The American Revolution That Hasn't Happened Yet: What Percival Everett's James taught me about slavery, white America, and the church.

Caution: this contains major spoilers for the novel

I was fifteen years old when Roots appeared on television in 1977.

My father was a minister, and I remember him canceling church meetings so our family could watch it. That alone tells you something about the importance he attached to what we were seeing.

One scene has stayed with me for nearly fifty years.

As I remember it, a slaveholder sits in his study reading the Bible. Just outside his window, an enslaved person is being beaten.

I’ve never forgotten that image.

A man quietly reading his Bible while another human being suffers just outside his window.

How does someone do that? How does a person read the scriptures, believe himself to be a Christian, perhaps even consider himself a good man, and remain unmoved by such cruelty?

I was fifteen. About the age of Huck Finn.

Now, nearly fifty years later, I have just finished reading James by Percival Everett.

And that image from Roots has come rushing back.

What an extraordinary novel. One of the finest books I’ve read in years. Everett is a remarkable storyteller. The twists are breathtaking. His writing is clever, funny, horrifying, and deeply moving. How have I missed this author for so long?

Everett retells Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, this time through the eyes of the enslaved man we knew as Jim.

Except he is James.

And James has a voice.

He is intelligent, thoughtful, perceptive, and well-read. He understands the white people around him far better than they understand him. But he lives in a world where revealing his intelligence could get him killed.

So he disguises it. He speaks the way white people expect him to speak. He pretends not to understand things he understands perfectly.

Imagine that indignity. Having to participate in the very lie that is used to justify your enslavement.

There are scenes in this novel that made my skin crawl.

The overseer and his companions gathered around a campfire, bragging about their sexual conquests. Except these aren’t conquests. They are rapes. The brutal exploitation of women who have no power to refuse.

And these men talk about it as though it were nothing.

Then there is Judge Thatcher.

In Mark Twain’s original novel, Thatcher appears as a respectable, educated man, a representative of law and justice. Everett turns that image upside down.

When James confronts Thatcher with the sexual violence inflicted upon enslaved women, the judge has no meaningful answer. His silence is chilling.

But when Thatcher discovers just how intelligent James really is, his response is one of fear and outrage.

Think about that contrast.

A man who has participated in a system of terrible cruelty is shaken to discover that an enslaved Black man can read, reason, and speak as intelligently as he can.

And here’s the irony. James has secretly educated himself, in part, by reading books from Judge Thatcher’s own library.

The judge’s books have helped James develop the very intellectual independence the judge finds so threatening.

What disturbs Thatcher isn’t simply that James has learned to read. It’s that James refuses to conform to the inferior identity that Thatcher has assigned him.

The judge can accommodate cruelty. What he cannot tolerate is a challenge to his understanding of his own superiority.

And perhaps that is what makes him so disturbing.

He represents a society more offended by a challenge to its presumed superiority than by the suffering upon which that superiority depends.

I wonder how often we still do that.

And then there is the minstrel show! The grotesque spectacle of white performers imitating Black people, and the extraordinary absurdity of James having to navigate that performance. Even one of the white performers becomes uncomfortable with the racial masquerade demanded of him.

What a thoroughly corrupted world Everett reveals.

But here’s something I found surprising about my own response.

I wasn’t particularly disturbed when James finally fought back.

He had endured years of whippings, humiliation, and the constant threat of losing his family. He had witnessed the sexual exploitation of enslaved women and the casual cruelty of men who believed themselves entitled to other human beings.

Eventually, James draws a line.

Enough.

He is fighting for his family. He is fighting for himself. But he is also fighting against an entire system of injustice.

And I found myself cheering for him.

I think Everett wants us to consider what it means when we are more troubled by the violence of resistance than by the violence that made resistance necessary.

That brings me back to Roots.

As I remember the series, it gave us some white slaveholders who appeared comparatively decent. People who could be kind, even while participating in a profoundly evil institution.

It allowed us white viewers a little room to breathe. We could imagine ourselves being among the good ones.

Everett doesn’t give us much room for that.

He doesn’t let occasional kindness excuse the ownership of another human being. He doesn’t let intelligence or respectability disguise moral corruption.

And he certainly doesn’t seem interested in making white readers feel better about themselves.

I don’t think Everett trusts white America.

And I don’t blame him.

We white Americans are quite comfortable condemning slavery. We look back at the slaveholders and shake our heads. We celebrate emancipation. We honor the Civil Rights Movement. We assure ourselves that we have come a long way.

And we have.

But we are far less comfortable when someone suggests that the racism that made slavery possible is still alive among us.

Not simply in individual acts of hatred, but in the assumptions we carry, the advantages we inherit, the institutions we defend, and the injustices we have learned to overlook.

We want to believe we’re the good ones.

Everett isn’t interested in handing us that reassurance.

And as a Christian, and someone who has spent nearly four decades in ministry, I find that especially challenging.

Because the church has an awful lot to answer for.

Christians defended slavery. They used scripture to justify it. They preached obedience to enslaved people while defending the rights of those who owned them. Later, churches defended segregation, resisted civil rights, and condemned those who challenged injustice as troublemakers.

Some of the same people who proclaimed the love of Jesus were perfectly comfortable with systems that denied others their humanity.

How could they not see the contradiction?

And then I remember that man reading his Bible while someone was being beaten outside his window.

Perhaps the more important question is not how they could have been so blind.

Perhaps it’s what we’re blind to today.

What suffering is happening outside our windows while we sit comfortably reading our Bibles?

What injustices have we grown accustomed to?

When do we become more offended by someone challenging our privilege than by the injustice they’re challenging?

And when do we confuse keeping the peace with doing what is right?

John Wesley insisted that faith involved both personal and social holiness. Loving God and loving our neighbors could never be separated.

Yet we Christians have often become far more concerned with personal goodness than with confronting systems of injustice.

We want to be kind people. Decent people. Good Christians.

But goodness that never challenges injustice is not enough.

And perhaps that is one of Everett’s most disturbing questions: What good is our goodness if we’re unwilling to challenge the suffering around us?

There is another part of James I keep returning to.

James doesn’t want to be white.

He wants freedom. He wants dignity. He wants his family. He wants the right to think and speak and live without fear.

But he doesn’t aspire to become the people who have denied him those things.

He wants to be fully himself.

And as the novel progresses, James changes. He reads. He encounters ideas that challenge him. He begins to write. He discovers not simply a voice, but the power to tell his own story.

And then there is that astonishing revelation about Huck. Suddenly, James’s fierce determination to protect the boy takes on an entirely new meaning. He isn’t simply protecting a friend. He is protecting his son.

It changes the way we understand so much of what has come before.

I almost wish Everett had ended the book with a few pages of James’s own writing.

Not more descriptions of the suffering he endured.

I wanted to know what he hoped for.

What kind of world did he imagine for his children? Could he envision a future in which they would never have to hide their intelligence or defend their humanity?

And would he ever trust white America to help create that world?

Perhaps Everett would refuse to answer that question.

And perhaps he should.

Because the burden of creating a more just society shouldn’t rest upon those who have suffered injustice. It belongs especially to those of us who have benefited from the world as it is.

The more I’ve thought about this novel, the more I’ve come to see it as a story of revolution.

Perhaps even the great American Revolution.

Not 1776.

That revolution declared that all men were created equal while leaving hundreds of thousands of human beings enslaved. Men fought for their freedom while denying freedom to others.

James’s revolution goes deeper.

He insists that dignity isn’t something the powerful give to the powerless. Freedom isn’t a favor. Humanity isn’t something that needs to be earned or approved by someone else.

It already belongs to him.

And he is no longer willing to live as though it doesn’t.

We fought a revolution in 1776. A Civil War ended slavery. Generations of courageous people struggled for civil rights.

And still, the promise of equal human dignity remains unfinished.

I believe in grace. I believe in the possibility of transformation. I believe people and communities can change.

But grace is not an excuse. Forgiveness cannot be demanded. And reconciliation without justice is simply another way of asking the wounded to remain silent.

If our faith means anything, it must make us willing to face truths that disturb us.

It must move us beyond wanting to be seen as good people toward actually doing what is good.

I think back to that fifteen-year-old boy watching Roots with his family.

My father canceled church meetings so we could watch.

I’m grateful he did.

Nearly fifty years later, Percival Everett has made me look through that window again.

And I find myself asking whether we are still reading our Bibles while people suffer just outside.

Maybe the great American Revolution isn’t over.

Maybe the question isn’t whether we are good people.

Maybe the question is whether we are willing to change.

And whether we are willing to open the window, put down the Bible for a moment, and do something about what we see.

shalom, just Brook w no titles