This rewriting of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Percival Everett is fascinating, but probably not for the reasons some people may think of. The original book was a denunciation of slavery at the very time of Abraham Lincoln's election and the beginning of the Civil War. It was to be implemented, at its writing time, as a denunciation of the Jim Crow segregation being instated by Congress in the 1870s, and the Supreme Court in the wake of it. "Stop doing that! You fools!" And it was totally useless and inefficient at the time. So, what does it mean today when rewritten by Percival Everett, not from Huckleberry Finn's point of view, but from the adult slave Jim's point of view? It means for today's public that the whole case of slavery is still not solved, and it has become the new racist and racial discrimination and segregation that still governs the USA. And this is emphasized by the most cowardly presidents we have had since Obama, meaning all the presidents since Obama. Trump openly encourages all reactionary nationalist and more than conservative, openly jingoistic forces in the USA, or Biden, who never had the stamina and will to really prevent this evolution by being weak and vain enough not to let the Democrats have a primary election, and thus forcing them into defeat in front of the new American-style apartheid. True enough, Trump has put some milk in his coffee, and he targets brown people with a lot of Native American blood and African slave blood in their veins, essentially Latin and Mesoamerican immigrants, illegal or not. They are the color of "Café au Lait" from New Orleans Café de Paris, if it still exists, rather than black coffee without milk and without sugar, since sugar is reserved for the elite of this society, and the elite is milk-colored, blond, and with blue eyes. And like Jim, you can only escape slavery if you kill a few people, if you set aflame a whole farm of corn and whatever else can burn, including a few buildings, and you run like an Olympic champion, and you drop your slave name and reduce yourself to "Just James;' just your fictitious full first name that no one had ever used, and you probably had not been regularly christened anyway, but that "Just James" instead of "Nigger Jim" makes you escape justice for the "crimes" committed during your escape from slavery. The author does not see that it takes more than just these two words, "Just James," to retrieve your purity, to get you epiphany, and to conquer your salvation. James is condemned to never tell his real liberation because even in the North, crimes are crimes, and the vengeance of the whites does not slice up justice in either South or North. Fascinating, I said, mesmerizing, I can also say, but it takes a lot more struggling to get rid of the enslaving racism of the American society, and melting or thawing the present ICE of this society will produce a million times more carbon dioxide than the whole planet produced in 2000 AD.
Jacques COULARDEAU (Mon,) studied this question.