I learned life-changing lessons from ‘Huck Finn’

Thanks for Tony Norman’s column “Read the Great Books That Use the Worst Slur” (Feb. 13). “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” changed my life. I read the novel one summer when I was about 13 sitting on the back porch of my grandmother’s house in the middle of a little Missouri town on the Mississippi River. The similarities between my culture and that of Huck Finn’s Missouri were striking to me.

Of course we did not have slavery, but we had brutal segregation in the early 1950s. Black families in our communiy were largely invisible. Growing up, I never saw a black person in a supermarket, movie theater, church, school or at any public event. The one notable exception was Little League baseball where, it seems, all the teams were eager to accept good players from the black families of “Old Town.”

In addition to the silent example of segregation was the teaching in our home that black people were morally and genetically inferior. One of my earliest memories was being in a car with my grandmother and passing a large black man with a shovel in the process of digging up a water pipe. The sweat and strain of working under a Missouri sun were taking their toll on him, but my grandmother assured me when I looked out the window: “Don’t feel sorry for him ... they do not feel pain.” My grandmother was born in the 19th century. She was passing on to me what was passed on to her, her grandfather being a Confederate soldier no less.

And then I read “Huck Finn.” And the passage that changed my life was at the moment where Huck wakes up early one morning and sees Jim weeping for his family left behind. I remember stopping my reading and thinking long and hard about Jim. And realizing for the first time in my life that everything I had been taught about race was wrong. That black people had the same emotions and feelings as I had.

Years later, I would graduate from the same seminary as Martin Luther King Jr. and enjoy having the same teacher for social ethics as Rev. King. But my journey had a beginning, a first step to a different life. And it was with a book by a fellow Missourian who learned somewhere, long before most, that racism is a terrible way to live. When I watch the news now, I wish Mark Twain was required reading for everyone — and read just the way it was written. TOM CLIFTON

Shaler