Linguicide and freedom: Percival Everett’s ‘James’

It was ‘my language,’ says our hero James, that ‘had so disturbed and frightened’ Judge Thatcher, the White slaver.¹

But it was neither James’s profanity (which is non-existent), nor his angry delivery, that shocks the Judge. Instead, it’s James’s ability to speak conventional American-English.

Up to this point the Judge, like all other White characters in the novel, had assumed that Black slaves can only speak in their patois, conceived of as a sign of lack of intelligence.

James is not unique: all Black characters are able to speak conventional American-English.

James’s novelty, however, comes in his willingness to set aside the linguistic performance of a Black slave, and all that comes with it. In opting to speak standard American-English with and in front of White characters, James effectively ends his performance as inferior.

That performance was primarily linguistic. James kills the language: he commits linguicide.

Rewriting Huckleberry Finn

James was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the fiction prize at the British Book Awards in 2025. He was also named as author of the year at the latter.

The novel is a revised version of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) which details the adventures of the boy Huck and the slave Jim. Not only does James bring Twain’s novel forward around twenty years (from the 1830s/40s) to the moment the American Civil War broke out (1861), but Everett’s novel also re-casts certain conversations from its foregoing novel.

For instance, a conversation about Huck hiding his ‘father’s’ pox-ridden body in chapter sixteen of Twain’s novel—all the while trying to hide Jim from other White people who might snatch him as a runaway slave—reveals Huck’s quick thinking much more in James.

In Huckleberry Finn, Huck ‘hadn’t the spunk of a rabbit’ when he’s being questioned by the men; but in James, he responds with confidence to the men’s first question: ‘“I bring him out for air every day. He’s got the smallpox.”’ (Everett, p. 81).

These are some narrative revisions. But the most significant revision is in the conception of Jim’s language performance.

Language performance

Early in James, Jim (still with his slave name) instructs his daughter how to speak ‘Black’. The ‘language lesson’ (Everett, p. 21) expands to include White people’s beliefs in God and the pernicious use the government makes of religion to coerce Americans.

It is clear that to speak in this way is a ‘performance’. There are several moments of performance in the novel, revealing that Everett uses it as a thematic device, and not just a passing comment.

We see the minstrels’ singing; we see the so-called Duke and King performing those roles and their confidence tricks; and we see Huck perform all sorts of parts during his various adventures.

The difference between those performances and the Black language performance is that there is a limit to the danger arising from those performances’ failures. The King’s and Duke’s results in a tarring and feathering in Huckleberry Finn, but in James we just see Huck escape their clutches and come to look for Jim.

However, Jim’s language performance matters. The passage that heads this blog is just among many where the White character is shocked by the revelation of Jim’s language performance.

And that shock and fear can only arise when the performance ends. When, that is, Jim can lift the veil on his speech to reveal his proper way of speaking.

The shock comes from Jim’s linguicide.

Linguicide

‘Linguicide’ is defined as ‘forced language loss’, and is often grouped together with, or put on a continuum with, genocide.² It is considered a violent act from one group against another where the target is language.

By eradicating a community’s language, you begin to erase the binds that tie the community together. In theory, the community will cease to existence as a consequence.

However, I propose to use the term differently here, and in full awareness of the different context. For, when Jim decides to speak only in the standard tongue of American-English, he is ‘killing’ his slave self and everything that comes with it: his ties to inferiority, his willingness to abandon his own needs and wants in favour of his White owners’, his public persona of trustworthy slave.

The sign for this is his new name, ‘James’.

And, by refusing to take a surname, he is also refusing to adopt the rules for naming as set out by the White establishment. This way he maintains a protest against the White power to name, all the while overcoming his owners’ prerogative of naming him ‘Jim’ in the first place.

Out of the ashes of the linguicide of the Black, slavery vernacular, James is re-born. Now he is free.

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1. Perceval Everett, James (London: Picador, 2025 [2024]), p. 290. ↩︎
2. Joshua James Zwisler, ‘Linguistic genocide or linguicide?: A discussion of terminology in forced language loss’, Apples: Journal of Applied Language Studies, 15.2 (2021), 43–7 <available: https://apples.journal.fi/article/view/103419/66705>. ↩︎