Featuring:
Also, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Roy Blount Jr., Ron Powers
I
My first encounters with books were disappointing.
I remember when I was a very little boy thumbing through the pages of fairy tales, which were, as far as I could tell, stories of cannibalism and mayhem in which giants and witches, tigers and wolves did their best to eat small children. Then came school and the announcement that I must learn to read, and the books they gave us to accomplish this task were as dull and dreary as the fairy tales had been terrifying. This is Spot. See Spot run. I wondered what these people were thinking. Whatever happened to the idea of a story? This was something I knew all about, for I had a favorite aunt—her name was Mary, but I called her Mamie—who had a gift for telling fine tales, which had the advantage that they were mostly true.
Mamie lived in the house next door to ours, and it seemed to be filled with the whisper of old ghosts. Not the scary kind, but the benevolent presence of a rich family past that wound its way back into hazy and unfamiliar places that we could only see in our minds. The house itself was a source of endless fascination for me, and for my cousin, who came to visit most often in the summer. We loved the nooks and crannies of the attic, where we sometimes sifted through the moth-eaten relics, old coats and dresses that my cousin loved, and a Confederate jacket that had once been worn by a member of the family.
Everything about the place was antebellum, but not in the Gone-With-the-Wind, Greek revival tradition with the great white columns and curving staircases; this was, instead, an unpretentious two-story house built to catch the summer breeze—a Gulf Coast cottage, constructed by slaves in 1836. It was surrounded by magnolias and oak trees draped with Spanish moss and azaleas blooming pink at the first hint of spring. Mamie roamed those grounds with great satisfaction, and welcomed an extended family of children into this curious world of memory. I remember sitting with her on the front porch swing when I was maybe five or six, my cousin Julie on one side, me on the other, while she told us stories of the Revolutionary War.
Her favorite subject was General Francis Marion, “the Swamp Fox” as he was then known, a Low Country-patriot from South Carolina with whom Peter Gaillard, one of our own ancestors, had ridden. “A plague on that wily Swamp Fox!” she would cry, imitating Cornwallis or some other British general driven to distraction by Marion’s bold guerilla raids. For me as a child, listening to her stories was pure joy, and at least for the first ten years of my life it simply never occurred to me that anything this good could happen in a book.
But then I discovered Johnny Tremain. I must have been in the fourth grade, and there it was on a library shelf, imposing in its mass at more than two hundred pages. Later, I would learn about its author, how Esther Forbes, a remarkably prolific writer from Boston, had won acclaim for her novels and a Pulitzer Prize in the 1940s for a biography she had written of Paul Revere. For Johnny Tremain, a story for young readers about the Revolutionary War, she had won the Newbery Medal in 1944, and even now her book is remembered as one of the finest children’s novels ever written.
For me, it was magic. It was the tale of a boy in Revolutionary Boston, a silversmith’s apprentice initially unaware, at the age of fourteen, of the turbulent history taking shape around him. He lived in the attic of his master’s house, sharing cramped quarters with two other boys, both far less gifted than he. I think I was drawn to this flawed hero, Johnny Tremain, precisely because the author had not made him perfect. He seemed so real in his flashes of arrogance and disdain, so completely believable to a reader like me, just a few years younger and thus drawn easily into his world. And what a world it was!
There was only one window in the attic. Johnny always stood before it as he dressed. He liked this view down the length of Hancock’s Wharf. Counting houses, shops, stores, sail lofts, and one great ship after another, home again after their voyaging, content as cows waiting to be milked. He watched the gulls, so fierce and beautiful, fighting and screaming among the ships. Beyond the wharf was the sea and the rocky islands where the gulls nested.
As Esther Forbes’s story unfolds, so does a vivid portrait of a time in which the people of Boston are much like the gulls—scrapping to feed their families and themselves. Yet they also know there are opportunities in America that the Mother Country could never offer. For their working-class counterparts across the Atlantic, there was far less hope of anything better, far less chance of upward mobility, no matter their ambition or grit.
In Boston, seething with life and a ferocious sense of greater possibility, a resourceful boy like Johnny Tremain could indenture his services to a master craftsman, knowing that one day he would have his own shop. For a time that was all Johnny thought about, encouraged in his dreams by the great Paul Revere, one of the finest silversmiths in the city. But then without warning, his expectations ended in calamity. As Johnny was rushing one morning to fill an order, a crucible containing molten silver cracked from the strain of too much heat, and the liquid metal quickly coated his hand, burning his delicate flesh so severely that his thumb became welded to the edge of his palm. Even after he recovered from the pain, and the fever and delirium that went along with it, he knew that his days as a silversmith were over. For a time he wandered the piers of Boston, trying to imagine another way of life but finding nothing to compare with what had abruptly been taken from him.
He rarely bothered to look at the signs over the door which indicated what work was done inside. A pair of scissors for a tailor, a gold lamb for a wool weaver, a basin for a barber, a painted wooden book for a bookbinder, a large swinging compass for an instrument-maker . . . A butcher (his sign was a gilded ox skull) would have employed him, but the idea of slaughtering animals sickened him. He was a fine craftsman to the tips of his fingers—even to the tips of his maimed hand.
Finally, Johnny came upon a newspaper office, where he was offered a job delivering papers. He might have considered such work beneath him, except for the fact that it came with a horse—a spirited gelding with pale blue eyes, his coat nearly white but flecked with brown, and a mane and tale that were almost black. Johnny was impressed by the animal’s beauty, and even more by his speed; but also by a timid, vulnerable spirit that required a gentle hand from the rider. Within a few days, horse and boy had developed a bond as they galloped through the rolling hills of Massachusetts, handing out papers from Boston all the way to Lexington and Concord.
The year was 1773, and Boston was the epicenter of rebellion—a fact that Johnny understood well. British troops now occupied the city, and flashes of violence seemed to happen every day. As he began to read the papers he delivered, studying the incendiary editorials, he developed a passion for the Patriot cause. He soon discovered that the attic just above the newspaper office was a place where the rebel leaders—John Hancock and Samuel Adams, Paul Revere and Joseph Warren—came and mapped their strategies of insurrection.
And so it was that Esther Forbes began to weave her tale of adventure through a history that had won her a Pulitzer Prize. The complexity of her achievement was beyond the understanding of a reader barely ten. Even so, I knew there was something in the way she told the story that went far beyond what I learned in school. Paul Revere, previously nothing more than a stick-figure legend, suddenly came alive in her pages—the robust son of an immigrant father, stocky in his build, swarthy in his look, a man who anchored a network of spies.
John Hancock, known to me only for his signature, emerged as a complicated character—one of the richest men in Massachusetts, with all of the vanity such wealth might imply, but a leader who was willing to risk everything for a cause in which he deeply believed. Along with Samuel Adams, an ally who could scarcely have been more different, Hancock was generally regarded by the British occupiers as one of the most dangerous men in the colonies. Adams, meanwhile, appeared in the pages of Johnny Tremain as a man who was never very good at anything, except politics.
Unlike John Adams, his more famous cousin, Sam was a patient, disheveled man in his early forties, prematurely gray, and content, it seemed, to let other men take center stage. His hands and voice often shook when he spoke, even as he planned the Boston Tea Party, but there was never any doubt—certainly not in the minds of the British—that his organizing genius lay at the heart of the Patriot cause.
But perhaps the most intriguing figure of all, and to me the least known, was Dr. Joseph Warren, a thirty-something physician who had achieved renown in the medical world through his belief in inoculations for small pox. The disease had ravaged Boston more than once, and in the great epidemic of 1764, Warren was able to demonstrate the value of his largely untested and controversial practice. One of those he inoculated was John Adams. As Boston drifted toward revolution, this gentle physician—“a fine-looking man,” in the words of Esther Forbes, “with fresh skin and thick blond hair and very bright eyes”—emerged as a leader both fiery and fearless.
It was Warren who, on April 18, 1775, sent Paul Revere on his ride to Lexington and Concord—first to warn Sam Adams and John Hancock, who were then in Lexington, that the British army was on its way to arrest them. The other mission of the British that night was to seize the Patriot munitions in Concord, and it was there that the minutemen gathered in force.
Faced with a withering fire as they marched toward the village, the British regulars broke and ran—a possibility that had scarcely occurred to them, given the ragtag army they were facing. It was, of course, one of those inspiring moments of history that mutates easily into mythology, and I remember as a boy being stirred. But there was something in the quality of Esther Forbes’s telling that suggested that this was a more subtle story, tinged, perhaps, with irony and pathos. Not that I formed such thoughts at the time. I was far too inspired by a newfound passion for history and books.
Many years later as I studied the Revolutionary War, I was prepared, I think, for the curious ambiguities of our founding—how the war slogged on for eight bloody years, and how George Washington’s greatest gift was not his grasp of military strategy, but rather his ability, against all odds, simply to hold his army together. His soldiers’ suffering at Valley Forge and other places was made even worse by the stinginess of American farmers, who sometimes charged outrageous prices for the food a desperate army had to have. And even the Founding Fathers themselves were capable of individual pettiness and possessed their collective feet of clay. Among other things, most of them understood the contradiction between their professions of liberty and the existence of chattel slavery.
“I can not, I will not, justify it,” admitted Patrick Henry of Virginia. But neither he nor any of the others did much about it.
And yet I think I also knew as I came to the end of Johnny Tremain that I had read a carefully crafted account—an account that now had a heart and a face—of the founding of the greatest country in the world.
II
Whatever the subject, my parents were delighted by my new love of books, and since we were the last in the neighborhood to actually purchase our own TV, we began a tradition that lasted several years. The three of us—my mother, my father, and me, the only child—would gather together in our den at night and read to each other aloud, passing around the designated book, until finally one or more of us would get sleepy.
I think we may have begun with Old Yeller, or perhaps a novel by Zane Grey. But one of the readings I remember most clearly was Eneas Africanus, a vintage story from 1919 written by a Georgian, Harry Stillwell Edwards. It was a happy tale of slavery in which Eneas, an elderly slave, becomes separated from his master, and even after emancipation, searches eight years to find him. The book, which sold through forty Grosset & Dunlap editions, ends on a note of tender reunion:
In the red light of the bonfire an old negro suddenly appeared, reining up a splendid grey horse . . . His “Whoa, Chainlightnin!” resounded all over the place. Then he stood up and began to shout about Moses and the Hebrew children being led out of Egypt into the promised land. Major Tommey listened for a brief instant and rushed out. The newcomer met him with an equal rush and their loud greetings floated back to us clear as the notes of a plantation bell: “Eneas, you black rascal, where have you been?”
However startling the political incorrectness, we were a family in the 1950s who very much wanted to shore up the notion that nothing in particular was wrong with the South. The civil rights movement was beginning to stir just up the road from us in Montgomery, and Southern defensiveness—that massive, collective chip on the shoulder that had been around at least since the Civil War—took a lot of different forms. One of them, certainly, was a book on racial harmony and contentment, rooted in the gospel of white supremacy. As a boy of ten, I was deeply moved.
But then we came to Huckleberry Finn. It was another splendid story of adventure—another boy about the age of Johnny Tremain, caught in his own encounter with history. It was set, of course, in a wholly different time, as the America created so painfully by the founders drifted inexorably toward the Civil War. The driving force in the conflict was slavery, and in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn we confronted the issue through the rough-hewn innocence of a runaway boy. But not right away. As literary scholars have told us through the years, when Mark Twain began work on his masterpiece, he set out modestly to write a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a best seller published in 1876.
In the early drafts of Huckleberry Finn, Jim, the slave, who provides the novel with its moral and literary strength, is only a minor character. And even in the final version, published in 1884 after Twain had worked on it for nearly ten years, the ethical tension takes shape slowly. In the opening pages, the book is driven by loneliness and fear, a ragamuffin boy on the margins of society, terrified of abuse at the hands of his father, and scorned by the people in his small river town for his superstitious understanding of the world. Even as a boy myself, skipping along on the surface of the story, I was touched by the beauty of Huck’s ruminations and the intimations of wisdom they contained.
I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars was shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me and I couldn’t make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell something that’s on its mind and can’t make itself understood, and so can’t rest easy in its grave and has to go about that way every night grieving. I got so down-hearted and scared, I did wish I had some company.
Even now, I remember reading that passage aloud, or maybe it was my mother or father who read it. Whatever, I was swept up gently into Huck’s place and time, able to hear what he heard, feel what he felt, and despite the sadness at the heart of the scene, there was also a serenity that came from the simple beauty of his words.
But it was soon disrupted by the character of Pap. Huck Finn’s drunken, violent father was, for me, an archetype of pure malice who resurrected old terrors from the world of fairy tales. Pap, however, was not a giant or a witch. There was nothing unbelievable about him when he appeared one evening in Huck’s room and threatened grave harm. Infuriated by people in the town who thought that Huck should have a better home, Pap took him to a cabin deep in the woods.
“It was pretty good times up in the woods there, take it all around,” Huck recounted. “But by-and-by pap got too handy with his hick’ry, and I couldn’t stand it. I was all over welts.”
Then one night in a drunken rage Pap tried to kill him.
He chased me round and round the place, with a clasp-knife, calling me the Angel of Death and saying he would kill me and then I couldn’t come for him no more. I begged, and told him I was only Huck, but he laughed such a screechy laugh, and roared and cussed, and kept on chasing me up. Once when I turned short and dodged under his arm he made a grab and got me by the jacket between my shoulders, and I thought I was gone; but I slid out of the jacket quick as lightning, and saved myself. Pretty soon he was all tired out, and dropped down with his back against the door, and said he would rest a minute and then kill me.
On my first encounter with the story, I read those words with a rush of pure fright, and the nerve-rattling tension only grew worse as Huck began to plan his escape. Locked in the cabin while his father went to town for supplies, he began to saw a hole through the logs, but would he make it in time? And after he made his dash to the river, would somebody see him in the canoe? For the next two hundred pages or more, one close scrape followed another, and I remember taking comfort in only one thing. I was glad that Huck had a little bit of company.
It began with an echo of Robinson Crusoe, Huck setting up camp on Jackson Island—a wooded, uninhabited patch of land just downriver from Hannibal, Missouri—then discovering suddenly that he was not alone. On a morning exploration he found a campfire, smoldering, only recently abandoned, and when he came back later, fearful and creeping through the dark, he saw that it was Jim, a runaway slave. “I bet I was glad to see him,” said Huck, for Jim had been the property of Miss Watson, a woman in Hannibal who had previously taken it upon herself to see that Huck became “civilized.” Jim and Huck had known each other and been friendly enough, and now for different reasons they were running away.
Jim, for his part, had overheard talk that he was about to be “sold down the river,” sent away to somewhere down in Louisiana, and his desperate flight to avoid that fate had awakened feelings even more elemental. He felt a powerful need to be free.
As the two traveled together on a raft, dodging bounty hunters and outlaws, they began to develop the kind of friendship that was, in the words of Toni Morrison, “so free of lies it produces an aura of restfulness and peace unavailable anywhere else in the novel.” I think it may have been that very thing that caught my fancy on the first of many readings—that and the palpable feeling of freedom as they floated the currents of the great Mississippi.
Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark—which was a candle in a cabin window—and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two—on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It’s lovely to live on a raft.
And yet, again and again on the journey, despite the companionship of those moments, Huck is caught in his own private struggle—a conflict, as Mark Twain later put it, between “a sound heart and a deformed conscience.” He knew he was helping a runaway slave, a sin and a crime by the standard of the times, and in a masterstroke of cultural satire, Twain has him agonize about that, accepting slavery, at least in his mind, as part of the natural order of things. Huck worries about what he’s doing to Miss Watson, Jim’s former owner, and worries that God, being white Himself, will send him to hell. “I about made up my mind to pray . . .” he says. “But the words wouldn’t come . . . You can’t pray a lie—I found that out.”
Huck, in the end, is too caught up in his friendship with Jim, in the kindness and humanity that’s he’s learned to appreciate on the river, and thus he bows to his inevitable fate. “All right, then,” he finally decides, “I’ll go to hell . . .”
It is, of course, one of the iconic scenes in American literature, that kernel of greatness in Huckleberry Finn that has made it a classic of American letters. “It’s the best book we’ve had,” Ernest Hemingway once declared. “All American writing comes from that.” And yet the story has always been double-edged. Ralph Ellison, one of the great black writers of the twentieth century, said that when he first read the novel as a boy, he could identify easily enough with Huck, but not with Jim, despite their common racial heritage. Jim, in his uncomplicated innocence, was a little too close to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom, or even worse, to Eneas Africanus, and thus it seemed to Ellison and others that Twain fell short on a fundamental task—“filling out the complex humanity” of a character who was indispensable to the story.
Robert O’Meally of Columbia University pushed a similar point even further. In an introduction to a 2003 edition of Huckleberry Finn, O’Meally recalled that as an African American student in the civil rights era, he first read the novel with great admiration. “Here was democracy without puffery,” he wrote, “e pluribus unum at its most radical level of two friends from different racial (but very similar cultural) backgrounds loving one another . . .”
But even in the rush of that first reading, O’Meally was troubled by the figure of Jim. It was easy enough, he thought, to admire Jim’s humanity, wisdom, and courage. But he urged readers to “resist the idea that Jim is thoroughly realistic, that black men of his time were typically this simplistic, docile, or full of minstrel-show-like patter.” In the end he wondered with Ralph Ellison if Twain had simply discounted black readers, if Huckleberry Finn at the time it was published—and perhaps even now—was primarily a dialogue among whites.
In my own re-reading of this most studied of American novels (I read it for a second time in college, and have read it four or five times since), I find that I’m conscious on every occasion of the debates that surround it. Sometimes I think they get in the way, detract from the beauty and the heart of a story that’s set inevitably in time. But I also came to believe through the years that these same debates underscored the power and the truth of the novel. At the very least, they made me want to know more about the author. And on that front a handful of modern scholars have excelled.
III
Time magazine, in a retrospective published in 2008, called “Mark Twain: Our Original Superstar.” In addition to his renown as a writer, Twain traveled the country in the latter half of the nineteenth century, delivering lectures to sold-out audiences. He could make them laugh simply by walking onto the stage, looking disheveled with his mop of curly hair, and delivering his own sarcastic commentary on the multiple hypocrisies of his time.
“We know his voice only from written descriptions of it,” wrote humorist Roy Blount Jr. “It was resonant enough to hold a large lecture hall audience rapt. He spoke in a slow backwoods drawl, with many strategic pauses . . . But he wasn’t the sort of funny man who laughs at his own jokes. In performance and in life, Twain’s facial expression—except, presumably when he was furious, which was often—was deadpan. After Twain’s death, the editor of the North American Review recalled that he had known him for thirty years and never seen him laugh.”
The definitive chronicle of Twain’s emergence as “the nation’s first rock star” is probably Ron Powers’s Mark Twain: A Life, a riveting, literary account, published in 2005. In the prologue of this fine work, Powers introduces his subject this way:
Mark Twain’s great achievement as the man who found a voice for his country has made him a challenge for his biographers. His words are quoted, yet he somehow lies hidden in plain sight—a giant on the historic landscape. He has been so thoroughly rearranged and reconstructed by a long succession of scholarly critics that the contours of an actual, textured human character have been obscured.
In his attempt to remedy this lack of understanding, Powers begins, as many biographers might, with Twain’s boyhood—with the days in antebellum Missouri when this most seminal of American authors was little Sammy Clemens, spending his early childhood years, not on the great Mississippi River but rather on a broad expanse of prairie. There, his hard-luck father, Marshall Clemens, who seemed to fail at everything he tried, owned a small farm with a handful of slaves. It was here, says Powers, that the future Mark Twain first developed those qualities that set him apart, his remarkable abilities to listen and to see.
The prairie in its loneliness and peace: that was what came back to him toward the end of his life . . . He thought not of the Mississippi River, which he encountered most fully later in life, but of “a level great prairie which was covered with wild strawberry plants, vividly starred with prairie pinks, and walled in on all sides by forests”—a swatch of great western carpet yet a decade from disfigurement by the grooves of the California gold rushers. There his prodigious noticing had begun. His way of seeing and hearing things that changed America’s way of seeing and hearing things.
With a gift that ultimately could not be explained, Twain transformed “commonplace language” into art, feeling its rhythms, its colorful riffs and improvisations, much as a great musician playing jazz. And nowhere did he find those rhythms more lovely than among the slaves he knew as a child.
One in particular captured his fancy. Uncle Dan’l was a dark-skinned man of middle age, the father of most of the Negro children on the farm, and in the words of Twain himself, a person “whose sympathies were wide and warm, and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile.” He was also a great storyteller, spinning his yarns for Sammy and his cousins, as well as the slave children gathered at his cabin. Uncle Dan’l’s speaking prowess, particularly his strategic use of the pause, later influenced Twain’s own style. More importantly, as Powers and other biographers have noted, this slave was also the model for Jim, and one of many in Sam’s early years who left their mark on his racial understanding.
“I have no race prejudices,” Twain later declared. “All I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me.” And he added with an irony that became his trademark, “He can’t be any worse.”
It always seemed to me as a reader that the fundamental truth of Twain’s self-assessment is reflected in the pages of Huckleberry Finn. But the issue, inevitably, is more complicated. As Powers, among others, is compelled to remind us, there was another experience in Twain’s early years, another more disturbing influence he absorbed. When he was ten a minstrel show came to town, featuring an actor named Thomas “Daddy” Rice, who performed in blackface and created a character he called “Jim Crow”—a slave whose colorful buffoonery usually drew gales of laughter from the crowd. One of those who laughed was the future Mark Twain. As Ron Powers notes, Twain never got over the delight he took in the choreographed foolishness of “the real nigger show,” and without any question in Huckleberry Finn, the character of Jim bears the taint of that memory. And there is also this: in the course of the novel, Twain used the n-word 219 times, thinking no more of it than did the masses of his readers in those closing years of the nineteenth century.
Thus, the modern debate over Huckleberry Finn has taken two forms. One is epitomized by the thoughtful ruminations of Toni Morrison, African American winner of the Nobel Prize, who is troubled by the flaws in the character of Jim, that interplay of heroism and unreality that came from the imagination of Mark Twain. She sees the limitations of Twain’s understanding; he was, after all, a man who lived in another century, when the nation first struggled with the aftermath of slavery, and the notion of racial equality was new. But Morrison is also moved by the book, moved by the strength and goodness of Jim, the moral decency of Huck, and the searing satire that Twain offers up against the casual hypocrisies of his time.
But there is a second kind of argument over Huckleberry Finn, one that first appeared in the civil rights years, and continues to raise its head even now. It can be reduced essentially to political correctness. In this debate, we focus on the n-word, as we so often do in our racial discussions at large—as if by stamping it out, we could free ourselves from racism itself.
Unfortunately enough, the discomfort we feel with Huckleberry Finn—which has lasted now for more than a century—goes deeper than that; as a society we are still engaged, in one way or another, with the fundamental conflict of Huck himself. During his time of moral agony on the raft, when he knows he is helping Jim to escape, Huck’s head and heart are locked in a struggle. His head, of course, blithely accepts the assumptions of his time: the rectitude of slavery and the racial inferiority of his friend. But his heart understands a much deeper truth: the humanity of Jim, and thus the lie at the heart of racism. Today, I think, it may well be that we have managed to reverse it. Our heads after so many years of struggle have almost gotten it straight, and thus Huck’s dialogue with himself seems both disconcerting and foolish.
I tried to make out to myself that I warn’t to blame, because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn’t no use, conscience up and says, every time, “But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.” That was so—I couldn’t get around that noway.
Now here we are, re-reading all this in the twenty-first century—a time when an ugly xenophobia is sweeping through our national debate, and when leaders in the opposition party are demonizing our first black president—and Huckleberry Finn, so perpetually provocative, is still as unsettling to us as ever. If our heads have finally learned what’s what, if, for example, most of us know not to use the n-word, I think that today it may be our hearts—our collective heart and soul as a nation—that we’re still a little unsure of.
IV
It’s true, of course, when I first read the book that I gave little thought to these kinds of issues. The great delight in Huckleberry Finn, just as it was with Johnny Tremain, was of seeing a story come alive on the pages. There seemed to be such magic in the telling, such joy in the dangers, such admiration for the pluck of both characters, and I knew right away that I had to have more.
Because of these gifts from Mark Twain and Esther Forbes, I understood clearly by the age of ten that books would be my companions for life—sometimes the same book, read again and again through the years. That most emphatically would be the case with my next great literary encounter—another multilayered tale of discovery, this one set even closer to home.