Examining the Loss of Innocence in Tom and Huck’s Heartland

Mark Twain was recently lionized by first lady Laura Bush on the occasion of his 166th birthday for providing “words and wit ... as appropriate today as when they were written.” Through Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, readers experience a uniquely American boyhood filled with whitewashed fences and raft excursions, the coming of age for not only those characters but for our youthful nation as well. Twain traps in amber that on-the-cusp-of-adulthood moment, sealing it next to the deep roil of the Mississippi, beneath the brilliant stars in an otherwise coal-black sky.

Author Ron Powers, in a stirring and altogether disturbing work of cultural criticism, takes on the nostalgia of Twain’s American boyhood--not to argue with the author’s portrayal, but to strip away the layers of sentimentality we persist in clinging to. In so doing, he shows us the nation we’ve become in middle age.

“Tom and Huck Don’t Live Here Anymore” is in many ways a personal work. Powers was raised in Hannibal, Mo., boyhood home of Mark Twain--the community that advertises itself as “America’s Hometown.” Growing up there in the 1940s, he experienced the Tom and Becky look-alikes dressed up for community celebrations, and a childhood more reflective of Twain’s version than anything remotely resembling Hannibal today.

Powers, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of eight books who now lives in Middlebury, Vt., was drawn back to Hannibal in 1997 when, in a span of six weeks, the unimaginable happened: Two utterly senseless murders were carried out by adolescent boys from America’s Hometown. Powers’ response echoes that of a nation baffled by an epidemic of angry, armed young men: “That sort of thing is not supposed to happen here.”

Looking at his Hannibal boyhood and trying to make sense of the violent incarnation that has usurped it, Powers strives to winnow out the factors responsible for this transformation. He uses a threefold narrative to detail what he finds: There’s Twain’s story told alongside that of his imaginative creations, Tom and Huck. Then there’s Powers’ narrative of having grown up in simple Hannibal times, remembering vividly the joy of the woods and the excitement of his natural surroundings, a sense of everything being as it should. Woven throughout, there’s the current-day tale of discarded children, forgotten lives, misplaced dreams and, ultimately, mindless violence and murder. But as Powers is quick to point out, this story does not belong to Hannibal alone. It is being retold on playgrounds and in juvenile detention facilities, in child-custody courts and day-care centers across our nation.

At the core of Powers’ narrative are two teen boys who share a last name. The first, 16-year-old Robie Wilson, the son of a Hannibal city councilman and letter carrier, was convicted of using the car door on his friend’s pickup truck to smash into a jogger, enacting a malice called “dooring” that took the life of the 61-year-old longtime Hannibal resident. As best as can be pieced together, this act of violence was the result of boredom. In the second case, 17-year-old Zachary Wilson (whose stepfather Kirk is brother to Robie’s father, Kyle), burst into the bedroom of his girlfriend’s step-grandfather and was convicted of shotgunning the sleeping, naked 67-year-old before stealing his truck and heading out on the lam. Later, the youth gleefully recounted gory details to police in what Powers describes as a gothic travesty of Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” in which Huck set out on his great journey having left a blood-soaked cabin to give the impression he’d been murdered. Again, boredom coupled with familial and societal disintegration seem to be key factors.

What is happening in Hannibal, and by extension, across our nation that we’re raising a generation of young men with murder in their hearts? That is the question Powers wrestles, looking to the community fabric for answers. He visits the homes of the boys, the widow of the slain jogger, the day-care center that serves the working parents, as well as with local social workers and teachers. What Powers finds is an appalling and frightening lack of societal cohesion. He meets “feral” children with no homes: “An address, perhaps. But no home.” Parents afraid and unable to cope with their children, who look to institutions to solve the problem. Meanwhile, incarceration is among the hottest trends in Missouri. “Prisons are a booming business,” he quotes the St. Louis Dispatch, “... a seemingly recession-proof industry.” Amid all these factors--even in his own childhood and the yesteryear stories of Twain--Powers detects a long-standing vein of repressed anger, debasement and violence, as strong and insistent as the Mississippi herself, passed down from father to son. This is the ethos, Powers argues, of Huck’s father, Pap, “daring all the world-awakening strivers of the future to escape the undertow of the past.”

Though Twain’s words are, as Mrs. Bush indicated, still abundantly appropriate, the world to which they are addressed is quite different. If, as Powers suggests, it’s time to investigate the lives of our current-day Toms and Hucks--the young men coming of age in this era of rampant consumerism, fractured family structures and disintegrating small town communities--then searching amid the tales in Powers’ book, the stories of Mark Twain, as well as within our own family walls, is a fitting and heartbreaking place to start.