SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 2 (of 78)

Death of Margaret and Move to Hannibal (1839)

After these long intervening decades, I can no longer quite make out her face—just fleeting wisps of sun-haloed dream-visions. How strange that the visage of someone to whom I was so close is barely perceptible to me now.

It was the summer of 1839, when she was nine and I was not yet four. That is when my older sister Margaret, to whom I was utterly devoted, died.

Margaret was the second of my parent’s children. She was born five years after the oldest, Orion, and five years before me.

It was in that way that at a tender age I was introduced to the great enemy, death. That is, it is an enemy to those left behind, but not to the one taken. This unavoidable guest would visit my family many more times in the years to come.

Almost immediately after Margaret’s death, our family removed from Florida forty miles northeast to Hannibal, for a fresh start in a village that seemed to promise better prospects than those of that sleepy, almost-invisible backwater hamlet on the never-to-become-significant and scarcely navigable Salt River.

Hannibal was a new town when we moved there, and growing. Upon our arrival in that white town drowsing—which I later dubbed “St. Petersburg” in my books detailing the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—I was older than the village itself.

EDITOR’S NOTES: Though the family did not know it, Margaret’s death was likely, if indirectly, caused by the “peculiar institution” of slavery, for the “bilious fever” (yellow fever) that did her in was transmitted by a mosquito native to Africa, which had made it to Missouri as a result of the slave trade. It seems that son/brother Benjamin would die of the same cause three years later, in 1842.

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Blackbird Crow Raven’s “Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs” is being serialized in this space on substack each Sunday; it is also available in its entirety from here.