about white Americans experiencing the shame and the contradictions of the condition of slavery. Here, we have this young American, this youth who is having to reconcile moving through the world as a free person while this person, the only father figure in the novel, is property.

Julian Lucas: Exactly. Huck's flight from home, his own search for adventure is the emphasis in Twain. Yet, there's a much higher stakes story going on for Jim because this runaway, it's a matter of life and death for him, even though it's more a matter of adventure and high jinks for Huck. It's one thing to really love a writer as you love Twain. It's another to actually try to rewrite their most famous book. I wonder, was there a particular moment in the book that you realized Jim had more to say than Twain lets him, or was it more, "This would be a great way to sneak onto the high school English syllabi?"

Percival Everett: First of all, I have to say that this novel doesn't come out of a dissatisfaction with the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I imagine myself in a conversation with Twain doing this, and one of the things I think that he and I would both agree on is that he doesn't write Jim's story because he's not capable of writing Jim's story, any more than I'm capable of writing Huck's story. In fairness to the novel, it is flawed. It is flawed in that Twain stopped in the middle of it and then came back to it. When he came back to it, I think there was some mercenary considerations at stake and so it becomes more of an adventure.

Tom Sawyer comes back into the novel and the tone of the novel changes. It's less an exploration of Huck's confusion about Jim and his condition, and more of a pure adventure. I'm addressing that as well. I'm trying to get past that switch in tone that happens. More importantly, I'm writing the novel that Twain could not. He was not equipped to do it.

Julian Lucas: Something I've always found so ironic about Huckleberry Finn is it's recurrently targeted by well-meaning anti-racists to either be redacted to remove the N-word from it or to cut it from syllabi entirely, and yet there are few novels that have been more championed by the greatest African American writers. It was so huge for Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison, and Ishmael Reed recently wrote an essay, which is just a rousing defense of the book and of Twain's insight. What do you make of this discrepancy in the way that it's been both condemned and celebrated?

Percival Everett: Well, it's condemned by people who don't read the book and actually it's an excuse for them. You've got to be against something, I suppose. Apparently, the word [inaudible 00:17:36] scares people. Quite frankly, if someone came into my study right now and shouted at me, "You dirty N-word," I'd be just as offended as if they actually used that six-letter word that I just said. It's all about intention and meaning. It behooves fascists to ban it because there is a proper and direct interrogation of what it's like to live in a world where slavery is present-

Julian Lucas: -and where conmen and hucksters are running [crosstalk].

Percival Everett: It's an American story [laughs]. That honest depiction is probably what scares some people.

Julian Lucas: Thank you so much.

Percival Everett: Certainly.

David Remnick: The novelist, Percival Everett. His new book is called James. Julian Lucas is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.