It has been 141 years! On Feb. 18, 1885, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn set sail into the American imagination.
Not with fanfare, but with a boy, a raft and a runaway slave named Jim — and with them, Mark Twain gave us more than a story.
He gave us a mirror: muddy, cracked and unflinching. A reflection of who we were, who we are, and who we still might become if we keep drifting toward the truth.
Twain, born Samuel Clemens, first adopted his famous pen name while living in California, where the gold dust had settled but the stories still shimmered.
It was in the Sierra Nevada shadows and San Francisco fog that “Mark Twain” emerged — sharp-witted, irreverent and tuned to the contradictions of a country still finding its soul.
This poem is a small raft of its own — a tribute to the book that taught us how to float through paradox, how to laugh at our follies, and how to listen to the quiet voice of conscience over the roar of the crowd.
Huck Finn Floats Again
He launched it on a February day,
a raft of paper and ink,
with a boy who lied like a poet and a man who ran like a prayer.
They floated past the polite lies of Sunday school,
past the sermons and the steamboats,
past the towns that spelled “freedom” but meant something else entirely.
Huck lit out for the Territory not because he was brave,
but because he couldn’t stand to be civilized.
And Jim — Jim was the heart of the river,
the one who knew that love can be a kind of rebellion
and dignity doesn’t need a deed.
Twain sat back in his white suit,
smiling like a man who’d just told the truth in a joke and gotten away with it.
And here we are,
still reading,
still arguing,
still drifting downriver,
upstream, and always deeper — deeper into the American story,
its conscience,
our unfinished business,
our reckoning with race, with freedom,
with identity — the current tugging at us still,
asking who we are and
who we dare to become.
