"James"

[fiefoe]

Percival Everett's rewrite of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" has two central conceits: one is that the slaves all speak educated English out of earshot of their masters, two is that James is Huck's dad. The first one is just the kind of clever thing that the authoer would think of, the second one strains my imagination just a bit too much.

• I was waiting there for her to give me a pan of corn bread that she had made with my Sadie’s recipe. Waiting is a big part of a slave’s life, waiting and waiting to wait some more. Waiting for demands. Waiting for food. Waiting for the ends of days. Waiting for the just and deserved Christian reward at the end of it all.
• White folks always remember things like that. I swear, I believe they set aside time every day to count towels and spoons and cups and such.”
• Lizzie cleared her throat. “Miss Watson, dat sum conebread lak I neva before et.” “Try ‘dat be,’ ” I said. “That would be the correct incorrect grammar.”
• So, my performance for the boys became a frame for my story. My story became less of a tale as the real game became the display for the boys.
• “So, who did?” “Necessity.” “What?” “ ’Cessity,” I corrected myself. “ ’Cessity is when you gots to do sumptin’ or else.”
• I don’t see no profit in askin’ for stuff just so I don’t get it and learn a lesson ’bout not gettin’ what I asked fer. What kinda sense does that make? Might as well pray to that board there.”
• a language lesson. These were indispensable. Safe movement through the world depended on mastery of language, fluency.
• “Never address any subject directly when talking to another slave,” she said. “What do we call that?” I asked. Together they said, “Signifying.”
• The youngest of them, lean and tall five-year-old Rachel, said, “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere.”
  “Perfect,” I said. “Why is that correct?”
  Lizzie raised her hand. “Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.”
• “There is no God, child. There’s religion but there’s no God of theirs. Their religion tells that we will get our reward in the end. However, it apparently doesn’t say anything about their punishment. But when we’re around them, we believe in God. Oh, Lawdy Lawd, we’s be believin’. Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.”
• The worst part was that the judge told the grand jury that it was an act of a multitude and so they couldn’t recommend any indictments. So, if enough people do it, it’s not a crime.” “Good Lord,” I said. “Slavery.”
• “He’s going to get drunk now, not so much because he can, but because we can’t,” I said.
  Luke chuckled. “So, when we see him staggering around later acting the fool, will that be an example of proleptic irony or dramatic irony?”
• I was as much scared as angry, but where does a slave put anger? We could be angry with one another; we were human. But the real source of our rage had to go without address, swallowed, repressed. They were going to rip my family apart and send me to New Orleans,
• “White folk believe all sorts a stuff I don’t know about. Dey is the stupidstitiousest people in da world.”
  “You mean ‘superstitious.’ ”
• “Seen lots of hawks flyin’ round. Dey likes to hunt fo’ it rain. And seen ants buildin’ piles round dey holes.”
  “How do they know it’s gonna rain?” the boy asked.
  “Dey’s a part of nature and weather be a part of nature and dem parts talk to each other.”
  “Ain’t people a part of nature?”
  “If’n dey is, den dey ain’t no good part. Da rest o’ nature don’ hardly talk to no human peoples anymo.
• Voltaire shrugged. “Let me try this,” I said. “You have a notion, like Raynal, of natural liberties, and we all have them by virtue of our being human. But when those liberties are put under societal and cultural pressure, they become civil liberties, and those are contingent on hierarchy and situation. Am I close?”
• I was even more afraid of further unproductive, imagined conversations with Voltaire, Rousseau and Locke about slavery, race and, of all things, albinism. How strange a world, how strange an existence, that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality, that one’s equal must hold a station that allows airing of that argument, that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree.
• In the religious preachings of my white captors I am a victim of the Curse of Ham. The white so-called masters cannot embrace their cruelty and greed, but must look to that lying Dominican friar for religious justification... But my interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on this page can mean anything at all. If they can have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning.
• We listed precariously toward the boat and then, as if the ship had a mind to let us go, we righted. I looked at Huck and he, too, knew what was coming. The wake. We grabbed on to our little craft the best we could, not just to keep it from capsizing, but to hold it together. The wake hit us, a wall of water. We lost some of our shelter. The wave soaked us through and we rocked violently. Holding on with one hand, we baled with abandon.
• Once it was light, we went through the robbers’ booty, as Huck called it. The boy was highly excited by the adventure of it all. I admired that, was envious of it, to tell the truth, to be able to feel that in a world without fear of being hanged to death, or worse.
• What would you wish fer?” <> Entertaining such discussions in character was exhausting, but I had thought about such a thing many times before and, just like a story I’d read in the judge’s library, I could see that anything I thought was good could entail some bad consequences. For example, living forever would mean you’d have to watch everybody you loved die. The question I played with, but certainly couldn’t share with Huck, was what would Kierkegaard wish for.
• At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.
• I studied the sky, saw a shooting star. “ ‘Golightly,’ ” I said. “What?” “Dat be my name. ‘Golightly.’ ”
• He was enjoying himself and that was all right with me. It always made life easier when white folks could laugh at a poor slave now and again.
  “I had you goin’,” Huck said.
  I acted like he’d hurt my feelings. White people love feeling guilty.
• “Way I sees it is dis. If’n ya gots to hab a rule to tells ya wha’s good, if’n ya gots to hab good ’splained to ya, den ya cain’t be good. If’n ya need sum kinda God to tells ya right from wrong, den you won’t never know.”
• I needed that pencil. I could not keep track of my thoughts. I could not follow my own reasoning after a while. This was perhaps because I couldn’t stop reading long enough to make space in my head.
• I had already come to understand the tidiness of lies, the lesson learned from the stories told by white people seeking to justify my circumstance.
• I understood, as absorbed as I was, that I was not interested in the content of the work, but its structure, the movement of it, the calling out of logical fallacies.
• Young George dug down into his pocket and came back with a stub of pencil. The pencil sat on his big hand like a small bird.
• a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written. <> With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.
• To tell the truth, I hadn’t seen much killing myself, except that I lived with it daily, the threat, the promise of it. Seeing one lynching was to see ten. Seeing ten was to see a hundred, with that signature posture of death, the angle of the head, the crossing of the feet.
• I knew I was dead asleep and dreaming, but I didn’t know whether John Locke knew that.
  “I’ve been thinking about you,” I said. “I’ve been pondering hypocrisy.”
  “Don’t start up with that now,” he said. “It was a job. After I wrote the constitution for Barbados, the Carolinians asked me to write them one, too, and I wrote it.”
• I could believe it, I thought, pretending, in slave fashion, not to be there. After being cruel, the most notable white attribute was gullibility. As evidenced by Huck’s reaction. He said, “You fellers are amazin’.”
• “I’m not one fer showin’ off, boy. I wouldn’t want to set a bad example. Besides, French is a very complicated language. Hearing it might cause yer ear a consternation from which you might never recover. So, I employ the language sparingly.”
• “Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ’em.”
• I could always run. But running and escaping were not the same thing. I could be like Josiah and run and end up back where I started, again and again. As it stood, I had no plan, but it was clear that I needed one. I had to ask myself and answer honestly, How much do I want to be free? And I couldn’t lose sight of my goal of freeing my family. What would freedom be without them?
• “Yessuh.” Easter knelt down and put the metal device around my ankle. It was a nostalgic terror that I felt. I couldn’t remember when I had last been shackled, but my body recognized the feeling. If ever I was ready to run, it was right then.
• “I understand why you talk the way you do.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “I mean it makes sense.” I studied his face. He was talking with his eyes closed, as much fighting sleep as losing to it. There was a lot of this in that face. “You be a smart boy, Huck.”
• “There was a lynching upriver,” Easter said.
  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
  “Guess what it was for?”
  I wasn’t going to guess and Easter didn’t expect me to. I raked my brow with my forearm and looked at him.
  “A pencil.”
  An ice-cold spear hit the back of my stomach. “A what?”
• I followed his instruction. The bouncing somehow made the hammer lighter, or at least provided a rhythm that urged me to the next blow. Soon it was the familiar semicircular shape.
• * “Heating and cooling it like that will harden the steel,” Easter said. “Metaphor,” I said. “That’s nearly all we have,” Easter said.


• * “You can write.” It was not a question or an accusation, more a discovery, perhaps a call to duty.
• These white men scared me. They scared me because they weren’t invested in my being afraid of them.
• Norman tucked a towel around my collar. “Can’t get this on your shirt.” He smeared the black onto my forehead. “They even do the cakewalk.”
  “But that’s how we make fun of them,” I said.
  “Yes, but they don’t get that—it’s lost on them. It’s never occurred to them that we might find them mockable.”
• “Not exactly. You’re black, but they won’t let you into the auditorium if they know that, so you have to be white under the makeup so that you can look black to the audience.”
• “I want you to be my white owner. I want you to sell me. I escape and we do it again. We save the money and you show up and buy my family. Then you take your money and go buy your wife.” “Are you insane?” “No. However, I did get the idea from an insane person.
• Clouds collected and there was no moon and the night fell hard.
• It was well populated with complacent-looking, nicely dressed white people, the scariest kind.
• He held it up to show me where there should have been fingers between the thumb and little finger of his right hand. “You know, dull tools are much more dangerous than sharp ones.” <> I paused to admire his metaphor, but he continued.
• “Likes the bully,” I repeated Luke’s words. <> Sammy nodded. “He’s going to do this for the first couple of days. He’ll let up on the third day, and you’ll be grateful.”
• “I know what it means,” Sammy said. “We’re slaves. We’re not anywhere. Free person, he can be where he wants to be. The only place we can ever be is in slavery.”
• “Then why do you stay colored?” <> “Because of my mother. Because of my wife. Because I don’t want to be white. I don’t want to be one of them.”
• And yet, with all that running, no place appeared like a new place. Perhaps that was the nature of escape.
• WE SCRATCHED and clawed open a hole in the world and placed little Sammy inside it.
• Norman was screaming and doing everything but jumping out of the skiff as the steamship became huge and loud. We nearly capsized as we folded into the wake on the starboard side. We were spun around so that our bow was facing upriver. Norman clutched the seat. We were up against the hull and then pushed to the side. I felt I might be pitched out of the boat at any second while I tried to find anything I could to tie us on to.
• Aside from being soaked, his clothes were filthy from the hull’s tar. Looking at him like that gave me a renewed appreciation of the power of his skin color. That alone had been enough to faze and control the slave in the engine room. Even though Norman looked like the poorest and worst-off white man, he still commanded fear and respect.
• “You didn’t see him. He just leaves you food by the door like you’re a dog. What does Massa Corey look like?” “He’s the massa, that’s all.”
• They both called to me, one, and then the other. They were equidistant from me but not near each other. I felt I was in some poor philosopher’s example. Huck slipped under and came back up, slapping the water. Norman struggled with his plank. I was frozen there, moving in neither direction, but needing to choose one.
• Maybe because I was tired of the slave voice. Maybe because I hated myself for having lost my friend. Maybe because the lie was burning through me. Because of all of those reasons, I said, “Because, Huck, and I hope you hear this without thinking I’m crazy or joking, you are my son.”
• I couldn’t stop seeing Norman’s eyes, his bobbing face, his waving hand as he went under. He had trusted me. Now he was dead. All of those dead white faces, and none of them mattered a note to me, but Norman’s, with skin just like theirs, was the world.
• looking for a hole in which a catfish might hide. I understood the principle, but I had never done it. I understood that when the fish tried to eat my hand I was to shove it down his throat and pull him free of the water. Just thinking that gave me a chill. Eat my hand.
• I recalled his expression as he went down the last time I saw him, a mixture of complaint, fear, confusion and anger. In other words, in that moment, he looked like a slave... I pulled and pushed and my head popped out of the water. I sucked in the world and saw the cloud-filled sky.
• White people often spent time admiring their survival of one thing or another. I imagined it was because so often they had no need to survive, but only to live.
• I was too tired for conversation, too angry to entertain anyone else’s thoughts. My anger fascinated me, still. It was certainly not a new emotion, but the range, the scope, the direction of it, was entirely novel and unfamiliar.
• “To fight in a war,” he said. “Can you imagine?”
  “Would that mean facing death every day and doing what other people tell you to do?” I asked.
  “I reckon.”
  “Yes, Huck, I can imagine.”
• “What’s going on?” I asked. I could feel the world crushing down on me, like all the water in the Mississippi.
• I wanted to feel the anger. I was befriending my anger, learning not only how to feel it, but perhaps how to use it.
• The waiting for some tear in the invisible curtain that bound us felt like centuries. In fact, was centuries. But this waiting for some news of my family’s whereabouts was endless, dead spaces separated by dead spaces.
• I hated the world that wouldn’t let me apply justice without the certain retaliation of injustice.
• “Why on earth would you think that I can’t imagine the trouble I’m in? After you’ve tortured me and eviscerated me and emasculated me and left me to burn slowly to death, is there something else you’ll do to me? Tell me, Judge Thatcher, what is there that I can’t imagine?”
  He squirmed in the chair.
  “Could you have imagined a black man, a slave, a nigger, talking to you like this? Who’s lacking in imagination?”

//Daniel Decatur Emmett was an American composer, entertainer, and founder of the first troupe of the blackface minstrel tradition, the Virginia Minstrels. He is most remembered as the composer of the song "Dixie".

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76-h/76-h.htm