Mark Twain’s Sequels

To understand Everett’s dialogue with Huckleberry Finn, it is useful to read James alongside other post-Huck works, beginning with the sequels written by Twain himself. Twain’s most direct attempt to write a sequel was the novel Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians, begun by Twain soon after the publication of Huckleberry Finn; its plot also picks up immediately after the end of the original novel, following Huck, Tom, and Jim as they head West into the “Territory” for further adventures. Twain abandoned this sequel in mid-sentence after 18,000 words and never went back to it, though his manuscript was eventually published in Life magazine in 1968. It was then eventually completed by author Lee Nelson and published as a full novel in 2003.

Nelson does a good job of maintaining the style of the original portion of the novel. Moreover, to be fair, Nelson’s contribution, which constitutes the bulk of the published novel, is probably at least as good a read as the original fragment, which sets the story up as a captivity narrative that seems pretty much as racist as most such narratives were in the nineteenth century. Whatever ironies might be embedded in the narrative, one of its principal motives seems to be to undermine Tom’s idealistic view of Indians as noble savages via a depiction of treacherous and murderous Indian behavior and through juxtaposition of Tom’s romantic vision with the more cynical (and downright racist) one of “Brace Johnson,” a character who plays the stereotypical role of the “man who knows Indians.” Events teach Tom that the Indians he has read about in books are not much like the “real” Indians he encounters in this novel, but then of course these are not real Indians, either, but just Indians in a different book. This direction in the narrative does not seem a promising one, and though he attempts to rehabilitate it to some extent, Nelson is never really able to rescue the book from Twain’s beginning, the problematic nature of which might well account for its being abandoned by him. In any case, while the completed novel does raise some issues with regard to the roles played by both Native Americans and Mormons (who figure prominently in the narrative) in the taming of the West, it does essentially nothing that might change the way we see The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Twain did, incidentally, eventually complete two “sequels” to Huckleberry Finn, both of which are narrated by Huck, though Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896) are much more in the mode of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), making it clear that Huckleberry Finn is a genuine outlier in the sequence. Both of these sequels are essentially children’s books that attempt to tap into what were then popular genres of narratives for boys. Neither does much to enrich or revise our understanding of Huckleberry Finn, though they do extend the notion of Huck as a relatively good-hearted naïf and Tom as something of a rascal. Meanwhile, poor Jim is again the butt of most of Tom’s pranks in Tom Sawyer Abroad, as when he clearly takes pleasure in completely confusing poor Jim with a specious argument about fleas being the world’s most remarkable animals. (We know from James that Jim might actually just pretending bafflement, but there is no evidence of such in Tom Sawyer Abroad.)

Other Key Contributions to Post-Huck Fiction

In addition to Twain’s sequels, literary follow-ups to Huckleberry Finn have been appearing for some time. David Carkeet’s I Been There Before (1985) builds on the biographical coincidence that Samuel Clemens was born (1835) and died (1910) in years in which Halley’s Comet appeared; in this novel, Clemens/Twain returns to life for the 1985 re-appearance of the comet. The novel somewhat amusingly parodies Twain’s style via his letters to his wife describing his adventures in 1985, but it does little to engage with Huckleberry Finn and can be considered a minor footnote to post-Huck literature. The same might be said for something like Kathy Acker’s The Empire of the Senseless (1988), which draws upon a number of predecessor texts in a very postmodern mode, including Huckleberry Finn, appropriating their energies for feminist purposes. Norman Lock’s The Boy in His Winter (2014) resembles I Been There Before in that it employs a sort of time-travel motif in order to update Huckleberry Finn by literally bringing Huck into the future—even all the way into our future in the 2070s. Here, Huck and Jim float down the Mississippi until 1960, when Jim gets off, only promptly to be lynched. Huck then gets off in 2005, re-entering time and living on until 2077, from which point he narrates the novel. With forays into dialogue with H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), A Boy in His Winter is an intricate exercise in intertextual dialogue, though Huckleberry Finn remains the key source text. Lock’s novel extends Twain’s original in some important ways but strays far enough from Huckleberry Finn that it fails to engage the original in any truly productive dialogue, instead functioning more as a standalone novel that happened to borrow much of its premise from Huckleberry Finn.

With the publication of Huck Out West in 2017, Robert Coover became the most notable author (prior to Everett) to have produced post-Huck fiction. Coover’s novel is very much what the title indicates—a sequel to the original Huckleberry Finn that follows the adventures of Huck, Tom, and Jim after they head West at the end of the original novel. Mostly, though, Coover’s novel follows Huck after Tom sells Jim off as a slave to a Cherokee tribe, though what happens to Jim after that is unclear because we hear about much of it from Tom, who turns out to be an extremely unreliable source. After selling Jim, Tom goes off on his own adventures, which include going back East to marry Becky Thatcher, then abandoning her when she is pregnant, thus driving her into prostitution. (This is not your father’s Huckleberry Finn.) Much of the action, meanwhile, is set much later than the original novel, centering on the key year of 1876, when Huck is being hounded by one “General Hard Ass” (a transparent stand-in for Colonel George Armstrong Custer), who believes Huck to have betrayed him when the latter, working as a scout, refused to help Hard Ass find and destroy a group of the Lakota.³ Huck, in fact, is quite relieved when the general is killed in the Battle of Little Big Horn, freeing Huck from danger at his murderous hands. Native Americans come off much better in this novel than do Hard Ass and most of the white “emigrants” we meet out West. A middle-aged Tom has by this time returned as well, having become a figure of “sivilization” (as either Twain’s or Coover’s Huck might put it). He is, in fact, devoted to taming the West in ways that Huck finds appalling, including the genocidal extermination of Native Americans, against whom Tom claims to bear no grudge, “Only, we’re building something grand out here, ocean to ocean, and they’re in the way” (Coover 2017, 204).

Tom here becomes a spokesman for the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, and there is even a subtle way in which Coover, by embedding a substantial amount of Native American storytelling within his novel, suggests that such colonialist notions are informed by the same ideology that inspires the Western taste for linear narratives with definitive closure. Indeed, while the connection to the original Twain novel certainly adds interest to Coover’s, the more interesting dialogue in this novel is not with Huckleberry Finn so much as with standard narratives of the taming of the West. Huck’s adventures, in particular, involve a number of classic scenes we might remember from Westerns. In one moment, for example, Huck is about to be hanged, when Tom appears and shoots the rope in half, saving his boyhood friend. This “shoot the rope” motif is especially prominent in Western films, such as the 1966 spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, while a similar scene (but in a more purely comic mode) occurs in the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2019), which is itself essentially a collection of pastiches of various well-known motifs from the Western genre. In the end, Huck Out West replicates the conclusion of Huckleberry Finn as Huck and his Lakota friend Eeteh head further West from the Dakotas. Tom stays behind to help build the frontier mining town of Deadwood⁴ into a site of modern capitalist routine, while Huck hopes to find lands that are still wild and free of the routinizing forces of modern capitalism, leaving Tom behind to pursue his opposed project.

As Christopher Conway points out, Huck Out West has much in common with Phong Nguyen’s The Adventures of Joe Harper (2016), except that (as the title suggests) Nguyen’s version of the Huck sequel focuses on the perspective of a minor character who was one of Tom and Huck’s friends in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and in Huckleberry Finn. This version adds in the perspective of Chinese railroad workers, a group that made a major contribution to the modernization of the American West—and one that has received far less attention than it deserves in American history and literature. Meanwhile, this particular novel positions Tom Sawyer even more as a villainous representative of the violent ideologies that won the West. However, while Nguyen “also associates Tom with the racist and nationalist ideology that underpins westward expansion, he presents a more psychologically nuanced representation of his protagonist, Joe Harper, who may be read as an analogue of Huck” (Conway 2022, 118).

Finally, the two closest predecessors to James among works of post-Huck fiction (in the sense that both might be characterized as retellings from the point of view of a character other than Huck) are Nancy Rawles’s My Jim (2005)—which fills in many details of slave life in the South but keeps Jim himself somewhat in the margins, while actually focusing on Jim’s wife Sadie—and Jon Clinch’s Finn (2007), which focuses on the story of Pap Finn, again keeping Huck in the margins. In the case of Rawles, Jim (despite his centering in the title) remains a figure mostly of memory and fantasy in the mind of his wife Sadie, who narrates the novel and provides a refreshingly different perspective by giving us a poignant and heartbreaking account of the travails of slave women. As such, My Jim is an important addition to the genre of the neo-slave narrative, even though it engages less extensively with the content of Huckleberry Finn—Sadie knows next to nothing about Jim’s travels with Huck—than any of the other post-Huck novels discussed herein.⁵

Among other things, the resemblances between the style of Sadie’s narration and Huck’s famous colloquial style in Huckleberry Finn resonate with an extensive critical literature concerning the intersection between Huckleberry Finn and African American culture, and especially with Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s groundbreaking study Was Huck Black? (1993), in which she traces the influence of African American vernacular language on the style of Huckleberry Finn. Fishkin does not mean to imply, of course, that Huck himself is literally black, but only that his language is. Finn, however, literalizes her insights and postulates an African American heritage for perhaps the best-known character in all of American literature. Finn is more closely related to Huckleberry Finn than is My Jim in that it centers on an important character from the original novel, seeking to explore the reasons why Pap Finn might be so hateful and abusive. Here, Pap is depicted as an even worse character than in the original, essentially a psychotic serial killer. We also learn that Pap is the son of a rich father with whom he never got along, though the novel somewhat unconvincingly suggests that what really drove him over the edge was that he captured a young slave woman named Mary, holding her as his sex slave but then falling in love with her. These feelings then conflict so strongly with his deeply ingrained racism that he becomes unhinged. Perhaps most importantly, in terms of this novel’s relationship with both Huckleberry Finn and James, Finn reveals that Mary (whom Pap eventually murders) is the mother of Huck, who thus becomes, by the rules of antebellum America, officially (but secretly, even to himself) black.

James and Huckleberry Finn

The motif of black parentage positions Finn in direct dialogue with James, which also envisions a black parent for Huck. In this case, Everett comes up with the even more daring proposition that it is the slave Jim⁶ who is Huck’s father, a proposition that might explain the oddly sympathetic relationship between Huck and Jim in the original novel. Thus, in a review of My Jim, Helen Schulman comments that, in Huckleberry Finn, Jim’s “compassion and selflessness gave Huck the only loving parent he’d ever known” (Schulman 2005). Schulman, of course, does not mean this literally, but Everett takes the extra step of performing this literalization, which (among other things) calls attention to the absurdity of racism by reminding us that it is often not a simple matter to tell who belongs to which race. And, by extension, this motif reminds us of the ultimate fictionality of race as a concept, something of which Everett seems very much aware. Thus, in Everett’s much-respected 2001 novel Erasure, Monk Ellison notes his inability to play basketball and his tendency to use ejaculations such as “egads” as evidence of his lack of adherence to racial expectations. Elsewhere, he makes his attitude about race quite clear, declaring that

I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it. I don’t believe in race. I believe there are people who will shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race, because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide nose and slave ancestors. But that’s just the way it is. (Everett 2001, 2)

Everett deploys the motif of Huck’s parentage in some subtle and playful ways. For example, there is a scene in Huckleberry Finn in which Huck saves Jim from some slave hunters by hiding him under a tarp and claiming that the hidden man is his father, suffering from smallpox—a possibility that sends the hunters scurrying away for fear of infection. The scene is essentially replicated in James, except that now Huck claims the infected man is his uncle, a modification that has no apparent motivation in the action but that, in retrospect, appears to be a sly indirect hint that calls attention to this moment in Huckleberry Finn when Jim is “identified” as Huck’s father, thus anticipating the coming revelation in James that Jim really is Huck’s father (Everett 2024, 81).

Importantly, though, this redefinition of Huck’s racial identity is something of a side issue in James, which reconceptualizes the story to decenter Huck and focus the reader’s attention on Jim. Everett, luckily, has the literary dexterity to carry off this important feat extremely successfully, adopting (and successfully carrying out) a different strategy in each of the novel’s three main sections. The first section largely reiterates events with which we are already familiar from Huckleberry Finn, but they are now related from the perspective of Jim rather than Huck. Part Two of James follows Jim during a period in which Jim and Huck are separated in the original Twain novel, so that the original only tells us of Huck’s experiences during this segment. And Part Three reunites Huck and Jim but completely rewrites the controversial final section of Huckleberry Finn, now following Huck and Jim as they escape (joined by a group of other escaped slaves) the slave South to ostensible freedom in Iowa, shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War.⁷ However, Huck is an minor figure during this segment, in which Jim/James clearly emerges as an independent character who moves well beyond Twain’s conception of him.

The combination of these three strategies allows each of the three sections of the novel to add different elements to Twain’s original, while also dialogically interacting with one another. The first section, by relating largely familiar material from a different perspective, provides a clear reminder of the problematic way in which Huck and Tom tend to treat Jim like a sort of plaything, despite the obvious fact that he is a human being with feelings and perceptions of his own. Part One thus performs perhaps the most obvious function that one might expect from a “rewrite” of Huckleberry Finn. In the hands of Everett, however, this function is enriched by the particular way in which Jim uses language—which dialogically engages not just with the original Jim’s notoriously subliterate language but also with the famous vernacular diction of Huck’s narration in the Twain novel.

We learn in this section of James that Jim is quite well-read, having secretly gained access to Judge Thatcher’s extensive personal library over a period of years, reading especially widely in the work of Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and John Locke. In fact, we will eventually learn that Jim has a virtual reverence for the written word, appreciating its potentially liberating power in ways that Huck (who sees reading and writing as just two of the ways “sivilization” is designed to limit his freedom) never could. As a result of his studies, Jim is able to employ excellent grammar and a sophisticated, even “literary” vocabulary in his narration—and even in his interactions with other slaves, to whom he has passed along as much of his learning as possible, though they also seem to have acquired some significant learning on their own, indicating that Jim is far from unique in his learning as an educated slave. Within the hearing of white people, however, Jim hides his learning and shifts essentially to the mode of speech attributed to him by Huck in Huckleberry Finn (which, of course, would be the only mode Huck had observed).

Early in James, Jim is regaling his fellow slaves with a work of imaginative fiction in which he envisions suddenly being transported to New Orleans: “See, I thought I was drifting off into a nice nap about noon and the next thing I knew I was standing on a bustling street with mule-drawn carriages and whatnot all around me” (14–15). Then, when he realizes that Huck and Tom have arrived in the bushes nearby, he switches dialects in a way that also alerts his listeners to the presence of the white boys. In so doing, he also switches to a moment of storytelling that replicates one that appears in Huckleberry Finn, while providing a new explication of the context of that storytelling: “Lak I say, I furst found my hat up on a nail. ‘I ain’t put dat dere,’ I say to mysef. ‘How dat hat git dere?’ And I knew ’twas witches what done it. I ain’t seen ’em, but it was dem. And one dem witches, the one what took my hat, she sent me all da way down to N’Orlins. Can you believe dat?” (15).

Jim’s changes of linguistic register make some very serious points, but they can also be quite comic, especially in the puzzled reactions of others when he occasionally slips into the wrong mode at the wrong time. Perhaps the funniest use of this motif in the novel occurs after Huck learns that Jim is his father and thus begins to attempt to emulate Jim’s slavespeak. “I be yo son,” says Huck, “so by law I be a slave.” Jim responds by urging him to “stop talking like that. You sound ridiculous” (255). Such moments make serious points, even while being quite funny, something that one might also say about James in general. One might also say the same about Everett’s writing as a whole, and his ability to detail some of the most disturbing aspects of American life in a comic mode is probably unmatched. Who else but Everett—in his novel The Trees (2021)—could successfully address the horrifying legacy of lynching in America in a mode of broad satirical comedy?⁸

In shifting his linguistic registers, Jim, of course, is employing the mode of African American linguistic dexterity known as “signifying,” most influentially brought to the attention of American literary studies by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who associates it both with the trickster figure from African mythology and with the kind of “double-voiced discourse” discussed by Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin’s work, meanwhile, is particularly relevant to James, which is dialogic in so many ways—most obviously in the dialogue between Everett and Twain that pervades the entire novel. In fact, Bakhtinian dialogism is a key element in all of Everett’s work, which engages in dialogues with a number of predecessor authors, texts, and genres. One thinks, for example, of the pastiche of the films of Sidney Poitier in I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009). There is also a great deal of internal dialogism within Everett’s novels. His novel Telephone (2020), for example, was even issued in three different versions, creating overt dialogue among the versions.⁹

Erasure provides some of the best examples of dialogism in Everett. In that novel, protagonist Monk Ellison has little success marketing his sophisticated and highly literary novels because they are not “black” enough; out of frustration, he writes (in what amounts to a virtuoso case of signifying) a parody of the kind of ghetto novel that the publishing industry seems to want. Perhaps predictably, the novel (which Ellison ultimately publishes under the pen name “Stagg R. Leigh”) becomes a runaway critical and commercial success. Erasure thus generates considerable dialogic energy from the conflict between Everett’s novel and Monk’s mock ghetto novel. But Erasure also engages in dialogues with the African American literary tradition as a whole, and especially with the work of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, Everett’s two most canonical predecessors among African American male writers. As Tamara Powell notes, this dialogue includes such minor things as the inclusion of a character named Doug Glass (presumably evoking Frederick Douglass), while the ghetto novel being parodied by Monk “seems to be a clear allusion to” Sapphire’s 1996 novel Push (102). Any number of critics and reviewers have pointed out that the protagonist of Monk’s ghetto novel seems to be a sort of figure of Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Wright’s Native Son (1940). And, of course, it is no accident that Monk’s surname is “Ellison,” while Powell also points out that Ellison’s Invisible Man is clearly “the novel that Erasure alludes most to (that critics have focused the most on in reference to Erasure)” (Powell 2012, 100).

In a book-length study of the participation of all of Everett’s novels through So Much Blue (2017) in the genre of Menippean satire (a genre closely associated with the work of Bakhtin), Derek C. Maus notes that a key element of this participation is the tendency of Everett’s novels to “feature shards of text from numerous literary and nonliterary genres embedded into their overarching novelistic narratives” (Maus 2019, 67). Of course, the incorporation of material from other texts and genres is key not only to Bakhtin’s discussion of Menippean satire but also to his theory of the novel, including the fact that the incorporated material is not simply imported but engaged with in active dialogue, especially through parody. Importantly, though, for Bakhtin (heavily influenced in this sense by the Russian formalists), parody goes well beyond mere mockery, becoming “an intentional dialogized hybrid. Within it, languages and styles actively and mutually illuminate one another” (Bakhtin 1981, 76). James certainly incorporates material from a variety of cultural forms, such as the racist legacy of blackface minstrelsy. But the most obvious case of such incorporation is the way so much of James is derived from Huckleberry Finn, creating a text that is very much a “dialogized hybrid” of the kind described by Bakhtin.

In terms of the notion of African American “signifying,” as employed by Jim in James, this mode of speech modification is an enactment of Jim’s crucial insight that “it always pays to give white folks what they want” (Everett 2024, 9). As such, it is very much the mode of signifying learned early in life by Ellison’s Invisible Man, who has heard that his grandfather, on his deathbed, told his father that he must try to “overcome” white people “with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction” (Ellison 1995, 16). And the Invisible Man himself, as a young college student, was advised by the Booker T. Washington–like Dr. Bledsoe that white folks have to be constantly manipulated in order for black folks to get by: “We take these white folks where we want them to go, we show them what we want them to see. Don’t you know that?” (102).

As Robert J. Butler has argued (2018), Everett’s engagement with Ellison in Erasure can be regarded as a form of signifying, which accords well with Gates’s use of the concept primarily as a mode of literary discourse that is a special form of intertextuality. For Gates, African American texts employ this mode to “talk to other texts,” defining the term as “repetition and revision, or repetition with a signal difference” (Gates 1988, xxiv). By this definition, of course, the “repetition and revision” of Huckleberry Finn in James functions even more obviously as a form of signifying. However, it is important to recognize, as does Fishkin, that Huckleberry Finn already performs a great deal of signifying in its own right, as Twain deploys diction and linguistic strategies possibly derived, at least in part, from African American models. Twain thus engages in a dialogue with the entire English-language literary tradition in a way that contributes to the development of a genuinely American form of literary language. If Twain’s signifying within Huckleberry Finn thus makes Everett’s signifying within James even more complex and multi-layered, it should be noted that there is still another layer, in that Jim’s signifying within Everett’s novel is, in fact, a sort of reversal of Everett’s own signifying, in which Everett refuses to have Jim speak in a dialect that might be most familiar for many white readers.

Jim’s use of multiple linguistic registers is only one example of multiple voicing in James. In particular, the impact of Huckleberry Finn crucially depends upon the colloquial dialect employed by Huck as its narrator, supplemented by the sometimes slightly different spoken dialects of the other characters (as emphasized by Twain in his famous opening explanatory note on dialects). By abandoning this sort of narration and having Jim narrate James in “standard” English (complete with sophisticated allusions to the Western literary and philosophical tradition), Everett essentially places Jim in the position of Monk Ellison in Erasure, while Jim’s reversion to slavespeak to make white folks more comfortable places him in the position of “Stagg R. Leigh,” whose work becomes hugely popular because it shows a black author who employs language that readers can identify as authentically “black.” In this sense, James engages in dialogue not just with Huckleberry Finn but also with Erasure, providing a gloss on the dilemma of Monk Ellison (and of Everett himself) by reminding us of the long legacy of linguistic games African Americans have been forced to play to get by, games that they were ultimately able to turn into a resource and a strength. Read this way, Jim’s ability to use standard language so effectively, while perhaps not entirely realistic, is motivated by the allegorical project of providing a reminder of the double coding of African American language going all the way back to the antebellum period. At the same time, Jim’s play with language resonates with the metafictional games that run throughout Everett’s fiction, as well.¹⁰

Of course, all writers of post-Huck fiction have had to deal with the legacy of Huck’s colloquial narrative style (and the problematic racist language) in one way or another. In Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians, Twain’s beginning again employs Huck as narrator, and in essentially the same style as in Huckleberry Finn. Nelson then attempts (quite successfully) to maintain this narrative voice and style through the remainder of his narrative. Similarly, in Huck Out West, Coover employs Huck as the narrator, essentially replicating the narrative voice of Huckleberry Finn, though tweaking it just slightly to indicate the fact that Huck has grown a bit older and wiser. The Adventures of Joe Harper is narrated by its title character, who (having grown up in somewhat the same milieu as Huck and Tom, narrates in a style that is reminiscent of Huck’s. The Boy in His Winter is also narrated by Huck, but, by the time of the narration, he has become quite well read and now narrates in “proper” English, much like Jim in James. My Jim is different in that Sadie employs speech patterns that one might expect from a slave of her era; as such, it uses a strategy that is similar to Twain’s in Huckleberry Finn, even if it is employed via a different character and a different dialect.

Clinch’s Finn is somewhat different from all of these post-Huck novels in that it employs an unidentified third-person narrator who uses relatively conventional “literary” language. As such, it deviates from Twain most of all the post-Huck novels discussed herein in that it uses a completely different conception of narrative voice. In a typical scene, for example, the hard-drinking Pap Finn sinks into drunkenness amid his fury at the idea that black people can vote in Ohio, thus providing a key indicator of the depth of his racism. The narrator describes him thusly: “For a man who enjoys his drink he permits it to make him miserable. He rages against the blacks and the government and the law, all of which he insists have conspired to bring him to ruin” (Clinch 2007, 66). Finn here expresses not only a particularly virulent version of nineteenth-century racism but also anticipates the sense of white grievance that has dogged American society into the twenty-first century. As happens over and over in this novel, we see here that the narrator is speaking in a third-person voice that is entirely unlike the diction that would be employed by Finn himself, but it is delivered essentially in a mode of indirect free style that reflects the point of view of Finn. Perhaps this linguistic dissonance is meant to distance us from Finn and his hateful perspective, but it is a bit jarring and is probably the weakest aspect of this novel because the style is so different from Pap’s own mode of speech.

James, though, uses an entirely different approach. By having Jim narrate, it again gives us direct access to the point of view of an important character. Having Jim perform this narration in such sophisticated prose raises some of the same questions about authentic ways of representing the African American experience that are so central to Erasure. But James addresses this question in more ways than simply the narrative voice. For example, the second part of James also contains another crucial motif when Jim, for a time, joins up with the “Virginia Minstrels” and their leader, Daniel Decatur Emmett, a traveling group of white singers who perform in blackface. The Minstrels were a real-world group actually led by Emmett (1815–1904), and their appearance is set up by a sort of preamble that appears at the beginning of the text, entitled “The Notebook of Daniel Decatur Emmett,” containing lyrics of a number of songs that Emmett has supposedly jotted down in the notebook. These traditional songs include “Old Dan Tucker,” “Old Zip Coon” (a version of “Turkey in the Straw,” which follows it), and “The Blue Tail Fly”/“Jimmy Crack Corn”). These songs have often (rightly or wrongly) been credited to Emmett, though the most important (and most relevant to James) of his attributed compositions is “Dixie,” widely regarded as the theme song of the Confederacy. “Dixie” is not included in this notebook, though it does make an appearance later in the novel, as Emmett sings an excerpt from “my new song” (179).

The authorship of many of “Emmett’s” songs, however, is in question, largely because he had a tendency to take credit where it wasn’t necessarily due. One thing that is clear is that the songs attributed to Emmett are strongly derivative of African American folk music, so that his work stands as an early example of the kind of appropriation of black culture by white musical performers that was central to blackface minstrelsy and that has been so widely noted in relation to more recent phenomena such as rock and roll music. Of course, Emmett was probably more important as a showman than as a songwriter, drawing upon some of the same cultural energies as did his more famous contemporary, P. T. Barnum (1810–1891), except with a larger element of appropriation from African American culture. Indeed, Emmett is best known for founding (and performing with) the Virginia Minstrels, who staged blackface shows that included elaborate skits characterized by Eric Lott as “little more than overgrown circus acts” (Lott 1992, 144). The Minstrels first performed together in 1843 (roughly contemporaneous with the setting of Huckleberry Finn), though Emmett is thought to have first performed “Dixie” in April 1859, which would be consistent with the setting of James, the action of which occurs just before and just after the beginning of the Civil War. While individual white performers had appeared in blackface before, the Virginia Minstrels are considered to be the first entire white troupe to have performed in blackface. In James, Jim joins the group briefly but also has to perform with blackface makeup, so that he will match the other members of the group. As Emmett puts it, “He ain’t black enough as he is” (158). This situation momentarily puts James very much in the position of Monk Ellison in Erasure (or, presumably, that Everett himself has felt placed in at times). In this sense, we can see that Monk, by becoming Stagg R. Leigh, is performing a form of blackface of his own. Finally, it should be noted that the whole Emmett motif reminds us of the position of Mark Twain, pillaging from African American culture to produce Huckleberry Finn (though James, as a whole, is not particularly critical of this tactic).

While with the Minstrels, Jim finds himself in the position of being a black man who is pretending to be a white man who is pretending to be a black man. Meanwhile, he meets up with Norman, a member of the group who is in a somewhat similar position in a different way: Norman looks entirely white but assures Jim that he is actually black but only passing as white, thus providing another reminder of the complexity of racial identities. Norman eventually becomes an important character, joining up with Jim after Jim flees the Minstrels, realizing that his cover will eventually be blown. Norman will eventually be lost after a steamboat explosion leaves Huck and Norman floating in the wreckage; Jim comes along and is able to save Huck but not Norman—with the implication that he had to choose between the two. Soon afterward, he reveals to Huck that he is the boy’s biological father, thus providing an explanation for the choice.

As scholars such as Lott have outlined, the blackface tradition is one of the most overt examples of the appropriation of African American culture by white artists and performers, “little more than cultural robbery, a form of what Marx called expropriation, which troubled guilty whites all the more because they were so attracted to the culture they plundered. Indeed, for a time in the late 1840s minstrelsy came to seem the most representative national art” (Lott 1992, 8). Lott also lists Huckleberry Finn among important American cultural phenomena that would not have been possible without the blackface tradition as background (5). Indeed, discussions of the influence of the blackface tradition are deeply embedded in the critical legacy of Huckleberry Finn, something of which Everett is clearly aware, as was Ralph Ellison, who (rather generously) noted back in 1958 that Huckleberry Finn was clearly influenced by the blackface tradition and that “Twain fitted Jim into the outlines of the minstrel tradition, and it was from behind this stereotype mask that we see Jim’s dignity and human capacity—and Twain’s complexity—emerge” (Ellison 1958, 215–16). As Fishkin notes, though, many recent critics have been less generous, suggesting that “Jim suffocated behind that mask, that the demeaning stereotype of the gullible, superstitious, laughable, ridiculous minstrel-show darky prevented Jim’s ‘dignity and human capacity’ from showing through” (Fishkin 1993, 80–81).

However one interprets the significance of the phenomenon, it seems clear that the blackface tradition was one of the important ways in which Twain was influenced by African American culture, here in a complex case of cultural dialogue that involves the appropriation of an appropriation. Everett then turns the tables—or at least extends the conversation—by re-appropriating Huckleberry Finn itself in James. Meanwhile, it certainly seems warranted to see Everett’s suggestion of Jim’s literal parentage of Huck as a sort of allegorization of the fact that African American culture served as a symbolic parent to Huckleberry Finn.

Near the end of Part One of James, Jim realizes that he has escaped slavery only to become a sort of indentured servant to Emmett, an inveterate appropriator of African American cultural energies. He therefore decides to escape again, taking with him Emmett’s notebook—not because he reveres the lyrics written therein, but simply because he values the blank paper that still remains within it. Reading and writing in the abstract—as well as physical books, paper, and writing implements—serve almost as magical talismans for Jim, emblems of the crucial importance of literacy to his potential for personal liberation and to the liberation of African Americans as a whole. Indeed, the physicality of the written medium is emphasized in the opening of James, which is typeset to evoke Emmet’s notebook, suggesting that Everett is re-appropriating the materials that Emmet had lifted from African American culture.

In Part Two, Jim is on his own without Huck, encountering experiences that were common in the real world of the slave era but that are far beyond anything related in Huckleberry Finn. While separated from Huck, Jim falls into the clutches of one Henderson, a brutal slave owner who operates a sawmill. Henderson whips Jim mercilessly (and for no real reason other than sadistic brutality) on their very first day together. That night, Jim, refusing to accept such treatment, decides to run away, taking with him Sammy, a teenage slave girl who has for some time regularly been both beaten and raped by Henderson. Jim does manage to get away, but Sammy is shot and killed by the slave catchers who are on their trail. This entire sequence is typical of the crucial way in which James reminds us of the horrors of the slave experience in ways that Huckleberry Finn doesn’t do—and couldn’t have gotten away with doing. These extensions are thus not so much criticisms of Twain’s novel as supplements to it.

Part Three of James again switches to a completely different strategy by going totally off script and imagining an entirely new ending for the story that essentially ignores the controversial final segment of Huckleberry Finn. After all, Tom’s outrageously abusive treatment of Jim (a focus of Acker’s rewriting in The Empire of the Senseless) can only partly be recuperated by the tradition of critical arguments that Tom’s holding of Jim in subjugation even after he is no longer a slave can be taken as a commentary on the on-going oppression of African Americans even after the end of slavery, and thus as a commentary on American race relations in the Reconstruction era.¹¹ Everett ignores this final segment altogether and provides his own ending. To have Jim simply escape to freedom and live happily ever after might have made for an easy fantasy conclusion, but Everett presents a more ingenious (and more realistic) solution. Moving the beginning of his story to the brink of the Civil War, which is nowhere on the horizon in Twain, Everett has his story conclude after the actual outbreak of the war. Huck and Jim now reverse the illogic of proceeding further and further south and finally take the logical step of moving northward; Huck returns home to Hannibal, while Jim—having just temporarily kidnapped Judge Thatcher and having just killed a vicious white overseer—escapes into what is apparently Iowa with wife Sadie, daughter Lizzie, and some other slaves from the plantation where they had been sent, violently liberating the slaves there in a moment of near-apocalyptic vengeance.¹² It is still the 1860s, though, and the white people of Iowa are not at all thrilled to accept the new arrivals, even though they feel obligated to do so because they are now at war with the slave South.¹³ We know how that war will end, and we know slavery will soon be abolished. But we also know that this abolition will not lead to a clean reboot. Jim’s troubles are hardly over, even though he can now hold his head high. Asked by the local sheriff if he might be the one known as “Nigger Jim,” he replies in the negative. “I am James,” he says (303).

Postmodernism, Pastiche, and Post-Huck Fiction

Much of the discourse surrounding African American fiction in the twenty-first century has centered on the notion that this fiction has entered a new era, partly due to the growing maturation of an African American literary tradition and partly due to an increasingly complex relationship between this tradition and American literature in general.¹⁴ Thus, Thelma Golden kicked off the new century back in 2001 by introducing the highly influential notion of “postblack” art that is “characterized by artists who [are] adamant about not being labeled as ‘black’ artists, though their work [is] steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness” (Golden 14). Then, in 2003, Madhu Dubey published an important study of “black literary postmodernism,” using a conception of postmodernism that was heavily influenced by Jameson as well as David Harvey’s somewhat similar vision of the postmodern, though arguing that there was something distinctively different about the ways postmodernism was enacted in the work of black writers that is not necessarily covered adequately in the work of these theorists.

Dubey does not mention Everett, and her book was perhaps a bit early to be able to appreciate him, given that his work had generally received less attention that it received at the time she was writing. However, she does pay significant attention to Colson Whitehead, as well as to writers of the previous century, such as Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed. Everett, though, has since emerged as an important and especially innovative figure. Indeed, attempts to characterize his writing have consistently acknowledged his newness, often linking him to such phenomena as “postblack” writing (Schmidt 2016 and 2017). Many of these attempts have focused on race and on the fact that Everett has become a major figure at a time in which African American literature has entered a distinctively new phase, perhaps moving beyond postmodernism. Ramón Saldívar (2011), for example, evinces Erasure as a key example of the kind of “speculative realism” that he sees as displaying a “postrace aesthetic.”

In any case, while Everett’s rewriting of Huckleberry Finn in James is an especially audacious literary undertaking, the broader phenomenon of post-Huck fiction has ramifications that go far beyond a simple dialogue with a single literary predecessor. For example, as Conway notes, the elevation of Joe Harper to a more important status in The Adventures of Joe Harper participates in an important trend within postmodern fiction, in which minor characters from classic works of literature are promoted to central status in later works, producing a sometimes jarring change in perspective. This trend, first identified by Jeremy Rosen (2016), includes examples that draw upon genuinely venerable classics, including John Gardner’s Grendel (1971, from Beowulf), Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005, from The Odyssey), and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia (2009, from Aeneid). And Conway is surely correct in suggesting that works such as Finn, My Jim, and Huck Out West (in addition to The Adventures of Joe Harper) participate in this phenomenon as well. I would add postmodern retellings of classic novels, from Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), whose radical shift in perspective relative to Jane Eyre has much in common with post-Huck fiction, as does Laila Lalami’s imaginative retelling of Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative of the sixteenth-century Narvaez Expedition from the perspective of a black slave in The Moor’s Account (2014).

Huckleberry Finn and post-Huck fiction are something of a special case of this phenomenon, both because of the original novel’s central and defining place in the canon of American literature and because Twain’s novel deals with highly controversial issues the exploration of which was inherently limited when the novel was originally published. There is thus considerable potential in the idea of extending this novel to deal with those issues in new ways. The most obvious of these issues involve slavery and racism, and James is a particularly valuable example of post-Huck literature, both because of its own literary merit and because it engages in such extensive dialogue with Huckleberry Finn in an effort to supplement and revise our understanding of that original text.

Given this dialogue, it is particularly instructive to recognize that all of the literary recyclings mentioned above can be regarded as examples of the kind of pastiche that Jameson has seen as a crucial technique for the composition of postmodern art. By pastiche, Jameson means the tendency of postmodern artists to borrow liberally from both the style and content of earlier works because the conditions of life under late capitalism make it difficult for artists to develop distinctive individual styles of their own. According to Jameson, postmodern artists treat the entire cultural tradition as a sort of aesthetic cafeteria from whose menu they can nostalgically pick and choose without critical engagement with the works being borrowed from or concern for the historical context in which those styles originally arose. Referring to this sort of borrowing as the “random cannibalization of all the styles of the past,” Jameson argues that this form of pastiche is,

like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of any laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. (Jameson 1991, 17)

In short, for Jameson, postmodern artists, because of their own lack of any genuine historical sense, borrow from works of the past without engaging in any genuine dialogue with those works or with the historical context in which they were created. Meanwhile, Jameson argues, this lack of dialogue is part of a genuine inability of postmodern art to conduct an effective critique of late capitalism because that art is so thoroughly infused by the ideology of late capitalism that “aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally” (Jameson 1991, 4).

Post-Huck novels such as Huck Out West, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians, and The Adventures of Joe Harper clearly qualify as works of pastiche because of the way they elaborately mimic the famed colloquial style of Huckleberry Finn. And this stylistic imitation seems to verify Jameson’s argument in that this imitation in itself does very little to engage Huckleberry Finn in critical dialogue. One could argue that these works (especially Coover’s) extend the political implications of Huckleberry Finn by looking critically at the racist violence that was central to the colonialist conquest of the American West, but this extension does very little that asks us to re-evaluate Huckleberry Finn itself, remaining well within the bounds of the high postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980s, of which Coover himself was a major practitioner.

James, on the other hand, surely invites such re-evaluation to a greater extent than any other work of post-Huck fiction, partly because of the depth and scope of its dialogic engagement with Huckleberry Finn and partly because Everett displays such a sophisticated understanding of just what he is trying to do. For example, Everett would certainly be expected to modify the style of his narration simply because he employs a different narrator. However, he resists the obvious rout of having Jim narrate in the style in which he speaks in Huckleberry Finn, delivering a sort of anti-pastiche that engages Huckleberry Finn in a highly critical dialogue that calls attention to the way Twain’s novel marginalizes Jim by making him inarticulate and providing him with linguistic resources so limited that they become a source of comedy. Jim’s shifts between linguistic registers depending on whether his audience is white or black surely represents a much more meaningful and dialogic engagement with the stylistic texture of Twain’s novel than could have been achieved simply by maintaining the style afforded to Jim in Huckleberry Finn.

The particular way in which Everett deploys pastiche in James, essentially a form of signifying, is almost the opposite of the “blank parody” described by Jameson. Indeed, Everett has often used an active, critical form of pastiche as a tool in his work. Erasure here is again a particularly important predecessor. After all, when Monk Ellison becomes frustrated at the success of a novel entitled We’s Lives in Da Ghetto by one Juanita Mae Jenkins, his solution is to produce, as Stagg R. Leigh, an extended parody of that novel that is intended precisely to engage it in critical dialogue and to provide a cry of protest against the notion that African American authors should confine themselves to writing in the same mode as Jenkins. Meanwhile, Everett’s refusal to have Jim narrate in a stereotypical slave dialect is very similar to Monk Ellison’s refusal to be limited to writing in ghettospeak.

In I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), Everett presents us with an African American protagonist (whose name is literally “Not Sidney Poitier”) who happens to be a dead ringer for actor Sidney Poitier. Meanwhile, this use of Poitier is a form of pastiche that rhymes with the use of other fictional versions of real people in the novel—including hilarious versions of media pioneer Ted Turner and of Everett himself. But the principal form of pastiche used in I Am Not Sidney Poitier involves the fact that most of the plot of the novel is derived from a mishmash of the plots of various films in which Poitier starred during his illustrious career. And, while this method of plot construction might appear to be mere literary play of the blank sort associated by Jameson with pastiche, it actually serves a critical purpose. By engaging in a dialogue with Poitier’s status as a paragon of middle-class respectability and as a standard-bearer for African Americans in show business, Everett interrogates the whole legacy of the participation and representation of African Americans in Hollywood. But, as one might expect from Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier engages in a rich dialogue with its literary predecessors as well. As Schmidt notes, through engagement with the work of predecessors such as Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, as well as Everett’s own earlier novels, this novel “signifies upon the history of African American literature and can fruitfully be read as a parody of it” (Schmidt 2016, 115).

All in all, it is clear that Everett’s particular strategies for drawing upon the work of his predecessors, perhaps most obviously in the case of Mark Twain in James, goes far beyond the “blank” borrowing described by Jameson with regard to postmodern pastiche and is often designed specifically to enact the kind of critical dialogues with predecessor texts that Jameson finds lacking in postmodern art. In so doing, Everett also draws upon particularly African American cultural traditions, such as the practice of signifying. However, if anything, Everett’s high-tech fiction should probably not be identified primarily with residual elements from the past, but with emergent forces within American culture, thus linking him, not to the past, but to the future, even as he employs and engages with elements of the cultural past (such as Huckleberry Finn) in a particularly effective and impressive way.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.