Playing hookey with Huck

Big storm over the Mississippi River. Right-thinking folks is indoors, minding their secret hoard of lickrish pieces and pinch-bug beetles, but we ain't no right-thinking folks. 'Let's go to the cemetery and cure some warts!' says the juvenile pariah sitting across from me. 

'By jingoes, let's!' says I. 

And two adults who should know better giggle out of a restaurant called Lula Belle's and tumble straight back into their childhoods. It's hard to do otherwise in Hannibal, Missouri for this is the home town of Mark Twain, novelist, humorist, inveterate traveller - and creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. 

Tom's and Huck's worlds, which Twain based closely on his own childhood in the streets and riverside and hiding places of Hannibal, have found immortality in the imaginations of millions of readers across three centuries, and this year, 2010, is awash with significant Twain anniversaries 

April 21 was the centenary of his death, February 18 was the 125th anniversary of the publication of his greatest work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and he was born 175 years ago on November 30 - all of which is a dandy excuse to visit. I wasn't quite ready for what I found, however. In its location and topography Hannibal is those two novels, Tom Sawyer especially, and of course it's an impression the tourist authorities do everything to encourage. 

'It's a holy pilgrimage, to stand outside the boyhood home and look up at the windows and think, 'They're the same windows he crawled out of as a boy',' says Cindy Lovell who, when she isn't impersonating Huck Finn, is the Director of the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum. 'I've seen grown men burst into tears right on the sidewalk.' 

Samuel Langhorne Clemens ('Mark Twain', as any fule kno, was a pen name he took from a term used on Mississippi steamboats) was born in 1835 in the village of Florida, Missouri, and moved with his family to Hannibal, some 40 miles north-east on the west bank of the Mississippi, in 1839. He jumped town, like Huck, less than 15 years later, and would travel across half the world. But a piece of Hannibal stayed in his heart. 

Twain's evocations of his childhood are so gilded ('it was a beautiful life, a lovely life. There was no crime. Merely little things like pillaging orchards and watermelon patches...') that as I drove up Highway 61 from St Louis on a rainy late winter's afternoon I was imagining a kind of Norman Rockwell painting. And blow me if I didn't find it. 

The slogan painted on the water tower out on 61 - the same Highway, incidentally, that Bob Dylan Revisited in his 1965 album - gives fair warning: 'America's Hometown,' it declares, as does the giant billboard on Mark Twain Avenue as you drive into town. 

Twain apart, Hannibal can lay claim to being a big fat apple pie slice of Americana. Neither north nor south, it sits at the vanishing point of the great prairies and rivers of the Midwestern US, on the epic waterway once known as America's Main Street. 

The population these days is 18,000, compared to 4,000 when the Clemens family left town in 1853, never to live there again. But the heart and essence of Hannibal, configured on a tight grid of streets alongside the river, is pretty much intact. To anyone raised on old movies it seems a paradigm of pre-shopping mall, small-town America, with enough scruff at the edges for it not to seem like a theme park. 

There's a discount tobacco and liquor store, a pawnbroker's, a perfectly preserved drug store, a restaurant that used to be a bordello, a coffee shop where liberals hang out, its quota of rednecks ('Obama lies,' says a slogan painted on the tailgate of a pick-up truck) and deep-porched, neo-gothic mansions up on the hill with river views from their corner turrets. 

And for overwhelming numbers of people there's an additional, magical dimension: wherever we grew up, this is the dreamscape of our childhoods for in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn Hannibal was transfigured by Twain's genius into 'the poor little village of St Petersburg'. 

Standing outside the whitewashed frame house of the Clemens family, I hear the ghostly strains of Aunt Polly: 

''Tom!' 

No answer. 

'What's gone with that boy, I wonder? You Tom!'' 

Here's the bedroom window Tom would crawl from in dead of night, summoned by the 'meows' of the 'juvenile pariah of the village', Huckleberry Finn. And here, of course, is the whitewashed fence that Tom inveigled his friends into painting for him, deploying 'psy-ops' of which the CIA would be proud. 

The old family home is the centerpiece of eight properties clustered in the 'historic downtown neighbourhood', just a block west of the Mississippi, that together make up the 'Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum'. Quotes from the great man are displayed in the glassed-off rooms of the house - including 'A person's nature never changes. What it is in childhood, it remains' - while the Interpretive Centre tells the story of the Clemens family and of Hannibal in the early 19th century. 

Facing the family home on Hill Street is the childhood home of Laura Hawkins, who was the model for Tom's inamorata in Tom Sawyer, the blue-eyed, golden-plaited Becky Thatcher. Next to that is the Justice of the Peace office (moved from its original location) where Twain's father worked, and next to that is Grant's Drug Store, where the Clemens family moved when they fell on hard times. 

A couple of blocks along Main Street, the Museum Gallery contains original artwork of the 15 illustrations painted by, wouldn't you know it, Norman Rockwell for mid-20th century editions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. They are beautiful paintings, depicting the whitewashing of the fence and so on and bathed in the golden light of nostalgia, but they do not tell the complete story of the town and the novels, for a shadow falls permanently across both. 

That shadow, what you might call the elephant in Hannibal's front parlour, is slavery. Missouri, unlike Illinois just the other side of the Mississippi, was a slave state and by the mid-19th century a quarter of the population of Hannibal County were slaves. If you were white you owned a person, or persons, as casually as nowadays you would own a car. 

The Twain museum tackles the issue in the Huckleberry Finn House. This simple clapboard cabin was reconstructed in 2005 from photographs of the home of the real-life Huck Finn, Tom Blankenship, which stood on the same spot till 1911. Here displays address the enduring controversy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which was denounced as 'trashy and vicious' when it was first published in 1885 and since the 1980s has faced regular calls for it to be removed from public libraries and school reading lists. 

The principal objection now is to Twain's liberal use of the word 'nigger', from which people deduce that he was a racist. In fact Twain was writing and thinking way ahead of his time and believed that 'slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarrantable usurpation'. By any measure Huckleberry Finn is a great humanitarian work that Hemingway, for one, believed to be the progenitor of 'All modern American literature'. 

'It [racism] was an issue then and it's still an issue,' says Megan Rapp, the assistant director of the Hannibal Convention and Visitors Bureau. 'We haven't gotten past it. That's why Huckleberry Finn is controversial. It's always been a controversial book. I think Twain liked it that way.' 

We are having lunch - pork tenderloin sandwiches the diameter of steamboat paddlewheels - in the Ole Planters Restaurant on North Main St. Behind us sits Jim Waddell, one of several Mark Twain impersonators who work the streets and theatres of Hannibal in the summer months. He's very good, I am told. 

'I'm getting ready to build a beehive,' he calls across cheerily. 'Did I tell you about the maple syrup?' 

Jim has time for such hobbies now, but come the season you won't see him for the white suit and face paint. For Hannibal is gearing up for a bumper tourist year, thanks to all those Twainian anniversaries falling obligingly into line. 

There will be fence-paintings contests and Tom and Becky competitions; there's a National Tom Sawyer Day, on July 4 naturally; the Mark Twain Riverboat, a replica of a Mississippi paddlesteamer, will cruise the river blaring out ragtime music; and 'all in a twinkling' the sleepy town will come alive, as it did whenever steamboats arrived in young Sam Clemens' day. 

For now it still sleeps, pretty much, and the sun casts a warm Rockwellian glow as I wander through Twain's pages. Down on the Mississippi, where winter ice floes still cling to the banks, I imagine Huck and Jim striking out for freedom. Out on Highway 79, a mile and a half south of town, I explore the maze of limestone tunnels where Tom and Becky got lost and Injun Joe died an agonising death. I feel as if I am playing hookey from reality. 

'Hannibal electrifies me,' says Cindy Lovell at dinner that evening. 'It sizzles for me. I come down that hill in the morning and I tremble.' From Pennsylvania via Florida state, she is a self-confessed 'cookie Twain person' who, as director of the museum complex, knows she has the best job in the world. 

It is now, over plates of yellowfish tuna and shrimp in Lula Belle's, the old whorehouse down by the river, that things grow truly surreal. Cindy comes up with the idea of visiting the graveyard at night, like Tom and Huckleberry, and there is no gainsaying her even had I wanted to. Which I didn't. 

So we drive through lashing rain to the old Baptist cemetery, a boggy hillside scattered with bare trees and gravestones. 'Just to give you an idea,' Cindy whispers. 'Back of that hill there: all slaves. No markers.' We splash among white folks' graves with 'Sacred to the memory of -' engraved on them, just like in the book. 

Then Cindy points a flashlight beam at a rare example of a marked slave grave, a low stone commemorating Agness Flautleroy who was 'owned' by Sophia Hawkins, the real-life mother of Becky Thatcher. 

Cindy has got the bit between her teeth now. She drives us across to another cemetery, the Mt Olivet, where we dodge the nightwatchman to find where the real Injun Joe is buried: 'His name was Joe Douglass, with two esses. In Tom Sawyer he dies in the cave but in real life he lived to be 102. Everyone said he was a nice guy'. 

It was Mark Twain who said that truth is stranger than fiction. The point is about to be well made. As the rain continues to fall we end up at Lover's Leap, a rocky bluff to the south of Hannibal with an overview of its silent twinkling streets. 

Down below, a freight train of the Burlington Northern Sante Fe Railroad slouches through town, its mournful whistle echoing along the banks of the Mississippi. And, honest injun, at that moment comes an answering, unearthly howl from the rocky escarpment beneath our feet. 

We are momentarily scared witless, then we listen hard. Definitely kids' voices. Cindy and I look at each other. Tom and Huck. Has to be. 

Published in The Daily Telegraph on April 17, 2010