Three Books on Slavery

 

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

James - Percival Everett

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass - Frederick Douglass

I should say at the outset that I am not a scholar of black studies or sociology or post-modernist post-structuralism.  I am skeptical by nature of cultural criticism which mostly strikes me as just-so stories that happen to justify the biases of the critic.  And don’t even get me started on music critics like Lester Bangs or Greil Marcus who view the value of musical work primarily through the lens of counterculture.  I am sure that there is much context and deeper meaning in these three works than I perceive.  I am not even a literary critic, admittedly dense in the nature of literary tricks like metaphor, analogy, and allusion.  So, take this review for what it’s worth.

This review is a three-books-in-one (aren’t you lucky).  It started because I wanted to read “James” by Percival Everett, which seems to be on everyone’s short list of books for the year for 2024.  “James” is a reworking of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” told from the point-of-view of the runaway slave Jim/James.  Since I had never read “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, I figured that I should probably start with that.  After reading “James”, I was left with some questions about the real lives of slaves and runaway slaves and I was thinking that it would’ve been great if someone had written a book contemporaneously discussing those things.  And, of course, many people did - including one we all know who wrote three.  So, I chose to also read the third of Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies, “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass”.

“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (hereafter referred to as Huck Finn or just Finn) is one of those books that everyone reads in high school.  Except that, there are so many of those books that most of us have not actually read most of them.  And, because of its language, Finn has faded even from that list.  Still, it is the first major contender for “The Great American Novel”,  Published in 1885, it follows the adventures of a boy, Huckleberry Finn, just entering his teenage years (which were a different thing in the 1880s than they are now) and a run-away slave, Jim, who travels with him.

Although Huck Finn can be read as just an adventure story for boys, it broke literary ground in its use of vernacular and explores complex themes as Huck observes how Jim is treated as a black man and a runaway slave and grapples with accepting the mores that he has been raised with or finding his own moral compass.  Twain’s opposition to racism is expressed through his scathing depictions of characters behaving in racist ways.  Still, we have to acknowledge that Twain wrote as a white man and did not capture the real experience of being a black slave in America.

It seems, btw, to be almost universally agreed that the novel ends badly, the final adventure is both absurd and loses the serious themes previously developed.  It feels like Twain wrote himself into a corner, unable to reach a suitable conclusion.

“James” by Percival Everett is a re-telling of Huck Finn from the point of view of the slave Jim (or James as he will name himself).  It mostly follows the events of the original story until FInn’s finale which he drops to provide his own ending,  He adds new “adventures” for James where Jim and Huck are split in the original.

Everett’s James is a much different character than Twain’s Jim.  Early in the book, Everett establishes that James, as well as all the other slave characters in the book, speaks eloquently and that the slave “dialect” is an elaborate exercise in code switching to meet the expectations of their white masters.  James is also literate and well versed in philosophy as he has imagined conversations with the likes of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Locke.  I struggled with this in the beginning, both because I wasn’t sure that it was credible and because it was such a deviation from the source novel which I had just read. Then I remembered, authors get to make their own choices, Everett is not actually bound to the source material or even history, and he is writing his own story to suit his own themes and purpose. ;-)  

So, what are those themes?  The novel certainly touches on the arbitrariness, the capriciousness, and the violence of slavery.  The code switching reminds us of how utterly exhausting the mental effort to continuously conform to a master’s expectations must have been. It also enables us to see that slaves are just like us  - they have the same thoughts, feelings, hopes and desires as we do. freedom was not some abstract thought too difficult for a slave to understand, but a real tangible expectation of what it means to be human.  And, in showing us James’ invention of himself, Everett shows us how even the fundamental need that we all have to create and understand ourselves was denied to the slave.

I think “James” is also a critique of (or corrective to) Finn.  I recently read “Notes of a Native Son” by James Baldwin in which he critiques literature going back to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” for portraying black characters as stereotypes, not fully realized props to tell stories about and for whites.  Finn certainly falls into this category.  

I have to admit that I didn't care for the ending of James either although I see how the author uses it to demonstrate the arbitrariness of race.

Overall, I was happy to have read “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “James” in sequence.

I mentioned that I was skeptical of the eloquence and erudition of James and I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice if someone had written about life as a slave.  And then I realized that of course people did write about it, including Frederick Douglass, who had the eloquence and erudition of James, and wrote three autobiographies about his life as a slave, his escape from slavery, and his life after slavery.  I read the final autobiography, ”Life and Times of Frederick Douglass“ which was originally published in 1881 and then updated with 13 new chapters in 1892.

The first half of the book covers much the same territory as his two previous autobiographies with more detail on his life and escape from slavery from the safety of post-Civil War America.  The remainder of the original edition reads very much written for posterity.  He describes his work as an abolitionist, relationships with other abolitionists like WIlliam Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown, his thoughts on the events leading up to the Civil War, and his relationship with Abraham Lincoln.  He did not always agree with his allies and he wrote to justify the positions that he took.

It actually felt very much as if the original final third of the book had been written over time.  Douglass was surprisingly hopeful that the relationship between black and white America could be normalized which would be even more surprising if it had actually been written after the collapse of Reconstruction and the assassination of Garfield.  He was specifically opposed, for example, to the migration of blacks out of the south.  In the final two chapters, he thanks those who have assisted him on his journey and reflects on his accomplishments and the meaning of his life.

The 13 new chapters written for the 1892 edition have a very different tone.  THey start with a recognition that he has again been called to the defense of his people.  By then, it is clear that Reconstruction has failed, that southerners have used terror to keep now “free” blacks economically and physically subjugated.  The Supreme Court has overturned the Civil Rights Act.  And, it was clear that white Americans outside the south would refuse to accept black Americans as even second class citizens let alone as equals.  Douglass is much less hopeful about the fate of black people in America in these final chapters,

These final chapters also include a description of events and controversies that occurred after 1881 and Douglass’s justifications for his actions.

Throughout the book, Douglass includes texts of many of his speeches and writings.

Taken together, these three works provide a window into slavery in the border states before the Civil War (which was different than life for slaves in the deep South), the movement to abolish slavery, and the hopes of black Americans.  Reading them has certainly been a journey.