James: A Novel
James: A Novel
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Percival Everett on James: A Novel
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A stray tennis ball and sixty-six years of accumulationWhen an audience at Duke University pressed him for the origin of the book, Everett refused the flattering version of the story. The actual moment arrived not at a desk but mid-game, when a misfired shot gave him just enough seconds of watching the ball to ask a question nobody had quite answered.
You know, I really wish I could tell you some romantic story. That this has been a burning desire for 30 years to write this novel. When in truth, I was playing tennis and I hit the ball wildly on the court, and as I watched the ball sail, I thought, ‘has anyone ever told a story about Jim from Huckleberry Finn?’
That single question had decades of pressure behind it. Growing up in Columbia, South Carolina, in a family with two generations of doctors, Everett found almost no fiction that reflected where he came from: the available stories placed Black characters in the antebellum South or the inner city, and nothing else. The gap between his actual childhood and what publishing permitted Black life to look like became, slowly, one of the seeds of the novel.
Anytime I would look for novels that had Black characters, it either took place in the antebellum south or the inner city. I came from a family of two generations of doctors; we would spend our summers in Annapolis, Maryland... My family wasn’t there, even though I knew my experience wasn’t unique. I started to understand some of the politics of publishing. And how I mentioned things build and come together over a period of time—that would have been one of the seeds of James.
The opportunity the novel presented was not simply a retelling but the chance to write what Twain, for structural and biographical reasons, could never have written. Everett locates the exact hole in the original text: Twain understood slavery as a moral problem for white innocence, and that framing left an entire interior life unwritten.
The novel belongs to Huck, and rightly. Huck is dealing with slavery in that American way, which is, ‘How does this innocent person, who knows that this is wrong, reconcile the fact that the only father figure in the novel for him is property?’ But Twain cannot put himself in the position of being a slave, nor in the position of anyone in his family being a slave. That part of the story cannot be there. To anyone with an imagination who is an ancestor of people who were serviced to that condition, I had to wonder what that story might be.
That distinction, between Twain’s incapacity and Everett’s inheritance, is where the book begins. The tennis court was the trigger; those sixty-six years were the fuel.
How he wrote it
Reading a book to death, then closing it foreverBefore Everett wrote a word of his own novel, he spent weeks reading the source text in a loop. The goal was not closer familiarity but the opposite: he wanted to exhaust the language until it stopped meaning anything, the way a repeated word dissolves into sound. He read Huckleberry Finn fifteen times consecutively for exactly that effect.
My research for writing James was more or less forgetting another text, not exploring it. I tried to create a blur. I didn’t want to remember any of the words that Twain used but I wanted to remember the world, so when I finished my exercise of finding a way to hate it, I closed Huck Finn and still have never looked at it since I started writing James.
He was candid about the efficiency of the method. Fifteen readings was the number he arrived at, but looking back, he thought it was more than he needed.
The most brutal realisation at the end of 15 readings was I probably could have gotten away with 10.
Conventional research, by contrast, yielded almost nothing. He made the trip to Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain’s hometown, and found it useless as source material. Speaking at Duke, he described what he found there and why the detour did not make it into the book.
It’s not a trip I would encourage. It was really useless. It’s just littered with Mark Twain memorabilia shops. And there were no slaves for you to talk to.
The code-switching at the novel’s center, where James and other enslaved characters speak standard English among themselves and perform dialect only for white people, required no archival discovery. Everett described the choice as simply true to how oppression works, a fact about human behavior rather than a historical finding.
Oh, I didn’t find out anything about coded language in that way. It’s just a fact that human beings, especially when they are oppressed and under fire, find ways to talk to each other in ways that their oppressors won’t understand.
The one structural obligation he accepted was to keep his own politics out of the writing. He worked in longhand, with episodes of Mission: Impossible running in the background for white noise, and held himself to a discipline he described at the UCSC Deep Read: the moment a writer thinks about the message, the novel is already lost.
Well, I don’t like messages so I abandon all allegiance to my own beliefs knowing that I can’t escape them. My politics will be there but if I think about politics when I am writing I am doomed to write a message novel and I am not interested in doing that.
On what the book is wrestling with
Freedom, rights, and what the Enlightenment philosophers are doing on the raftThe most precise thing Everett says about his novel’s subject is a distinction, not a description. The book contains slavery the way a war novel contains bullets: as the condition of life for its characters, not as the thesis. He made this point emphatically when the subject came up.
I hope that no one thinks that my novel is about slavery. There’s a difference between writing a story about people who happen to be slaves and writing a story about slavery.
The Enlightenment philosophers James argues with in his own imagination, Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire, are not there for decoration. Everett names exactly what he wanted them to do: to make visible a contradiction that runs through Twain’s own sympathies, a paternalism that felt like generosity but carried the same root assumption as the system it opposed.
Being a product of his time — much of his [Twain’s] attitude towards Black people was paternal, which was, at its root, racist. Which is why Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire are present in the novel.
When Elle pushed him on whether Black Americans could ever reach true freedom in the United States, he declined the abstraction and replaced it with a more precise claim. The word “freedom” carries a philosophical weight in the novel that, in practical terms, he translates into something far more specific.
In this American discussion of ‘freedom,’ there is a distinction to be made between freedom and rights... what slaves wanted was to enjoy the same rights as people who were not slaves. And I think that’s still what people want: to be able to drive on the road and not have particular fears because of the way that you look as opposed to the way someone else looks.
What he wants us to sit with
Language, subversion, and what fascists don’t wantThe philosophical question James asks himself throughout the novel, whether marks on a page can carry meaning, and whether that meaning can sustain a life, is not incidental to the plot. It is Everett’s longstanding preoccupation, rooted in his study of philosophy at the University of Miami, placed inside a specific historical catastrophe. He made the stakes of that question plain in conversation with Esquire.
Language is all we have, really. It’s how we think and how we move through the world — not only with other people, but with ourselves.
The novel’s range of enslaved characters reflects a claim Everett made explicit to students at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. James is not a representative figure, and the book does not treat the people around him as a type. Their differences in response, in fear, in strategy, are the argument.
It is often assumed that just because some people have the same skin color, they have the same experience. But it is more complicated than that. Our location, our upbringing and the culture we’re around all influences our experience.
Everett resists the idea that he is writing against Twain. He frames the relationship as conversation rather than correction, which carries a specific implication: his novel does not replace the original but occupies the space the original left open.
I flatter myself to imagine that I’m in conversation with Twain and writing the novel that he couldn’t write.
At Duke, addressing an audience that had been reading the book together as part of a university-wide program, Everett turned the occasion itself into a final point. The act of gathering to read and argue about a novel is not a leisure activity, in his account. It is a political one.
Reading is the most subversive thing that we can do in a culture. Being educated is subversive. The second most subversive thing we can do is be a part of a book club. I’m serious. It’s because it’s there that we open up to each other and discuss the art and learn more about it and more about ourselves and become more critical of the work and the world around us, and that’s what fascists don’t want.