Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week Tiya Miles writes about Percival Everett’s novel James, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction earlier this month.
I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn decades before it became a banned book, for the umpteenth time, in the early 2000s. The scene of the future crime was my high school English language and literature class at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati.
I loved English class. It captivated me with unfamiliar places and people, with dips and swells of language. We read what were then defined as the classics of American literature, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” which we had to memorize. Those opening stanzas still echo in my head.
But I hated Huckleberry Finn.
