"James" by Percival Everett

An audio book

The first-person PoV is Jim from "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" - which I've not read. James teaches fellow slaves how to read and how to understand society, and tells them stories. He's married with a child. When he learns that he's going to be sold he leaves with Huck along the river. He finds some books (by Voltaire, Rosseau, etc). He's as much interested in the patterns of thought/argument than the particular subject matter. He hallucinates talking to Voltaire, John Locke, etc. There's a reward for finding him - people think he killed Huck. He asks a slave for a pencil. He sees the slave later being whipped for stealing the pencil. He starts writing his life story - faintly, so the pencil doesn't wear out too soon.

He and Huck meet a couple of men claiming to be a Count and the King of France. They conveniently say that James is their slave. They watch a white preacher/healer perform. The Count and King plan to sell Jim as a slave, wait for him to run off and return to them, then resell him. Jim is hired by a singing group for $200. He gets $1 per performance. They black-up, so he has to pretend to be a blacked-up white.

He runs off. He and Norman (a slave with a wife he wants to buy back, though he looks white) go round together. They plan to enact the Count's multiple-sell trick. James is sold, meets a girl slave, maybe 14, who dresses as a boy and who's raped by the boss. They escape together, meet up with Norman. She's shot dead. Norman and James escape onto a ship. The slave in the boiler room doesn't recall leaving it, and though he says he works for the boss above, he doesn't recall seeing him. He overloads the boiler. The ship explodes. On shore, James meets Huck who saw Norman drown.

Jim tells Huck that he and her mother were friends, and Huck is his son. Huck accepts this. They return home. Jim's wife and daughter have been sold off. Huck tries to find out where. While Jim waits, he sees the Overseer rape a slave. He later has an opportunity to kill him so he does. He finds his wife and daughter. They escape with anyone else who wanted to. A war is on. At the end he says he's not a runaway, he's just James.

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Other reviews

• lonesome reader (The whole question of freedom and identity becomes much more layered as James joins a minstrel show, meets a man who is passing for white and ultimately reveals his true relationship with Huck. This gives a whole new meaning to their bond and why James is especially attentive and caring towards Huck. ... In Twain's novels the boys often surreptitiously view people and scenes while they are concealed. This amplifies the entertainment and drama of it all – as if we're being allowed secret access to conversations and information. It's ingenious how Everett uses this same dynamic several times throughout his novel especially towards the end ... I think it's incredibly impressive how Everett handled writing this novel bringing with it all the adventure of Twain's classic but also challenging the reader to think about race, language, literature and history in a more complex way)
• Joseph Hunter (the book is unenjoyable. And I don’t mean that it’s clumsy or wrong. I don’t mean that it’s failing in its principles, aims, or losing the brief. I mean that it isn’t good to read and the prose is flat and downright strange where it should be most powerful.)
• Garrett Biggs (Huck, like many, thinks he can exonerate himself by implicating himself; it’s only a matter of time before he considers a career as a personal essayist. And yet, in what can feel like a mystery, Jim remains devoted to the child’s safety.)
• Anthony Cummins ( Is there pause for thought when Jim says “white people love feeling guilty”, having told us on the first page that “it always pays to give white folks what they want”? Yes, after decades as a writer’s writer, Everett is finally hitting the big time, but somehow you doubt he’ll be giving anyone the chance to feel too cosy about that.)