“Jim? My goodness. Where on earth have you been?” He looked past me to see Huck and so repeated the question. “Lawd a’ mercy. Where ya’ll bin all dis time?”
“My God, you too Doris?” Huck said. (this excerpt found on page 272 of the novel JAMES)
“Jim?” ( Jim talking with Judge Thatcher)
“James,” I said.
“Boy, they’re gonna lynch you everyday but Tuesday,” he said.
I was so confused by his expression of white-hot anger that I let the barrel of the pistol drop. He approached slowly. With out threatening him with the gun again, I said, “Please, don’t do that.”
He stopped. He studied me and then looked out the window behind me, as if for help. “What are you doing here?”
“Where are my wife and daughter? I know you handled the sale of them. I need to know where they’ve been taken,”
” Why are you talking like that?”
” Confusing isn’t it?” I said.
“Slaves get sold. It happens,” he said.
“Who bought them?” I cocked my head. I pointed the pistol at him again. “Have a seat.” I nodded to the chair in front of the desk.
He sat. “Why are you talking like that?”
“I’m pointing a pistol at you and asking about the whereabouts of my family and you’re concerned with my speech? What is wrong with you? (Preceding excerpt from pages 288 and 289, JAMES written by Percival Everett. )
The run away slave Jim is confronting Judge Thatcher, who handles the buying and selling paperwork of men, women and children in bondage locally, to find out to whom his wife and daughter were sold. Another excerpt between Jim and Judge Thatcher shared here is found in Percival’s novel on page 290, starts as follows;
“Are you going to kill me?”
“The thought crossed my mind. I haven’t decided. Oh, let me translate that for you. I ain’t ‘cided, massa.”
I had never seen a white man filled with such fear. The remarkable truth, however, was that it was not the pistol, but my language, the fact that I didn’t conform to his expectations, that I could read, that had so disturbed and frightened him.
This month, I had the privilege to read the novel, JAMES, written by Percival Everett and published by Doubleday New York. As a teenager I met my first literary love, a novel by Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn published in 1865. As you probably know, Twain wrote this novel in the first person of the main character Huck Finn. Huck runs away from an abusive father and while hiding he meets a slave named Jim who is also a runaway. Huck shares with us their growing bond of friendship as they raft down the Mississippi. Huck also shares his strength of moral character; he can have a close connection of trust and caring for a slave even as he wonders if a bi-racial, (my word not Huck’s), friendship is legal.
JAMES, tells Huck’s story with the difference being “run away” slave Jim narrates from his point of view. Author Percival Everett has the courage and skill to deliver a powerful corrective to both literature and history. (Ann Patchett, back cover). In the 1860’s Mark Twain’s courage was evident when he wrote a novel highlighting the main characters’, (one black, one white, both poor), deep friendship as the cornerstone of his story. Twain was one of the earlier American authors to write the story’s prose in the dialect of the time. In 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published. The author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, was also credited with being one of the first writers to express her story with dialect writing. The selected excerpts from JAMES demonstrate how Jim’s slave dialect was ingrained in the racist tuning forks embedded in white slaver ears. Slaves apparently learned that their continual N**** talk afforded the racists daily comfort promoting needed peace and a break from the crack of the whip while the white overseers sucked their thumbs of ignorant prejudice. Jim was able to hide his ability to read, think and communicate well with other blacks without using stereotypical N***** talk. When James stopped using his practiced fake “ignorant” style of talking in front of a white man, the racist couldn’t hide his rising fear and terror.
Another point, before I move on, Harriet Beecher Stowe displayed an empathy with all her characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She had just lost one of her young children in 1851. Her grief was a foundation, I believe, for her abhorrence of the routine practice of taking young black children from their mothers and selling them away in bondage to make a profit. She writes of Eliza, a runaway slave who is escaping with her young son so he can not be taken away from her and sold. Their remarkable journey’s apparent success was applauded around the world. Stowe had to feel what it was like to be Tom Loker and Simon Legree along with Eliza to write her novel. Mark Twain, a decade later, also had to be able to feel what it was like to be Injun Joe, Jim the runaway slave, Huckleberry Finn and his best friend Tom Sawyer. And as I read this month, Percival Everett displayed that same empathy in his novel JAMES. His empathetic narrative allowed me to understand how a black man, living with the sting and blood of the whip and the finality of the hangman’s noose could have had the moral strength to self learn how to write, how to read and speak, (as my late mother used to say), the King’s English. A time again in the 1860’s where white fear would hang a man of color for simply taking a pencil!
Ann Patchett ends her back book jacket summary about Everett’s novel JAMES as follows; I found myself cheering both the writer and his hero. Who should read this book? Every single person in this country. I couldn’t agree more with Ms. Patchett’s answer to her own question.
As I reflect this month and watch the tide coming in, I ask the question, are we facing a tide of change? My Lighthouse can not shed a light on this question. How can I doubt that change for the better is washing us in its waves. Well, let us look at the facts. Two hundred and forty eight years ago our founding fathers created our Declaration of Independence. The text begins, We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal……. Who was their audience? Of course they were challenging the King and others in England. Some might argue that men of color, in their hearts, were less equal. Some might argue that women of all colors were less equal. And each new wave of immigrants were very much less equal. Native Americans very very much less equal.
Our sins of slavery, misogyny, antisemitism and other redundant racism’s were baked into our Country’s birth, but their ideals, though tainted by their time, were the seeds of a new national garden of possibilities. The Bill of Rights, our Constitution, and The Declaration of Independence were and are the national greenhouse of new practices of fairness! Yes, the weeds of slavery, legally killed in the 1860s, sprouted new weeds of Jim Crow laws. Women finally were allowed to vote a little over a century ago with the adoption of the 19th Amendment to our Constitution. (More weeds of inequality killed.) It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act of 1957 that women had the right to serve on federal juries. Individual states as early as 1898 allowed women on juries yet it wasn’t until the 1930s the right to serve on juries was regularly granted to women. (And again more weeds of inequality killed.) People of color found more relief from the racist segregation with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (Another great weed killer.) Immigrants of the 19th century wove themselves into our nation’s neighborhoods only to turn around and attempt to exclude new waves of foreign immigrants. Lady Liberty stands over three hundred feet high overlooking Ellis Island that hosted over 12 million immigrants between 1892 and 1954. At her base the poem, The New Colossus written by Emma Lazarus was attached in 1903. Of course her famous words were learned by most of us in elementary school in the 1950’s: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free. What a wonderful weed killer addition to our national greenhouse!
What? More weeds of inequality, racism, and antisemitism are still growing today? Twenty nine years after we had a U.S. President call on Mr. Gorbachev to tear down this wall!, it is 2016 and we have another U.S. President calling on Mexico to pay for a wall that needs to be built along the entirety of our southern border. Why? We are told the wall is needed to stop the crush of illegal immigrants, foreign murderers, and terrorists that are pouring into our country by the millions! We have a candidacy that promises the creation of the largest deportation centers ever amassed in human history! Weeds of fear, Fear, FEAR still being sprouted in our wonderful greenhouse! So negative! Our country is built on immigration and a supposed leader has the gall to say they are poisoning the blood of our nation! I say truth to power! Yes immigration laws and procedures have to be improved to meet the realities of our current times, no argument here. Just leave the authoritarian plants out of our national greenhouse!
This month, I read about a slave in literature who had the courage and moral strength to care and love a white boy. At the risk of being hung he learned to read and write. Yes, James came to life through the imagination of Mark Twain and blossomed further through Percival Everett’s imagination. But he is real as there are countless numbers of slaves who demonstrated in their lives that same strength. Please read their stories. The promise of our country is still before us. This year we have an election that is a great story. A candidate that has made his platform a salad dressed in fear. Looking for a second term where he will be a dictator for only a day! A champion for national christian protestants blurring the lines between Church and State. He is a powerful showman. We have another candidate who is, on the surface, the last person 46% of our country would ever think could win our presidency. Why? This candidate is a woman and also a woman of color. As I leave my metaphorical lighthouse I am left with this thought and conviction. I know who I am not going to vote for, the same person I did not vote for in 2016 and 2020. I do not know yet who I am going to vote for. As you know I love a wonderful story and a woman of color as our 1st female president in office when our country celebrates our 250th birthday in a couple of years, well that is one heck of a story! But I have never voted for a story. This new candidate has to show me her vision for our country’s future along with details of her vision of the road ahead before I give her my vote. She has less than 100 days to reveal who she is and who she wants to be, if elected!
Thank you for reading.
Be in peace and joy!
Mark