Monthly Archives: April 2025

This Isn’t Twain’s Jim

What is it that guitar-shredding word slinger, Everlast, says about perspective and storytelling?

I stroked the phattest dimes at least a couple of times 
before I broke their hearts.
You know where it ends, yo,
it usually depends on where you start.

That's it.  Thank you, Mr. Everlast, there's no fiction in your diction.

So if I’ve correctly interpreted Everlast’s hip-hop tribute to Finnegan’s Wake, his observation is irrefutable. It’s not disputable. Perspective is mutable, and everything depends on how fortunate the storyteller is in life’s lottery.

Take, for example, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It’s narrated by Huck Finn, a brilliant storyteller. But would his “adventures” look different if they were told by someone else? Someone with a different upbringing. Would they even be Huck’s adventures? Take Jim, the enslaved man who runs away from Miss Watson. He and Huck spend a lot of time together floating down that grand Mississippi. I wonder if Jim saw that journey as an adventure.

Well, I need wonder no more because Percival Everett has written James, and from the beginning it’s clear Jim sees things differently. First, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer aren’t Twain’s mischievous scamps. To Jim, they’re “little bastards”. Second, that muddy Mississippi isn’t Huck’s freedom trail. It’s a “vast highway to a scary nowhere”.

Everett is wise. He has no intention of re-telling Twain’s classic, because that would be foolish and impossible. Instead, Everett aims to bring more nuance and depth to Jim, and he succeeds. Like Huck, Jim is a skilled and engaging narrator who’s easily up to the task of telling his story. Many of Twain’s characters show up as well, but they’re depicted as Jim sees them. Most are still recognizable. Huck’s street smarts and moral clarity are still evident. The Dauphin and Duke are still scoundrels, but Jim’s assessment of Judge Thatcher may surprise those familiar with Huck’s opinion of the man.

Strange diction and dialect aren’t just points of pride for Everlast and Mark Twain. They’re the difference between life and death for Jim and his enslaved community. As Jim teaches the children, “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them . . . The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us.” It’s harsh but undeniable. In the United States from colonial times until the day after tomorrow, the better white people feel, the safer black people are.

Jim runs away when he learns Miss Watson intends to sell him. This and several other events are consistent with Mark Twain’s story; however, Everett does eventually abandon the Hucklebery Finn plot and crafts a different narrative entirely. Jim spends his time on the river learning to “befriend” his anger. “I hated the world that wouldn’t let me apply justice without the certain retaliation of injustice.” This isn’t Twain’s Jim. This Jim learns how to feel anger. More importantly, he teaches himself how to use it. He becomes James, a name he gives himself. When he returns home to free his family, he’s ready for whatever may come.

The Mississippi meanders, but this story doesn’t. It’s not a raft adrift on a current. It’s a cigarette boat on a drug run. The ending, with its sudden explosion of violence, resembles Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained more than anything Mark Twain wrote. But it works because this is a story told from the perspective of an enslaved black man just as the American Civil War is getting started. Jim’s dialect is gone now and so is Jim. James has mastered his anger and forged a new voice. And it thunders. “I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night . . . I am a sign. Your future. I am James.”

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Each Spring Beckons Me Out the Door

A fuzzy pink sweater adorns the cherry tree
and all the ladies, half my age, are smiling at me.

Or so it seems –
maybe they’re just smiling near me.
It’s hard to see with such watery eyes,
as if I’m looking through melting ice.

Each spring beckons me out the door,
but I’m moving slower than the year before
and can’t keep up as the ladies walk past.
When did these women get so fast?

Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief

The Play’s the Thing

There is much to like about Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, assuming you can ignore the title, which is taken from Macbeth. Oh, yes, you’ll also need to ignore all the other references to Macbeth in the novel. But if you’re able to do that (and good luck), you’ll find the novel is an engaging look at video games and the impact they’ve had culturally over the last forty years.

The story relates the decades-long love affair between Sam and Sadie. Refreshingly, the affair isn’t sexual. Their love is built upon a deep friendship and a fruitful creative partnership. They meet in a hospital when Sam is twelve and Sadie is eleven. Sam’s foot has been destroyed in a horrific car crash. He needs multiple surgeries and essentially lives in the hospital for months. Even after the surgeries, he’s crippled – and not just in the physical sense. Sadie’s sister has cancer, so Sadie is a daily visitor to the hospital for much of the time Sam is there. They bond over video games.

The importance of play in life is undeniable. But Zevin’s observations on video games and play have heft, because Sam is the perfect avatar. “Sometimes, I would be in so much pain. The only thing that kept me from wanting to die was the fact that I could leave my body and be in a body that worked perfectly for a while – better than perfectly, actually – with a set of problems that were not my own.” That’s powerful. However, at other times, Zevin’s celebration of play and video games is silly. “To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt.” Even if that’s true, it doesn’t mean play and video games are unique. The same thing could be said about gardening, being pen pals, going on long drives, or doing anything with someone you have an intense connection with. The activity isn’t relevant, the connection is. And Sam and Sadie have an intense connection that can be tempestuous.

The novel follows their relationship into adulthood where they form an artistic collaboration (because, as Zevin convincingly argues, video games can be art) that becomes a successful business. They have strong personalities and opinions, which give birth to petty jealousies and major clashes of vision. Still, their friendship survives and evolves.

Zevin succeeds with these themes, but she isn’t satisfied. Intimacy built around art, creativity, collaboration, and friendship are all well and good, but Zevin wants you to know her novel is art, too. And it’s important. She conveys this through frequent references to Emily Dickinson and William Shakespeare. Her obsession, however, with Macbeth is strange within the context of this novel. Macbeth is a different kind of play, and it doesn’t seem well-suited for Zevin’s story.

In Macbeth there is no redemption or rebirth. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow is how Shakespeare begins one of his great soliloquies. The one that ends with life is a “brief candle . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Death is final in Macbeth, as it is in everything. Except video games. Zevin alludes to this herself and does so unironically. “What is a game? . . . It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.” Fair enough, I guess. That is, after all, a great description of a video game but it’s a lousy one of Macbeth.

So what are we to make of Zevin’s constant allusions to Macbeth? Is life, friendship, art, and play nothing more than sound and fury signifying nothing? Her novel suggests the opposite, that there is solace and meaning in intimacy, creative collaboration, and even video games. So why bring nihilistic Macbeth into all this? It’s a puzzling distraction in an otherwise compelling and enjoyable story.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor