THE MISSISSIPPI'S LEGACY

MARK TWAIN USED THE MISSISSIPPI AS A METAPHOR FOR FREEDOM IN HIS NOVEL'ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN-BUT THE NOVEL'S RACIAL ATTITUDES HAVE NOT AGED WELL

-  UTTARAN DAS GUPTA

IN THE VILLAGE OF HANNIBAL, MISSOURI, on the west bank of the Mississippi River, all the boys aspired to be steamboat pilots. "Pilot was the grandest position of all," wrote one of them decades later. "The pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary." When the boy's parents would not let him pursue a career on the river, he ran away from home. After a few false starts, he convinced a pilot to take him on as an apprentice.

The name of this boy was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. On completing his training, Clemens became a pilot. "I was going to follow the river the rest of my days and die at the wheels when my mission ended," he later wrote. "But by and by, the war came, commerce was suspended, and my occupation was gone." Clemens served as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi from 1857 to 1861 when river trade was suspended at the start of the American Civil War. After trying to be a silver miner and a journalist, Clemens eventually found success as a writer and became famous as Mark Twain.

In "Life on Mississippi" (1883), Twain wrote in painstaking detail about his short, eventful career as a steamboat pilot and also another journey he took on the river in 1882.

The second part of the book is filled with nostalgic memories of the "old Mississippi Days of steamboating glory & grandeur as I saw them," but also about competition to steamboats from the railways and new towns on the Mississippi's banks, full of bad architecture. The river, however, was intrinsic to Twain's self-making. In the introduction to a 1984 edition of "Life on Mississippi," James M. Cox, a scholar of English literature, describes the Mississippi as "the river flowing through the heart of Mark Twain's boyhood...the river he succeeded in identifying himself with." The river also plays a critical part in the novel, which is often considered Twain's masterpiece, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1884).