Percival Everett and the Reinvention of Mark Twain’s Jim

In a new novel, Percival Everett offers a radically different perspective on the classic story “ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .” Everett tells the story of Jim, who is escaping slavery; he calls his book “ James .” “My Jim—he’s not simple,” Everett tells Julian Lucas . “The Jim that’s represented in Huck Finn is simple.” Everett, whose 2001 novel “ Erasure ” was adapted as the Oscar-winning film “American Fiction,” restores Jim’s inner life as a father surviving enslavement, and forced to play along with the pranks of two white boys. But like other Black authors, including Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed, Everett considers Twain’s original a central American text grappling with slavery. “I imagine myself in a conversation with Twain doing this. And one of the things I think he and I would both agree on is that he doesn’t write Jim’s story because he’s not capable of writing Jim’s story—any more than I’m capable of writing Huck’s story.”