On April 25, 2025, students in Professor Stephen Pasqualina’s Winter 2025 Black Modernisms course attended the 2025 Bauder Lecture featuring author Percival Everett. Just a week before the lecture, the class concluded with intensive readings and discussions of his latest novel, James. The following is a reflection on the lecture by one of the outstanding students in the course.
by Asha Sierra, ’26
On April 25th, award-winning author Percival Everett visited the Marygrove Conservancy to deliver the thirty-sixth annual Bauder Lecture, presented by the Contemporary American Author Lecture Series (CAALS). The focus of his talk was his most recent book, James, winner of several major literary awards, including the 2024 Kirkus Prize, the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction, and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
During the lecture, Everett read from different passages of his novel and then offered insights about his writing process and what he thinks of the work now. The night was concluded with an engaging Q&A session and a book signing.
James takes the character Jim from Mark Twain’s classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), centering the once side character in a story of his own. Despite being based on Twain’s work, the creative choices Everett makes turn it into not just an entirely new narrative, but one Twain wouldn’t have been able to write.
One primary change is the addition of code-switching in James. In Twain’s novel, his character Jim and other enslaved people have their own dialect or accent. In Everett’s novel, he calls this diction “slave talk.” In James, it is revealed that this coded language is an act or a performance put on by the enslaved.
Early in the Bauder Lecture, Everett read a passage from the book in which James hosts a class for enslaved children on how to speak around white people. His aim in this “language lesson” is to protect the children by teaching them how to reinforce white people’s superiority complex amongst the enslaved.
“Let’s try some situational translations. Something extreme first. You’re walking down the street and you see that Mrs. Holiday’s kitchen is on fire. She’s standing in her yard, her back to her house, unaware. How do you tell her?”
“Fire, fire,” January said.
“Direct. And that’s almost correct,” I said.
The youngest of them, lean and tall five-year-old Rachel, said, “Lawdy missum! Looky dere.”
“Perfect,” I said. “Why is that correct?”
Lizzie raised her hand. “Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.”
“And why is that?” I asked.
February said, “Because they need to know everything before us. Because they need to name everything.” (Everett 22)
What James is teaching — the act of changing one’s language style based on a different audience or environment — aligns with the standard definition of code-switching. However, this is a much more extreme version. Today, when code-switching is used, the motivation is most often to create comfortability while in a new environment or with a new audience. In James, code-switching is not just about comfort; it’s about survival.
As James explains: “White folks expect us to sound a certain way . . . The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior’” (Everett 21). If the enslaved were to reveal that they sound just as if not more intelligent than their white counterparts, they would threaten the entire antebellum social hierarchy. If this threat is perceived, it would result in the enslaved receiving further mistreatment, abuse, or even death if the threatened party feels it is suited.
Code-switching is now far more than a skill to keep in one’s back pocket for assimilation. During the Bauder Lecture, Everett explained that the change of dialect in James is “how people survived in the world.” It is a constant performance they had to put on, a mask to wear. Exhausting as this act may be, it was one of the few ways they knew to keep their livelihood. Even as brutal and unfair as that livelihood was, it was all they had.
Attending this lecture made me appreciate the novel with new eyes. Everett’s insights on code-switching and Black life pointed out new layers and hidden subtleties within his work. While there, I also realized the book is not short of humorous moments. When reading James in my Black Modernisms class, I brushed over a lot of lines that earned substantial laughter from the audience when read aloud. At times, I felt I was hearing the different passages for the first time.
Overall, the event made me that much more impressed with Everett as an author. He not only reinvented a classic tale but, for a night, made his novel feel brand new again.
Asha Sierra (she/her) is an English major minoring in Psychology. She has a passion for diverse storytelling and aims to provide the representation she never saw for herself. When not writing, you can find her working with Detroit Mercy Theatre Company as a costume and scenic assistant. She graduates in 2026 and hopes to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing.
Missed the Bauder Lecture? Catch it on PBS Books or on Detroit Mercy’s College of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences Facebook page on May 7, 2025, at 8:00 pm. Follow CAALS on Facebook and Instagram.
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