My husband and I just got back from a trip into the heartland of the Delta. We traveled up through Mississippi, across Memphis and into northern Missouri. Our main destination was Hannibal, Missouri, the childhood home of Samuel Clemons, also known as Mark Twain. Clay hunts near this town and had talked to me often about the quaint place nestled on the cliffs above the Mississippi River.
Thanks to our 6th grade English teacher at Bowling Green, my first meeting with this great writer occurred when we spent weeks reading Tom Sawyer and later Huck Finn.
I have been a fan of Samuel Clemon’s work since then, always working in a unit on his stories each year in my classroom. What I did not know until this trip was how much of these stories came directly from his own personal life, and his little hometown.
We drank his famous root beer recipe. We toured his home and the small shop he had to go to work in as a child. We toured Huck Finn's childhood home and the home of his young sweetheart. She also made a splashing appearance in Tom Sawyer. These children had different names, but the layout of his stories match their little town back in his era.
We walked up the 246 steps to get to the lighthouse that was built in his memory. And we trekked down into the depths of the cave he played in as a small child.
This was also the cave Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher were trapped in surrounded by darkness when her light went out. It was the cave where he happened to get a glimpse of Injun Joe. He was also a real live character in Hannibal, Missouri, but a very nice man simply villainized because he had a massive number of pock marks from a childhood illness.
A riverboat still anchored on the docks down from Samuel's home and a slave auction block once sat between the two. Samuel Clemons had witnessed an African American family being auctioned and sold off, splitting them up. This lasted with him, no doubt prompting the character who became Huck Finn's best friend in the later novel.
We were able to stand on the vast cliff overlooking the mighty Mississippi, spying Turtle Island that was indeed shaped like a turtle. This was the island Tom and Huck snuck off to on a raft only to return home days later to attend their own funeral after Aunt Polly had declared them dead.
So much of this town was brought to life in those books I enjoyed as a small child. An entire history was resurrected that will live on within the characters of these children Samuel Clemons spent his days with along the muddy Mississippi River.
I am not sure if it is something about the long-term memory far exceeding the short term memory as we age, but a grocery list I jotted down thirty minutes before is quickly lost as opposed to the smell of fresh rain in the wet grass in the pasture next to my childhood home. The many mornings marching down the center of a church shouting out Christian tunes arm and arm with little girls eager to see what that day of Bible school would bring.
I too have memories of an ice-cold river on a steamy hot summer afternoon, and the smell of fish and mud. I remember fair parades snaking through town as we waved our little hands to a crowd of people we knew, all having parents and grandparents who had known each other as well. I can remember like yesterday pulling a line from our pond with a squirming fish yanking my cane pole. Digging my bare feet into the grass as I twisted it off the hook and plopped it down in a bucket of water.
Maybe it is that our brains were still fresh and young, not clouded by a lifetime of stress and anxiety. Maybe it was the sheer innocence of a time when the toughest summer day was deciding how you would spend it. Regardless, touring Samuel Clemons’ hometown rekindled an appreciation for those days of old when childhood friends were a blessing, summer evenings were for catching light bugs in a jar, and our imaginations were free to run wild. Thank goodness Tom and Mark were able to capture a piece of it.
