Week 2: Doubled Voices: Language, Minstrelsy, and the Performance of Race

Welcome to Week 2 of our exploration of James. This week, we’re reading through Part One (Chapter 32) of the novel together with the help of Professor of Literature, Susan Gillman, to explore three interwoven threads: language, minstrelsy, and the performance of race. We’ll also hear from Jaye Padgett, Professor of Linguistics, and akua naru, Assistant Professor of Music, who both raise important questions about the politics of these threads in the book, particularly around language.

As Prof. Gillman points out, these themes all represent innovations that Percival Everett creates in his “conversation” with Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Let’s turn to language first. In Twain’s novel, Jim speaks a single, fictional slave vernacular, and his voice is always mediated by the protagonist, Huck Finn; we never hear from Jim directly, and we don’t have access to his inner thoughts or feelings. We know that Everett’s invention is to grant Jim this interiority and his own speaking voice, to allow James to “speak back,” as we focused on last week, but this speaking is far from uncomplicated in Everett’s hands. In James, he speaks two “languages,” both standard English and what Gillman calls “slave talk,” vacillating between the two depending on who he is speaking with and for what purpose. Jim speaks standard English with fellow slaves and when writing or relating his internal thoughts and feelings, and he speaks in the fictional slave vernacular when speaking to or in the proximity of white people, using what he calls a “slave filter.” Everett, then, grants James a “doubled voice,” which marks the way he navigates the contradictions of his humanity and enslavement. But what are the origins of this linguistic innovation? Why does Everett invent a “doubled voice” for James, and what is the effect of James’s bilingualism?

Framing the Doubled Voice: Genre and Performance

This doubled voice, Gillman suggests, is rooted in Everett’s satirical play with genre and his penchant for linguistic games. While the novel borrows from the structure of 19th-century slave narratives like Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative of the Life, particularly in the ways it depicts Jim’s literacy and quest for freedom, it also picks up on Twain’s literary lineage in its evocations of the tradition of American frontier humor.

As Gillman explains, frontier humor often involved a layered narrative frame in which a “cultured” narrator introduces a “vernacular” storyteller who would spin the frontier yarn, creating distance and space for commentary in the process. Twain broke that frame in Huckleberry Finn, allowing Huck to tell his own tale from beginning to end without the prop of a cultured, urbane narrator who sanctioned his story. Everett, Gillman argues, does something even more radical: “he combines the cultured and vernacular narrator in one person—James himself.”

This combination challenges our assumptions about identity and speech. As Prof. Padgett notes, “Jim’s use of a highly educated sounding English as an expression of his ‘truest’ self, will challenge many readers’ preconceptions of him and of slaves.” At the same time, this fusion also creates a rich, dynamic doubleness and layered irony that invites us to move in and out of registers with James and compels us to come along for the linguistic ride, as we are asked to constantly distinguish between what James is saying, what he is pretending to say, and what he “really” means. In this way, as Gillman attests, “the novel is all about language. Everett wants us to be constantly thinking about language and how language is performed.”

Performing Language, Performing Slavery: Teaching the Code 

Everett is also drawing our attention to language as performance and, thus, depicting slavery itself in performative terms. Slave vernacular is a performance that James describes as linguistic expertise, as evidence of a “mastery of language” and “fluency,” and as a political necessity, required for “safe movement through the world.” It is also “exhausting,” as we see when James is traveling with Huck and is forced to “play” the slave at every turn, occasionally having “language slips” due to this exhaustion and perhaps his growing camaraderie with Huck as well.

The political stakes of James’s bilingualism and the tension surrounding the performance of “slave talk” is revealed early in the novel when James is teaching a “language lesson” to his daughter, Lizzie, and other enslaved children. They’re bright and eager, but they don’t yet understand why they have to learn this second language of enslavement. We see this in an exchange James has with his daughter:

James’s lesson makes it clear: slave talk is a protective performance, a tool for survival in a violent slave system. When teaching the children how to warn a white neighbor about a fire, he instructs them not to say “Fire!” but instead, “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere.” As he explains: “We must let the whites be the one who name the trouble.” While these language lessons reveal slave talk as strategy, they also depict a fundamental irony of the novel: only the enslaved characters know that they are performing the stereotypical language of enslavement. The white enslavers are ignorant of the doubled voices of the enslaved characters as well as the performative nature of language and, thus, slavery.  

Prof. Gillman calls this unique linguistic move “passing down” and argues that what we see in James isn’t standard code-switching: “It’s not code-switching, which generally applies to a bilingual speaker using the dominant form to pass among dominant-language speakers. In James, the slave speakers put on slave talk to pass down—to speak as the master expects them to.” According to Gillman, this reversal—performing down rather than up—”explodes our expectations.” The dialect we associate with Jim in Huckleberry Finn becomes, in James, a kind of performative, satirical theater that isn’t presented as “natural” to the enslaved but must be taught and maintained with extreme vigilance. What we see is a performance of powerlessness, crafted by those who understand power more intimately than the powerful.

Blackface Minstrelsy and the Fiction of “Blackvoice”

The satirical performance of slave talk gains an additional layer of irony when Jim is bought by Daniel Decatur Emmett and joins the Virginia Minstrels in Chapters 26 to 32. While this minstrel episode is another major invention of Everett’s James, it draws directly from history and speaks to minstrel elements of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

As Prof. Gillman reminds us, the Virginia Minstrels, founded by American composer Daniel Decatur Emmett, were one of the first 19th-century blackface minstrel troupes, white entertainers who “blacked up” to comically perform as slaves for racist white audiences, made famous for popularizing Emmett’s songs like “Jimmy Crack Corn” and “Dixie.” We see James play a blackface minstrel character, but with the added ironic layer that he is passing for white, made to look “white under the makeup so that [he] can look black to the audience.” As part of the troupe, he is being asked to wear blackface and comically perform racist songs in the very slave vernacular that he has mastered and taught to the children, but now exaggerated and made grotesque for being “purely” performative rather than strategically so.

In this new role, he is unsure how to perform his doubled voice. Befuddled, he asks another troupe member, Norman, who is also passing for white, “What about my language?” Norman responds: “Don’t talk at all–that’s the best thing.” For the first time, James is uncertain whether he should use standard English or slave vernacular. When asked by Emmett if he is ready to go on stage, he recounts: “I paused, unsure of my diction, whether to speak as myself or as a slave. I made the safe choice. ‘I is, suh.’”

For Prof. Gillman, this episode shows how Everett’s satire of minstrelsy isn’t just visual but vocal: “Minstrelsy is about blackface, but in James, it’s blackvoice, too.” James’s slave talk, for her, isn’t historical vernacular; instead, it is a stylized fiction shaped by racist expectations that satirically draws on and reworks Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, a novel that leans heavily on the minstrel tradition in its exaggeration of Jim’s dialect for comedic effect and its characterization of Jim as a stock minstrel figure, the enslaved fool or trickster. Everett’s James is presenting slave talk as a performative fiction–a kind of “caricature of a caricature” in relation to Huckleberry Finn–to not only critique Twain but also highlight the way our expectations of language conform to fictional (and here racist) scripts. Letting us in behind the minstrel mask, James mocks white pleasure in slave talk and slave song and, at the same time, makes a mockery of standard English–with all of its naming, exclaiming, and proclaiming. “Emmett’s songs are music for idiots,” Norman tells James, who recognizes that white names are translated, imitated, and mocked in the minstrel lyrics they sing and which we see in his exchange with Polly, the white girl he meets at his first minstrel performance: “’I’m Polly,’ she said. ‘Polly Wolly Doodle,’ I said. We had sung the song.”

Who Gets to be Heard?: The Effects of James’s Doubled Voice

The fictionalization of slave talk is a view linguist John McWhorter shares in a recent New York Times op-ed on James in which he argues that Everett deliberately veers from the historical origins of Black English. As he explains, Black English did not originate as a “survival strategy” among enslaved people but “when slaves were exposed to non-standard English dialects spoken by plantation owners and white indentured servants from Britain and Ireland.” He also raises another question about the effect of standard English on James’s humanity in the novel. He argues that when James and his fellow slaves speak standard English it “makes them more readily human to us.”

This is not a view shared by all linguists or readers of the novel. Some, like Prof. naru, wonder why James must be humanized via standard English: “Why does this character have to be able to speak standard American English in order to be seen as having humanity?” For her, James’s humanity in the novel is registered by his mastery of standard English, which implies a marginalization (or worse) of people and communities who don’t historically speak standard English, have limited fluency in standard English, or who are associated with non-standard dialects.

Prof. Padgett speaks to similar troubling effects of James’s doubled voice, asking this important question: “If we index features of more standard English to intelligence, sophistication, or virtue, then what do we imply about non-standard dialects and their speakers?” As Prof. Padgett reminds us, “African American Language (AAL) is as rich and rule-governed as any dialect of English.” Its stigmatization reflects not linguistic inferiority, but power dynamics: “Standard dialects become standard by being spoken by those with power and wealth, not because they have any purely linguistic advantages.”

This is where Everett’s satire may be seen to walk a knife’s edge. Does the novel expose linguistic racial bias, or does it rely on it and perhaps reinforce it? Does it question or bolster, even if unwittingly, the stigma attached to non-standard dialects and the people who speak them? It’s a question that resonates in the novel, across history, and in our own contemporary moment. Who gets to be heard? Whose voices are considered articulate, intelligent, and human? And what does it mean to satirically perform a dialect, especially one that has been historically used to dehumanize or marginalize people and communities? 

Community Conversations

We’re eager to hear your thoughts and ideas about these questions and more in the novel so far. What do you think about Everett’s approach to depicting James’s humanity in the novel? Do you locate his humanity and agency in his facility with standard English, in his bilingualism, or elsewhere? What do you think about the concerns raised by Professors naru and Padgett about the politics of standard English in the novel? Does James’s use of standard English reinforce existing linguistic hierarchies? Is it doing something else?

How are you experiencing what we’re calling James’s “doubled voice,” and how are you making sense of it? Do Prof. Gillman’s insights about Everett’s satirical relationship to Twain and minstrelsy help you grasp the function of his doubled voice and the performance of language and race in the book? Do you think the novel is satirizing both standard English and slave vernacular, as Prof. Gillman suggests? Finally, are you seeing any contemporary resonances with the themes of language, minstrelsy, and the performance of race that we’ve been exploring here?

Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below. Your voice is a valued part of this conversation. We’re looking forward to continuing to explore James with you.