Tag Archives: Moral Clarity

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

Not Just Another Nepo Baby

Reading Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater reminded me of something profound I just made up. Only the delusional or masochistic read Vonnegut hoping to find an intricate plot or a deep analysis of a character’s psyche. If anyone reads Vonnegut these days, they do so for his moral clarity and barbed humor. To that I say sign me up, as long as I can still be masochistic in all the other aspects of my life. What’s that you say, Dear Reader? Ouch, that hurt! Say it again, daddy.

The protagonist and hero in this story is Eliot Rosewater, a trust fund baby who is a “drunkard, a Utopian dreamer, a tinhorn saint, and aimless fool.” He also owns and manages his family’s charity, which is worth millions. He tires of his privileged life in Manhattan and moves back to Rosewater, Indiana, a neglected rust belt community that’s also his ancestral home. He wants to become an artist. “I’m going to love these discarded Americans, even though they’re useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art.” Most artists have a God complex, but Eliot is a modern-day Christ figure, and just like Jesus he has a difficult and domineering father.

That father is a U.S. senator, who has “spent [his] life demanding that people blame themselves for their misfortunes.” He disapproves of Eliot and would desperately like a grandchild he could approve of. One that would take over the charity and be less charitable. There’s another person who’d like to do the same. He’s a lawyer and he believes he’s found a way to replace Eliot as the charity’s manager. He just has to prove Eliot is insane, and Eliot is doing a wonderful job of unintentionally helping the lawyer prove his case. So who will control the charity? The welfare of Rosewater’s destitute citizens depends on the answer.

In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater Vonnegut skewers the purported legitimacy of inherited wealth. “I think it’s terrible the way people don’t share things in this country. I think it’s a heartless government that will let one baby be born owning a big piece of the country . . . and let another baby be born without owning anything.” Published in 1970, the story is as relevant now as ever. The novel is the perfect introduction to, or reminder of, Vonnegut’s simple grace, moral outrage, wicked humor, and deep intellect.

But let’s say you only read novels with intricate plots and complex psychological analyses, then read this instead. It’s the best summation of Vonnegut’s works, and it happens to have been written by that grand curmudgeon himself: “Pretend to be good always, and even God will be fooled.”

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor