I'm the fourth of six kids, born to an English major and a lawyer. Words were supremely important in our house, and my mother read to us almost every night when I was little: Scupper the Sailor Dog, The Little Engine That Could, Millions of Cats, The Secret Garden, Dr. Doolittle, Mr. Potter's Penguins, Heidi.
But I was no Scout Finch; I didn't learn to read by watching my mother read. The first day of first grade, Sister Mary Virginia put an enormous board book on an easel in front of the class. Each vast page had a big picture of one person/pet/deity, plus a name in giant letters at the bottom:
DICK. JANE. SPOT. PUFF. OUR ALMIGHTY FATHER IN HEAVEN.
Everyone else seemed to have attended secret first grade prep class, because they shouted the words out in unison when Ster tapped each one with the pointer. I sat there with my mouth open, feeling, for the first but not the last time, like a goat that had wandered into a flock of smartypants sheep.
Within a month or two I'd caught on to the reading gig, and I made it into the GOOD reading group (the Robins. Trust me, you didn't want to be a Bluejay). But my social skills remained inert, along with an utter inability to play volleyball or even foursquare, the only playground activities sanctioned for girls in the 50s and early 60s. Also I couldn't sing, so no girls' choir for me.
That left reading, and that's what I mostly did in elementary school: Jane Eyre, Little Women, Nancy Drew, Albert Payson Terhune, Black Beauty, The King of The Wind, the Hardy Boys, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Kidnapped, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Tender Is The Night, The Great Gatsby. The white middle class Anglo-centric classics of the time, pretty much.
By high school I was assigning myself more interesting books -- most of Jane Austen, The Brothers Karamozov, Crime And Punishment, The Grapes of Wrath, a lot more Steinbeck, David Copperfield, The Catcher in The Rye (which hasn't stood up, imo). And for fun, all of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey. Science fiction and fantasy, including lots of Ursula LeGuin, came along later. I've been reading ever since. There's always a book in the car and a book by the bed and the Kindle in my purse.
Any book, even a terrible one, takes you on a journey, invites you into another world. And you never return exactly the same. A lot of books have affected me. But I think Huckleberry Finn affected me most. I first read it in sixth or seventh grade, and have read it probably twenty or thirty times since then.
It's lyrical, cynical, funny, satirical, compassionate ("Human beings can be awfully cruel to one another"). The voice and dialogue are incomparable. It's flawed (that last section, arrgh). It's about nature, civilization, and freedom. And above all, the scene where Huck decides that he’ll go to hell rather than return Jim to slavery is revolutionary. Huck accepts the morality of his society without question, and internalizes it. Look at how he describes his struggle with his conscience.
Huck gets back to the raft one day to find Jim gone. The king and the duke have turned him in as a runaway slave for reward money. He's being held at a nearby farm.
At first Huck reacts emotionally, naturally:
After all this long journey, and after all we'd done for them scoundrels, here was it all come to nothing, everything all busted up and ruined, because they could have the heart to serve Jim such a trick as that, and make him a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too, for forty dirty dollars.
Then Huck thinks it would be better, since he's been caught, for Jim to be returned to Miss Watson, until he realizes that she'd probably be so angry she would sell him. And even if she didn't, everyone would despise Jim for running away, and despise Huck for helping him.
The more I studied about this, the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman's ni---r that hadn't ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there's One that's always on the lookout, and ain't agoing to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared...
Pretty classic description of a religious revelation, isn't it?
It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray; and see if I couldn't try to quit being the kind of a boy I was, and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that ni---r's owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie-and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie- I found that out.
So he writes a letter to Miss Watson, telling her where Jim is.
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking- thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time; in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind... and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
"All right, then, I'll go to hell"- and tore it up.
It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.
The reader, of course, knows that the “right thing” in this case is loathsome, and that Huck rejects it for that reason. But Huck doesn’t know that. He's chosen to go to hell.
When I read the book, the civil rights struggle was just beginning in the South, and middle class social consciousness was radically different than it is today. The Catholic church in which I was raised was nowhere near the forefront of that struggle, or any of the other struggles for human dignity that were taking place (plus ca change, eh?). Even minimal racial justice was regarded with hostility. Everyone was heterosexual. Women were allowed to vote only because men were nice guys.
That moment when Huck rejects the moral authority of his whole society stayed with me. I always read that part slowly, reread it, visualized it. Over time I thought maybe others besides Huck had been conditioned to accept without question a social order that was wrong; had been unable to see outside it. And then I thought, maybe I had been.