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Part 3, Chapter 11
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in James, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Speech, Performance, and Willful Ignorance
Identity, Narrative, and Agency
Racism, Dehumanization, and Hypocrisy
Innocence vs. Disillusionment
Family, Alliance, and Loyalty
Summary
Analysis
The runaways scatter. James speculates that some are killed or captured or return to their owners. He, Sadie, Lizzie, and a few of the men who helped them escape make their way to a town in Iowa. With the war raging, the white people there have no choice but to accept them. The local sheriff asks if any of them goes by Jim, using the n-word before his name. When everyone else is introduced, Jim responds to the sheriff “I am James. […] Just James.”
The novel suggests that James and his family’s reception in the northern free states is less than welcoming, likely indicating that even the white people who support abolition still deny Black people’s humanity to some extent. But James is mainly focused on the fact that he has successfully reunited with his family and has constructed a new identity for himself. In leaving behind his old name and claiming a new one, James denies his enslavers the ability to define him, and he thus concludes his self-written narrative.
Themes
