Two Rafts, One River
On the performance of race in America
When I was a senior in high school, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn found itself at the center of yet another controversy. A publishing company in Alabama had released an edition replacing every instance of the N-word with the word slave. Critics who supported the change argued that our language had evolved and that the slur had no place in a classroom. Others argued that removing it fundamentally altered the novel and softened the ugliness Twain was asking readers to confront and, in doing so, undercut his satire.
All this to say, Huckleberry Finn never appeared on my required reading list. But all that controversy had the opposite effect on me. It made me want to read it more. I wanted context for what everyone was arguing about.
I read an unaltered copy of the novel, and I’d say I understood, at least superficially, what Twain was trying to do. I caught the satire, but I also found myself uncomfortable reading it. This was around the time when conversations about what was and wasn’t acceptable language were changing constantly and they seemed to be everywhere.
I also wasn’t reading the novel with the guidance of a literature class. I was reading it on my own, which meant my takeaway was, in hindsight, fairly simplistic. I came away thinking that Huckleberry Finn had a somewhat lukewarm moral center, a lot of wonderfully nonsensical humor scattered throughout, and could be rather neatly labeled “problematic.”
This summer, I decided it was time to revisit Twain’s work. I’ve been steadily making my way through the American classics, and after spending so much time immersed in Steinbeck’s prose, it felt only natural to turn to Mark Twain, whose fingerprints can be found all over American literature.
My age and life experience certainly changed the way I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But I can’t credit my deepened understanding of the novel to myself alone. Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James made my rereading all the more enriching, and I cannot recommend strongly enough that these two novels be read together.
My reading of Huckleberry Finn this time around zeroed in on the fact that one of Twain’s sharpest satirizations is that of performance—in particular, the performance of civilization, high society, and aristocracy. In the United States, those performances cannot be cleanly separated from race. Reading Huck through that lens made one of Everett’s central ideas even sharper to me as I worked through James simultaneously: that race itself is, in many ways, a performance within American culture.
In James, it is revealed that the way enslaved people speak to white characters is a performance for their own safety. White society delights in feeling superior to them, and so, for their own protection, they benefit from “playing dumb” before a white audience. The white people around them are then able to maintain a sense of power rooted in racial hierarchy.
Everett makes clear that this dialect is not careless or unintelligent. It has its own complex rules of grammar. Jim and his wife, Sadie, give their children language lessons around the family table. There is a right and a wrong way to put on the performance.
At one point, Huck and Jim encounter an enslaved man who assumes that Jim is Huck’s father. When Huck is out of earshot, he asks Jim whether the boy knows and how Jim taught him to pass. The assumption is that Huck is the one putting on a performance of whiteness.
This becomes especially interesting when placed beside Twain’s novel, because Huck performs quite a bit. He is, for lack of a better word, white trash within Hannibal, Missouri, as is his father. He does not have the same access to society and civilization that a character like Tom Sawyer does. He exists as a cultural other.
It would arguably benefit Huck to refuse friendship with Jim, to perform cruelty, and to behave in the way Pap Finn does. For most of the novel, he holds his ground against that expectation. But once he falls back under Tom Sawyer’s influence at the end, he slips into exactly that kind of performance.
The stakes are, of course, much higher in Jim’s performance. The consequences of a slip-up in Jim’s world are violent. Everett also tells us that Jim himself is a light-skinned man. The aforementioned enslaved man even remarks that Jim isn’t much darker than Huckleberry. Huck himself makes a similar observation near the beginning of Twain’s novel.
James also offers an almost meta commentary on the performance of race. While Huckleberry is away with the Duke and the King, Jim is “hired” by a man performing in a minstrel show. The man explains to Jim that he and his troupe are against slavery. Jim asks if they are abolitionists, to which the man replies, “I wouldn’t go that far.” They don’t believe in slavery, he explains, but neither are they fighting for the freedom of the enslaved. It is later revealed that this troupe is just as cruel and racist as any slaveholder.
Most fascinatingly, while traveling with the troupe, Jim is forced to perform a sort of play within a play. He is first covered in makeup to make him appear white. Boot polish is then applied over that face so that he can perform as a Black man. It sounds complex and ridiculous because it is, in fact, complex and ridiculous. White society wants to entertain itself with Blackness without the actual inclusion of Black people.
I take Everett’s inclusion of the minstrel show as a nod to the reality that Mark Twain’s own views on race were, in fact, complicated. It is well documented that, while Twain opposed slavery, he also remembered the minstrel shows of his Missouri childhood fondly. One could even argue that minstrel shows still exist to a certain degree. In a modern context, audiences may still expect Black entertainers to perform Blackness in a particular way.
A long-discussed point when it comes to Jim in Twain’s original novel is that he often seems to be performing for Huckleberry Finn. We get scattered moments throughout the text where that mask, so to speak, appears to slip. I think Everett’s decision to plainly name that yes, there is a performance element to Jim’s behavior—while also making it abundantly clear that he genuinely loves and cares for Huckleberry—ultimately makes for a stronger and clearer reading of Jim in Twain’s original novel.
One of the biggest deviations from the original text in James is the revelation that Jim is Huckleberry’s biological father. While I don’t think this revelation was necessary in order to clarify the relationship between Huck and Jim, I found it to be a deeply loving addition to Huckleberry’s story.
Pap is horribly abusive to Huck, and no institution is really in place to protect him from his father’s drunken violence. One thing is clear in Twain’s novel: Huckleberry loves Jim despite the society in which he’s been raised. He cares for him and, while misguided, views the entire affair as an adventure shared with a friend. Interestingly, it is one he seems to enjoy far more than the sort of adventure Tom Sawyer would have manufactured for him.
When Jim reveals that he is, in fact, Huck’s father, Huck goes through a roller coaster of emotions. He immediately asks whether that makes Lizzie his sister. Jim replies, “Sort of.” Huck then asks what that makes Jim’s wife, Sadie. Jim answers, “Nothing.”
I found this little exchange particularly heartbreaking because Huck is a child without a family, and almost immediately he begins trying to fit himself into one. In the span of a few moments, he imagines having a father, a sister, and a mother.
Huck is angry that Jim has lied to him for all these years, but he also begins wrestling aloud with what this revelation means for his own identity. If Jim is his father, then what does that make him? Jim’s answer is beautifully simple: it means whatever Huck wants it to mean.
Huck falls asleep crying. The next morning, he wakes and begins attempting to speak in the slave dialect Jim has spent the entire novel performing for white audiences. Jim immediately tells him to stop. His performance is wrong. More importantly, it is unnecessary. “You’re a white boy,” he tells Huck. “Be white.”
A few chapters later, the conversation resurfaces. Huck insists that he wants to be Black if it means he can remain with Jim as his son. He imagines running North with Jim and his family and beginning a new life together. Jim refuses. There is no reason for Huck to choose a life of danger and enslavement. Being a slave is not a life he would ever wish upon his son.
In Huckleberry, Everett makes perhaps his clearest point about race as performance. Blood quantum laws and ideas of racial purity were once taken with deadly seriousness in the United States, despite having no biological basis. Huck, upon learning the truth of his parentage, is confronted with the unsettling realization that his identity is not nearly as fixed as he believed. He can continue living as a white boy, a lonely choice that nevertheless affords him protection. Or he can choose to identify with Jim and the family he has found, knowing that doing so would place him in constant danger.
It is an impossible choice, and that impossibility is precisely Everett’s point.
The strongest argument I can make as to why these two novels should be read together is that Everett is not correcting anything Twain did within The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Everett has clarified in interviews, and through the text itself, that he understands what Twain’s project was. Twain was writing about an adolescent white boy as an allegory for an adolescent America.
Everett’s mission is different. As a Black man and a father himself, he offers greater insight into Jim’s character that feels honest and alive. He does not replace Twain’s novel or attempt to rewrite its moral center. Instead, he expands the conversation, giving voice to the man who stood beside Huck all along.
To read these two texts simultaneously is to find yourself in a literary conversation stretching across 140 years.