“With my pencil, I wrote myself into being.”

Central Library’s Brown Baggers had a lively discussion of Percival Everett’s award-winning 2024 novel “James” on February 12th.  (Everett appeared in Charlottesville at The Paramount to talk about “James” as part of the 2024 Virginia Festival of the Book.)

A modern retelling of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, most of our readers gave the book high reviews.  One reader felt that while “James” was a good read, the fact that it was based on another book (a derivative of another book) made it less award worthy.  Another reader countered that most books are a “rewriting” of another story, and felt that “James” deserved every praise and provided new insights to the original story.  

The plot follows Twain’s Huck Finn only for the first portion of the story, then takes a sharp turn from the classic title familiar to so many.  Themes in “James” include the violence and brutality of slavery, the high value of literacy and self identity/naming oneself. 

There was some discussion among the group of the language/dialects used in “Huck Finn” vs that used in “James,” as well as personal anecdotes about local dialects in general.

Readers enjoyed Everett’s portrayal of a private world and mutual understanding among enslaved people that meant that they code-switched when whites were around in terms of their language and intelligence/understanding.  Enslaved people acted and played the role whites expected in order to survive.

One reader felt that Everett depicted the whole spectrum of stereotypical whites of the time and said Everett was “setting the record straight from his perspective”.