Current events nearly overshadowed Banned Book Week 2025. It’s already Friday—but I didn’t forget. I just finished reading Percival Everett’s 2024 masterpiece, James: A Novel, and I can honestly say it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. It retells Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the slave who accompanied Huck on the journey down the Mississippi River.
Everett spins a can’t-put-it-down story that made me laugh, cry, and seriously examine the darkest chapter in American history. The book gives voice to the oppressed, providing a compelling counternarrative to Twain’s classic.
Humor is a powerful messaging tool. Twain knew it, and so does Everett. The character James’ use of language struck me immediately. Around white folks, James and other slaves spoke in the expected vernacular, but when the whites were out of earshot, the enslaved people used perfect, even eloquent, English. It made me laugh initially, and then it made me think.
I first read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on my own as a ten-year-old, after reading Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which I loved. I read Huck Finn again as “required reading” during junior high school, and yet again—more analytically—in college. It is, indeed, a classic.
James is also a classic, and a perfect companion to Huckleberry Finn. Both should be required reading at the junior and/or senior high school level. The modern-day fact that these books are now banned in many schools speaks volumes about how fearful our society has become of empowering youth. Offering young people access to multiple perspectives helps them learn to critically examine issues and to think for themselves. Without that, I fear we are doomed to revisit an ugly past. Maybe not repeat it exactly but, as Twain put it, “history rhymes.”
#BannedBooksWeek #james #criticalthinking
Photo by S. G. Benson
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