Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore: Childhood and Murder in the Heart of America

Rating:
Summary: If there were means to require reading for American adults
Review: Hannibal, MO was a good place - a place Mark Twain would still want to write about and still call home. And Hannibal's crusade to retain its association with one of America's greatest authors continued even as its population pushed out and away from its 1926 civic monument to Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and it changed. The gewgaw attractions, souvenir shops and then Wal-Marts and Super Centers took their place as the source of the pulse of Hannibal's community. Another Hannibal writer and native, Ron Powers watched from his adopted state of Vermont. It was puzzling to Powers, but he watched from a distance.
Then one evening in November 1997 two teenagers cruised the Hannibal streets looking for something to do, not far from Powers own childhood home. Robie Wilson and William Hill drove up to a 61-year old jogger and "doored" him - pushed open the car's passing door into the jogger's face at 50 mph.
Six weeks later, another shock hit small town Hannibal when two more teenagers, Zach Wilson and Diane Myers, were arrested for the shotgun murder of Diane's sleeping grandfather, J.D. Poage.
Two crimes, two murders shattered the semblance of calm in Hannibal and sounded an alarm as far away as the mind of Pulitzer-winner Powers who feared he was seeing the collapse of something bigger, something far beyond the place they called "America's Home Town" in Missouri.
Powers left Vermont for Hannibal and undertook some frightening analysis of the forces that led to its violence and wrote Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore: Childhood and Murder in the Heart of America.

"With the supplanting of local merchants by corporate retail colonies at century's end, place had lost most of its morally regenerative force in heartland American life. The distinctive textures and the nuances of country and town life had stopped growing more separate. They had largely reconverged: subsumed into a larger, encroaching culture dedicated to the leveling of distinctions, and the allegiances and exaltations that such distinctions fed. 'Place'," Powers says, "had been supplanted by 'venue.'"

Powers describes the accused murderers and their culture, their families, their friends and their disconnect from moral mooring. As he does so he writes his own biography and weaves in references to life on the banks of the mighty Mississippi and the shore of a society eroding from a vision we often pretend to be true.
Powers' imagery is unnerving, at times described in stunningly fluid style, at others burdened by the author's attempt to find absolution for his own relationship with his late brother, Jim.
Powers writes an indictment of an America that has broken faith with its children. Not surprisingly there are questions unanswered, but this account blends a tail of two killings (and subsequent trials of the lost boys who committed them) with Powers' memoir of growing up.
There are no answers to why children kill. Yet, symptoms of community disintegration and the loss of social connection plague the country (latchkey children with over-scheduled parents, members of families distancing themselves from one another, families distancing themselves from their community, commercial sprawl next to neglected neighborhoods and a withering civic consciousness seem to be everywhere), and the cost is clear.
Powers writes with a mastery of language that sends readers back again and again to the top of his paragraphs. Tom and Huck is a dark and sobering book, but Powers' love for his hometown is enviable. This book is about social change that comes faster than anyone would like and the resulting struggle we all undertake to protect ourselves and those around us from that change.
Tom and Huck will help you understand your past and your present. You will better understand what young members of our culture see while we are not looking. There are shadows, but there is light. If there were means to require reading for American adults, this book would be on the list.

Rating:
Summary: AUTHOR DELIVERS A COMPELLING READING
Review: Ofttimes, an author brings a greater depth of understanding to a reading of his work than does a professional actor. Such is the case with Powers' reading of his latest offering, a sad but necessary visit to Hannibal, Missouri, the hometown he shares with Mark Twain.

The focus of this story is not a carefree, innocent childhood largely spent on the banks of the Mississippi, but rather heinous crimes committed by teenagers. Powers interweaves his personal odyssey, Twain's story, and the contemporary tragedies to form a compelling true tale which asks what has happened to our children?

The author, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and co-author of "Flags Of Our Fathers," interviewed the victim's relatives, neighbors, family members, and the teenagers themselves. Ace reporter that he is, Powers has delivered an accurate and astounding story. The current events are compounded by the author's own experiences at the hands of an abusive father, a Fuller Brushman.

This is not a pleasant tale, but it is one that needs to be heard. Few who hear it will remain unchanged.

- Gail Cooke

Rating:
Summary: A sliver of truth from Hannibal, Missouri
Review: Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore, by Hannibal's native son, Ron Powers, is his latest commentary on the condition of the condition we're in.

I doubt that Mr. Power's own dysfunctional behavior, examined in great depth throughout the book, is the result of being raised in Hannibal. Geography is not to blame for the events in his life, or that of the Wilson boys.

Overall, the basic observation, from this intimate outsider, of Hannibal's "cut-rate" low-income segment of society appears to be reasonably accurate. The particularly dark subject he has chosen for this book is, unfortunately, a part of our local history. Sadder still is the realization that our community is not alone in this loss of innocence. Thankfully, though, that's not the whole story.

As a life-long Hannibal native, a wife of 17 years, a working mother, and part of a classic example of an "average" family in America's Hometown, I can assure you that everyday juvenile violence and drug abuse are not the norm in middle-class Hannibal. Abstract worries that I'll be murdered in my sleep by the adolescent living next door are not a part of my life here.

I'm sure, in comparison with the author's recollection of the ideal Hannibal he knew as a child, things have changed. Still, I find it rather disconcerting that he makes no apology for failing to mention the positive aspects of his, and my, hometown. Hannibal is a community rich in history, full of caring individuals, active civic groups, a fantastic Arts Council, community theater, and a top-rated public school system. We are a strong community with diverse industries. We have state-of-the art medical facilities, agri-business, a mature tourism trade, and over 5,000 well-paying manufacturing jobs in a community of only 18,000. The Provenance Project, an innovative fine-artist recruitment initiative, was the recipient of the Missouri Governor's Award for Economic Development in 2000.

Hannibal, like most rural communities, continues to face challenges daily. But, wonderful things are happening here, too. Read the book, then, come see for yourself.