sttimsbbb

James, by Percival Everett

Percival Everett’s novel, James, which recently won the 2025 Pulitzer for fiction, is a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckelberry Finn told through the sensibility of the slave Jim.

Everett introduces the story with pages from the notebook of Daniel Decatur Emmett, a 19^th Century composer who formed the first black minstrel troupe. Some of these songs, like “Old Dan Tucker” and “Turkey in the Straw,” were disconcertingly familiar to our group because we had learned them as children and sang them with innocent ignorance.

Everett rips away that band-aid of ignorance with Jim’s opening reflection:

Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass. The moon was not quite full, but bright, and it was behind them, so I could see them plain as day . . . Lighting bugs flashed against the black canvas. I waited at Miss Watson’s kitchen door . . . Waiting is a big part of a slave’s life, waiting and waiting to wait some more. Waiting for demands. Waiting for food. Waiting for the end of days. Waiting for the just and deserved Christian reward at the end of it all.

Waiting for someone to get raped or beaten or burned alive or sold away from their family.

The little bastards, of course, are Huck and Tom conspiring to play some kind of demeaning joke on Jim the slave, a grown man who understands he must show white folks what they need to see: a docile darky, happy under the massa’s thumb. So Jim obligingly calls out to Huck and Tom, “Who dat dere in da dark lak dat?” and introduces the fascinating construct that builds the irony that drives the story: the slaves are not the dumb, insensitive, superstitious, sub-human creatures the white folks need them to be. Among themselves, they speak in cultured voices with rich vocabularies, read the great thinkers, and parse the subtle difference between dramatic and proleptic irony. In the slave quarters, they drill the children in situational translations. How, for instance, to tell a white lady her house is on fire. Not by yelling, “Fire, fire!” because that is too direct, but by exclaiming, “Lawdy, missum, looky dere!” because whites must be the ones to name the trouble.

Miss Watson soon names the trouble that launches the story when she is overheard declaring her intention to sell Jim away from his wife and daughter, and Jim decides he must run—though he knows the horror of what can happen to a runaway slave. At the same time, Huck stages his own murder and runs to avoid the blows of his abusive father. When the Jim and Huck coincidentally end up together on Jackson Island, their river adventure begins. Sometimes they are together, and sometimes they are separated. They are always growing in their understanding of the world and their places in it, in their understanding of their connection to each other. They grapple with what it means to be black or white or slave or free.

The story is narrated by Jim in his “real” voice, and the tension from the irony of who this person really is, versus who white people believe he is, builds an intimacy with the reader that makes the pages fly by, sometimes showing foolishness, sometimes tenderness, sometimes the omnipresent violence of a slave’s world. Rape so common it’s almost banal, a slave hanged for stealing a pencil, a slave burned alive, a wife and young daughter sold to a slave breeding farm.

At the beginning of this gripping story, Jim is understandably reactive and runs away from the threat of being sold. But as the story develops, he becomes determinedly proactive. This turning occurs at the midpoint when he is caught up in Daniel Emmett’s racist minstrel show. He is sold as a slave, bought as a tenor. He becomes a black man who must be made blacker with shoe polish so people will believe he is white.

The wrenching irony of all this finally twists Jim from reactor into protagonist. He steals the journal with Daniel Emmett’s songs and the beautiful blank pages beyond them and runs like only a slave can run: this time, toward his wife and child to somehow save them. Eventually getting a pencil stub, he begins to write, which becomes a metaphor for his emerging fully into his own and daring to reveal his true self to the white world on the final page of a truly brilliant novel.

“Are any of you named Nigger Jim?”
I pointed to each of us.
“Sadie, Lizzie, Morris, Buck.”
“And who are you?”
“I am James.
“James what?”
“Just James.”

Before James became the book everybody was reading and raving about, few of the people in our group were familiar with Percival Everett’s work. Now we are eager to read more.

— Sharelle Moranville

The Demon of Unrest, by Erik Larson

The book’s subtitle points to its main themes: “A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War.” It is a full saga, though compressed into about five months, with plenty of each of those themes.

The election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 began a swirl of events in the North and in the South. In the swirl are successive state secession conventions, polarization of views, and Lincoln’s formation of his cabinet and the long train trip from Springfield to Washington. By April 1861, hostilities have begun.

Along the way we meet a remarkable array of characters. Familiar characters include Lincoln and incoming Secretary of State William Seward, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis; less familiar are people like Sen./Gov. James Hammond of South Carolina, the secessionist Edmund Ruffin, the diarist Mary Chestnut, Abner Doubleday in military service rather than baseball context, and Allan Pinkerton of detective fame.

Larson takes us back into the decades leading up to 1860 to show the intensification of attitudes for and against slavery and how the hubris of those extreme viewpoints built on each side. Ultimately the extreme abolitionists could not reconcile slavery with union, those on the other side could not reconcile union with slavery, and all discounted the eventual cost of war.

The heartbreak took many forms. Those in the middle ground were dragged to extreme positions by lack of familiarity with other regions, and by political bungling that drove people to opposite extremes. For example, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry pushed southerners to extreme defense of slavery, while South Carolina’s belligerence to Fort Sumter solidified northern union support. There were many examples of bungling as events built between the election and the inauguration on March 4. Did Lincoln need to enter Washington incognito? How could the battleship Powhatan be dispatched on two different missions? How many telegrams were misinterpreted or summarized to suit a political position? (Telegrams were a relatively new communication technique in 1860, and like e-mails today, lack tone of voice and body language that help convey accurate meaning. They were also subject to interception, non-delivery, and other problems. Letters and messengers were slower, but usually more secure). Decisions, like resupplying Fort Sumter, were delayed past the time when they could have made a difference.

Heroism was shown most clearly in Major Robert Anderson, commandant of Fort Sumter, which was strategically located to control access to the Port of Charleston. He was given ambiguous orders and incomplete information, and inadequate garrison troops and supplies to actually defend the fort. He understood the political implication of surrender, and used judgment and tact to delay his surrender until mid-April, after secession decisions had been made. With 491 pages of text, the book packs a lot of information, but Larson delivers again as a superb story-teller. He gives us a page-turning narrative that holds the attention and still respects the historical record (there are 51 pages of bibliography and notes). The saga provided lots of grist for our discussion, from the depictions of slave markets to artillery techniques, planter society and mentality, and how political positions can be polarized. Even the history-reluctant members of our group enjoyed this saga.

— Bill Smith

How to Read a Book, by Monica Wood

The cover of Monica Wood’s How to Read a Book is warm and inviting, especially to a lover of books and reading. It shows the exterior of a cozy bookstore from the sidewalk, beckoning readers to come on in. What follows is a highly engaging and uplifting story full of quirky and complex characters, difficult situations, emotional highs and lows, growth and redemption, and resilience. Is there a bookstore in the novel? Yes – but there’s so much more!

There’s Harriett, a.k.a. “Bookie,” who runs a book club inside a women’s prison in Maine. She is dedicated to sharing the power of literature with every member of the group, helping them know their worth and express their feelings as they read aloud, react, discuss, write, and make connections to themselves and others. Wood does not sugar-coat their voices as they express powerlessness, rage, longing, resentment, distrust, love and more. We get to know each member of the group as they support one another through a very meager existence.

But if the cover of the book showed a prison, it would not suggest that one of the youngest inmates, 22-year-old-Violet, is suddenly freed at the beginning of the book. In fact, the bulk of the story is arguably hers as she tries to navigate life as an ex-con “on the outs” where she never had a chance to live independently before being locked up. We watch as she goes from a tense reunion with her sister to a chance meeting with Harriett (at the bookstore!) and another fraught reunion with Frank, the husband of the woman she killed in the drunk driving accident that landed her in prison. Through much effort she lands a job for which she has “affinity,” a word that provides fledgling self-esteem, documenting research on talking parrots in a university lab – where the birds themselves are characters, as well as her ill-tempered, manipulative boss.

Perhaps a bird would have made a good cover image, since the birds, too, were captives. And in addition to Violet’s work with the birds, the inmates give a gift of a small, knitted bird to Harriett as a token of their appreciation. She keeps it, though she’s been warned not to accept anything from them, and not without consequence. This repetition of birds seems symbolic, and yet a bird on the cover wouldn’t adequately represent Frank, a third major character who longs for a relationship with Harriett while feeling terrible about his true feelings around the death of his wife. No spoilers, but it’s not what you’d think. In addition, we get to see his rocky relationship with his daughter and his brilliance as a retired machinist-turned-handyman….at the bookstore.

So, maybe the bookstore is the thing that ties everything together and is the best choice for the cover after all. As a member of our group observed, avid readers are drawn to books that have bookstores on the cover, and an avid reader would thoroughly enjoy this book. Also, its marketing had the intended effect. It looked like it would be an easy and enjoyable read, and it was, while still being intricately well-written.

As a bonus, our book club happens to include several people who have spent time volunteering at a women’s prison in Mitchellville, Iowa, as well as providing support to women who have recently been released. While there are some differences between the systems in Iowa and Maine, and it’s clear that some details were added to advance the story (such as Violet being outfitted with a fully stocked apartment upon her release – a lucky break that is very unlikely in reality), their general take was that the overall tone of the prison aspect of this book was spot-on. If any Iowa area readers are so inspired, check out Women at the Well for ways to get involved with helping women who are incarcerated and recently released.

We were glad to have found and read this book, and glad that it left us feeling hopeful. It was also a good reminder of this:

“The line between this and that, you and her, us and them. The line is thin.”

— Julie Feirer