"left"> I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
Langston Hughes
I don't like the feel of wet clothes. Damp clothes. Slushy shoes. If I've walked in mud, it was by accident.
I've never swam in any body of water-- river or lake. I'm not a beach person. Never even been in a pool. I don't know how to swim; and yet, I've never had lessons. I was born under a water sign, if you believe in astronomy. I don't. We had an abundance of water-sign folks in our family: Cancers, Pieces, and Scorpios"
So when I think of my ancestors, escaping plantations by way of the river, the Mississippi, on a skiff or raft, I understand the price they paid in the name of freedom.
It's been a little more than a year since I first read Percival Everett's James: A Novel. The first time, I read it out of curiosity, given I had never heard of the author. I made a point of seeing the film American Fiction, an adaptation of his book Erasure. To be honest, I tried to read Erasure, and I heard myself thinking about what a short time I have left on Earth. Twenty pages in, I put it down, deciding to see the movie, American Fiction, instead, on my laptop. The film was a little more interesting. At least when I think about how agents and would-be-producers are still expecting the "Black voice" to sound like Jim in Huckleberry Finn. Or, at least, similar to the street-wise Blacks, if not outright gangsters"
I think I was still seeing Mark Twain's shuffling Jim as Huck's sidekick. On the second go-around, I felt as if I were reading a book I had never read and noticing gems of wisdom throughout the book. To miss a sentence in James is to miss a whole universe on that Mississippi River.
I could see James and, most important, I could hear him. Awoke to the hypocrisy of the rhetoric of a US, claiming to be a beacon of democracy, James transverses the space between us to say, don't believe a word of it! The practice the violence of rape and the cruelty of depriving humans of their right to be human beings still is. I could also see that James isn't Mark Twain's story.
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