What the Huck?

Why should we care about the story of a Black man and a white boy on the Mississippi River told from the Black man's point of view?

Huckleberry Finn & Jim on the Mississippi. Detail from the Social History of Missouri Mural in the State House. ©Thomas Hart Benton 1936 via WikiArt

1. Burning Mr. Washington

Recently, while reading Percival Everett’s retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from his enslaved companion’s point of view, I was reminded of something that happened to my brother about a year after my mother died.

Having suffered a heart attack, he was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night for emergency surgery. As the gurney hustled him down a long hall into the operating room, my brother looked at the attending physician and said: “Is y’all gon burn Mr. Washington?”

The comment caught the doctor completely off guard. Despite the gravity of the situation, he cracked up laughing.

At the time of this medical crisis

my brother held advanced degrees in divinity and psychology and also owned a thriving health practice in downtown Chicago. An erudite and well-spoken man, he does not usually speak like a character in a Tyler Perry movie.

But despite his education and professional demeanor, those of us who are closest to him have always felt he probably missed his calling. Because Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor had nothing on him.

If my brother had given up the ghost at that moment

he would have been satisfied to have forced a laugh from a situation that cried out for gravitas. Fortunately, he survived the cardiac scare with a few stents, a statin, and an admonition from his physician to take better care of himself.

Is y’all gon burn Mr. Washington? is a line spoken by a stereotypical Black character in a movie we saw on afternoon TV as kids. The actor was probably someone like Willie Best, whose frequent movie roles reinforced the negative images white people promoted about African Americans during Reconstruction and Jim Crow.

In that particular scene, Willie Best is standing in the engine room of a steam-powered locomotive that is quickly running out of fuel. Two white men have burned everything in sight to keep the train moving until finally the only thing left to burn is a wooden bust of George Washington.

This was a moment of great tension during the film

Some kind of chase or get-away was underway. So when the Black actor said, Is y’all gon burn Mr. Washington? — we kids fell on the floor hysterical with laughter. Ever since then, that line has been a pneumonic for my siblings and me.

We often use it to evoke that hilarious memory during childhood. It’s been an ice-breaker, a tension-cutter — and for my brother a non sequitur that upends the moment. Even when that moment is as serious as a heart attack.

With Percival Everett’s new novel ‘James’ on my mind,

my brother and I recently had a conversation about why that silly bit of dialogue made such a lasting impression, striking us in the funny bone instead of embarrassing or humiliating us. The answer was obvious to us both.

It never once occurred to my siblings and me that these stereotypes had anything to do with us. We didn’t relate to them. We didn’t talk like that or act like that. Nor did any of the adults in our world. For us, burning Mr. Washington might just as well have been uttered by Bugs Bunny or Jiminy Cricket.

But there was a problem with that

Although we knew we weren’t like that, many white people did not. And in those cusp years of civil rights when our world and the nation’s future were on the line, the perpetuation of these images was troublesome. They were used by racists as proof that we weren’t quite human. And if we were, then certainly we were not on the same level of humanity as white folks. Why therefore, should we receive equal justice under the law?

This was how the trick, which Black folks were forced to play on whites, backfired. The shuck-and-jive of Uncle Tom, which was supposed to allay the fears of the oppressor, became a double-edged sword.

If it saved you from the whip and the noose on one side, it yoked you to a defamatory notion on the other. A notion used to justify continued oppression in one form or another. Separate but equal. Voter suppression. Redlining. Driving while Black. Rodney King. George Floyd. Ahmad Arbery.

2. We’re in the same boat

In the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain tells a uniquely American story by placing a Black man and a white boy on a raft floating down the Mississippi River. Both are runaways. Neither can read or write. But each needs the other in order to survive.

Along the way, they have many adventures. The boy discovers that his Black companion is kinder and more decent than the whites they meet during the trip. As Huck becomes aware of this, he realizes there’s something wrong with the social order from which they have both escaped.

Mark Twain’s story is about the transformation of the boy’s consciousness. He begins this journey by thinking of the Black man as property, a slave called Nigger Jim. By the end, Huck can no longer think of Jim that way. This journey has taken him from blind prejudice to truth—his awakening to Jim’s humanity.

It’s a beautiful story in which the frequent use of the N-word is absolutely necessary to demonstrate the nature of that transformation. But don’t try telling that to folks on both sides of the political spectrum who want to bowdlerize the book by removing the N-word or banish the novel altogether.

But the novel ‘James’ has different fish to fry

Percival Everett’s new retelling of Twain’s book throws a monkey wrench into the story by asking this question: What if Huck’s enslaved companion has learned to read and write? What if he sneaks into Judge Thatcher’s library from time to time to read Voltaire, John Locke, and other writers of the Enlightenment? What is he to do with the disconnect between those liberating liberal idea and his enslaved condition, which contradicts them?

James and the other Black people in this story all speak to each other in standard English. But when whites are around, they play the role expected of them. They speak in a broken dialect and pretend not to understand. They teach their children that they must always let white people think they have the best ideas and correct solutions. They must never, ever appear to know more than white folks. Or to be smarter than them on any subject.

The Black people in this world are forced to create an artificial version of themselves in order to stay alive. The tension between his fake self and the literate one James knows himself to be is a major theme of Everett’s novel.

When W.E.B Dubois used the term two-ness, he was referring to African Americans. But the term is not exclusive to one group. Look at Don Draper in Mad Men and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. O.J. Simpson and Patty Hearst. Any woman living with an abusive man. Any gay man or woman in the closet.

Although white people refer to James as Nigger Jim, he knows that is not what he is. But he does not know who he is at his core. All he’s ever known is the life of a slave. The life forced upon him by “the peculiar institution.” What else could one be? Who else might he be if he were free? It’s through writing down his thoughts that he begins to investigate the nature of self.

My name is James, he writes.

I wish I could tell my story with a sense of history as much as industry. I was sold when I was born and then sold again. My mother’s mother was from someplace on the continent of Africa…I cannot claim to any knowledge of that world or those people, whether my people were kings or beggars.
…
I can tell you that 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.¹

3. The Artificial Nigger

It has taken nearly a century-and-a-half for a writer of Percival Everett’s stature to address the disconnect between Black interiority and the roles African Americans have been forced to play historically. It’s a subject his work has taken on before.

In the opening scene of American Fiction, the film based on Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, a white student complains that “The Artificial Nigger”—is printed in white chalk on a blackboard. That’s the title of a Flannery O’Connor short story up for discussion, but it makes the white student uncomfortable. ²

Like those who want to ban Huckleberry Finn, she’s virtue-signaling. That word is so terrible, she doesn’t want to be subjected to it in a college classroom. But her argument misses the point. Although we do not need that word in society, we we do need it in literature and in academic settings in order to understand the meaning behind it.

As James Baldwin observed in Take This Hammer—nigger is a projection of the white psyche. It refers to something that’s inside white people, something hateful within themselves, which they fear and repress. It’s their own dark side, something so dark and frightening they need to put it in chains, whip it, torture it, keep an eye on it. The trans-Atlantic slave trade gave them a human vessel within which to invest this fear.

What the Huck?

Although Baldwin came to terms with the meaning behind nigger at an early age, not every African American manages to do so. That is why we often see social media posts expressing outrage when some ignorant white fool slings that particular slur in a Black person’s face. But if everyone knew what James Baldwin knew, there would be no reason to read his books.

Percival Everett’s James also knows he is not a nigger. He is certainly not Nigger Jim. But he has been forced to play that role all his life. So who is he really? How is he to extricate himself from the artificial and inhabit the authentic?

How does he navigate the contradictory complexities of his own inner world? His journey with Huck down the Mississippi is one of self-discovery. Some of the things he discovers within himself astound and frighten him.

Although James is a story that deals with slavery, it raises important questions about identity, double-consciousness, and the lingering impact of slavery on the Black psyche. And on America itself.

But this novel has broad implications for everyone. After all, who among us has not played a role at one point or another? Who among us has not felt conflicted? How many of us are secure enough to ask in some fashion — Is y’all gon burn Mr. Washington? And understand that it has absolutely nothing to do with who we really are. 

©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill

Thanks for reading/listening.

If you enjoyed today’s story, you might also find this one of interest.

1. Percival Everett. From the novel James, Chapter 16.

2. Although the title of O’Connor’s short story seems to be about Black double consciousness and role-playing, the story is really about two poor whites—an old man and his grandson whose trip to Atlanta exposes their ignorance and racism.  It’s only when the two rednecks happen upon an antebellum lawn ornament of a Black jockey in disrepair, that their own brokenness is revealed to them.