Week 3: History and Myth, Literacy and Resistance: Slavery in James

Welcome to Week 3 of our exploration of James. This week, we invite you to finish the novel and consider what it reveals about historical memory, the resistance to slavery, and the power of literacy. With guidance from Greg O’Malley, UC Santa Cruz Professor of History and historian of Atlantic slavery, we’ll think about how the stories we tell and the myths that circulate about slavery cohere with its history (or don’t). We’ll also look at how Percival Everett is challenging these conventional stories and myths and encouraging new ways for us to grasp the history of slavery and its narration. Along the way, we’ll suggest how James is in conversation with 19th-century slave narratives, and we’ll hear more from Professor of Literature, Susan Gillman, who has observations to share about the role of James’s writing in the novel.

Widening the Frame: Stories of Slavery, Histories of Slavery

One insight that Prof. Greg O’Malley offers about James is that the novel is attuned to a key distinction between the static stories we often tell about slavery and its protracted, dynamic history. As he explains, we often grasp American slavery as a “static institution over time.” Much of what we understand about it, he continues, comes from a very narrow time frame, mostly the last thirty years before the Civil War: “We tend to talk about slavery like it was always the same. But most of the stories we tell are about the last few decades, when there was an anti-slavery movement in the North and an obvious destination for enslaved people seeking to resist their enslavement.”

Slavery has a long and shifting history—one that includes changing laws, geographies, and systems of control. In James, Everett stretches our sense of that history, even as he moves the novel’s timeline to the run-up to the Civil War, this period that is more familiar to us. Set after the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a law that intensified existing fugitive slave laws by obligating people and institutions in free states to return slaves to their owners, James shows that, from the perspective of a fugitive slave (and perhaps all enslaved people), there is no real distinction between North and South.

The novel registers this indistinction between the Northern free states and the Southern slave states in both comic and serious modes. When Jim is first on the run in Chapter 14 and meets a group of slaves, he soon learns that he is in Illinois, which prompts him to ask: “So, I’m in a free state?” In response, “the men laughed,” with one “muscular man” quipping, “Boy, you’re in America.” The suggestion that enslaved people could be free anywhere in America is laughable to this group of enslaved men. In Chapter 30, we see Everett make this point again, but in a more serious register. James describes walking with the minstrel troupe through a border town’s main street that served as the line between North and South: “There we were, twelve of us, marching down the main street that separated the free side of town from the slave side …  the storefronts, a bank and a store and such, all looked flat and without depth, like I could just kick them over. It occurred to me that there was no telling which side was free and which was slave. Then I understood that it really didn’t matter.” The North, the geographical site that we associate with freedom and signify as the destination for fugitive slaves, is not a clear site of freedom for James or other slaves.

Here, Everett is recalling that the so-called “free” states weren’t necessarily safe or free, particularly in the period when the Fugitive Slave Act was the law of the land. As Prof. O’Malley reminds us, such is the case for much of American history. In the colonial period that he works in, for example, “the North doesn’t mean anything. It’s the colonial period. They’re all British colonies. Slavery is legal in all of them. Slavery is legal in New York. Slavery is legal in Pennsylvania. Slavery is legal in Massachusetts, and that’s actually true for most of slavery’s history in North America that there is no lodestar. There is no imagined space of freedom that is the obvious destination to pursue.”

For O’Malley, James is a “rare example” of contemporary popular culture that takes a long view of the history of American slavery and attempts to “trouble that line” between North and South. “The North,” he continues, “isn’t clearly a space of freedom in this novel, and it takes a long time before James adopts the strategy of running that way. Although it’s also really interesting to me that in the end, he does just that.”

Resisting Slavery:  Exploding the Myth of the Contented Slave

Similarly, Everett troubles the roles of the Underground Railroad and the Civil War in his depiction of James’s quest for freedom. James “has heard of” the Underground Railroad and the imminent war but he doesn’t view them as clear paths to freedom that are readily available to him. On the Underground Railroad, he comments: “I wanted it to be real, even if I could have no truck with it. Some people were finding a way north–that was what I, so many of us, needed to believe.” The difficulty is gaining access to this network, though, as he couldn’t safely travel to find it: “It pained me to think that without a white person with me, without a white-looking face, I could not travel safely through the light of the world … Without someone white to claim me as property, there was no justification for my presence, perhaps for my existence.”

James expresses a similar indifference to the impending Civil War. When Huck reveals excitement after seeing Union soldiers pass by, James reflects: “The thought of war didn’t mean much to me. I didn’t know what war meant. I didn’t know who would be fighting whom or why it should matter to me … The only thing I could think was that I had to keep moving North.” Soon after, Huck asks Jim if he can “imagine” fighting in a war. “Would that mean facing death every day and doing what other people tell you to do?,” James asks. “I reckon,” Huck responds. “Yes, Huck, I can imagine.” As Prof. O’Malley explains, James is saying here: “I’ve been a soldier in a war all my life.” James’s indifference toward the Civil War, then, should be understood not as apathy to a potential path to freedom but within the larger context of slavery as a perpetual state of war, a claim that many scholars have made and that, as O’Malley points out, is corroborated by the fact that many overseers who managed large plantations, especially in the Caribbean, had military experience and were hired to implement military style discipline within slavery.

James’s skepticism toward the Civil War and the Underground Railroad, and the fact that he never connects with them in the novel, makes his resistance to slavery and continued trek north all the more powerful. Here, O’Malley sees Everett registering important and historically nuanced points about the relationship between enslaved peoples’ resistance and the Civil War, namely that eventual emancipation is not a “gift” or inevitable result of the War but an opportunity seized upon by runaway slaves and created by their continued risks and resistance. The controversy over the Fugitive Slave Act and the return of enslaved people to the South from the North were central to the regional tensions that caused the Civil War: “It was enslaved people’s resistance that created the opportunity, and it was their pursuit of that opportunity that breaks the whole thing down and leads to the Civil War [and emancipation].”

Prof. O’Malley also sees Everett taking on and exploding a major racist trope of American history in his characterization of James–the “myth of the contented slave.” Here, he explains this myth and points to the questions that animate it:

For O’Malley, “the complacency myth couldn’t be more wrong,” and he thinks that James suggests this, too. Even as the novel rejects easy paths to freedom for James and depicts the extreme difficulties of resisting slavery, it characterizes James as a most intransigent slave who has been resisting the institution of slavery all of his life and continues to resist it in the face of constant societal opposition and the very real threat of violence and death. “The terrible irony,” O’Malley continues, “is that slaveholding societies brutalized enslaved people for their frequent acts of resistance but also criticized them for not resisting more.”

Literacy as Resistance: Reading and Writing as Subversive Acts

One key way that we see James’s perpetual resistance in the novel is through his commitment to his own literacy. James’s “deep level of learnedness” strikes Prof. O’Malley as “historically impossible in this period,” largely because his intimate knowledge of difficult texts would require regular access to books and materials as well as a community of interlocutors, but his literacy is certainly possible. It is “atypical,” O’Malley notes, “but not unheard of.” We see this reflected in the novel, as fellow slaves are often amused at James’s ability to read and a few, like Josiah and Norman, relate their own ability to “read some.”

At the beginning of the novel, James presents his reading as a resistant power that must be kept secret from Huck and others:

In contemplating the necessity to keep his reading secret, James discovers an inherent secrecy and freedom in the act of reading itself. No one knows what he is doing when he is looking at a book, and no one can tell what he is getting out of it; because of this, reading is “completely subversive.” It’s a point that Percival Everett himself often makes. In an interview at Waterstones Bookshop, he asserts that “reading … is really the most subversive thing you can do.” Prof. O’Malley highlights the historical nature of the subversive power of reading when discussing the prohibitions against enslaved people reading and writing, which we see in anti-literacy laws during the slavery period: “It was explicitly illegal. It wasn’t just frowned upon. There were laws in many colonies, and then in states, against teaching an enslaved person to read … this was seen as dangerous knowledge.”

Reading and subversion is a common thread in 19th-century slave narratives, such as Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life (1845) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), both of which are echoed in James. Douglass, for instance, discovers the power of reading in its prohibition by his enslaver, Mr. Auld, who says of the young Douglass: “if you teach that n— (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.” As Douglass reflects, “from that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.” For Douglass, reading is subversive because it is an escape from slavery, and not just a mental or psychological one: “the more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers.” Reading is an impetus for rebellion and physical escape, a threat made even more dangerous when an enslaved person could also write, as we see with both Douglass and Jacobs as well as James.

When Jim acquires paper and then his pencil, the latter at much cost to his fellow slaves, and learns to write, he begins his transformation into James, the revolutionary fugitive in active opposition to slavery. He begins to write his own narrative, which is emerging as the novel itself: “My name is James,” he writes, “I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written. With my pencil, I wrote myself into being, I wrote myself to here.” Writing, for James, is a radical claim for human agency and social personhood, the very conditions slavery denies him. James is instantiating himself as the author of his own story and, by extension, his own fate. As Prof. Gillman points out, Everett uses these italicized interludes of James’s writing not just as stream-of-consciousness reflections, but as assertions of authorship: “It’s not just that James is literate … It’s that he’s actively rewriting the narrative structure. He is no longer just a character in someone else’s story.”

Prof. O’Malley agrees. He points to the increased power, danger, and responsibility that comes with James’s ability to write, while also emphasizing the historical character of these amplifications: “This idea that a pencil would be such a point of controversy and danger, that strikes me as real. And part of the reason why is that knowledge itself is dangerous for enslaved people to have.” He continues: “the ability to write could trouble some of the systems of control … By law, any white person in slaveholding territories could stop any enslaved person to ask them what they were doing there, and ask for papers documenting either that they were free or on an errand from a master … they would produce that note if questioned, so if enslaved people knew how to write, all of a sudden [they could have] forged those passes … that kind of paperwork becomes important to some of the escape stories, too.”

That James can write is a direct challenge to the slave system, and his ability to write sparks astonishment among his fellow slaves as well as appeals for him to continue writing. We see this when Young George, who is later lynched for stealing the pencil for James, asks him what he is writing about:

Here, Young George implores James to tell his story as well as the story of his fellow slaves. Prof. O’Malley makes a similar observation in his reflection on this scene: “Young George asks Jim to tell his story with his ears … because he’s not just telling his story, he’s telling the stories of all of these other people who can speak to him orally, but don’t have the pencil or the knowledge of how to read and write, and will never get to tell their story to the public in the same way.” In other words, James becomes a subversive writer of the collective story of slavery; his resistance and subversive literacy is all enslaved people’s resistance and literacy. James is more than one fugitive slave on the run.

Community Conversations

How do you understand the representation of reading and writing in James? Do you agree with Everett that literacy is inherently subversive? Do you experience it in this way or not? What do you think about Prof. O’Malley’s insights about the historical nature of literacy’s subversive character during slavery?

What do you think about the ways Everett is troubling or contesting our conventional historical understandings of slavery? Did you grasp this when you were reading? What do you think about Prof. O’Malley’s suggestion that James explodes the myth of the “contented slave”? Have you noticed any other myths that the novel challenges? Why do you think Everett is confronting these various historical myths and conventions? Why is this important to the book? Why is this important in our contemporary moment?

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 finishing James with you this week.