Tag Archives: Highway

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

Frankenstein Meets The Children of the Hill

The cover of Jennifer McMahon’s The Children on the Hill includes a quote from a book promoter who proclaims, “This novel is an all-nighter!” That’s called marketing, my friends. You can tell because it ends with an exclamation. Having read that assessment, I was surprised to find I had no problem putting this novel down for a good night’s sleep. That happened on successive evenings until I finished the book.

Ms. McMahon is a fan of Frankenstein, and The Children on the Hill is her reinterpretation of Mary Shelley’s classic set in contemporary times. She succeeds there but you shouldn’t wait for a string of movies culminating with The Bride of The Children on the Hill or The Children on the Hill Meet the Wolfman.

The story bounces between 1978 and 2019. In 1978, Vi is living with her brother and grandmother in Vermont. The grandmother is a doctor “famous or helping patients others couldn’t help.” These patients are “people who had done terrible things not because they were terrible people, but because they were sick.” One day Gran brings home a thirteen year old girl to live with them. She’s the same age as Vi, and they become “Sisters . . . not by blood, but by something else. Something deeper.”

The intense connection is related somehow to Gran’s work. That should be no big deal, but the girls learn sweet old Gran is into eugenics and believes the “survival and overall success of the species is dependent on those who are superior weeding out the weak and inferior.” This discovery sets off a chain of events leading to disaster. One sister disappears and the other goes to foster care.

In 2019, one sister is a self-described monster who is likely responsible for the disappearance of several teenage girls. The other sister has changed her name to Lizzy Shelley (with an intentional nod to Mary Shelley) and has (conveniently) become a monster hunter with a significant social media following. The monster initiates a cat and mouse game with Lizzy, and we all know what happens to the mouse in that game.

Lizzy loves monsters. Ms. McMahon does too, and she’s happy to get pedantic about it. “Here’s why the world needs monsters: Because they are us and we are them.” Huh? Assuming that’s true or intelligible, it doesn’t explain why the world needs monsters. She follows that incongruous statement with “We all have a little monster hiding inside us.” Now, that’s true and intelligible, but it isn’t new and insightful.

Of course, the sisters confront each other in a surprise ending that disrespects the reader. Up until this point, the novel was diverting. The ending, however, is abrupt and silly. The cat and mouse game was gratuitous, a mere plot device to enable Ms. McMahon to write a Frankenstein story. A simple phone call or a handful of texts between the sisters would have saved everyone a lot of time and highway miles.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor