Books: James

The picaresque novel is an enduring literary tradition that’s been holding readers in rapt attention since the 1550s. It typically features a plucky protagonist of low social standing narrating a series of (usually) first-person adventures that may or may not be related or linear but that together compose a tale of self-discovery or personal growth and almost always of biting social commentary.

 
Think Miguel de Cervantes’ 1605 Don Quixote, Voltaire’s 1759 Candide, Mark Twain’s 1884 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Invisible Man … and on a grander, more modern scale, every book series, soap opera, sitcom and movie franchise that eventually uses the word “universe.”

Twain’s Huckleberry Finn follows the adventures (or at least the extraordinary experiences) of a young white boy in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) South who runs away to escape his abusive father and along the way joins forces with the runaway slave Twain calls N****r Jim, who’s escaping all the horrors you’d expect a human slave to want to escape from.

 
Twain narrates the novel exclusively through Huck Finn’s perspective as he and Jim raft down the Mississippi and encounter bounty hunters looking for Jim, charlatans, hostile crowds, distant family members (and other massive coincidences), love interests, and a host of other people and situations that hold them back and propel them forward to a number of discoveries—the most notable being Huck’s (and our) deeper understanding the cruelties and horrors of slavery.

But it’s told completely through the lens of a white man of privilege.

 
Percival Everett's 2024 novel James revisits Huck and Jim’s picaresque narrative and tells it entirely from Jim’s perspective. The fact that Everett has Jim call himself James (out of earshot of white people when necessary) is the first layer of the dignity, humanity and imperfect complexity he brings to the man as he and Huck stumble from horrors to joys to near misses to more horrors on their way through the antebellum South.

 
It’s not a spoiler to say that he gives James the ability to read and write. Or that he often strays far from Twain’s original narrative, especially as he fills in the blanks in James’ life during the times Twain has him separated from Huck.

 
I hate that my review of this book is mostly about the white literary history and context instead of James’ experience as a black man. But the book is so full of rich details and poignant moments and random brushes with history and a level of experience I could never possibly understand as a white man that I don’t want to decide for people what parts of it are mine to divulge.

 
I’ll leave it at this: The character James that Everett creates in the book is so compelling and so human that I was immediateky invested in everything he says, thinks, observes and does. And I know enough about the original Huck Finn story that I was often filled with dread about the things I knew awaited James as I read. Everett even gives the secondary and tertiary characters James and Huck meet on their picaresque journeys enough humanity and dignity that they stuck with me long after they had fulfilled their literary purposes and he’d left them behind.

James is one of two novels by black authors about black experiences I’ve been reading simultaneously during Black History Month. It is at times a very tough read. It alternates between gorgeously crafted prose and dry, jagged exposition as situations dictate. It’s filled with characters Everett gives deep intrinsic value with small, masterful brush strokes.

And it’s definitely something I’ll read again.

Happy 134th birthday, Grant Wood!

Grant Wood, best known for his iconic American Gothic, lived and worked most of his life in and around Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His legacy in the area—in addition to an exhaustive collection of his work in the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art permanent collection—includes an annual art festival, a grade school (my alma mater!) and even the entire region’s public education agency—all in his name.

Of course, no Cedar Rapids student’s education is complete without thorough coverage of Wood’s stylized, iconoclastic, humorous and sometimes political oeuvre. And this Cedar Rapids student came away with a lifelong love of his work.

Grant Wood was a pioneer in a loosely coordinated artistic movement called Regionalism, which eschewed modernist, abstract trends like Impressionism and Cubism in favor of stylistic, romanticized views of everyday rural life in the 1930s. The Regionalists were less concerned with the trendy politics of 1930s Social Realists than with renouncing the hegemony of popular European art and culture and celebrating the honest work ethic and modest demeanor of the Midwest.

In 1928, Wood received a commission to create a giant stained-glass window for the American Legion in Cedar Rapids. In preparation, he traveled to Munich to study ancient stained-glass techniques under Germany’s famed master craftsmen. The window he created, featuring a 16-foot Lady of Peace standing over six life-size soldiers representing the Revolutionary War through World War I, was a masterpiece of technique, form and color. Though as far as Google and every search term I can think of are concerned, it never had a name. But you can see it in all its shimmery namelessness here:

Fun fact: The model for the Lady of Peace figure was his sister, Nan Wood Graham, who was also the model for the female figure in "American Gothic."

Despite the window's unmistakable American themes, it drew fire from misguided patriots who criticized Wood for studying with the Germans—the enemy!—so soon after the Great War. One of the most vocal groups was the local chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution.

Wood’s elegant response: Daughters of Revolution, a satirical painting showing three dour spinstresses standing self-righteously—one, pinky extended in haughty indignation, holding a teacup in my grandmother’s china pattern—in front of Emmanuel Leutz’s famous Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Wood’s point, lost completely on the knee-jerk reactionaries the painting so elegantly mocked, lies in the fact that Washington Crossing the Delaware—that beloved icon of American patriotism—was painted by a German.

I loved this painting before I even knew its story. The delightfully smug women drew me in because their spiritual progeny hung just a few branches over on my family tree. The Blue Willow teacup fascinated me because its cousins served as my grandmother’s everyday dishes. (Have you ever eaten green Jell-O from a blue plate? It looks very-not-deliciously brown.) And that shape—that relentless horizontalness—made the painting such a challenge to display in any setting ... like right here on my blog.

My relentlessly horizontal framed print of Daughters of Revolution—which has followed me through six houses, apartments and condos in Cedar Rapids and Chicago—now hangs in our relentlessly long front hallway, and one of my grandmother's Blue Willow teacups sits safely on a tastefully underlit shelf with a small collection of other blue-and-white ceramicware in my bedroom. They are quite literally among my favorite possessions. 

And I am proudly and dutifully as a Cedar Rapidian sharing these works and their stories here so you can enjoy their oft-overlooked brilliance and awesomeness in celebration of Grant Wood's birthday.