In Chapter 2 of James, the title character teaches his six children how to speak to white people—how to speak like Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. “Why do we talk differently for them?

You can hear that stress prefigured at the end of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” when Huck admits, “If I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it.” ...