Lit on Fire

James by Percival Everett

• Elizabeth Hahn and Peter Whetzel • Season 1 • Episode 11

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 28:32

Send a text

Ready to question tidy endings and comfortable myths? We dive into Percival Everett’s James—a bold reimagining that shifts the center of gravity from Huck to Jim as James—and uncover how language, law, and narrative shape who gets to be seen as fully human. From the opening pages, we wrestle with why this isn’t a simple retelling: Everett keeps the river but strips out the wishful thinking, replacing it with a more honest ledger of costs, choices, and the brutal calculus of survival under slavery.

We unpack how the novel treats language as a shield and a strategy. James teaches his family a public voice that meets white expectations and a private voice that preserves intellect, dignity, and trust. That code switching is not performance for approval; it’s counter‑control, a way to reclaim agency in a world that demands visibility without consent. Along the way, Huck’s famous “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” gets reexamined. For Huck, hell is theoretical; for James, hell is daily life—separation, threat, and the constant risk of erasure. The contrast exposes how moral drama can comfort privilege while injustice persists.

We also tackle the myth of “free states,” tracing how borders promised liberation that practice often denied. Everett’s depiction of mob impunity, dispersed blame, and legal loopholes feels uncomfortably current, echoing debates about systemic racism, accountability, and the politics of delay. And we confront the critique that James “loses the moral high ground,” asking who gets to define morality when systems block redress. Sometimes survival narrows choices; sometimes refusing neatness is the most honest act a story can perform.

If you care about banned books, critical race theory, language and power, or how literature challenges the American canon, this conversation will stay with you long after the credits roll. Hit follow, share with a friend who loves challenging fiction, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway—we want to hear where the novel changed your mind.

Support the show

SPEAKER_02:

Welcome to Lit on Fire, the podcast where literature meets controversy, where banned books, silenced voices, and dangerous ideas refuse to stay quiet. From classrooms to courtrooms, novels to news cycles, we explore how stories challenge power, expose injustice, and ignite social change. So if you're ready to question, to argue, to feel uncomfortable, and to think deeper, you're in the right place.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm Peter Wetzel.

SPEAKER_02:

And I'm Elizabeth Hahn.

SPEAKER_01:

And this is Lit on Fire.

SPEAKER_02:

Welcome back. Today we're diving into James by Percival Everett, a bold, razor-sharp reimagining of the American canon that refuses to sit quietly on the shelf. Everett takes a familiar literary landscape and flips the lens, centering the voice that history and literature has too often pushed to the margins. The result? A novel that is at once darkly funny, devastating, and fiercely intellectual. In this episode, we'll wrestle with the social and political currents running beneath the surface of the text. Systemic racism, the construction of language and power, and the violence embedded in so-called American innocence. We'll bring in critical race theory to examine how the novel exposes the machinery of racial hierarchy, not just as personal prejudice, but as a system built into institutions, narratives, and even storytelling itself. So grab your annotated copy, bring your sharpest questions, and settle in. Let's see the world through James' eyes. All right, Peter. I know we both read Huckleberry Finn, and now we've read this novel. What was your thought?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, of course, you've read Huckleberry Finn many more times than I have and much more recently. But what I did not want from this novel was simply a retelling of the same story that I was already familiar with from Mark Twain, but from Jim's perspective. And I was really worried that that was what I was going to get. And for the most part, I did not get that. For the first half of the book, it was very, very, very familiar. Except that we got a lot more detail in the background with Jim's family and his kids and everything that was going on between him and his fellow slaves. And we got this interesting development of how they used language to communicate with one another, and I thought that was really fascinating. But what it really took a positive turn for me was near the end where Huck and Jim are separated, and then you get Jim's story exclusively and the things that he has to go through, and it really developed a lot more. And then, of course, the ending, which was a complete and total departure from the original book, and I absolutely thought it was necessary, and I ended up loving Percival Everett's take on this very familiar story. What about you?

SPEAKER_02:

I agree. I was worried because I have read Huckleberry Finn so many times, that it would be a repeat. I would say that I didn't need for Percival Everett to get me on Jim's side because Jim is already the person that I'm centered on when I read Huckleberry Finn. Jim is the character that I sympathize with. Jim is the character I gravitate toward. Jim is always the center of my attention when I'm reading Twain's text. So I didn't need for him to flip the script on me for that purpose because I'm already in Jim's corner. But I agree with you. When he's separated from Huck, I so appreciated getting into his head and hearing his perspective and hearing his personhood and his thoughts and his conversation with other slaves and his reflections on the experience. There was so much more nuance and so much more internal dialogue that I really enjoyed exploring in those moments that I thought was really great. I love Jim as a character. And when I read Huckleberry Finn, my favorite part with Huckleberry Finn is when Huck finally gets to the moment and says, All right, then I'll go to hell, and we're gonna talk about this more later. And that had a bigger impact in this book, James, but this brought a whole new level of understanding as you were going through and experiencing it.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and I might make the argument that even in Mark Twain's story, even though the book is called Huckleberry Finn, he does intend for Jim to be a huge part of the point that he's trying to make.

SPEAKER_02:

I believe so too. There are certainly lots of things that we could criticize Mark Twain for in the way he handles certain things. You know, certainly he's coming at the story of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of a southern white man, but he is a southern white man that does not believe in slavery and is intentionally trying to point out the problem with the things that are going on. And he uses a lot of verbal irony, just that real sarcastic tone and some of that perspective going on. But I do believe he wants us to center on Jim. But I think what Percival Everett gives us is just a very thorough picture of James as a fully developed individual.

SPEAKER_01:

Now, first of all, I'd like to say that you do not need to have read Huckleberry Finn in order to appreciate James on its own. If you are not familiar with Huckleberry Finn, it's a story of an orphan boy. Well, he has a father, but his father is deeply abusive and alcoholic, and he's taken care of by the widow Douglas and Miss Watson. And so he's their ward. So for all intents and purposes, he is an orphan.

SPEAKER_02:

Right, because he's a ward against his own will because he doesn't want to have to dress up and go to church.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. And Jim is uh one of Miss Watson's slaves, and he and Huck have this casual friendship relationship, and when Huck ends up running away for fear of being sent back to his abusive father, he finds out that Jim has also run away because Jim has learned that Miss Watson intends to sell him to somebody in New Orleans and he'll be separated from his wife and his kids, and so he doesn't want that to happen. And so he and Huck end up running away together down the Mississippi River and adventures ensue. And essentially, all of that happens in James as well. However, where it departs from that narrative is what I really love about it. Because as you already alluded, although Twain is against slavery, he's still writing it from the perspective of a white male privilege. And his solution to Jim's problem and just his overall picture of slavery in general, it comes across very Deus Ex Machima and very paternal in a way. Whereas Percival Everett says, no, too clean, too easy. This is the dark truth of slavery, and he takes a much more realistic perspective of it, and the book does not end the way Huckleberry Finn ends. No. I'll just say I can spoil Huckleberry Finn if you don't mind. At the end of Huckleberry Finn, it's all wrapped up very neatly when Huck and Jim come back home. Jim discovers that Miss Watson has passed away, and in her will, she has freed him and his family. All is well in the world, and Jim's not in trouble for having run away.

SPEAKER_02:

Right. And when we talk about dance machine, and I think we need to talk about that, literally translates God of the machine. And the idea is that that is a technique where God comes in or the God in Greek mythology or anything like that. God comes in at the end and plops down and solves everything, right? And so it's one of those really neat, oh, everything is resolved endings, for better or worse. We get that in Huckleberry Finn because, oh, Miss Watson's died, she realized she was wrong, Jim is free, yay, everything's gonna be all right.

SPEAKER_01:

She was one of those good slave owners.

SPEAKER_02:

She's yes, she's a good slave owner. And that's not what Percival Everett gives us because that's not realistic. Those types of endings are not realistic. Life is not wrapped up in a neat package like that. And so Percival Everett gives us the real.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. So that's a little bit of the background on Percival Everett. So obviously, he is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of this novel, James. However, he is also a professor of English at the University of Southern California. He's written over 30 books in his career, including novels, short stories, and poetry. And in 2001, he wrote an award-winning book, Erasure, which in 2023 became an Oscar-winning movie, American fiction, right? That's correct. And he is known for his quote saying, Reading is the most subversive thing that you can do. What do you think about that?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, it's interesting. We just finished this book and I read this quote, and I had also just seen an article as I was scrolling through social media, as one does, and the article said that bookworms would save the world. And so then I saw this quote from him that reading is the most subversive thing that you can do. And I think as a literature teacher, I've said this before, but we have to acknowledge that fewer and fewer people are reading. And as fewer and fewer people are reading whatever it is that people are reading, what that leads to is less and less knowledge, less and less empathy, less and less ability to see different perspectives, to see different experiences, to understand different people. And that leads us to a less diverse, less understanding, less open culture. And it's easier to hate the other. It's easier to shut yourself off. It's easier not to be open to hearing from other people, not to be open to change. Deliberate ignorance is a thing. When we look at all of that, reading does become subversive. How many times has banning books and burning literature been a tool of fascism? How many times has that been a deliberate method of shutting off whole groups of people? You don't have to search very far to see that. I have a wonderful t-shirt that says, when has it ever been the good guys that banned the books? Knowledge becomes subversive. And I think those of us that read, those of us that involve ourselves, even if it's reading magical realism or fantasy or whatever else, we've all we prove over and over again on this podcast that whatever book you read, you can pull out deeper meaning from it. And I think that we need to be open to doing that and talking about it, because then we open up these conversations and the conversation keeps going.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, we've discussed this before, and to a certain degree, each of our realities is somewhat of a construct of the narrative that we're constantly being exposed to. Correct. In other words, reality has its own algorithm for us. And one of the things that reading has the opportunity to do is to present a reality to us without an algorithm. Of course, we can we can obviously cognitively choose to read within our own bubble in our own comfort zone. But if you are a reader, you have more of an opportunity to expose yourself to an uncontrolled narrative that will disrupt the propagandized narrative that you're typically exposed to within your own algorithmic reality, right? Right. And so that is the power of reading and how it can become subversive to the message and the control of the narrative that those that would be in power would like you to be exposed to.

SPEAKER_02:

No one can tell you how to interpret something. And I think that is really important. As a literature teacher, teachers also get a bad rap for indoctrinating their students. I think that's one of the fears of certain individuals that want to control knowledge, is that, oh, those public school teachers, they're trying to indoctrinate their students. Someone can read over your shoulder, but they can't tell you how to interpret what you're reading.

SPEAKER_01:

I don't believe you can receive something that you aren't ready to receive.

SPEAKER_02:

That's right. You have to, as a teacher, teach your students how to think, not what to think. I can't control how my students respond to something I give them to read. And that's the beautiful thing about reading is that you read and you absorb and you create that meaning for yourself.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Powell And this is an interesting segue into how language itself and how we use it is a form of power. And Percival Everett definitely delves into that with James. You want to talk about how he does that.

SPEAKER_02:

What Percival Everett gives us as far as language and power is concerned is he shows us with James, an individual who realizes his place in this society as a slave, and realizes that he does not want to allow the white slave owners to control who he is. He only wants to allow them in so far, to know him only to a point. So he takes control of his own language experience and he actually teaches the people around him, including his daughter, how to speak in front of the white slave owners. And that is in a slave speech, to dumb down your speech, to speak in a grammatically incorrect way in order to appear less intelligent in front of these slave owners so as not to make yourself threatening and also not to let them in. Whereas in private, James can read and James can speak in a much more intelligent way. Now, having researched this after reading it, while code switching is definitely a historically accurate thing, there is no historical evidence that this was happening all the time with slaves during this time period. However, I think symbolically, Percival Everett is showing that idea of language's power.

SPEAKER_01:

Right, yeah. He learns how to maneuver within the white slave-owning society in a way that meets their prejudicial expectations and helps make himself and his fellow slaves invisible, essentially. Less, like you said, less of a threat. He learns to understand psychologically the needs of the white slave owner's ego and how to manipulate them, how to use the language to manipulate them and find a source of control and power for him and his fellow slaves, which I thought was fascinating.

SPEAKER_02:

And for him, it's also about developing a circle of trust with his fellow slaves and with his family. Language becomes a way of developing your own space. So when he is talking with his daughter and his wife and with his neighbors, they are able to have that common language and that common understanding of one another. And then immediately the shutters close when anyone white comes around. And that includes even Huck, even though he considers Huck a type of friend.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And I think it's very telling that he continues to slip up consistently around Huck throughout the story. And I think that symbolizes his coming to slowly trust Huck and his recognition that Huck is also going through a journey of understanding and in a way is a generational departure from the traditional racist prejudicial view of his elders. And so there is a shift in the mentality that Huck represents, and therefore that also helps the relationship between him and Huck evolve. And he begins to slowly let down his guard throughout the story. And one of the things that Huck is very famous for saying when it comes to his wrestling with the idea of slavery and one man owning another is when he decides to wrestle with the moral implications of not turning Jim in once he realizes that he is a runaway, and he decides if not turning Jim in means that I'm going to go to hell, then all right, then I guess I'll go to hell, which is something you mentioned before.

SPEAKER_02:

And I want to say something else about Huck, and that's that he also represents a type of other. And this is where irony really comes into play with Twain in a lot of ways. Huck is poor. He is very underprivileged in a lot of ways. His father is an alcoholic. He lives in squalor. Huck is pretty uneducated. The widow Douglas and Miss Watson have been trying to dress him up and take him to church and get him educated. And it's this forced church upbringing that has caused him to realize that stealing is wrong. And if Jim is property, then I am stealing, and that is a sin, and that could lead me to go to hell. And then ultimately leads to that, all right, then I'll go to hell.

SPEAKER_01:

Huck is at a place where because he is not fully indoctrinated, there's still this sort of moral innocence that guides him. He isn't as susceptible to religious attempts to complicate his morality, which is what it does. And that is the reason why he is able to see the hypocrisy in the religion versus the reality. And I I do appreciate that.

SPEAKER_02:

But there's a sense of irony in that Huck even has privilege over Jim, even though he is so other as far as the white community is concerned, he still is more privileged than Jim, who is a grown adult with a family, and then also in Percival Everett's version, can read and write and has this knowledge that Huck doesn't even have. But let's leave that to the side for a second. So Huck says this thing, and yes, it's a profound statement for me, because I know that for both of us, we have both come to that place of deconstructing our Christian faith in prior years. One of the authors that I had read for a long time used that statement, particularly when she faced the idea of serving communion to the LGBTQ community, and someone told her what she was doing was wrong, and she quoted that statement and said, All right, then I'll go to hell. So it's become this kind of mantra for people with the idea that is if you're telling me that this God is saying I have to do this thing that I feel is morally wrong or conflicts with what I know to be right and wrong, all right then I'm not down with what this God is saying, right? And so it becomes that powerful statement. But the thing we have to acknowledge in reading James is when that statement comes up, we're forced to also look at Huck's privilege in that moment because Jim, James, is living hell. Huck is sitting there grappling morally with I'm stealing something from someone else. All right, then I'll go to hell. I'll risk going to hell this morning.

SPEAKER_01:

It's a very theoretical sacrifice.

SPEAKER_02:

Theoretical sacrifice. Jim is in hell. He is beaten repeatedly, he's always under threat of death. He could lose his family at any moment. He's separated from them this entire novel, which is a horrible thing that is not even really recognized by Huck. This horrible separation, it's inhuman. The way in which he is treated, this is hell. It's not theoretical sacrifice for Jim. It's what he lives with every day because of what's been forced upon him. So while we can sit in white privilege and say, all right, then I'll go to hell, this is magnanimous of me, isn't it? Jim is living that experience. We get down to this idea of privilege and of these false conceptions. One of the things, other misconceptions I think we have going on in Huckleberry Finn and with these narratives of free black men versus slaves, free states versus these southern states where there's slavery, is that when a slave gets to a free state, everything's gonna be okay. And what I love about Percival Everett's novel, this narrative, is that he shuts that down pretty quickly. And there is a great line in this where they are traveling down the Mississippi and they are trying to get of to a better place. And James's ultimate goal is to be able to get money and buy his family. And of course, he wants to be free and he's trying to get to a place where that's going to be possible. And what state are they in? Are they in Illinois? Is that where they are?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, Illinois. He's talking to a group of slaves.

SPEAKER_02:

Free black men.

SPEAKER_01:

Free black men, technically, who are still slaves. And he goes, he goes, I thought this was a free estate. And you go, and they say, Well, the white people don't know that. We we keep telling them that we're in Illinois, and they keep telling us that we're in Kentucky.

SPEAKER_02:

Percival Everett really throws down on that idea that there was a lot of distinction, especially on the border of North and South. But regardless, let's be honest, people are still marginalizing and looking at anyone who is different as less than. And we have to acknowledge that because that is not all that different today. I mean, we would like to say that it is different, but the systemic problems are still here and people still look at people differently.

SPEAKER_01:

It was interesting to me that early on we get this story that Jim and his fellow slaves tell amongst themselves about a freed black man who was in a free state at the time. And I can't remember exactly what he's accused of doing, maybe looking at a white woman the wrong way, but it ends up with him being brutally killed by a mob of white people. And they make the comment that the judge ruled that no one could be charged because it was an act of a mob. And they kind of laugh saying, so if enough white people do something terrible to a black person, then no one's committed a crime. Which is kind of funny because I mean, it's kind of what we're saying today is if we charged everybody who was wrong in this situation, then we'd have to charge so many people that the whole system would collapse, right? We can't charge everybody who's guilty because if we did, then it would have too much of a negative impact on the systems that we have in place.

SPEAKER_02:

Jeffrey, Jeff Ripson.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. Exactly. So we're still operating in that way today that if enough people do the wrong thing, then it's just sort of we gloss over it. We gloss over it.

SPEAKER_02:

Because it's too difficult to handle. Right.

SPEAKER_01:

Which goes into the whole systemic racism. We that's why we don't solve systemic racism because we're dependent upon it as a system.

SPEAKER_02:

Which goes back to our whole conversation on burn the whole freaking thing down, because how else do you handle it, right? No one wants to actually go through the hard work of dismantling a problem and then rebuilding step by step. And that's where we run into all the problems in society, is when we don't really want to deal with the problem. And if you don't really want to deal with the problem, you either allow it to continue and turn a blind eye.

SPEAKER_01:

And this is an old argument that occurs every time society reaches a point of evolution. When we were abolishing slavery, it was, but the economy is dependent upon it. We can't just abolish slavery right away. We have to phase it out over a course of decades and decades and decades. That way we won't suffer from the economic fallout. And then, of course, with also segregation, same thing. How can we just integrate schools all of a sudden? It's just all this dragging our feet on change.

SPEAKER_02:

So you turn a blind eye or you justify it.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, you justify it, which is why many it is very realistic that many slaves were not freed for decades and decades and decades. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02:

Right. Or when we desegregated, why many school systems were not desegregated for decades and decades and decades, particularly in the South, because that wasn't something you could just do overnight. You know, we gotta give people time to get there.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So this point that personal advertisers making is that even in a free state, no one's really free. No one told the white people. So we've already said that this book does not end the way Huckleberry Finn ends. It's not so neatly tied up in a bow. James ends up having to do many different difficult things in order to achieve his freedom and be reunited with his family. And I read a critique of this book where they accused James of having lost the moral high ground because of some of the decisions that he makes by the end. What do you have to say about that?

SPEAKER_02:

First, what is this moral high ground of which you speak? What a horrifically privileged statement to make. Bullshit? Yeah. Yeah, let's just call that out right now. That had to be a white person that critiqued that. He's a slave. He will be killed if he is caught. He has very few choices. These people have mass murdered his friends, family, raped people along the way, raped people, sold his wife and child. There are a lot of things that happen in this book and that we know happened historically to people that were enslaved. What moral high ground can he possibly lose? Who has the moral high ground? Certainly not the white people. You better not be saying the white people have the moral high ground, because near as I can tell, it would be morally correct for him to act in whatever way he has to act to achieve his freedom because the ultimate wrong has been done to him.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. Now, this is something that is just part of the conversation over and over again today. People respond to acts of violence with this self-righteous attitude of, oh, look, they've turned to violence, therefore now they have no moral high ground. Therefore, now they're in the wrong. But what we don't understand is not that we are advocating for violence, but we've talked about it over and over again. In a lot of these books that we've been discussing, there is no other recourse because the system is so stacked against the victims, but for them to turn to violence. It's not a good thing, but it is pointing out a big problem that we have is that when you create a situation where a whole group of people is completely powerless, what other recourse do you expect from them? It's a symptom of the problem. It's not the problem itself.

SPEAKER_02:

But even when we qualify and say it's not a good thing, but sometimes it is the morally correct thing. We see a situation here locally where a mother who is being abused shoots her husband and injures him because he is an abuser and he is threatening her life. She is brought before a judge, even though it is blatantly an act of self-defense. She is sharply criticized for the judge for resorting to violence and her child, the custody of her child, is taken away from her. Then she meets that same man in a parking lot to negotiate the visitation with her child, and he shoots her dead in front of her child. She was right to shoot him in the first place. Right?

SPEAKER_01:

Right. And what I mean by it not being a good thing is it's it's not a good thing that they turned to violence. It's not a good thing that society didn't adapt in time.

SPEAKER_02:

Right. To avoid them having to resort to that. But it's just such a horrible thing that we turn and we say, Well, they were wrong on both sides.

SPEAKER_00:

They shouldn't have showed up at that protest. She shouldn't have tried to drive away.

SPEAKER_02:

How often have we heard that moral equivocation, that equivocating and trying to make it wrong on both sides or a little right on both sides? Bullshit. Sometimes the only thing you can do in the face of wrong is to fight back. And that is it. And so whoever wrote that about him losing the moral high ground, shame on you. Anyway, this is a great book. It is worth reading. It is worth going into. You don't have to have read Huckleberry Finn, although if you choose to, that might enrich your experience. But James definitely can stand alone, and it gives great insight into some of that experience. So I definitely recommend it. So what are we going to read next time?

SPEAKER_01:

We're going to discuss Matt Dinneman's new novel, Operation Bounce House.

SPEAKER_02:

And for those of you that haven't picked up on Matt Dinneman, is the author of Dungeon Crawler Carl, and this is definitely different, but it is so good, so exciting. So until then, keep reading, keep thinking, and we will be talking to you again soon.