“What if the enslaved were never silent?”
By Peggy Arthur
Greetings!
Why It’s Rooted
James is not just a reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It’s a literary reckoning—a powerful act of reclamation. Told through the eyes of the enslaved Jim—here named James—Percival Everett unearths a history long buried under myth and whitewashed nostalgia.
Everett dares to ask:
What if enslaved people had their own secret language?
What if “yes, massa” wasn’t compliance but survival?
What if silence was never emptiness, but resistance?
This novel gives voice to what was forcibly silenced. It reshapes the American canon with sharp wit, brutal honesty, and radical imagination.
Root Connection
Reading James forced me to face echoes I’ve tried to forget—minstrel songs, coded speech, hidden literacy. It reminded me that many of our ancestors had to survive not just bondage, but performance. That to be brilliant and Black under slavery was to be invisible on purpose.
Like my own characters in The Pretender’s Game, James moves through danger cloaked in subversion. He teaches in secret. He reads in hiding. He resists through thought, through silence, through memory.
This story felt like ancestral fire—burning down illusion to make way for truth.
What It Made Me Ask
- What does it mean to speak when no one wants to hear you?
- What do we lose when we let whitewashed versions of history define our classics?
- Have we been listening to the wrong voice all along?
Rooted Reflection Prompt
Have you ever read something that made you see a “classic” differently?
Did James’s voice challenge how you understand the legacy of slavery—or resistance?
Have you ever encountered a silence that was actually filled with truth?
Share your thoughts below—I want to know what stayed with you.
Recommended For:
Readers of historical fiction, literary fiction, anti-racist literature, Black history, and anyone ready to reimagine the canon through a Black lens.
Related Rooted Reads:
- Happyland by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
- Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
- The Known World by Edward P. Jones
- Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
- The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Love books with depth.
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Peggy Arthur 