Huckleberry Finn & James: How Did the Two Novels Score?

On February 27th when the RILL book club met for the first time this year, I borrowed an idea from Flannery O’Connor. This unique Southern writer said when it came to fiction, she could only be a “literary midwife” and declare whether a story was dead or alive. I did admit to the ten members there, that Flannery’s statement, logically speaking, was an either/or fallacy.  But I used it anyway and asked for a one-word answer. “Did you find Huckleberry Finn, dead or alive?”  Ten of us (I voted too) said, “Alive.” One said dead! Next I asked about James. This 2024 novel is in hardcover at $28.00 and currently a big best seller. Still and all, only four members said, “alive,” while seven of us saying “dead,” though not without caveats.

I will say that using Flannery’s quip of being a “literary midwife” provoked good discussion, often passionate and forceful about James, along with some wonderful humor. One member, born in Louisiana, spoke with zeal about Everett’s novel and called herself, “an activist in my mother’s womb.”  She added at the end of two and a half hours, that our session had been welcome; that we hadn’t been Southern ladies at a tea party. I also appreciated the response from one member who said “six-feet under” for James. Except for Everett’s Jim/James, in contrast to Twain’s depiction of the slave Jim, she asked if we didn’t already know what Everett portrayed. Her comment caught my attention because in my notes for the meeting, I had made a check list for James. Is the reader provided a lynching? A rape? A beating? Fear and Trembling? A Nate Turner murder?  

Yes, all and more. While reading James, I kept thinking of the graphic and unforgettable series Roots, televised five decades ago in the 1970s.  

There is much to say, so next week I will return to James with more thoughts about Percival Everett’s novel and Mark Twain’s Huck.

Percival Everett’s James Stirred Southern Memories

I was “reared” to speak a standard English and spoke differently than my paternal grandmother. She longed for Arkansas and never got over leaving that state for California in the early 1920s. But grandmother’s accent helped me in college when I had to pretend to be a southerner for my final reading in a literary speech course my sophomore year at USC. I choose to read from the recently published, To Kill a Mockingbird.

I spoke Scout’s words when she’s in front of the Macomb jail where Atticus is sitting on the porch to guard Tom Robinson, and a rough group of men arrive.  I practiced a long time to give a reading in a voice unlike my own, with a lot more action in my mouth to say,

“HE-Y, Mr. Cunningham, how’s your entailment getting’ along?” A long reading that night, for which I received a grade of A and the professor’s request that I agree to do this reading from Harper Lee’s novel, which she would tape in her office.

Then in 1979, living in Montgomery, Alabama, my five-year-old daughter played with Charlotte May, who lived across the street. A week hadn’t passed before Michelle was saying, rat for right, gonna & gotta, and had waved good-bye to ING. Something else stayed in my mind from that year. A meeting I attended one Saturday afternoon of a Montgomery PEN chapter. The president was a handsome black man, a professor, whose English was not accented in the least. But later in the parking lot outside the library, I heard him in conversation with a black man who was changing a flat tire. The professor’s voice was entirely different, as if two speakers of English existed inside him.

I thought of this recently when I watched American Fiction, the movie made from Erasure, Percival Everett’s last novel before James. In it, a fictional character, a literature professor, can write and speak in “code,” and easily assumes the character of a black gangster and writes a novel the New York publishing world will want. This writer’s fine fiction can’t find a market, so he decides to write merde, to use the French; and of course it sells and even wins a literary prize!

I won’t say anything more this week about Everett’s recent novel. The first meeting of the RCC-RILL book club is Thursday. Twelve of us will discuss Huckleberry Finn and James. One of the book club members researched something I had wondered about. What percentage of slaves could read?  Apparently, only two percent.  Yet James is one of them and Mark Twain’s Jim isn’t.

Paula Fox’s Luisa Sanchez is a character I won’t forget …

Saturday afternoon, rain falling, Mozart’s Prague #38 playing, and beside me, A Servant’s Tale, Paula Fox’s sixth and final novel.

I was surprised after writing blogs on Fox’s two memoirs, to realize I had this novel in my library.  I must have bought it from Daedalus Books after I read Borrowed Finery and The Coldest Winter, written after Fox stopped writing novels. She did, however, keep writing books for children; and A Servant’s Tale shows her keen understanding of them.

Luisa is a child when the novel begins in Malagita, on the Spanish-speaking island of San Pedro in the Caribbean. In Fox’s early and complicated life, she spent time in Cuba with her grandmother; and in part one of the novel, Fox’s evocative prose conveys tacit knowledge of this place where “The bats would begin to fly… vague, smoky shapes in the fading light.” The reader lives closely with Luisa and understands why at the end of part one, she dreams “of the day when I would return to San Pedro, now a bluish haze receding on the horizon.” Her father had made them leave because of his mother, “so rich she could settle the question of who belonged in this world and who didn’t.” The father’s story is a complicated one, woven throughout the novel, but his wife does not adjust to their new life, a common story of estrangement, not learning English, and yearning for home.

Part two takes place in a New York City barrio and frequent moves within it for father, mother, and Luisa.  For this inquisitive child to become a young woman who feels herself to be “a shapeless lump of obduracy” is unsettling, as is the question she asks: What if defeat is a large portion of your heritage?

You might be asking, “Why let yourself in for 321 pages of a novel that sounds dismal and dreary?” Because the writer is Paula Fox who communicates what’s worth understanding in a prose worth reading. One reviewer wrote, “Luisa Sanchez is as indelible and eternal as many in Dickens, Balzac, or George Eliot.”  Luisa is not without a memorable friend like Ellen, and she does marry and have a son, Charlie, though no happier ever after with her husband and a disheartening scenario with her son. 

Yet the core of this novel is Luisa’s work as a maid, and for a decade or longer, in the same three residences. There is the decent Mr. Erwin, an antique dealer, the neurotic and animal loving Mary Lou Jester, and the unforgettable Phoebe Burgess with her “glutinous violence of soul.”  You would need to read the novel to understand how something from the first chapter has resonance for Phoebe, whose innards are as rotten as the doll Luisa opens in Malagita.

I liked the Baltimore Sun reviewer who wrote, “A reader will not take anything away from this novel.  It is too rich for that. What the reader will take away, and will live with, is the entire work.”  I know I will not forget this novel and will read others by Paula Fox.

Next week: The popular and wildly praised James