Author Percival Everett on reimagining ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and history’s dominant narratives

Percival Everett’s newest novel reimagines “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of the enslaved character, Jim. Everett joins Washington Post Live to talk about "James,” reexamining history’s dominant narratives and his literary journey over the last four decades.

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Highlights

“It was a longstanding dissatisfaction with the representation of enslaved people in literature and film … This portrayal of a simple-minded beast is unfair to the really complicated human beings that all of the enslaved people of course were.” - Percival Everett (Video: Washington Post Live)

“Reading is perhaps the most subversive thing that we can do. No one is privy to what goes into us when we look at a text. So, someone can actually read over your shoulder, but they have no idea what the work is doing to you … This is why people who would oppress and would seek to control you were so afraid of literacy … Perhaps the second most subversive thing is actually writing. Providing a text that can be consumed by someone else that will lead to that subversive act of reading. So, Jim, in writing himself into being, is actually taking control of his own story so that he might relay it to someone else.” - Percival Everett (Video: Washington Post Live)

“That was a common word then … To not have it in the text—say to do what someone tried to do—republish “Huck Finn” with the word ‘slave’ replacing that particular, unfortunate word is to try to clean up American history. The word belongs there because it was there. What education does is it allows us to see what the word represents, what it means about America, what it means about the culture’s attitudes towards an underclass at that time. It is much better to have it there and to educate people than to remove it and have them be ignorant." - Percival Everett (Video: Washington Post Live)

“Anyone who talks about banning books has never read a book. And if they have, they haven’t understood the book … Florida is a mess and sadly it's a symptom. To just say Florida is to do what America always does, which is to find some region to blame so that it can absolve itself of its guilt elsewhere." Percival Everett (Video: Washington Post Live)

Percival Everett

Author, “James”