(Co-Ed note. Both images provided by DWB –Oh, to have Boo’s energy! Today we revisit Dale’s piece about America’s Shakespeare, the great Mr. Clemens/Twain, which was first published by Literally Stories UK. Sam had the same level of education as the Bard, but he’s is not detracted by his own legion of fatuous Baconites.–LA)

“Twain is America’s Shakespeare.”

– Leila Allison (2nd Co-Ed note–see, what did I just tell you!)

From the ages of twelve until sixteen, I was raised on the banks of the Mississippi River.

I first got truly intoxicated via alcohol on the banks of the river. (Alcohol would later become a major passion, until I had to give it up.)

I first tasted cigarettes on the banks of the river. (Same.)

I first tasted the sacred ganja (weed), too, on the banks of the Mississippi River. (Also a major passion, not given up so far as of this writing, except in the smoking form; medical edibles are stronger and more long-lasting anyway…)

I first held the hand of a girl on the banks of the river.

I knew a boy who was raped, robbed, and murdered by two other boys, who I also knew, brothers, who people called “white trash,” his body dumped into the river.

I was first shot at on the banks of the river (the one and only time so far, although a few people have threatened to do so since then, both those with guns and those without, women and men) which is a long and involved story all unto itself.

We lived a couple of miles inland. My friends and I would go down to the river whenever we could, which was frequently. Exactly like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer (which I didn’t know at the time), my friends and I would sneak out of our parents’ houses at night, sometimes out of the window exactly like Huck, to go roaming around our small-town world under cover of dark, in the night, the fabulous night, when the ghosts, the angels, the wild animals, and the beautiful mermaids swimming in the foamy river waves come out, or you wonder if you’ve seen them at least.

We sometimes passed the Lincoln-Douglas Debate statue on our way down to the miles-wide river. One time, some friends of mine climbed all over the statue, which I didn’t do, not because I wasn’t a climber, I was a climber, of trees, cliffs, bridges, public buildings, water towers, fences, and sometimes up and down the outside walls of my parents’ house when getting in and out of the window at night without them knowing.

I didn’t climb on the Lincoln statue because I respected Honest Abe, and what he stood for, too much. I’d first learned about him back in Michigan from Mrs. and Mr. Murphy, our next-door neighbors, who had three framed photos alongside one another on their mantle above the fireplace in the early 1970s: Lincoln, John. F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

When we moved to Illinois, I was instantly aware that we were entering the Land of Lincoln because of them. His leftover presence or memory bathed the whole land for me in a sort of immortal or legendary aura, or glow. He was the reason I would join the Blue Devil high school wrestling team here in Illinois, because I knew Old Honest Abe himself had been a wrestler, an individual who took on the bad guys even then (in my mind they were the bad guys).

One of my earliest memories is of crossing the river, in a car, on a bridge. We still lived in Michigan then and were on a family trip to the West. Dad was driving, and mom was pointing out the window, explaining why the river was so legendary.

The deep country in that part of Illinois surrounding America’s largest river is a mythological land that is yet or again unknown to many, but one day may become much more central to America again (despite its being in the center), because of all the fresh water it contains.

Hilly, extremely rural, filled with cliffs, ridges, forests, prairies, cornfields, eagles, deer, wild cats, wild dogs, and hogs, a place where you can easily get lost for hours on the back roads and not see another single human soul, a land of tiny, sleepy villages at crossroads with one person sitting in a chair on a porch maybe, mysterious isolated farm houses and barns back by themselves in the hollows, and small family cemeteries on hilltops like something out of “Wuthering Heights,” an area where the people almost seem to speak with a deep southern accent, a remote, vast region bordering the unconquerable river that few tourists or outsiders ever venture to or stop at, but where you can sometimes see travelers like hobos wandering up and down the lanes or waiting with their bottles and bags to jump a train, this part of Illinois still has an aura about it that conjures up an American past straight out of a Mark Twain story, large-haired, large-eye-browed, large-mustachioed, cigar-chomping, corncob-pipe-holding, whiskey-swilling, covered-in-newspaper-ink, laughing uproariously, raging Mark Twain.

While we visited Hannibal, Missouri, Twain’s home town, many times, like everyone else in the area, I never read Mark Twain’s stories, essays or novels when we lived along the river. In a fit of homesickness not long after we moved to Chicago when I was sixteen, I picked up “Huckleberry Finn” on a lonely summer afternoon and was suddenly transported back to the river country, where my best friend had been black, just like Huck and Jim. Their escape down the river forever after would stand for the longing for, and movement toward, freedom in my mind.

William Dean Howells called Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Twain, “the Lincoln of our literature.” Lincoln, Twain and THE LAND equaled THE RIVER in my mind, the strong brown god, as T.S. Eliot from Saint Louis, Missouri, called it, and the river itself equaled freedom, the cardinal virtue in the U.S. of A.’s finest idealist notions of itself. ILLINOIS, the middle of the country and the middle of nowhere, is America itself, boiled down.

As another great and legendary, iconic Middle American, Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan, has it about his youth in Minnesota: “Songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.”

“FREEDOM!” as Mel Gibson’s version of William Wallace, eternal Scottish rebel, a hero to both Twain and Lincoln, hollers out with his last echoing breath at the end of “Braveheart,” a great and overblown film, defying both the king and the mob, and even something else, like death itself.

Americans are good at escaping, or they used to be, just like me and my friends used to escape the comfort of our homes to go roaming where the edge of the world could be found. As Huck says at the end of his book, which he wrote himself, “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest…” Now we inhabit the territory of The Mind, and lighting out means keeping your brain (and spirit) as free as possible from the disease of modern life, even (or especially) when they’re coming to get you.

Twain himself had become a kind of early conscientious objector, when he defected from the Confederate army after his very first taste of real violence, which he documents in “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed,” and “Roughing It.”

“I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating,” he says about his decision to bow out of the army, avoid the carnage he now knew was coming for sure, and soon, and flee to the West.

“In this country, on Saturday, everyone was struck dumb, and saw at first only deep below deep, as he meditated on the ghastly blow,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination.

The paradoxical actions and reactions regarding freedom of Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, one running for his life, then writing about it, as an example to all of us about how you can escape the system if you try; the other refusing guard and accepting the death he knew was coming for him like it had come for so many (and which comes to all of us late or soon), and which had been shown to him in a dream…are both embodied in trips they took down The River. Lincoln saw slaves on the auction block after a raft trip down The River to New Orleans, and told a friend, “If I ever get a chance to hit slavery, I’ll hit it hard.” Fifty years later, Twain went back into the past and wrote a story about a small “white trash” white boy and a good-hearted, good-looking, and wise, black man becoming the best of friends, all by themselves, at the bottom of society, on a raft trip down The River.

“The brown god / is almost forgotten / by the dwellers in cities,” as T.S. Eliot knew; but “the river is within us…”