Week 4: Becoming James—Naming, Violence, and Unfinished Liberation

We have now reached the end of our time with Percival Everett’s James. If you’ve finished the book, you know that it is a journey that refuses tidy closure or clear resolution. James offers neither an explicit heroic redemption nor the assurance of freedom for its fugitive protagonist. Unlike classic slave narratives, Everett’s novel ends with briskly paced episodes of brutal violence and without an arrival of our fugitive slaves in a Northern city an a path to freedom, even if a limited one. Instead, James leaves us sitting with discomfort, anger, and uncertainty. But why? And what assurances do we have, if any, at the novel’s open-ended conclusion?

As we reach the end of the novel, three major arcs converge: James’s assertion of his name; his fractured relationship with Huck; and the violent, unfinished struggle for freedom that bursts into open flame in the final chapters and is still smoldering on the last page of the book. This week, we’ll trace these threads and their connections with the help of our Deep Read faculty–Professors Susan Gillman, akua naru, and Greg O’Malley–to explore the possible meanings of these themes and to suggest ways of reading this seemingly narrative of liberation from slavery.

The Weight of a Name: Naming, Misnaming, and the Refusal of Inheritance

From its first pages, the novel depicts an acute awareness of the stakes and function of naming. In the world of antebellum slavery, names are not just labels but mechanisms of power and control. To name is to claim, to assert a property right over and to signify subordination. Jim indicates this oppressive function of naming in the first words he writes: “I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name.” Using the passive voice, he affirms that “Jim” is not his name but something he’s “called” by others; “Jim” is an unwanted imposition of his enslavers but one he has “yet” to replace.

Enslaved people in the novel have given names only–Josiah, Katie, Jim, Lizzie, Easter–and often these sole first names are infantilizing diminutives, as is the case with “Jim.” As Prof. O’Malley notes, this was “very common under slavery.” To be without a last name, or to be forced to adopt an enslaver’s name, indicates how enslaved people’s alienation from their African heritage and the reality of their enslaved condition were written into their everyday linguistic lives as constant reminders of ownership and loss.

Misnaming, or a lack of concern for enslaved people’s names, comes into play here, too. When “the Duke” is in the midst of taking over the revival and is making property claims on James, James recounts that he “forgot my name and introduced me as Caesar.” As James notes, “being seen as incidental in the white world paid off,” as “Jim” was now a well-known fugitive slave and would have been recognized and captured if called by his correct name. Later, “the King” will echo this function of misnaming as a sign of subordination: “‘There’s something about you, Caesar,’ he said. ‘His name is Jim,’ Huck said. ‘Whatever.’ The King waved a dismissive hand. ‘Caesar, Jim, April, Boyboy, Mandingo, don’t make no diff’ence.’”

Despite this subordinating reality of naming in slavery, we see James contesting it throughout the novel. In Part 1, he lays the groundwork for claiming a new name and asserts a positive function for naming. He suggests that names can be a mark of character and identity, or a label that indicates “sumptin’ bout” a person, as he tells Huck in his performative “slave talk.”

When asked by Huck what his last name would be if he could choose one, he responds playfully:

Although joking with Huck in this exchange, James is also dead serious. He is insisting on being called “James,” trying on his shift from Jim to James, and choosing a last name, “Golightly,” that reflects his fugitive condition, a situation of agility, evasion, and impermanence. Soon after, he’ll try on another surname, “Faber.” This is the brand marked on the pencil stolen for him by Young George, and a name that reflects his emergent position as a writer and chronicler not just of his own story but every enslaved person’s story: “I knew I owed it to [Young George] to write something important … I resolved to use it with a light touch to have it last as long as possible. Stamped on it was the name FABER. Perhaps that would be my last name. James Faber. That didn’t sound too bad.” Golightly and Faber are names of escape and duty that reflect James’s identity, but they are fleeting monikers to which he never returns.

As the novel moves to its conclusion, we see James repeat the declaration, “I am James,” both to the white enslavers he’s targeting and the enslaved people he’s trying to rescue. In the last lines of the novel, we see a local sheriff in Iowa who is suspicious of his runaway group and interrogates James:

In the last two words of the novel, James claims something dangerous in its simplicity: the right to name himself free from an inherited surname and without qualification, explanation, or embellishment. As Prof. naru notes, he is “declaring himself in the fullness of his humanity and on his own terms.” In his refusal of a last name, he is attesting to the completeness of himself and his family as is. He does not need to adopt his enslaver’s surname or the name of his enslaver’s plantation in the hopes of later reuniting with his family, as Prof. O’Malley notes was the case for many enslaved people who were separated from their families. He defies at once the oppressive form of naming enforced by the slave system and the respectable expectations of naming fundamental to the slave narrative tradition. James resists what we see in the stories of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, and others, who adopt surnames to affirm their new status as free persons, to inscribe themselves into the civic order that had once excluded them, or, as with Brown, to pay homage to an abolitionist benefactor.

“Just James” pays homage to no one but James himself. It is an announcement that rejects inherited frameworks of naming, and, by extension, the notion of inheritance and inherited belonging itself. In this way, James suggests that the project of freedom must be self-actualized and self-forged. Freedom cannot be gifted, inherited, or granted by external forces or by one’s ancestors or former enslavers; it must be taken and asserted by the individual who desires it. For Prof. Gillman, James’s final words reject any form of patrimony or link to the past: “he is not looking back to Africa or back to the slave plantation.” Instead, he is dwelling in an insecure present and exclaiming that his escape and unsteady freedom is his doing and his doing alone. This may not be a sure triumph or permanent victory, but it is a radically open declaration of self-authorized action and identity that aligns justice with a chosen name, “Just James.”

James and Huck: An Impossible Kinship

James’s rejection of inheritance is a repudiation of not only naming but also the entire social structure of slavery, and it isn’t without collateral damage. Becoming “Just James” and escaping to an unsteady freedom necessarily means abandoning his newly revealed son, Huck.

Huck and James’s relationship is tenuous and ambivalent throughout the novel. When traveling downriver early in their journey, Huck asks James why he doesn’t just make him ferry him across the river: “In Illinois you be a free man.” In response, James reflects that this would take him “farther from family,” but he also expresses a responsibility for Huck that obliquely includes him in his family orbit: “‘I thinked on it, Huck. But you and me be friends. I cain’t just leave you.’ And I meant that. Huck was just a boy.” Despite James’s declaration of friendship and concern, which we also will learn is paternal, this is not an uncomplicated attachment. Soon after when they become separated from one another for the first time, James wonders, “in spite of my concern for the boy, if that was a bad thing.” James professes a desire to both stay with Huck and leave him, and he feels both responsibility for him and relief when released from this responsibility.

A certain impossibility always colors their attempts to establish a bond of kinship. After another separation when their raft breaks apart, James declares their situation “hopeless”: “I couldn’t very well roam the land asking about the whereabouts and condition of a white boy, this while being the subject of a manhunt myself.” Friendship between a white boy and an enslaved Black man, much less an enslaved Black man on the run, was implausible, despite both their mutual affection for one another and their attempts to hide this affection under the cloak of a master/slave relationship. As Prof. O’Malley points out, even though they attempt to masquerade as master and slave at several points, “it doesn’t work as a cover story.” Huck and James, he continues, “want to have a more equal relationship with each other, but they have to feign a hierarchical one all of the time, because racial hierarchy is what’s comprehensible to people and it’s the only thing allowable by custom and by law between them.”

For Prof. O’Malley, the continued imposition of a racial hierarchy onto their relationship and James’s eventual and repeated rejection of Huck at the end of the novel illustrates a profound insight about the pervasive nature of unfreedom in the slavery period:

As we know, Huck is also not free to be James’s son, a tragic reality that only James understands. When a confused Huck asks James, “What should I be?,” after learning that he is his son, James responds: “Just keep living … Just remember, once they see you, or see me in you, you’ve been seen. I know you don’t understand. But you will one day … You can be free, if you choose. You can be white, if you choose.”

While Huck can “choose” to be free and white, it is clear that this choice is restraining and compels Huck to reinforce a system that he doesn’t support and that doesn’t support him. As Prof. O’Malley explains, “they’re all less free in a certain sense, because slavery exists. There’s a tremendous social and even legal pressure on white folks to toe the line with the institution of slavery, whether they want to or not. And I think that comes out at the end of the novel.”

James and Huck’s fractured bond is a concrete example of the inescapability of the racial hierarchy in American slavery and a powerful metaphor for its psychic and social costs. As Huck returns to Hannibal and James continues his dangerous trek north, their distance marks the way that the incomplete status of freedom and emancipation touches enslaved and free alike.

Violence, Rage, and the Revolutionary Turn

As Huck and James’s relationship becomes increasingly fractured in the final section of the novel, the violence of the slave system and James’s consequent anger which has been simmering just below the surface, come bursting through. The end of the novel forces both James and the reader to confront the gendered brutality and sexual violence that undergird slavery.

In the earlier sections of James, violence is an implied, lurking threat. James and his fellow slaves must navigate the constant potential for violence without meeting it head on, using what Prof. Gillman calls, echoing the novel, “slave talk” to deflect and diffuse this violence by performing their expected role of racialized submission. But, at the end, this violence becomes explicit, personal, and unavoidable; it also becomes clear that its predominant form is gendered and sexualized. After witnessing Katie’s rape by Overseer Hopkins back at his old plantation and facing his inability to intervene, James is consumed with self-hatred and guilt. This soon transforms into a “blossoming” rage, what Prof. naru calls “deeply human rage,” that motivates him to confront Hopkins and force him to acknowledge his sexual crimes: “So that these minutes aren’t wasted, Overseer Hopkins, I’ll ask you to think about the women you have raped. Think about Katie. Think about her fear, her voice, her begging you to stop.” Soon after, when James captures Judge Thatcher, he asks him similar questions, compelling him to face his own sexual predation of enslaved women: “‘Have you ever raped a slave? When you were young and strapping …? Did you ever rape a woman?’ His silence was profound.”

When James next moves to Graham farm, the “breeding” plantation to which his wife and daughter have been sold, he doesn’t bother to ask pointed questions to the white enslaver or force him to reflect on his grotesque misdeeds; instead, he frees the enslaved people, sets the place on fire, and fatally shoots him in the chest: “I pointed my pistol at him. ‘I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night,’ I said. ‘I am a sign. I am your future. I am James.’”

James’s final scenes of violence are not framed as redemptive acts but spectacles of revolutionary justice rendered necessary because of the foundational violence of a slave system that refuses to confront its own blind injustice. Because of this tragic necessity of violence, and of James’s transformation into a revolutionary “angel of death,” Everett leaves us with no satisfactions that justice has been served and all will be well; rather, he offers us a revelation of the grim reality of the cycle of violence under oppression. There is no certainty that this violence will end and freedom and justice will be achieved. James cannot claim liberation within the existing order, and, at present, the only thing to do is to resist and refuse it; until the violent order of slavery is completely eradicated, James implies, the project of American emancipation will remain what Prof. Gillman notes is understood as an “unfinished revolution” by many historians. As is, the project of freedom will remain unfinished, incomplete, and partial.

Community Conversations

By refusing to “complete” James’s revolutionary turn within the text of James, Everett compels us to grapple with the ongoing, unfinished “business” of slavery and emancipation in our country and beyond. What do you think Everett is asking us to do or to reflect on exactly by giving us this concluding revelation of freedom as an unsettled fact? Is James trying to challenge us to rethink our understanding of freedom today? Is it trying to ask us to grapple with legacies of American slavery? Who do you think the novel is speaking to exactly? Why don’t we get any assurances, or even half assurances, of freedom, triumph, or justice at the end of the novel? Or do you see glimpses of assurances somewhere at the novel’s end, or perhaps earlier, that we could take away from the novel?

What do you think about the role of naming in James’s transformation? What do you think about his abandonment of Huck and his insistence on the impossibility of a stable relationship with him? And how are you grappling with James’s revolutionary, violent turn? Do you think Everett is depicting this violence as necessary, as we are suggesting above? Why exactly, and what purpose does it serve? Or do you see this violence as gratuitous and unnecessary?

Please respond with your comments and questions in the section below. We are interested to hear how you experienced the novel’s final acts, and the novel overall. Thank you so much for coming along with us on this journey to deeply read James. Be well, and we’ll see you again next year.