Spoilers Ahead
Spoiler warning. This video gives away all of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and all of James, endings included.
Here is the short answer. Twain’s novel is a runaway boy and a runaway man drifting down the Mississippi, told by the boy. Percival Everett’s James follows the same river, but the man tells it, and he knows far more than Huck ever notices. Part one is the Huckleberry Finn summary. Part two is what James keeps, flips and adds.
A Note On Language
First, a note on language. Twain’s book, in the free Project Gutenberg copy, ebook seventy six, uses a racial slur again and again. I ran a count, and it appears more than two hundred times. James uses it too, about seventy times in our copy.
I will not say it in this video, and it will not be in the captions. Where a line needs it, I will describe the line instead.
The American Library Association puts Huckleberry Finn at number thirty three on its list of the most frequently challenged books of twenty ten to twenty nineteen. Read it with that history in mind.
Huck Runs
Twain published the book in the eighteen eighties, and Huck tells it in his own voice. A notice on the first page warns that anyone looking for a moral will be banished. Huck lives with the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson, who try to civilize him. He has six thousand dollars from a robbers’ cave, held by Judge Thatcher.
Miss Watson owns a man named Jim. In chapter two Tom Sawyer plays a prank on him while he sleeps, and Jim turns it into a tall tale about witches. Then Huck’s father, Pap, a violent drunk, grabs him and locks him in a cabin. Huck escapes by faking his own murder with a pig’s blood and paddles to Jackson’s Island. That is chapter seven.
Jim On The Island
On the island Huck finds Jim. Jim ran after overhearing that Miss Watson would sell him to New Orleans for eight hundred dollars. Huck decides to keep the secret, even though he fears people would call him a low-down Abolitionist. Jim, counting his luck, says he owns himself, and is worth eight hundred dollars.
A flood floats a house past them, and Jim finds a dead man inside. He covers the face and will not let Huck look. A rattlesnake bites Jim, after Huck’s own joke goes wrong. Then a woman in town tells Huck that Jim has a reward on him, and they flee.
The Raft
They raft south by night. In the fog they are separated, and when Huck finds him, he tries to convince Jim it was all a dream. Jim answers that trash is what people are who put dirt on their friends’ heads. Huck apologizes. That is chapter fifteen.
Near Cairo, the town where the Ohio River could carry Jim to freedom, Jim talks of buying his wife and children, or stealing them. Huck almost turns him in. Two armed men ask whether his man is white or black. Huck says white, and cannot say more. They miss Cairo in the fog, and a steamboat smashes the raft.
Feud And Frauds
Huck lands with the Grangerfords, a family locked in a feud with the Shepherdsons. A boy named Buck explains it started about thirty years ago, and nobody can say why. Huck then watches Buck and a cousin shot in the river, and covers their faces.
Back on the raft come two con men, who call themselves a duke and a king. Huck knows they are frauds and stays quiet. The king poses as a reformed pirate at a camp meeting and collects eighty seven dollars. In an Arkansas town they stage a show called the Royal Nonesuch, which takes in four hundred and sixty five dollars over three nights. Elsewhere in town a man is shot dead, and a mob forms, until a man named Sherburn faces it down. At night Jim mourns his family, and tells Huck how he once struck his little daughter, ’Lizabeth, not knowing she had gone deaf.
The Choice
The frauds then fleece a grieving family, the Wilks sisters, by posing as their uncles. Huck steals the money back, and tells one of the sisters the truth.
Then the king sells Jim for forty dollars to a farmer named Phelps. Huck writes a letter to Miss Watson to tell her where Jim is. Then he remembers the trip, and tears it up with the words, all right, then, I’ll go to hell. That is chapter thirty one.
The Phelps Farm
At the farm, Aunt Sally mistakes Huck for his friend Tom Sawyer. The real Tom turns up, and agrees to help free Jim. But he turns it into a game, with a rope ladder baked in a pie, secret letters and a coat of arms.
Tom is shot in the leg, and Jim stays to help the doctor. Then Tom reveals that Miss Watson died two months earlier and freed Jim in her will. Tom knew all along. He paid Jim forty dollars for his trouble. Huck says he will light out for the Territory.
Where It Ends
In my view, this last stretch is where readers argue most. Jim is a full person on the raft, and then becomes a prop in Tom’s adventure. Others read the farm as Twain mocking Tom’s romantic games.
One last fact. Jim finally tells Huck that the dead man in the flooded house was Pap. So Huck is free of his father, and his money is safe. Huck says that if he had known how much trouble it was to make a book, he would not have tackled it. The book ends with his own sign off, yours truly, Huck Finn.
Who Tells It
Now part two. James won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in twenty twenty five, according to pulitzer dot org. Everett’s big change is the narrator. Jim tells it in the first person.
In plain English, Jim is educated and ironic. He only slips into dialect when white people are listening. In chapter one he calls it the correct incorrect grammar. Twain’s Jim is seen from outside, through Huck. Everett’s Jim knows exactly what he is hiding. Twain opens with a note that his book uses several dialects. Everett turns dialect into a mask. After the snakebite, Jim has a fever dream in which he argues with the philosopher Voltaire about whether Black people are equal. In Twain, Jim argues with Huck about King Solomon and why people do not speak one language. Everett gives him Voltaire.
The Name Count
Here is our own count, done by searching the text. Twain’s book is about one hundred and ten thousand words. James is about sixty six thousand.
In Twain, where Huck narrates, his name appears about seventy times. In James, it appears over four hundred. Jim’s name goes the other way, about three hundred seventy times in Twain and about one hundred fifty in James. The narrator is the one who is named least.
What James Keeps
Everett keeps the skeleton. Miss Watson plans to sell Jim. Huck fakes his death, they meet on Jackson’s Island, and a house with a dead man floats by. The snakebite, the fog and the wrecked steamboat called the Walter Scott all return.
So do the Grangerford and Shepherdson feud, and the duke and the king. Tom Sawyer teases Jim in the opening, as he does in Twain. Jim has a daughter in both books, though she is Lizzie here.
What James Flips
The flips matter more. Jim learns of the sale from his wife, Sadie, who overheard Miss Watson. He arrives on the island first, and Huck comes second. Huck is the one who dresses as a girl, but only because Jim talks him into it. Jim writes his first words, I am called Jim, and says he has yet to choose a name.
The biggest flip comes in part three. Jim tells Huck that the dead man was Pap. Then, in plain English, he tells Huck, you are my son. The book never settles whether that is true.
What James Adds
Everett adds a whole world, in fifty three short chapters across three parts, with thirty two, nine and twelve chapters. Sadie and Lizzie are living people, whom Jim is trying to reach. He is bought for two hundred dollars by a blackface minstrel troupe led by the real Daniel Emmett. Later he works with a man named Norman, who passes as white, in a scheme to sell and escape.
Part three turns violent. Jim returns to Hannibal, kills an overseer, burns a cornfield and frees his family. Tom Sawyer is gone after the opening. There is no Phelps farm.
Two Endings
In Twain’s ending, Jim is freed by a will and Huck runs off. In Everett’s, Jim frees himself and takes Sadie and Lizzie north to Iowa. A sheriff asks for a runaway by a slur attached to Jim’s name.
Jim says, I am James. The sheriff asks, James what? Jim says, just James. Those are the last words of the book. Huck is not even in the final four chapters.
Here is the difference as I see it, and this is my opinion. In Twain, Jim was already free by the time he was shut in the hut, and nobody told him. In Everett, nobody grants his freedom. He takes it, at a cost, and then names himself.
Which To Read
My opinion is read Twain first if you can, and know the language problem before you start. Read James if you want a funny, angry book that answers Twain scene by scene. It is violent, so check the content notes. James stands on its own, but it is richer if you remember the raft. It is also the shorter book, in short chapters, so it moves fast.
Subscribe, tap like, and tell me in the comments which ending hits harder. Our full James guide is at book explained dot com.
