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niakayjones 's review for:

3.0

Never got the opportunity to read this in school—we were required to read other classics instead. But now to get into James by Percival Everett, and to understand its context, I’m reading this now.

Literature, and all other forms of art and media, tend to be trapped in time. Which you think obviously, but when reading them centuries later, sometimes you really have to keep that in mind. 

In my first read of Huck Finn, I believe it to be a story about escaping what you once knew to find better, abandoning who you once were, what you once believed, and the life you once knew to become more. to be free. for its time, i think, it exists to challenge certain racial stereotypes, humanize black folk in ways they might’ve not been before. reading it now, in 2025 it’s like, i question this—to humanize us, how much do you have to dehumanize us to get there? because the depiction of jim—and with that a whole host of racial stereotypes (c’mon a watermelon, the way he talked… how he talked…) humanizes him in the most dehumanizing way, if that at all makes sense.

it made me wonder, if you sat with a black person in america at the time, and told them about this story, written by mark twain, told them all about jim and his depiction, would they be grateful to have this sort of representation that challenges preconceived notions of race that likely existed at the time or would they feel dehumanized too? would they feel both even? i genuinely wonder this because it’s easy for me, sitting in such a privileged life as an educated black american in 2025, to be like hey this feels… eh, but what would a black person in those times think, if they could even be afforded the space to sit and read a mark twain book and analyze it. does this make sense? am i making sense? maybe not.

ANYWAY… this is why i am super looking forward to read James. I have a pretty good feeling it’ll give that extra layer of commentary and ultimately humanity to the people (jim most notably) that weren’t given it in this one. i can tell just by the title—james the full name for jim.