MISSISSIPPI RIVER

Which?	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)
What?	Mighty waterway through the heart of America, brimming with adventure and social significance

SOMETIMES THIS river seems wide as an ocean. A great blue-grey expanse, slipping ever southwards from glacial lakes and tallgrass prairie to the sultry subtropics. It makes a massive, meandering journey, but is a place for simple pleasures; where you can float away from your troubles. It’s a place for lazing back, trailing a toe in the flow, and listening to the somnolent trickle. For eating mushmelon and corn dodgers, talking aimless flapdoodle. For gliding to the hum of mosquitoes. For gazing at a sky a-flicker with stars. The ancient river: an invitation to drift, an opportunity to escape …

Ol’ Man River, Big Muddy, Father of Waters. The Mississippi, a leviathan of many names, flows through the heart of America. It once served as the country’s western border, and has long been key for trade and transportation. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), the river’s capture by Union forces signalled a turn towards victory. In short, the Mississippi looms large in America’s history, culture and consciousness. And it’s central to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens – pen name Mark Twain – was born in Florida, Missouri, in 1835 but moved to nearby Hannibal, on the Mississippi’s west bank, in 1839. He was raised in antebellum America, a time of growth and expansion, thriving plantations and goods-laden steamboats; as a young man, Twain even worked as a riverboat pilot, gaining intimacy with the Mississippi’s many twists, turns and eddies.

This was also a time of slavery. Unlike Illinois, across the river, Missouri, was not a free state; by the mid-19th century, a quarter of Hannibal County’s population were slaves. While Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published two decades after the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the novel is set in the 1840s. And Twain’s novel – at first glance, a simple boys’ own adventure – is a blistering examination of American attitudes to race at the time.

The novel follows the exploits of teenage vagabond Huck Finn and Jim, a black adult slave. Both live in the Missouri town of St Petersburg and both want to escape incarceration. Huck is running from his abusive, alcoholic Pap and the constraints of ‘sivilized’ society – the hand-washin’, meal times and starchy britches that have been inflicted on him. Jim is fleeing slavery. So the pair strike out together, intending to raft to the free state of Illinois. Their drifting comes at a cost – they lose their raft, witness a massacre, encounter burglars and murderers. But despite all this, the wandering river provides the ultimate prize: freedom. Unlike life ashore, it’s not ‘cramped up and smothery’. Once they’re sliding down the Mississippi, it’s as if they exist beyond society’s normal rules. On the water, a white boy and a black man can float together, talking as equals.

Academics argue over Twain’s stance on race. Some see the novel as a scathing attack on prejudice; others condemn its repeated use of the word ‘nigger’ and feel it stereotypes black people. But it remains one of the most important works of American literature, as well as a rich evocation of the mid-19th-century Midwest.

To get a taste of Twain’s Americana, head to his one-time hometown of Hannibal, on which fictional St Petersburg is heavily based. The heart of the riverside town remains largely intact, its gridded historic centre lined with old-fashioned drugstores and taverns, as well as the old Clemens’ house, now the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum. You can also soak up the scenery that inspired Huck’s adventures – the sandbanks, the old mansions, the lazy river views – and board a replica paddle steamer for a journey on the Mississippi.

A few miles south of Hannibal is Jackson’s Island, where Huck and Jim meet up and forge one of the most monumental friendships in American literature – a mixed-race mate-ship in an era when this was rare indeed. The narrow, wooded island is still uninhabited, aside from the muskrats, turtles and beavers. And it’s still an ideal spot to play, hide, lark, tumble and watch the timeless river glide by.