Thoughts on James and the Swamped History of Black Women’s Resistance

I recently rewatched Harriet (2019) starring Cynthia Erivo. I was a high school History teacher when the film first came out and I organized a screening with students and our school community. I was inspired to watch it again after reading Tiya Miles’ amazing new book, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People (2024).  

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This book followed my reading of Percival Everett’s new novel, James, which I read with my neighborhood book club. Reading both books together (along with the film) prompted me to reflect on the history of slavery in the United States and, especially, on women’s resistance. Everett’s novel prompts us to question how history gets told, who gets to tell it, and what gets left out. These are the same questions I think about every day as a historian of women.

Twain, Everett, and the Power of Language

The starting concept of Everett’s James (2024) is that Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) was radical in its own right. Set during the antebellum period of slavery, yet published twenty years after the end of the American Civil War, Twain’s novel asks the reader to see what White America still could not see: the full humanity of a Black man. The reader is taken on a journey with Huck, accompanied by “Jim,” an enslaved Black man who offers humor, kindness, friendship, and protection. Jim’s depth of character was radical at the time, even though the character exists only in service to Huck’s journey. 

Everett does not reject Twain’s “Jim.” Instead, he makes him the main character.

As Everett explains:

I hope that I have written the novel that Twain did not and also could not have

written. I do not view the work as a corrective, but rather I see myself in conversation

with Twain.

James is a work of fiction, but it is both fair and necessary to read the novel in historical-political terms. Everett is making a deliberate intervention into American literary and historical narratives, traditions that have long treated certain voices as central and others as peripheral. The primary question of James is, who gets to tell the story? 

Like Mark Twain, the character of James is a storyteller who must navigate the treacherous racial politics of the mid-1800s United States by becoming adept at language. Modern readers of Huck Finn are often challenged by Twain’s vocabulary and language. Young Huck’s speech is an exaggerated rural Southern dialect, including the humorous misuse of words. Huck speaks this way because he actively resists education, which is part of his boyish charm, whereas Jim speaks this way because education has been purposefully kept from him.

In Everett’s story, though, we learn that James uses this dialect as a method of survival. This is the dialect that White people expect and want to hear from enslaved people. In his private moments, or with other Black people, James uses standard English, or even the very formal English of the philosophical books he studies. Language is a form of both survival and resistance.

Exploring the politics of language is not new to Percival Everett. In his previous novel, Erasure (2001), the basis for the Oscar-nominated film American Fiction (2023), a modern Black writer struggles to get his work published. Only when he produces a parody of the gritty, stereotypical story and speech of Black “urban” life, a genre that White publishers and the public expect from African American authors, is he lauded as an “authentic” Black voice and finds commercial success. Everett’s work in both novels deals with the relationship between language, survival, and self-authorship.

Harriet Tubman and the Power of Naming

James is written in the first person, in James’ own voice, using his chosen name. Like the character, James, the real-life Araminta “Minty” Ross, a young enslaved girl from Maryland, renamed and reimagined herself as Harriet Tubman. She chose the name Harriet, after her enslaved mother, Harriet “Rit” Green-Ross, and Tubman, after her first husband, John Tubman, a free Black man. As Harriet Tubman, she guided hundreds of people to freedom along the Underground Railroad.

In Night Flyer, historian Tiya Miles interprets Tubman’s choices to use both her mother’s name and that of her husband as explicitly feminist acts in a system in which the marriages and family relationships of enslaved people were not legally acknowledged, and in which women had no bodily autonomy. To take her family names, rather than use her enslaver’s name, was a radical act of claiming her self.

Women’s Voices and Female Selfhood in James

In reading James, I was struck by the lack of voices from the female characters. Twain gave us Jim and Huck in what is essentially a boys’ adventure story, and Everett expands upon that genre by putting James at the center of that story. And yet, female characters are central to James’ story of resistance, as James’ primary motivation for setting out on the journey of the novel is not just securing his own freedom, but finding his wife, “Sadie,” and daughter, “Lizzie.” Sadie and Lizzie are not present for most of the action of the novel. Like the original character of Jim in Huck’s story, Sadie and Lizzie are a necessary part of James’ journey. But they do not exist as fully developed individuals with their own stories.

There are other female characters in James. Some come directly from Twain’s novel, including “Mrs. Watson,” the widow who owns Jim and raises Huck, and her sister, the “Widow Douglas.” In Everett’s expansion of Twain’s story-world, James meets a young white woman, “Polly,” who flirts with James because she thinks he’s a White man playing a Black man in a minstrel show (it’s complicated). We don’t need to know anything else about Polly except that her White femaleness poses a deadly danger for James. Polly’s father confronts Jim, and Polly becomes a political-sexual pawn in the tensions between Black and White men.  

Besides Sadie and Lizzie, there is another young enslaved girl whose appearance in the novel is especially haunting. “Sammy” is introduced through a scene of graphic sexual violence perpetrated against her by a White man. Like Polly, the character of Sammy exists in service to James’ narrative. She reminds him of the stakes for his wife and daughter. And she reminds the reader that slavery has robbed James of his ability to protect any woman, as a man, a husband, or a father. Sammy, though she barely speaks, does have one important point of agency in the novel, though: She decides to run away. She resists.  

Douglass, Jacobs, and Gendered Resistance 

As much as Everett’s novel is in conversation with Mark Twain, his work also connects to the larger history of resistance by enslaved people. The entire novel echoes the real-life figure of Frederick Douglass, from James’ hunger for literacy and his voracious intellect, to the larger project of self-emancipation, all of which is detailed in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). Douglass not only taught himself to read while still enslaved, but became one of the most important Black intellectuals of the 19th century. The character of James is in that lineage, if not a direct homage to Douglass.

Those who are familiar with the story of Frederick Douglass, may or may not know of Harriet Jacobs. In her narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Jacobs tells a particularly female story of survival as a “girl” under slavery. In her most poignant (and oft-quoted) line, Jacobs expressed her sadness and fear upon giving birth to a daughter: 

When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my

heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery

is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for

women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they

have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications

peculiarly their own.

Like the character of James, the real-life Jacobs is motivated by the need to keep a girl child safe. While James must go in search of his daughter and wife, Jacobs left her children behind in the care of a grandmother, seeking her own freedom first before returning for them.

Swamped Sources and Women’s History 

Harriet Jacobs was still an exception. Harriet Tubman was definitely an exception. While many enslaved women resisted, most never reached freedom at all. 

Celia was an enslaved girl in Missouri in the 1850s. She was purchased at around age 13 and repeatedly raped by her owner, Robert Newsom. The legal right of Newsom over Celia’s body, and the status of her future children, was established in the earliest laws on slavery in the American colonies, which remained in effect in the United States for 300 years:

Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a Negro woman should be

slave or free, be it therefore enacted and declared by this present Grand Assembly, that all children born in this

country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother... *

Laws of Virginia, 1662

(*Note: The law went on to say that "if any Christian shall commit fornication with a Negro man or woman," they would pay heavy fines; yet, a fine was a minor punishment for a law that created an even greater economic incentive for White men to use Black women to produce more slaves.)

To ensure access to her body and children, Newsom provided Celia with her own cabin on his property. This allowed him to keep Celia isolated, but the cabin also provided her with some privacy in acting out her resistance and finally killing Robert Newsom. She bludgeoned him, dismembered his body, and burned him in her fireplace in the private cabin that he built for her. Celia was still a teenager and pregnant again when she stood trial for the murder of a White man. She signed court documents with the mark of an X because she could not read or write. 

Click here to read Celia's statement, signed “Celia her mark  X” 

Celia could not write her own story, but because the records of her trial were preserved, we know that Celia did what Frederick and Harriet and Harriet did. She did what James did. 

Celia resisted. 

Celia could not sign her own name, but even well-documented voices are often mediated by others, and always mediated by time. Just as Harriet Tubman traveled through the swamps of Eastern Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay and learned to navigate her way to freedom, historian Tiya Miles reminds us that the past is full of “swamped sources.” We can only attempt “to dredge the historical record” and tell the stories, especially the buried stories of enslaved people, of women, or other marginalized groups, as truthfully as possible.

(For discussion of "swamped sources," see Miles, Night Flyer, p.241.)

Women’s Violent Resistance

While reading James, I thought constantly of Celia, alone in her cabin, waiting for Newsom one last time. 

And of Harriet Tubman, feeling called and protected by God to risk her life and make multiple trips back into Maryland, but carrying a gun with her as back-up. Just in case. 

Violent resistance is so often narrated as male. One of the most haunting film representations of the Middle Passage, in which stolen Africans were brought across the Atlantic Ocean in the slave trade, in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997). Based on true events, the men on board organize a mutiny under the leadership of Joseph Cinque. It’s an incredible story, but the focus of the film version of the story is on White men (lawyers and abolitionists) coming to the aid of the Black men who resisted. The image from the film that stuck with me, however, is that of an African woman launching herself overboard into the sea with a baby in her arms, denying the slave traders access to either herself or her child. 

My colleague Rebecca Hall has resisted the narrative that only men rebelled against slavery in organized or violent ways. In her graphic history, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (2022, illustrated by Hugo Martinez), Hall documents the role of women in uprisings, shipboard and otherwise, that did not fit the gendered narratives of slave resistance. Those who recorded the events in the original logs and business records of slavery and the slave trade did not look for or see women. Generations of librarians and archivists tasked with preserving and granting access to those primary records (some of which were still denied to Hall in her recent research) did not look for or see the women. And previous historians did not always ask the right questions and so did not look for or see women in those records.

Swamped sources. 

The Real Thing

There’s a story about Harriet Tubman that I thought about as I watched the powerful Harriet film again. The story goes that, after settling in Philadelphia, the real-life Tubman was invited to a stage performance of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). She declined, stating: 

I ain’t got no heart to go and see the sufferings of my people played on the stage…

and I tell you Mrs. Stowe’s pen hasn’t begun to paint what slavery is as I have seen it

at the far South. I’ve seen the real thing, and I don’t want to see it on no stage or in no

theater.

(Tubman quoted in Miles, Night Flyer, p.186.)

Harriet Tubman reminds us that whatever we think we know or can learn about the history of slavery, we will never know “the real thing.” 

Percival Everett wrote the story he wanted to tell - the story of James, a man who could not be contained or fully understood as simply “Jim.” The novel reimagines who this character might have been if anyone had bothered to ask, or to listen. As a novelist, Everett wrote a fictionalized story grounded in a real history. And he reminds us to ask the questions that historians ask: Are we looking in the right places? Are we listening to all the voices? 

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