When you look at who has historically held the pen in published literature, a pattern emerges that is hard to ignore. The voices that have shaped our understanding of history, both in fiction and non-fiction, have largely belonged to those in power. This isn’t just an academic observation as it has real consequences for how we see ourselves and others.
Attempts to rewrite history in US schools by means of book banning make this question urgent: who gets to tell the story, and what happens when we only hear one version – or none at all?
Percival Everett’s James does tackles this problem. It takes Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and flips it entirely. Where Twain gave us Jim who was the stereotypical ‘good slave’, ‘black saint’ existing mainly to help Huck grow morally, Everett hands Jim the narrative. And in fact in this narrative, with symbolism that doesn’t need to be subtle, Jim writes himself into history with a stolen pencil.
Part of what makes Everett’s approach so good is how he handles Jim’s voice. Jim deliberately speaks in an ‘uneducated’ dialect around white people because, as he puts it, “white folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them.” This is part of how Everett dismantles the harmful archetype Twain created: the selfless, uneducated black character who can’t think beyond serving white interests, who finds meaning only through sacrifice. In James, Jim feels rage alongside his other emotions. He’s angry about his enslavement, about slavery itself, he can act in his own self-interest. This emotion wasn’t really there in Twain’s version. There’s nothing more threatening than an educated black man who refuses to accept his circumstances.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn itself has faced bans throughout American history. The book has been challenged primarily for its use of racial slurs. And it wasn’t only the language that was unnecessary (written by a white man) and harmful but the single story it told of enslaved people.
This connects to today’s book banning. Works like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye are being pulled from shelves because they refuse comfortable fictions. These books explain race, colourism, and black identity without sugar-coating or appeasing to white guilt. Similarly, books about queerness are being banned, encouraging narratives that are anti-trans and erasing valuable experiences. They threaten the single story by offering perspectives that have been historically (and are currently being) silenced.
The stories we grow up with matter. They shape who we think exists in the world and how they exist. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie puts this perfectly when she talks about the danger of a single story and how we become impressionable in the face of one narrative, creating assumptions about entire groups of people based on limited exposure. When marginalised voices haven’t had control over their own narratives, we develop these incomplete pictures. Even I remember that when I first moved to London, someone (English) asked if we even have washing machines in Scotland! I wonder which book they got that idea from… We all carry ideas about people and places based on limited stories.
Twain’s Jim was presented as deserving freedom only because he was exceptionally good. This created a false standard and erased the complexity of enslaved people’s experiences. Crucially, this story came from those who held power over the narrative and not from enslaved people themselves.
Everett’s James doesn’t just retell but takes back. It is a reminder that behind every single story are countless others, waiting for someone to steal that pencil.
As Tash wrote in her previous blog, fiction helps us empathise with others. It transports us into different worlds where we get to try on someone else’s (book) sleeves, to see life through their eyes. When we don’t hear stories from marginalised groups we lose a crucial method of building empathy. This is why reading books by people who are not like you matters so much. It’s also an argument for reading translated literature: even when we’re not experiencing the original language, we’re exploring stories told in fundamentally different ways.
As I think about this, I find myself questioning: what assumptions have I made based on the stories I’ve been told? Which voices am I still not hearing?
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