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
Pungent Sound Journal of Pulp Poetry 