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EVERETT'S JAMES AND MY EVE
I had to read Percival Everett’s novel, JAMES. Maybe I wanted to read it after seeing online excitement over it. But I needed to make time to read his re-telling of a familiar story (HUCKLEBERRY FINN) in a different voice (Jim’s). The novel I’ve just finished writing re-tells a familiar tale (Adam and Eve) in a different voice (Eve’s). So, Everett’s book could work as a comparison for my novel, even though 19th century America is far removed from my prehistoric Eve. Another possible comparison point popped up; James speaks in two dialects; Eve and her mother are among the few Fast-Talkers in a community of traditional Steady-Talkers. So I have two dialects going in conversations, not quite as complicated as James getting confused himself as to which dialect he means to use in a particular situation.
My fictitious Eve imagines reminiscing with the younger brother she had left behind in Eden. She recalls herself as a teenage mother observing their own mother treat the boy’s injured leg.
Papa shouted to us. “Kintu fall on rocks.” Below the knee your leg looked bright red. “You fix him.”
As Mama crouched over your bleeding wound, I admired her skill in covering the gash with wet acacia leaves. But when she smeared softened sap, I frowned. “You got some globs of sap mixed with those leaves.”
“Can’t hurt.” She picked a twig off the gooey, leaf-covered wound. “Now don’t run and jump. Or climb anything.” She poured the remainder of the water over her hand, and a couple of lumps rolled into her palm. She squished them together and smeared them just below your knee with the remainder of the wet leaves. “Keep the leaves on it all night. If you don’t, your leg could swell with hot pus, and that’s harder to heal.
A couple of days later you showed me your healing wound. Well then, I was shocked, my assumptions turned upside down. The place under your knee was healing faster than the lower cut that had no sap. I was reluctant to acknowledge that softened sap could have made the difference. But, after trying wet acacia leaves and warmed sap myself, I concluded that the leaves are good for shallow scratches and softened acacia sap is better for deep cuts. This was not the only time that my assumptions about the way things work argued with what my eyes showed me.
Everett wrote a powerful novel that hovers around Twain’s masterpiece as the escaped slave and runaway boy shelter on an island near Hannibal, Missouri. Then Jim, recovering from a fever, persuades the boy to return to Hannibal to check on Jim’s enslaved wife and child. When Jim is left alone on the island, the reader sees the man’s character emerge from the confines of slavery.
“I’m glad you didn’t die,” Huck said.
“Ima right pleased ‘bout dat my own sef.” I stared into the fire. “Dyin’ can ruin a good time.”
"What is it, Jim?”
“I be worried ‘bout my fambly,” I said. “I know dey be worried ‘bout me. You gonna have to go see if’n dey awright.” [p. 53]
Then I wrote my first words. I wanted to be certain that they were mine and not some I had read from a book in the judge’s library. I wrote:
I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name.
In the religious preachings of my white captors I am a victim of the Curse of Ham. The white so-called masters cannot embrace their cruelty and greed, but must look to that lying Dominican friar for religious justification. But I will not let this condition define me. I will not let myself, my mind, drown in fear and outrage. I will be outraged as a matter of course. But my interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on this page can mean anything at all. If they can have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning. [p.55]
It feels presumptuous, as an unpublished writer, to set my words next to Everett’s, but, if an agent asks for a novel to compare with mine, I’m ready.
There is another point that the novels have in common: a great river pulses through the heart of each story.