\n<\/p>\n
Last year, Everett published \u201cJames<\/a>,\u201d his reimagining of the American classic \u201cThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,\u201d told through the voice of Mark Twain\u2019s enslaved Black character Jim. In the strictest sense, \u201cJames\u201d employs parody and pastiche, drawing broadly from Twain\u2019s plot and characters but endowing its first-person narrator with the wit and eloquence that his original creator denied him. Generous readers of Twain\u2019s novel, like the writer Ralph Ellison, who bemoaned that \u201cTwain\u2019s bitter satire was taken for comedy,\u201d forgive \u201cHuck Finn\u201d its many abuses \u2014 the 219 instances of the N-word; the indulgent last third of the book (which Ernest Hemingway advised readers to skip), which gives itself over to Jim\u2019s gratuitous confinement and petty torture, masterminded by a sadistic Tom Sawyer and a complicit Huck. Everett retains the best of Twain\u2019s story \u2014 especially the freewheeling adventures of Huck and Jim on the Mississippi \u2014 and layers over them a sophisticated satirical register in which Jim, now James, claims agency.<\/p>\n The second chapter begins with James leading an unconventional elocution lesson for a group of Black children, instructing them on how best to fracture rather than to refine their English pronunciation. \u201cWhite folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don\u2019t disappoint them,\u201d James tells the children. One of his keen pupils offers up an axiom: \u201cNever address any subject directly when talking to another slave,\u201d she says. When encountering a kitchen fire, for instance, instead of warning directly, you might instead exclaim, \u201cLawdy, missum! Looky dere,\u201d so as not to show up your white mistress. \u201cWhat do we call that?\u201d James asks his pupils. Together they respond, \u201cSignifying.\u201d<\/p>\n Signifying, a form of semantic indirection, is neatly suited to satire. As the literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. defines it, signifying is encoded linguistic play that exposes \u201cthe figurative difference between the literal and the metaphorical, between surface and latent meaning.\u201d Signifying, like the broad category of satire, is a double-voiced art; it doesn\u2019t so much say one thing and mean another as it says one thing and means two. An abiding practice that stretches back through the Black oral tradition \u2014 in the playful and profane narrative poems called the toasts, in the games of verbal jousting called the dozens and in sermons and songs \u2014 signifying testifies to the centrality of satire as a resource for Black Americans, both artists and everyday people.<\/p>\n THE FIRST BLACK American satirists were enslaved, lampooning the rituals and manners of those who called themselves masters. Cakewalks, emulations of white high society\u2019s formal promenade dances, were ostensibly performed for the benefit of plantation owners, though in fact they were exquisite parody \u2014 exposing white pretensions through Black virtuosity. Traces of this same sensibility are apparent in 19th-century folk lyrics that white listeners often mistook for songs of mirth. Such subtle comic subversions sat beside more overt expressions that centered persuasion over amusement. David Walker\u2019s<\/a> \u201cAppeal\u201d (1829), a groundbreaking antislavery pamphlet that made the case for abolition decades before Harriet Beecher Stowe\u2019s stilted and stoic novel \u201cUncle Tom\u2019s Cabin\u201d (1852), calls out the hypocrisy of a South Carolina newspaper that had the temerity to label the Turks \u201cthe most barbarous people in the world\u201d for their treatment of the Greeks while advertising a slave auction directly below. \u201cI declare,\u201d Walker writes<\/a>, \u201cit is really so amusing to hear the Southerners and Westerners of this country talk about barbarity<\/em>, that it is positively, enough to make a man smile<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n The Black smile would be cast as caricature starting in the early decades of the 19th century with the advent of blackface minstrelsy, a practice in which white male performers would \u201cblack up\u201d their faces using burned cork, painting on rictus grins of livid red. The songs, skits and comic routines of the minstrel stage served as cruel inversions of Black linguistic fluency and imaginative expression. Satire had no place in minstrelsy because the joke was invariably one-note: punching down at those excluded from the promise of American freedom. In the aftermath of the Civil War, some newly liberated Black performers would take the minstrel stage themselves, introducing a satirical sophistication winking from behind the black mask. This practice extended into the 20th century, most notably with the comic actor Bert Williams<\/a>, who along with his co-star George Walker created \u201cIn Dahomey: A Negro Musical Comedy\u201d (1903), the first full-length musical written and performed by Black artists to appear on Broadway.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\u201cHumor is vengeance,\u201d the novelist Paul Beatty writes.<\/h2>\n