The Search for Huck Finn
I’ve had the privilege of working on a No Dull Life book (that is just about finished!) for a couple in their eighties. Both Hans and his wife immigrated to the United States from Germany (via Canada) when they were in their twenties. We have frequently discussed what drove them to take the risk and embark on this adventure. I love Hans’s explanation of that force, which was his desire for freedom:
When the British bombs began to rain down on Dusseldorf every two or three days and Hans’s grandparents’ home was destroyed (happily, they were safe at a saloon when their house was bombed), Hans’s father, who was in the German air force, decided to evacuate the family to his brother’s home in eastern Germany.
There was no military activity at all in this tiny hamlet, which was surrounded by farms and situated in the mountans. The town consisted of a castle and a main street with a few nice buildings. Hans’s uncle, a rich and politically connected man, lived in a mansion. The family owned everything they saw for as far as they could see. Hans’s uncle was the boss there in every way; he practically owned the people of Ballenstedt, almost all of whom worked for him.
Despite the relative prosperity he enjoyed by virtue of being his uncle’s nephew, Hans chafed at the constraints of his uncle’s house. When Hans was a little child in Dusseldorf, his mother had always had au pairs around to care for Hans and his brothers. Hans remembered these caretakers and how he hated when they would set him on top of a shoulder-high chest of drawers in the hallway, keeping him captive because he had no way of getting down. It was even worse in his uncle’s house, where he could do almost nothing without permission and scrutiny.
He was actually jealous of the children of his uncle’s workers. Sometimes Hans would sneak out early in the morning and meet some of these six- and seven-year-old children at the fountain in the town square. They would catch frogs there, occasionally blowing them up with straws and doing any manner of things that would not be allowed under the watchful eyes of Hans’s family or caretakers. While Hans’s clothes were fastidiously laid out for him each morning and changed the moment they got dirty (if he was lucky enough to do something that might get his clothes dirty, that is), these children ran around in their nightshirts because their parents were too busy working or too tired to control them. They could do anything. Hans couldn’t quite understand what it was that made him so envious until several years later, when he started reading Mark Twain’s books.
Hans began school at the age of ten, a year before his father’s return from the war. He became a voracious reader throughout his school years, reading a complete book every day; if he went to bed at ten o’clock p.m. and needed seven hours to finish the book, he would read until five o’clock a.m. to do so. When he was eleven or twelve, he read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain—in English. He found a hero in Huckleberry Finn. Huck Finn could get away with even more than the children in his uncle’s town:
Huckleberry came and went, at his own free will. He slept on doorsteps in fine weather and in empty hogsheads in wet; he did not have to go to school or to church, or call any being master or obey anybody; he could go fishing or swimming when and where he chose, and stay as long as it suited him; nobody forbade him to fight; he could sit up as late as he pleased; he was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring and the last to resume leather in the fall; he never had to wash, nor put on clean clothes; he could swear wonderfully. In a word, everything that goes to make life precious that boy had. So thought every harassed, hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg.
Nobody controlled Huck Finn; his freedom was absolute.