Prize-Winning Author Takes on 'Smart,' 'Bitchy' Mark Twain

Goodreads: To get started, Jim from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is such an iconic character—has a narrative from his character’s point of view ever been attempted before?

Percival Everett: I'm not sure when it first occurred to me [to write about Jim]. I read the book when I was very young, and I do love the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. One day, about three years ago, I wondered if anyone had ever tried to tell the story from Jim's point of view. 

It seemed weird that no one had and—as far as I can determine—no one has until now. 

And then I thought, “Well, I didn't think of it either” [laughs] until right then. It makes perfect sense; I just don't know why no one thought to tell it. 

I have to say that this novel doesn't issue from some dissatisfaction or deficiency I find in Twain’s Huck Finn. This is a novel about the character told in a way that Twain would not have been capable of telling it. It wasn't in his experience—there would be no way for him to occupy that space. 

I flatter myself to think that I've entered into a discourse with Twain. 

GR: Can you say more about that discourse?

PE: [Twain’s] novel is about Huck Finn, a young American boy dealing with probably the most crucial issue of American history, which is the construction of, and attention to, the bogus category of race that was generated by the institution of slavery and dealing with those moral questions.
 
Again, Twain being unable to tell this…he can no more tell Jim’s story than I could tell Huck’s story. So, in a strange way, our works are completely separate but are in concert.

GR: To that point, how did you develop the plot of James while rereading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? James follows along Twain’s path but then becomes a completely unexpected story. 

PE: I read the novel 15 times in a row so that it would become nonsense to me. And when I say, “in a row,” I mean I would finish the last page and go back to the first page so it would start to blur, and I would not be repeating the story. Once I did that, I never looked back at Huck Finn.

Much of the novel of Huck Finn, Jim is not present. That stuff, in my novel, Jim can't know what's going on. So what is happening to Jim when they're not together? Those are the spaces that I attempt to occupy. I'm trying to use the adventure that Twain has created for Jim and Huck in a second-order way. 

I'm not simply stating what happened. I'm attempting to use the elements of the adventure that Twain has created for metaphorical import. 

Huck Finn isn't without its problems—one of them is the novel is uneven. Twain abandoned work on Huck Finn and returned to it later in life. And you can feel the demarcation. You can feel the switch, and it becomes more of an adventure novel when Tom Sawyer, again, enters the story.

GR: Did you write James straight through? Did it come together all at once in a matter of months and years, or is it something that you worked on for many years? 

PE: It took about a year and a half to write. Again, I read the novel so many times so that I could own the material because I did not want to repeat—those scenes are there—but I did not want to tell them in Twain's way.

You know when you say a word over and it starts to sound strange?

GR: I do. 

PE: That's what I achieved by reading the novel so many times in a row.

GR: The James you write, he's incredibly literate, and he's often in conversations with John Locke and other philosophers. Why develop that sort of discourse and relationship for him?

PE: The Enlightenment is fascinating, and Thomas Jefferson as a product of that Enlightenment, it figures prominently in our understanding of the institution of slavery. Morally, it would seem that he would be opposed, yet he owned slaves and cohabitated with one. 

Those voices of the Enlightenment—duplicitous as they are—necessarily become a part of James understanding his own condition.

GR: The books that James steals from Judge Thatcher: Candide, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, and the narrative by William Wells Brown who was the son of a white man and an enslaved woman—what was the rationale curating those books?

PE: I had a list of books, any number of which would have fit. I'm as much trying to say something about Jim's process processing the world as I am the novel’s processing of the world. And I see those as two different things.

The novel is me. But Jim, I can only write Jim to a certain point, my never actually having been enslaved. As I imagine Jim, these are the idols that would have been important to him.

GR: James being able to read and write and the act of getting a pencil turns into a big event for his life. It speaks to the importance of writing and the power that comes from telling a story.

PE: Probably the most subversive thing we can do in any culture, in any society, is read, which is why fascists always want to burn books. You never see liberal-thinking people burning books. [Laughs.] It doesn't happen. 

I just saw in the news—the other day—some woman who's running for some office in some state burning LGBTQ books that she had checked out from the library. And she had a flamethrower and was burning these books.

GR: A flamethrower—wow. 

PE: It was sort of homemade, but shooting these books with flames, and laughing. So reading is important. We have to have something to read. The second most subversive thing we can do is write. And write truthfully. There's plenty of stuff out there that is disingenuous and sophistry and meant to cheat us of choice, but generally speaking, real thought issues from literacy.

GR: In this new telling of James' story, he has this whole other life and his relationships with the other slaves show a different side of survival.

PE: The most intimate thing that any of us had is a shared language. I don't mean a national language or anything like that, but a shared mode of communication that derives from our having the same needs and desires in the world, and that's what he has. 

For the slaves, it's not only to one day not be enslaved, but also to survive every day. And to survive every day as comfortably as possible.

Slaves would realize that satisfying the expectations of their oppressors creates comfort for them. They have to behave in a way that is not in any way threatening, and anyone who would enslave other people must be terrified all the time in some regard. 

You don't want to play into that insecurity and terror. You want to give them what they want, so that you can live a life.

GR: In terms of name and identity, James goes through many processes of choosing a last name and never quite lands on one. Why?

PE: I don't know exactly—I guess nothing satisfied me. But also, I think for Jim maybe he decides he really doesn't need one. He's defined not by a name but by his own humanity.

GR: Changing gears a little, you were the executive producer on the film American Fiction that’s out now and was based on your book Erasure. Was this your first foray into film?

PE: First off, to say that the fact that I'm an executive producer only underscores the fact that I really had nothing to do with the movie. Cord Jefferson used my novel and made his own movie, and it's great—I love the film—but I did not do any work on the project. Instead of giving me money, they gave me a credit. [Laughs.]

GR: What about writing the script?

PE: I wouldn't have been capable of writing the script. When you write a novel, you love all the scenes in it. It's very hard to get rid of them, but [in a movie] they need to go. And Cord did a great job.

GR: You also paint and write poetry. I assume novels and fiction are your favorite?

PE: I am a novelist at heart. That’s how I think, that’s what I want to make. Occasionally I write stories, but they're really just distractions from novels. I've published a few books of poems, but I'm not a poet, and I keep thinking that I'll stumble upon a good poem one day.
 
I like paintings, and I like abstract paintings, and that's a reflection of my desire to create an abstract novel. I don't know what that would look like. I'm always trying, but I don't know what I'm doing, which is pretty much how I do life anyway.

GR: Just a few more questions about James: In terms of slavery and American history, the Civil War is just starting when this is taking place, but James doesn’t seem to think there is much difference between the free versus slave states and not much of a difference between the sides. It reminded me of the Great Migration, where African Americans would move to different places expecting a different experience and then get more of the same.

PE: Well, it's America. And the American experience is what it is. It's not to say there are no differences—it's quite true that you're going to find fewer MAGA people in New York City than you would in Dallas. That's a fact. However, when you look at elections, a few votes this way or that way at any given time would make a red state blue or a blue state red.
 
That's essentially what it is—boundaries are fluid. It's not land; it's people. When Jim is dealing with this, you can find kindness in the middle of Mississippi, but he can find menace as well. And it turns out, the same is true in Illinois. Land is indifferent.

GR: Got it. And then what books are you reading now?

PE: I'm reading a lot of student work right now. [Laughs.]
 
I've been reading a lot about music lately—a couple of books on Dvořák and music theory. Somehow, I'm in the middle of starting a new novel, and I end up researching all sorts of things that are not going to help me with the novel, but I somehow have talked myself into believing are necessary.
 
I just read this young woman—I don't know if it's right to mention her because she's doing an interview of me, too—but her name is Maya Binyam, and her novel is called Hangman. I thought that was really good.
 
Then this young man, Gabriel Bump—and I remember his name because it's hard to forget the name “Bump.” [Laughs.] [His book, The New Naturals,] it reminded me so much of a very smart, modern Blithedale Romance sort of thing—not that at all, but that commune-gone-bad sort of story.
 
And there is one novel that is great, and that's my wife's new novel, which is Colored Television. It's really smart and really funny—she's the funny one in our family. It's a great book.

GR: Anything more you’d like readers to know about this book or you and your process?

PE: That I don't matter, and my process doesn't matter at all. Pretend they found it in a time capsule on some beach, and nobody knows who wrote it. It's a work of art there to be consumed by whomever finds it. I have nothing to do with it.

GR: Last question: In your acknowledgements, you mention heaven for the climate and hell for a long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain. Anything specific you’d talk about?

PE: [Twain] was really smart, really funny, and really bitchy. And those are my three favorite things. I don't know—maybe we wouldn't say anything? But I would feel better for the experience.