Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer

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This is the New yorker radio hour a co-production of w nyc studios and the new yorker

this is the new yorker radio hour i'm david remnick percival everett used to be a writer deeply admired by critics but a relatively small number of serious readers i put it in the past tense everett is very much alive

Because a year ago, he published his 24th novel, a book called James, and James just blew up.

It won the National Book Award, and last week it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Staff writer Julian Lucas is a very close reader of Percival Everett's novels.

Whether it's his novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, about a character who ends up stuck in the plot of basically every Sidney Poitier movie, or Erasure about a black novelist so frustrated by the pigeonholing in the publishing industry that he writes an elaborate literary prank under a pseudonym,

to read Percival Everett is always to grapple with the prejudices and the assumptions and the acts of imagination that we have to make in communicating with one another through fiction and through art.

And so when I saw that he was rewriting Huckleberry Finn, I knew that it would be an opportunity not just to read a great narrative, but also to read along with him one of the foundational stories in the American narrative.

Julian Lucas talked with Percival Everett last year when the novel James had just come out.

So I love how this novel begins.

I mean, first of all, the title, because in Twain, we know this character as Jim,

or, you know, sometimes as more derogatory epitets, but immediately he's announced as James.

And the reframing you do is just so clear in the very first sentence.

And I wonder if you could read for us the first page of the novel.

Okay, see if I can get close here.

Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.

The moon was not quite full, but bright, and it was behind them, so I could see them as plain as day, though it was deep night.

Lightning bugs flashed against the black canvas.

I waited at Miss Watson's kitchen door, rocked a loose stepboard with my foot, knew she was going to tell me to fix it tomorrow.

I was waiting there for her to give me a pan of cornbread that she had made with 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.

Those white boys, Huck and Tom, watched me.

They were always playing some kind of pretending game, where I was either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy.

They hopped about out there with the chiggers, mosquitoes, and other biting bugs, but never made any progress toward me.

It always pays to give white folks what they want, so I stepped into the yard and called out into the night:

Who dat dare in that dark like that?

What I love about this is you take a scene that in Twain is a kind of fun prank played by these two boys,

and you immediately make us see it from the bitter, exhausted perspective of a grown man who has to play along with these children's games essentially because he's a slave.

And you hear it immediately in those little bastards.

How did you arrive at this voice for Jim?

Well, I don't know.

The first thing I did to start this was I read

Huckleberry Finn 15 times in a row.

And I would stop and just go right back to the beginning.

And so

until it became a blur.

You know how when you say a word over and over, it finally sounds like nonsense?

Well, I needed it to become nonsense because I didn't want to merely regurgitate scenes.

I needed to own the material, and that allowed me to own the material.

So I was never saying what I thought Twain had said because I couldn't remember what Twain had said.

Aaron Powell, I love that.

It's almost a river-like reading experience.

You keep going back to the beginning.

And I know you have a very high opinion from nonsense and of nonsense and have written essays on it.

Did you stop enjoying it after a while?

Did it affect your

yes, I was sick of it.

I wanted to be sick of it.

How many readings did it take to get sick of it?

Oh,

a couple.

Once you've read something, you've read it.

And I think after three or four, I was really tired of reading it, but I had to keep reading it.

Do you feel like it's a voice that you found in the book?

I mean, you know, when Jim talks to Huck in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he's usually calling him child and honey and all these sweet, affectionate names.

Was there a kernel of the character you created sort of hidden in Twain's character, or did you, did you kind of have to invent him whole cloth?

You're right.

He is not

inclined to use the same kinds of

terms of endearment that

Jim uses in Huck Finn.

But it's also because there's a

my gem is

he's

he's not simple.

The gem that's represented in Huck Finn is simple, and that's the part that Twain wasn't capable of writing.

For Twain,

a slave was a simple person.

And by simple, I don't mean uncomplicated.

I mean not

terribly smart.

One of the themes you've been most interested in throughout your career is language miscommunication.

You studied the philosophy of language as a graduate student,

and

so many of your novels are interested in these kinds of misunderstandings and failures of language.

What interests you about the way slavery shaped communication?

I can preface that with

a complaint about a film,

and that's Tweeders a Slave.

When this black man who has been living as best friends and neighbors and co-workers with

white America is stolen away from his home and spirited down to a plantation in the South.

He's thrown into a situation with slaves,

and he can understand what they say,

and that can't happen.

He does not speak their language.

People who are oppressed find a way to talk to each other that does not allow their oppressors to understand what they are saying.

And he would be as lost as that slave owner would be listening to the slaves talk to each other.

And I was offended by that film because it cheated the enslaved people out of their humanity.

The other thing about it is just the humor.

People survive with humor in the most dire of straits.

the picture of slavery that's painted in literature and

film,

The people are

all just,

how would you put it, bleak.

Whereas

if they're surviving, they're surviving because of their strength and their irony.

Aaron Powell,

I'm glad you brought up humor because

your work is really known for

finding humor in unexpected places.

Your novel, The Trees, is a very dark satire about the legacy of lynching in the U.S.

And did you want this book to be funny?

Did you want it to be funny in the way that Twain's work is funny?

Well, not funny in that way.

And

I think naturally

I seek to employ humor as

a disarming tool.

I don't know how to be funny.

If I try to write funny, I think I fail.

Again, the lessons I've learned from

the lesson I learned from Twain

is that humor exists in the irony of the situation.

I can't write jokes,

but

I can find the humor in

the human condition.

In your story,

James isn't just running to freedom.

He's also reading and writing about it.

And throughout the book, he hallucinates these very funny debates with philosophers like Voltaire and John Locke.

And you put them in the middle of these really dramatic moments when he's been bitten by a rattlesnake and he's hallucinating or he's trying to catch a fish with his bare hands.

I wonder if you would read one of these moments for us

from page 48.

I was in Judge Thasher's library, a place where I had spent many afternoons while he was out at work or hunting ducks.

I could see books in front of me.

I had read them secretly, but this time, in this fever dream, I was able to read without fear of being discovered.

I had wondered every time I sneaked in there what white people would do to a slave who had learned how to read.

What would they do to a slave who had taught the other slaves to read?

What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenuse was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled?

I was burning up with fever, fading in and out of consciousness, focusing and refocusing on Cuck's face.

François-Marie-Aquette de Voltaire put a fat stick into a fire.

His delicate fingers held the wood for what seemed like too long a time.

I'm afraid there's no more wood, I said, which is fine, because I am hot enough.

Too hot.

Percival Everett reading from his Pulitzer Award-winning novel, James.

We'll continue in a moment.

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To me, there's a kind of kismet in the fact that James,

your appropriation of Twain, is coming out at the same time as American fiction, Cord Jefferson's adaptation of your novel, Erasure.

For our listeners,

it stars Jeffrey Wright as a very literary black novelist who is so fed up with stereotyping in the publishing industry that he writes a street novel under a pseudonym as an elaborate literary prank.

So you wrote it in 2001 at the height of the vogue for urban lit.

Do you think the story still has the same resonance in our post-Black Lives Matter era when,

at least for a moment, a lot more attention was given to African-American literature.

I suppose it's a way of asking, do you think black writers are as confined now as then?

Or is there just a different kind of confinement?

Well, no,

there's a much greater range of work

available now, some really fine writers who've found places

in the literary world.

And so things have gotten better.

A few months ago, I stayed up late and I turned on the television at 3 a.m.

and there was an Abbott and Costello movie.

I don't remember the title of it, something like Screams in Africa.

And in it were all of these stereotypic black Africans, wide-eyed and afraid of everything, running around carrying stuff for white people.

And

I realized, well, yeah, we have more, but we haven't gotten rid of this baggage.

The producers or whatever you call the people who, the programmers of this network, saw no problem with airing this.

They had a slot, let's use this.

And it's that kind of insidious insertion of

the old stuff

that caused so much damage to black psyches that

persists.

You know, I was rereading Huck Finn for this, and it just struck me how wildly contemporary it still feels.

You know, like Huck's abusive father sounds like a MAGA voter.

He's so angry that he saw a rich black man voting that he wants to overthrow the government.

And

I wonder if it was

anything in what's going on in this country today that brought you back to the text and got you thinking about a story from Jim's perspective?

Well, I think

that is true.

And I think it was unconscious more than anything else.

The U.S.

really hasn't changed in character all that much.

And what defines us remains the same.

The interesting thing about Huck Finn is it's the first novel

that it's not that it's about slavery.

It's about a a man who was enslaved.

You know, when you think of

Stowe's novel or some of the slave narratives, they're about slavery.

They're not

about Americans,

white Americans, experiencing the shame and

the contradictions of the condition of slavery.

But here we have this young American, this youth, who's having to reconcile moving through the world as a free person while this person, the only father figure in the novel, is property.

Exactly.

And Huck's flight from home, his own kind of search for adventure,

is the emphasis in Twain.

And yet there's a much higher stakes story going on for Jim because this runaway, it's a matter of life and death for him, even though it's more a matter of

adventure and hijinks for Huck.

So it's one thing to really love a writer as you love Twain, and it's another to actually try to rewrite their most famous book.

And I wonder, was there like a particular moment in the book that you realized Jim had more to say than Twain lets him?

Or was it more, you know, this would be a great way to sneak onto the high school English syllabi?

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: It was,

you know, first of all, I have to say that this novel doesn't come out of a dissatisfaction with the adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

I imagine myself in a conversation with Twain doing this.

And one of the things I think that he and I would both agree on is that he doesn't write Jim's story because he's not capable of writing Jim's story any more than I'm capable of writing Huck's story.

In fairness to the novel, it has flawed.

It is flawed in that Twain stopped in the middle of it and then came back to it.

And when he came back to it, I think there were some mercenary

considerations at stake.

And so it becomes more of an adventure.

Tom Sawyer comes back into the novel, and the tone of the novel changes.

It's less an exploration

of Huck's confusion about Jim and his condition,

and more of a pure adventure.

And so I'm addressing that as well.

I'm trying to get past that switch in tone that happens.

But more importantly, I'm writing the novel that Twain could not.

He was not equipped to do it.

Something I've always found so ironic about Huckleberry Finn is it's recurrently targeted by well-meaning anti-racists to either be redacted, to remove the N-word from it, or to cut it from syllabi entirely.

And yet, there are few novels that have been more championed by the greatest African-American writers.

It was so huge for Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison, and Ishmael Reed recently wrote an essay, which is just a kind of rousing defense of the book and

of Twain's insight.

What do you make of this discrepancy in the way that it's been both condemned and celebrated?

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, it's condemned by people who don't read the book

and have

a reaction to,

and actually it's an excuse for them.

You've got to be against something, I suppose.

And apparently the word scares people.

Quite frankly, if someone came into my study right now and shouted at me, you dirty N-word, I'd be just as offended as if they actually used that six-letter word that I just said.

It's all about

intention and meaning.

It behooves fascists to ban it because there is a proper and

direct and

interrogation of what it's like to live in a world where slavery is brilliant.

And where con men and hucksters are running rampant.

They're running rampant.

It's an American story.

And that honest depiction is probably what scares some people.

Thank you so much.

Sirli.

The novelist Percival Everett, speaking with staff writer Julian Lucas last year.

Everett's novel, James, just won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

I'm David Remnick.

That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today.

See you next time.

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