James: A Novel

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an early example of a novel written entirely in dialect. That the text did not employ standard English set it apart at the time of its publication. Although many readers struggled with the difficulty of the language, its use of dialect was groundbreaking, and it paved the way for other works of English-language literature that employed vernacular. Everett engages with that history but complicates it. In James, the white characters speak to one another in standard English, but so too do the enslaved characters. Enslaved people code-switch, meaning they change from standard English to dialect when in the presence of white people. This is because they understand that enslavers expect them to use dialect: They see them as inferior, as less than human. The truth is quite far from that, and James and his fellow enslaved men and women are a thoughtful, intelligent, literary bunch.

The novel’s use of language, then, is a meta-commentary on the birth and perpetuation of racist stereotypes. During the pre-emancipation era and even well into the 20th century, many believed the racist lie that white people were naturally more intelligent than their Black counterparts. Real intelligence, in the world of James, lies within the Black rather than the white community: It is the novel’s Black characters who understand that there is little intellectual difference between white and Black people, and that the failure of the enslavers to realize this basic truth amounts to an intellectual failing on their part.