Pulitzer Prize Winner Percival Everett (‘James’)

Earlier this month, writer Percival Everett was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for James, his subversive and singular reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At the top, we discuss the philosophical problem that led to James (5:50), what repeated readings of Twain’s classic unlocked in Percival (7:56), the influence of his father’s sense of humor (16:20), how he arrived at writing growing up in South Carolina (19:40), and his relationship to the publishing industry, as depicted in Erasure and later the Oscar-winning film American Fiction (21:59). On the back-half, we talk about teaching in the digital age (32:26), why Everett still assigns Blazing Saddles to his students (34:22), the “bad neighborhood” of his own mind (46:08), and what he’s chasing—or trying to excavate—each time he sits down to write (47:04). This conversation was recorded live in Los Angeles in partnership with the Aspen Society. If you’d like to come to our next live show, it will be Saturday, June 14th at the Tribeca Audio Festival in NYC with actor Sam Rockwell. Tickets here https://tribecafilm.com/films/talk-easy-live-episode-with-sam-rockwell-2025! Thoughts, future guest ideas, or your favorite one-liner from this talk with Percival? Comment below or email us at [email protected]. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:21Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:38Sam Fragoso?

  Today, writer Percival Everett. He's the author of more than 30 books across fiction, poetry, and criticism. A feat that is so impressive that I'm tired just saying it. He's also the recent recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his latest novel, James, a funny and bold reimagining of the adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but this time told from Jim's perspective. Of course, Twain's southern classic follows Huck and Jim down the Mississippi, or at least that's how I remember it, reading it as a kid. But a few years back, while Percival was rereading the book, he kept running into the same questions. What

• 1:19Sam Fragoso?

  happens when Huck isn't with Jim? What does freedom mean when you're seen as someone else's property? And so, in the absence of answers from Twain, Everett produced James. For those unfamiliar, Everett has been a quiet but steady literary force since 1983, with many first discovering him around his 2001 novel, Erasure, a biting satire of the publishing world and the narrow expectations often placed on black authors. The book was then adapted into the Oscar-winning film, American Fiction, which introduced Everett's singularly sardonic voice to a wider audience. I sat with Percival recently at Christie's Auction House in Los Angeles as

• 2:04Sam Fragoso?

  part of an intimate live event hosted by the Aspen Society. The Aspen Institute is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. They do a ton of good work, which you can learn about on our website. And I'm excited to share that we'll be returning to the annual Ideas Festival this summer. We went last year with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. We're also going to be coming to New York City for a live show at the Tribeca Audio Festival with none other than Sam Rockwell. It'll be on Saturday, June 14th, at the SVA Theater. If you're in town and want to come, go to TribecaFilm.com/talkeasy and use the code SAM and SAM for 10%

• 2:44Sam Fragoso?

  off. That's TribecaFilm.com/talkeasy, code SAM and SAM, S-A-M-A-N-D-S-A-M. Since the other Sam was in that dinner scene from this season of White Lotus, which is maybe my favorite moment of television in the last couple of years, I have been dying to talk to him. So if you want to hear about that and all things Sam Rockwell, one of, I think, our best living actors, I hope you'll come out in New York City, Saturday, June 14th, at the SVA Theater. We're going to be doing a lot more live shows this year. And so if you want to know when and where those are happening, be sure to join our mailing list. You can

• 3:28Sam Fragoso?

  do that by emailing us at [email protected]. We've also included a link to the Tribeca Festival, our email address, et cetera, in the show notes of this episode. And now, here is my live conversation with Pulitzer Prize winning author, Percival Everett.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Sam, do you mind if I apologize to everyone for being late? I have no excuse except that I am absent-minded. And if I were you, I would have been gone by now. So I thank you for remaining.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  I really thought you were gonna pin that on me.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Do you know it was Sam's fault?

• 4:21Speaker 02

  It's nice to meet you.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Nice to meet you, Sam.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  You're up for this Aspen Literary Award, the winner of which will be announced later this month. But recently, in a profile for The New Yorker, you called awards, quote, "offensive and invidious comparisons of works of art." So I thought we'd start here. How many voters were you trying to win over with that description?

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Well, I always have my fingers pressed firmly against the pulse of American popular culture, which is why I wrote a novel about Dionysus. You know, it would be nice to win an award every week. It's a nice feeling. But really, when you get down to it, it doesn't do anything. It's great to have more readers. But, you know, if any award had been judged on Wednesday instead of Thursday, someone else would win. It's like participating in a blind free throw contest.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Have you done that recently?

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Every week.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Every week, okay, good. So let's talk about the book. I heard that it came to you while playing a game of tennis, which is amazing, because when I'm playing tennis, I'm thinking about playing tennis.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Which is why you probably play a lot better than I do.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  In between volleying, how did this book first appear to you?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, there wasn't much of an appearance. I hit a ball wildly out of the court, and my first thought was, I wonder if anyone has told the story of Huck Finn through James. Which only explained my shot. And then later, I started doing a little research and found that no one had.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  In the Paris Review, you said, "I'm not a natural storyteller. I start with something that bugs me, some philosophical problem, and then I look for a way to explore it." So what was that for James?

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Well, usually, that's very private for me. At the basis of nearly everything.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Well, we're only talking in public, so I think it's okay.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  It's the idea of the construction of meaning, how we do that. Language. You know, people talk about the code-switching in this novel. I never thought of using that term.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Do you not like that term?

• 6:43Speaker 01

  No, I don't dislike it at all, but it makes it sound special when it's only being human. It's what we all do. It's not unusual. It's not exceptional. It's just how we survive in the world. So to name it seems to give it some special standing that I don't think, not that it doesn't deserve, but it misses the point of it.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  So the philosophical problem that you feel comfortable sharing?

• 7:11Speaker 01

  If you're going to force me to be really boring, it comes down to the notion of sense and reference that we see when we entertain fragrant puzzles of, for an example, how you can have the morning star, the evening star, and Venus, the planet, all three things being the same thing but being referred to quite differently and having different contextual import.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  When you published your 2009 novel, "I'm Not Cindy Poitier," you watched all of his movies over and over and over again. You did the same, I'm told, before writing James, rereading Twain's Huckleberry Finn 15 times. What happens through this immersion process? Are you trying to drive yourself mad before you start writing?

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Well, that was an unforeseen side effect of it.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  I wanted to blur the novel. I wanted to know that world, feeling that I owed some loyalty to that world, but I didn't want to owe any loyalty to the text. I'm an admirer of Twain's prose, so I needed to remember what had happened without remembering how it was told to me. And so, reading it over and over, you know, when you repeat a word and it becomes nonsensical, it sounds, what does that mean? Well, that's what happened. The sad part is that I could have read it 10 times and achieved the same effect. But I read it 15, I closed it, and I haven't looked at the text since then.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  So when I made my novel, anything that's in there from Twain is really only a memory of a world and not of the book itself. I never appealed to the book.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Your memory of your experience having read it 15 times?

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Is that what you mean by loyalty? I'm trying to understand that. Loyalty to your memory versus loyalty to the text?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Well, loyalty to the world of that text. What happened to Jim and Huck and all of those events. And much of the novel, much of Adventures of a Huckleberry Finn, is Jim and Huck are separated. And that, of course, gave me the window through which to tell the story. That part of the story is missing. What is Jim doing when Huck is not with him? And so, of course, in my novel, one has to wonder what Huck is doing, because Huck is not present since it's from Jim's point of view.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Well, why don't we read from a scene where we're with Jim and he's united with an instrument to start to tell his story from page 50 in the book.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  For the first time in my life, I had paper and ink. I was beside myself. I found a straight stick and shaved it to a point and stretched a groove into one side of it. I put the paper on my lap, dipped my stick into the ink, and wrote the alphabet. I printed letters as I had seen them in books, slowly, clumsily. And then I wrote my first words. I wanted to be certain that they were mine and not some I had read from a book in the judge's library. I wrote, "I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name. In the religious preachings of my white captors, I am a victim of the curse of Ham. The white so-called masters cannot embrace their cruelty and greed, but must look at

• 10:48Speaker 01

  that lying Dominican friar for religious justification. But I will not let this condition define me. And when I let myself, my mind drown in the fear and outrage, I will be outraged as a matter of course. But my interest is in how these marks that I have been scratching on this page can mean anything at all. If they have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning."

• 11:13Speaker 02

  How do you feel about rereading your own work?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's ridiculous, readings. And I wrote it down so that other people could read it.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  I sensed that when I asked you to do it. You gave me a face that went, "This is ridiculous."

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, I get it. People like to hear.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Oh, no, you're gonna, I'm gonna ask you to keep doing it, so it just...

• 11:37Speaker 01

  No, it's, it's, I don't have much affection for my work when I'm done with it. I call it the Mama Bear School of Art, and that is when I'm finished with a, with a book, I push it away. And if it can eat and survive, well, that's great, but it cannot come back to the den. My job is to move on to something else.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  And my job is to stay with it. So you've written two dozen novels, six collections of poetry, four collections of short stories, and one children's book, all of which you've rendered to be, quote, "complete shit."

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. But it's over. It's done. It's, it's...

• 12:15Speaker 02

  So something being done means it's shit?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I have, I have not satisfied myself yet.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  And, and...

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Are you being hard on yourself so that you wind your way back to the page?

• 12:26Speaker 01

  I'm not that smart, no. I have this belief, I love abstract art paintings and I, and I love music because it's abstract. And I really believe that I should be able to make an abstract novel. I don't know what that looks like. I don't know what it would look like. I've never seen one. And every time I set to work, that is what I am trying to do. And every time I finish, I haven't done it. I'm very pleased that some people like some of the, some of the books I make. And if they don't, well, you know, that's okay. Maybe they'll like the next one. But I've yet to do the one thing that I, that I, that I mean to do.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  I heard you say that, um, starting a book is the equivalent to knowingly entering a bad marriage. You've written a lot of books, so does that make you a masochist or a monogamist?

• 13:21Speaker 01

  That's a, a distinction with no difference. Um, uh, no matter what your friends and your loved ones say to you, you're going to do it anyway. And no matter, and it's going to be full of lots of highs and lows and, and no matter what you do, it's going to end badly. That's just the way, I think, maybe making all, all art works. It sounds romantic when I say it, but I, but it doesn't feel that way at all. You have to tear up a part of yourself to make something new. Um, and it's, and it's, that's the unpleasant part of it, but it's also the part of it that's thrilling and, and, and the part of it that keeps us, um, making more work.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  You know, we talked a little bit about Mark Twain. I believe he's one of four figures that have shaped your sense of comedy. Is that right?

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and this is, I've sort of been able to articulate this for a long time. It's, um, in order of importance, my father, uh, Mark Twain, um, Groucho Marx and Bullwinkle the Moose. Um, just to give you an idea of how cool Bullwinkle is, um, my father was a punster and so I liked puns and, and, um, Bullwinkle, there was an episode, uh, of Bullwinkle and Rocky the squirrel trying to find this little boat covered with gems. And it was the Ruby Yacht of Omar Cayenne. And I just love that. And I'll share with you my favorite pun of my father's, which was my mother would put

• 14:59Speaker 01

  newspaper on the kitchen floor. So that by the time on rainy days, you got through the kitchen, your shoes were a little drier by the time you got to the nice floors. And he was standing on the newspaper and he looked at me, I was nine, I remember this so vividly, and he said, "These are the times that dry men's souls." And I thought, "That is fantastic."

• 15:25Speaker 02

  And a writer is born, just like that. You know, you are born in Fort Gordon, Georgia.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  It's now Fort Eisenhower. It may well be Fort Gordon again any day now.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  I'm gonna leave that one there. But you're raised in Columbia, South Carolina, is that right? Inside a 4,500 square foot home that your grandfather built.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Well, not with his own hands, but yes, he was a physician.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Age nine, I'm curious, what does your father's sense of humor look and sound like throughout your childhood? You put him first on that list of Twain, Groucho, and Bullwinkle.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Well, my father was probably the gentlest person I've ever known. The kindest, I never heard him utter a mean thing about anyone, all the way through to his death. But his humor was, again, not just punning. Well, I'll give you an idea. My father, in the last years of his life, was an invalid because of strokes. It was hard for him to communicate, and it was very difficult to understand what he was saying. And he was, um, my mother was salting his food. And I said, well, you know, maybe salt, too much salt's not a good thing.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Though probably in those years, uh, those last years, it really didn't matter. But I was trying to be a good son. And, and my sister's husband said, very nicely, he repeated exactly what I had said. And my mother snapped at him and said, I've been taking care of him for years. And my father very clearly said, and yet I continue to live.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  And you said he never said a mean thing? No. It wasn't mean, that was, that was quite true. But still, um, there he was, and I, and I knew that he was, he was in there. You said that he was the most gentle person you had met? Yeah. And your mother? Not so much.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  No, I, my mother was a, was a, was a loving, loyal mother and, and, um, and could be mean. My father, that gentle man, as we were driving home from my, my mother's family's farm when I was maybe 10, in a meadow, there was a huge cross burning. It was a Klan rally. And it was nighttime, and there was a checkpoint where these Klansmen were stopping cars as they came by. And, you know, this was in, when I was a kid, we didn't have seatbelts, kids were, I probably

• 18:28Speaker 01

  was standing on the seat of all things, but I was in the front seat with my father, and I looked over, and in his lap, I had never seen it before, I didn't know he had it, I didn't know it was in the car, I don't know where it came from, was a pistol. And we came to the checkpoint, he stepped in the gas and we roared away. And luckily, no one followed us and we didn't end up in the newspaper. But I never forgot that this person who was so gentle and so kind to everyone had to change his entire being to protect his family.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  And when I say gentle, I mean it, but also he lived in a real world.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  What do you say, it's not code switching, it's being a human being?

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. You came of age in the sixties and seventies. You were in segregated schools until you were in junior high.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  So that's about a decade of segregation being a constant. When you went to bookstores, coming from a family of a generation of doctors, I believe, did you find yourself or your family inside the literature available to you at that bookstore or in the libraries?

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Well, when I would look for contemporary novels or novels present in the bookstores I would enter, it was frustrating because it seemed that all the literature I would find was about the antebellum South or the inner city North. And none of them represented middle-class black family of doctors. So I didn't exist. But on the shelves of my grandfather and of my father, I slowly stumbled onto books of the Harlem Renaissance, which were more diverse and with a greater range of society.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  What I realized was the books being published at the time I was a kid, someone was making this decision that those were representative of the African-American experience. Of course, the failure there is

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Thinking that one can identify an African American experience. And this is something that my father and I would talk about a lot. The fact that from place to place, religion to religion, I grew up with a grandfather, a physician in Columbia, South Carolina, who was a raving atheist. All of his patients were Christians and they would ask him, should we pray? And he would look at him and say, it can't hurt. So we talked about the fact that we're all as different as the world depicted of white America.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  And that the real racism started with this belief that we were all the same.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Your book Erasure, which was later adapted into an Oscar winning film called American Fiction, gets at some of the thing you're talking about in terms of what the publishing industry chooses to prioritize, which kind of stories from quote unquote, black life it deems to fit print. But you seem the most interested in language here, more than anything. You said recently, the fact that people could even talk about black life as if that exists. The idea that a book would be about black life in America any more than a book could be about white life in America is ridiculous. Unpack that for us. What do you mean by that?

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Well, a black family living in Wyoming is a completely different experience from a black family living in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. A completely different experience from a black family living in the Bronx, New York. Why? Because they live in different places. Black Muslim people have a different experience from black Christians. Socioeconomic differences make, just like anyone else. The only shared experience, and this isn't just shared with other black people, the only shared experience that we can talk about with any amount of confidence is that

• 23:04Speaker 01

  brown people in this country, when they see blue lights in their rearview mirror, all have the same feeling. That is a shared experience.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  So when you start publishing, you know, in the eighties and into the nineties, what did you make of the industry at large, knowing that you discovered what was popular during the Harlem Renaissance, but by the time you were a kid was no longer deemed popular? How did you situate all of that?

• 23:35Speaker 01

  I don't know how much I actually thought about it. I was trying to make work.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  So how did you make it work?

• 23:40Speaker 01

  You know, you tell stories. And that's the thing, is that you don't go to work as an artist, acting as a politician. The things we believe, the politics we carry, are going to be in our work, no matter what we do.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  I make a bet with my students all the time. I tell them to write down their five most profound fears. Then I tell them, if you can write a real story, and I cannot find those five fears in it, then you get an A. You don't have to do anything else. I don't make bets I can't win. They can't do it. And if they do think that they have, they've worked so hard in this story, that they've done what I've wanted them to do anyway. When I started writing, to be true to my art, I had to trust that my world and my politics would follow me, not that I would follow it.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Well, I'm gonna hold some of your politics for a moment. And to do that, I'm gonna make you, I'm gonna ask you kindly to read a passage from your book, Erasure.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  I sat in an empty, thinly upholstered, orange chair beside a young woman with curling blue fingernails. She had a little boy with a runny nose sitting on her lap. "Handsome boy," I said. "How old is he?" "Two years," she said. I nodded. The chair was more comfortable than I expected a waiting room chair to be, and I felt the artificial pressures of my day fading away, trailing off to a whisper in that den of reality. So what are you doing here in Washington? Yvonne asked me from her desk. Came in for a meeting, I said. You must be important to be coming to Washington for a meeting like that, she said. I shook my head and laughed. No, it's a meeting of the Nouveau Roman Society, hardly important. I read a paper this morning, and now I'm done.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Yvonne looked at me as if the words were getting lost in the space between us. She nodded her head without looking directly at me and went back to her work on the desk. I felt awkward, out of place, like I had so much of my life felt, feeling like I didn't belong. You write books? The woman with the child asked. Yes. What kind of books you write? I write novels, I said. Stories. Already feeling out of place, I now didn't know how to sound relaxed. My cousin gave me "Their Eyes Were Watching God." She had it in a class. She goes to U D C. I like that book. That's a really fine novel, I said. She gave me "Cane" too, the young woman said, adjusting her son on her lap. That's one of my favorites. Great book.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  It ain't a novel, though, is it? She asked. I mean, it ain't just one story, and it's got poems in it. But it seemed like one thing. Know what I mean? I know exactly what you mean. I think about that story, "Box Seat," and I think I'm in that theater all the time, watching the midgets fight. She shook her head as if to come back around, wiped her child's nose. Have you gone to college? I asked. The girl laughed. Don't laugh, I said. I think you're really smart. You should at least try. I didn't finish high school. I didn't know what to say. I scratched my head and looked at the other faces in the room. I felt an inch tall because I had expected this young woman with the blue fingernails to be a certain way, to be slow and stupid, but she was neither.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  I was the stupid one. Thank you, I said to the girl. She didn't respond to that and luckily was called back to the examination room at that moment.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Is that one of those that you're okay reading?

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that one's okay. You did all right.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  That part towards the end, I'm distraught by that. In terms of like the perceptions, the perception we have, how we enter a room, who we think is of value, where does that land with you reading it now?

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Oh, it's a lesson I learned on a ranch, actually, about not assuming anything about anyone, the same way that I wouldn't want anyone assuming something about me. I got a job on this ranch. This one was actually in Montana. There was a man on the ranch and the people around said that he didn't know his numbers, was how it was put to me. It was, in a way, they were telling me that he was challenged. And we went out, three of us, in a truck to count cows on BLM land.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  That's not Black Light and Smatter, that's Bureau of Land Management. And we went out and we were to cover different areas. And me back at the creek and the foreman who was with us said to the, and I can't remember the man's name, said to the challenged man, supposedly challenged, "Well, when you see a cow, use your thumbnail and make a mark on your saddle." And he said, "Okay." And we rode off and we came back after our counts and we met. And on the man's saddle, there were in fact marks, but then there were these spirals.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  And the foreman said, "Eddie, Eddie, what are those?" He said, "Well, them's bunches." So the count really wasn't going to be good. So we just, "Okay, we'll just come back and collect these cows tomorrow." And we did. We came back, we rounded up the cattle, we set up the pen and they drove them into the trucks. And as we were standing there, Eddie, I just named him, looked to me and to the foreman and said, "There are three missing." He knew what a bunch was. He also was able to add our, our, our counts, tally them and add them to his, in his head.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  He was remarkable. And that was, that was a huge lesson for me. I never forgot it.

• 29:51Sam Fragoso?

  We'll be right back with Pulitzer Prize winning author, Percival Never.

• 30:02Sam Fragoso?

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• 31:33Speaker 02

  So taking us back into the classroom, you've been teaching for a long time. How do you hold, I don't know, that curiosity and that openness with students as kids have increasingly decided that they, how do I say, don't read? Every week in New York Times, New York, etc., there are articles written about how professors will not assign whole books anymore.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Well, that's a shame, and I think that it's probably true. And people read differently now. I'm surprised at just how accelerated the run from books became after COVID. I have teenage kids, and COVID hit when they were still in middle school and the beginning of high school. And all of a sudden, everything was on a screen. When COVID ended, that persisted. The weird and unfortunate thing was because it's much easier to grade assignments on screens, they had twice as much homework, which was not helpful.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  But also, they were reading snippets, chapters, instead of, as you say, entire books. So that is true, that has happened. I feel very fortunate that my kids maintained a love of books. But I did, I have seen that they're less likely to finish books that they began than they were before.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Are they more cautious about language?

• 33:13Speaker 01

  My kids are not cautious about language at all. No, no. And I don't think there's a lot of second order thinking about language right at that age. It's either the enjoyment of access to information or just the enjoyment of the story.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  You show kids, you do a class on Westerns, and you show the film Blazing Saddles. How does it play now in 2025?

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Before I talk about Blazing Saddles, this is the first time I've taught this. I'm teaching it this semester. Not one of them has ever seen a Western. In fact, the other day, we were watching John Ford's Ford Apache, in which Henry Fonda plays a Custer figure, and none of them knew who George Armstrong Custer is. And it reminded me, I taught this course at the Sorbonne in Paris, to 27, 24-year-old French women, who had never seen a Western. And it was the same thing.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  I had to explain every code to them, that nearly every film they see has been based on the structure of the Western. But the tropes of the Western are lost on them, and they're catching up again.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  And is the comedy of Blazing Saddles lost on them?

• 34:41Speaker 01

  A little bit. Blazing Saddles is so much smarter about race than anything we have now.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Why do you think that is?

• 34:53Speaker 01

  It was written by Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor. And both of them were famously lacking in filter. And things would just pour out unchecked. The joking about race in it is just that. And there's a lot of joking back and forth. And it's very relaxed. When I started doing this 20 years ago, even then, I'm the only one in my department, who can teach Blazing Saddles. My white colleagues are afraid to do it. And I get it. My students, mostly white at USC, look at me, and they are looking for permission to laugh.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  They hear the word nigger one time, and they become terrified. And I tell them, "You're not saying it. It's okay. It's the context. It's a six-letter word. Don't be afraid of it. Understand it." There was an addition of, at least there was talk of an addition of Huck Finn, where they replaced the word nigger with n-word. N-word Jim.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Now, if I'm out in the world,

• 36:09Speaker 01

  and there is somebody who will use that word, you know what I would like to know? That they will use that word. Because I know where I stand.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  I don't need to think that people are hiding this. I never thought I, and I'm sorry, I'm gonna talk about politics. I never thought that I would long for the intellectuals of the Bush administration.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  But I do. You know, for a while, even, even the worst racists in America, the Jesse Helms and the Strom Thurmans, knew enough to know that their, their politics was shameful. And they would attempt to, if not change, to try to appear as if they were changing. Then, all of a sudden, racists got their swagger back. And so, it has changed.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  In 1989, I was invited to the South Carolina State House to address the South Carolina State Legislature on the arts.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  It was a very easy yes for me, because I knew I wasn't gonna have to write anything. I showed up on time, sorry.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  And, um... I must have not been with you. Yes.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  And I, and I stood there after the governor introduced me, and I said, "I can't talk to you, because in this room is a symbol of exclusion that will not let my words matter. On top of this building flies a symbol of exclusion that will not let my words matter." And I sat down. That was the Confederate flag it was referring to.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  There was a, kind of a brouhaha, and I found it easy to do, because I was getting on a plane the next day. But a lot of people in the state took up the issue, and they got the flag removed after years of protest.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Now, as an American, I think I was wrong. I think the flag ought to be there. And it ought to be there for the same reason that I appreciate a big sign at the edge of a minefield that says "mines."

• 38:31Speaker 02

  It's funny, like, you know, everyone who teaches, I hear the same complaints, and speaking of signs, about trigger warnings and things that one can and cannot say. And it strikes me that your writing, you said Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor were unfiltered, but I think your work often reads and feels that way at its best. I know you don't do well with compliments, but it does. So I want to end on your work for a second. You said recently that "the only reason I come to this art form is because I'm interested in playing with how meaning gets constructed." Now, not to be dim, but what does that mean?

• 39:18Speaker 01

  At the basis of my interest in meaning, and my interest in language, and so my interest in literature, in making something that has meaning, is a really basic tenet of logic. I started out my studies in college as a logician. I studied mathematical logic. That's how I think about the world. And it has nothing to do with cultural identity, or racial identity, or even personal identity, but the idea of logical identity gives me a headache. That A equals A is not the same thing as A is A is enough to make me stop talking.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  That's where I start. And then it starts to build as I think about what is reality and what equals reality? What is meaning and what equals meaning? And so that's where I start with the idea of story. Then there are things that bug me in the world.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Like?

• 40:22Speaker 01

  I don't talk about them. It's private to me. Oftentimes, my novels are doing work for me that I don't expect anyone to see.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  Although you have said in just about every interview around this book that one of the reasons you wrote James in the way that you did is because you found 12 Years a Slave to be particularly frustrating.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's not really why I wrote the book. That just happens to be true. And I'll go ahead and say why it's frustrating, but it has to do with language. In that film, I don't know if you're familiar with it, Steve McQueen directs this story, a memoir of a black man who was kidnapped from the North before the Civil War. And this did happen. And he's taken to the South and sold into slavery. It's not a bad film. It's a bit fantastical, his ideal life, living in Vermont, eating crumpets and drinking tea with his white neighbors.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  But he's taken South, sold, and he's put into quarters with enslaved people. And something happens that is just not possible. He has not been enculturated with the people with whom he is put. He has not grown up with them, but he understands what they are saying to each other. Enslaved people were as complex as anyone else. And one of the things that we as human beings do, complex human beings, is we find ways to talk to each other that will not allow entry of our oppressors and enemies. They would have found a way.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Who knows what it would have sounded like? And James, I use standard English. But who knows what it would have sounded like? But it would have been theirs. A language that would allow them to speak about the things that human beings talk about. Their hopes, their worries, their fears. The depiction of the enslaved people that we get in our culture throughout the 19th and 20th centuries were of superstitious, simple-minded people capable of eating, drinking, and procreating. But that's not true. They thought about the stars. They thought about religion in ways

• 42:54Speaker 01

  that were more complex than mere fear or desire for an afterlife. And that's what's missing, is a true representation of complex people. And so that's where my complaint about that film comes in. But that really is just a part of the construction of the novel, not at the base.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Well, in the interest of leaning into complexity in 2025, why don't we read from chapter 15 of James?

• 43:29Speaker 01

  I read and read, but I found what I needed was to write. I needed that pencil. I could not keep track of my thoughts. I could not follow my own reasoning after a while. This was because I couldn't stop reading long enough to make space in my head. I was like a man who had not eaten for a season and then gorged himself until sick. I appreciated Voltaire's notion of tolerance regarding religious difference, and I understood, as absorbed as I was, that I was not interested in the content of the work, but its structure, the movement of it, the calling out of logical fallacies. And so after these books, the Bible itself was the least interesting of all. I could not enter it, did not want to enter it,

• 44:13Speaker 01

  and then understood that I recognized it as a tool of my enemy. I chose the word enemy, and still do, as oppressor necessarily supposes a victim.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  That part right there, the, "I was not interested in the content of the work, but its structure, the movement of it, the calling out of logical fallacies."

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Do you know what the Shakers were? They were a religious group who sort of condemned themselves to obsolescence by deciding they would not procreate, and so there are no Shakers left.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  But it's, every force evolves a form. Every story generates a structure that makes meaning for it and for the story, which is why my works don't look the same one to the next.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  My last question, in the interest of meaning, you said this thing about yourself that has just stuck with me all week in preparation. You said recently that your head, which is where you live when you write, is a bad neighborhood.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  And I do not like being in there.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Apparently, I do like being in there, but you know, it's a... But still, it's a bad neighborhood.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  What are the defining features of a bad neighborhood for Percival Everett?

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  And why, if it is so bad and is so difficult, how and why do you keep coming back to it?

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Like most bad neighborhoods, that's where most of the interesting people live. There are caves there. You know, for it to be a bad neighborhood, it has to have, like any really good bad neighborhood, it has to have things that are seductive. And so those might be seen as good things, but there's certainly things that pull me in so that I can be near the bad things. One can't be too literal about these things, but I did fall in love with caves for quite a while. And I found myself going into developed and undeveloped caves all over the US until a friend of mine, when I said, "I don't know why I keep going into caves with my stupid

• 46:31Speaker 01

  lighted helmet and all this stuff," and he, you know, sort of slapped me and said, "You're working on a novel." And he was right. As is my, my custom, turned out that I didn't have to go into any caves to write that novel. There was one cave in it, but I did all this research. But what I learned was something that was not only crucial to that novel, but to my understanding of why I make art, anyway. And that is, caves are scary to us. The abstract. They're dark. There's something in there. We don't know what's in there. Monsters are in caves. Snakes, bats.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  And when you start going into caves, they're unknown. And as you get deeper, you keep looking back and you can see the light of the opening, and that's kind of your safety. Well, if, if the shit goes bad, that's, that's where I'm going. Then something happens. You get deep enough into the cave and you make friends with it. And you don't look at the entrance, the lighted part, as the place that you want to turn to. It's always, "I want to go deeper."

• 47:54Speaker 01

  And, and it's that, I call it this, this area of interstitial tension. And that's where art lives. When you hit that, not wall, but that space where everything turns around, is where I, I have to be to make the next one.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  Well, I thank you for living in the interstitial for as long as you have. And it's meant the world that you showed up here today, late and all. I think it's still on me. And thank you for the book. Thank you, Sam.

• 49:08Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's conversation with Percival Everett, be sure to leave us five stars on Spotify. Share the program on social media. Share it with a friend. Review it on Apple. All of this, any of this, I say it every week, but it really does help us make this program each and every Sunday. I want to give a special thanks this week to the teams at the Aspen Society and Double Day, and of course, our guest, Percival Everett. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, James, can now be found wherever you do your reading. For more talks with other great writers, I'd recommend Jennifer Egan, Ta-Nehisi Coates,

• 49:49Sam Fragoso?

  George Saunders, Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood. George Saunders, again, he's come on twice. We've really had on so many fantastic writers. You can find all of those and more at talkeasypod.com. If you want to listen to more Lemonada podcasts, listen on Apple, Spotify, wherever you listen. You can also subscribe to Lemonada Premium for bonus content. Just hit the subscribe button on Apple or head to lemonadapremium.com. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Janix Abraha. Today's talk was edited by Adam Jamal and Matt Sasaki and mixed by Andrew Vastola. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Illustrations, Chris Chaney. This episode was made in partnership

• 50:34Sam Fragoso?

  with the good people at Lemonada Media, and I'm Sam Fragoso.

• 50:38Speaker 04

  Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here on Wednesday for a very special bonus episode. Until then, stay safe and some more.

• 50:58Speaker 05

  History gets written, then rewritten, sometimes by scholars correcting the record, sometimes by committees deciding what a generation of kids will and won't learn. The version that makes it into the textbook isn't always the only story. It's the one that won out. That's the kind of thing Ground News was built for. It shows you how outlets across the spectrum tell the same story, side by side, so you can spot the shading for yourself. Ground News gives each outlet a factuality rating, so you know how much weight to give the source, and shows you who owns it, so you know what's behind it. The Nobel Peace Center called it "an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers,

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• 52:19Speaker 04

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.

• 52:27Speaker 06

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 52:31Speaker 04

  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

• 52:33Speaker 06

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 52:36Speaker 04

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 52:40Speaker 06

  That's it.

• 52:42Speaker 04

  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast What It's Like to Be.