THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were nobly transient. When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn, but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.

Twain/Mississippi, 1984

His fascination was with the Mississippi as it had been in the past… [H]is Mississippi books are works of memory, even of archaeology. Into them Twain poured all the half-forgotten trivia and pop ephemera he could dredge up from his childhood: the bad pious poetry and the worse folk songs, the primness of river town society matrons and the crazy banter of the river men, the omen reading of the conjurers and the tirades of the drunks on the riverfront levees, the childhood games, the rumors, the ghost stories, the superstitions… it was as though the murkiness of the Mississippi had cleared to reveal. drowned town miraculously preserved on the river bottom.

Sandlin/Wicked, 2010