"New World Views with Mark Twain," says the title. She must have read something by him, thinks the reader.
You would be correct, but which came first - the chicken or the egg?
A couple weekends ago, our family went to Hannibal Missouri. Apart from having a fantastic name, Hannibal is also famous for being the hometown of Mark Twain.
Mark Twain? Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer's author, yes. That year of assigned reading in High School. And, as with all things that are assigned reading, his books became assigned drudgery. My memory of the books, in essence, was racism floating down a river.
I was no fan of Mark Twain. As I got older, and listened to my mother talking about how much she enjoyed him, I was willing to move from dislike to apathy, regarding the author - not taking much of an opinion on the man, but not seeking him out.
Because, aside from Huckleberry Finn, the only thing I knew about Mark Twain? He was anti-Mormon.
That's it, folks. Game over. I didn't like him. He once said, "All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so 'slow,' so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print."
No, my friends, I did not like Mark Twain.
I think it took me moving to Missouri to think about Mark Twain again. I didn't know that was where he was from. I didn't know he grew up an hour drive south of Nauvoo, just across the river, and was raised, there in Hannibal, starting in 1839. He would have been nine years old when Joseph Smith Jr was killed in Illinois. I have plenty of memories from the age of nine. Mark Twain would have had opinions, surely.
But OH, how I hated assigned reading.
I went to the Museum there because my husband suggested it. We went with his mother and, obviously, our children. Surprisingly, the museum was VERY child-friendly, so I went into it with a positive mindset - seeing the costumes kids could try on, and the stagecoach they could climb inside. There was the fake raft, which, artistically, was very well done! There was a cave to walk through, and white picket fences half-painted. (Somewhere inside my memory I think that's Tom Sawyer...)
My love for Mark Twain, and not just his museum, really grew on the third floor of the building. Inside cases were displayed many of the books, with summaries, that he had written. I had no idea that Mark Twain had ever written anything aside from books about bratty, ignorant boys. Because that's how much I knew about him, before forming the opinion that I didn't like him.
Turns out, Mark Twain wrote a lot of stuff. Also, turns out, the man had some great one-liners. Who knew that he was so quoteable! And so dry, and witty!
Turns out, Mark Twain was a father of daughters. (I have a soft spot for men with no sons. I think they stand a chance at beginning to see how the world works, that way.)
He had terrible hair. He frequently wrote while lying in bed. He bought his wife lovely things. He wore out his clothes until they had rips, because they were his favorite things.
Mark Twain, turns out, was liberal. He was probably an old timey Bernie Sanders.
And not only was I impressed, I think I realized that I love him.
Mark Twain made me see him as a man of authenticity - who didn't care what others thought. He was humble. He enjoyed being comfortable. He was "without guile," per the words of Jesus. And he was impressively observant, and eloquent about those observations.
I picked up a couple books, in the gift shop, and had finished both the Diary of Adam and the Diary of Eve before the weekend was through. And I laughed. I so enjoyed how he thought.
I concluded, at the end of this trip, that assigned reading, in school, in a surefire way to make people hate authors. Don't tell ME what I'm supposed to enjoy thinking about, in my free time, cause it sure as hell isn't some redneck boy floating down a river. No thank you. Stop making teenagers read books written for adults.
But SECOND, I still have a lot of background biases I'm still unpacking, from Mormonism.
My mother has been enjoying Missouri with me, since we both moved here. We've been exploring, and she has been exploring with her photography. One of her friends commented, "Thank you for showing me that Missouri is a beautiful place. I'd always thought it was terrible, and unfriendly."
If you ask my ancestors, Missourians are the worst sorts of people. Devils, frankly. (That's written in teenage girl pioneer journals.) I think it's easy to look back on Mormonism's past, and make some pretty easy assumptions about the sorts of people who must live in Missouri. (Yellow dog prophecy, anyone?)
Missouri is so beautiful and wonderful that Joseph Smith named it as the Garden of Eden. Surprise, it's fantastic. Even my neighbors that I share almost NOTHING in common with, apart from also having children who go to school, are wonderfully social and kind. I would never pick them as a friend, and yet I think friends we are, simply because of their kindness and openness to be a good neighbor.
More biases - the other day I was watching a movie when, surprise, the lead character of the plot was a lesbian! "Oh no," some quiet voice in the back of my head whispered. "I probably shouldn't watch this." I was only ten minutes in. I'd already stopped watching a Viggo Mortensen movie that wasn't to my liking, so...
She was a LESBIAN. That was IT. It was a historical drama! It was my kind of movie!!!! I LIVE for historical dramas! And I was going to let the fact that she wanted to kiss a woman stop me from watching a retelling of an actual person's life?! I watched the movie, I'll have you know. There was no reason not to! If she'd been a heterosexual I wouldn't have blinked twice. But there I was, blinking before I even knew what I was doing.
I blinked about a lesbian, and I spent over a decade blinking about Mark Twain, because all I knew about him was that he was anti-Mormon. I love him, and I may never have known that, if I hadn't been willing to reconsider everything.
I'm grateful that I'm growing up. It's uncomfortable, sometimes, to look at my biases with honesty, but I'm grateful that I'm seeing myself for who I am, now. And I'm grateful that I get to write my story with my own values and words, now.
