A retelling of Huckleberry Finn with Jim, the enslaved ‘friend’ of Huck as the focus and told from his point of view.

James, no longer Jim, is a reader who has to hide his large vocabulary from White people and who pretends to get big words wrong, putting them through what he calls his ‘slave filter’. Towards the beginning of the book, we find James teaching children to use their own ‘slave filter’,

The children said together, “And the better they feel, the safer we are.”

“February, translate that.”

“Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.”

“Nice.”

No page numbers, audiobook

This is what James calls a ‘situational translation’ and it is survival. There are shades of Erasure here where an author had to dumb down his writing and speak ‘ghetto’ in his book to write an ‘authentic’ story that ‘spoke’ to White people but was not necessarily the Black author’s experience. It was just what White folk expect Black stories to be.

Having never read Huckleberry Finn it is nearly impossible for me to write about how closely, or not this book follows the story – pretty close in parts, I think. But Everett has also added in his own sections seamlessly such as James becoming part of a singing group that uses boot polish to ‘Black up’. James has to use the polish plus some white make-up to make it seem as if he is a White man masquerading as a Black man. There is also a lot of hair touching going on in this section – is it a wig or is it his real hair?

This really is a remarkable novel, one that can be read separately to Huckleberry Finn. Everett is never afraid to take that most of American icons, this time Mark Twain’s Huck, and rewrite to balance what it means to be American from a Black point of view.

It’s on my list of best books in 2024.