James by Percival Everett (Mug Included)

June 19th, 2025 Celebrate Juneteenth with literature and an apropos coffee mug! JAMES is a morally-enhanced reimagining of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, itself a scathing critique of humanity’s capacity for dehumanization. An Odyssey across 19th-century American South. In this version, James speaks with a graduate-level command of English with his fellow brethren, whilst outwardly playing the dull-witted subordinate in front of his masters. It might be easy to dismiss Percival Everett’s re-interpretation of James as historical sanitization, bequeathing him a sense of dignified selfhood to suit our 21st-century appetite for human rights. After all, to paraphrase David Graeber, what is slavery but the ultimate form of being ripped from one's context, and thus from all social relationships that make one a human being. The slave is, in a very real sense, dead. Therefore, to breathe LIFE back into James is to give him a soul, a will to live, an emaciated heart, and the strength to exact revenge. James, our hero, our prosecutor and judge, is powered by an energy source containing 160 years of collective shame and redemption. Who, then, is better qualified to acquit us of our sins than one who was last and then became first? (Matthews 20:16) My conclusion: No, Percival Everett did not resort to cheap sanitization. He is asking James a spiritual question. Percival Everett is reaching across space and time to ask this of James: “Will you forgive us?” *** -Pick-up in Danville. -Free for the individual who go can best challenge my analysis. -Do not use AI for I can sniff it out like a fart in a crowded elevator.