I was always a great fan of Huckleberry Finn, maybe to the point of over-identification. There seemed to be so many similarities in our lives and feelings.
Huck's alcoholic father abandoned him after his mother died, and he was taken in by a local widow. His father would only show up, to abuse and torment Huck, when he got drunk. Finally, Huck faked his own murder to escape the man. He then set out on a life of freedom and adventure on the Mississippi river with a stolen raft and a run-away slave named Jim. Huck's story ends at about the age that mine really begins. His father has died and he is now free to return to the widow. There is a six thousand dollar inheritance from his mother's estate.
The book does not tell us whether he chose to go back or to set off on further adventures.
Some years ago, PBS bought the rights to Hucks story and produced a weekly television program featuring Huck as a young man who had returned to live with the widow and went to college. On the program, he was portrayed as a young lawyer, helping the downtrodden.
I just don't think PBS had a good handle on who this kid was. He might very well turn into Atticus Finch later in life, but to this point, he has known nothing but crisis and adrenaline. Freedom is all he's looking for.
Other than his friend Jim, Huck would appear to have little trust for people. He had become an accomplished liar with a real flair for doing whatever it takes to meet his needs. In his interaction with other people, he appears to be as much an observer as he is a participant, constantly looking for clues in order to determine who he should be. Perhaps the only reason for his trust in Jim is that Jim is a runaway slave who needs Huck as much as Huck needs him.
No, I think Huck was more likely to choose to continue his new life of freedom and adventure at that point. He would have no tolerance for confinement of any kind. He was so caught up in crisis living, that he would find it hard to live without the adrenaline rushes he was so used to.
My father didn't drink.
However, he was so brutalized as a child that he almost died from a beating when he was fourteen years old. His whole forehead is a mass of scar tissue from that beating. My grandfather beat him unconscious with a steel rod about 2 o'clock in the afternoon and left him lying in a field, where they had been plowing. His crime was plowing crooked rows. He lay there overnight. The next morning my Grandmother realized he had not come home that night and suspecting something was not right, went to the field and found him lying in a pool of blood, still unconscious.
I have heard many horror stories about the things that happened to him as a child, though not from him. I understand the shame and embarrassment that kept him from telling anyone what happened to him.
Today, he would be diagnosed as a case of post-traumatic stress syndrome. At that time, no one knew anything about such things.
He was 6'3" and 250lb's, a very powerful man. The few people I ever saw challenge him physically, usually wound up with a gun in their face or a knife at their throat. Once, when I was a small child, a man cut him off in traffic. He ran the man off the road and beat him unconscious. Then drove away and left the man face down in a ditch full of water.
The insanity began in my generation when I was three years old. I was playing with a ball on the front porch, when the ball bounced and broke a window. I remember my mother telling me that he would whip me when he came home from work. But, he didn't. He put me in the car and drove me out into the woods. He put me out of the car and drove away. Several hours later, I wandered out onto a highway, where a policeman picked me up walking. As it was a very small town, it didn't take them long to find out where I belonged. The story given was that I had been playing in the yard and must have wandered away.
The beatings and other torments would begin a little later in life, though I can't tell you exactly when. Only that I don't ever remember not being afraid of my father. He always said that he would kill all of us if we ever told the things that happened at home.
I was in the fifth grade and my brothers in third and second grades respectively, when we were beaten with a bullwhip, so badly that it couldnt be hidden. However, we were sent to school anyway. My middle brother began to cry from the pain of sitting and when the teacher put her hand on his shoulder to ask what was wrong, her hand came away bloody.
The police were called. They stripped us down and photos were taken. The whole family had to appear in a juvenile court, where my father was given a 90 day suspended sentence and told not to use the bullwhip again. This was the only time he was ever in trouble for this kind of thing.
I was pretty much an insomniac by the time I was twelve and plagued with depression and self-doubt. Being the oldest of six children, I felt very responsible for the well-being of my siblings and my mother, who by then had been hospitalized several times for "nervous break-down", but I felt powerless to protect them.
One day, after my father had thrown a full glass of iced tea in my mother's face- "glass and all- I had gone to a local Judge and told him about the way things were at home. He called my mother and asked if it were true. She admitted that it was, but refused to press charges out of fear.
Some months later, my father had my mother down on the floor with a pistol in her mouth and I decided the only answer was to kill him. As I sat in another room with a rifle aimed at his head through the doorway, my youngest brother came in and asked me, "Are you going to kill him?" I told him that I knew I would go to prison, but that I couldn't see any other answer. He asked me what would happen to the rest of the family.
My mother had a high school education and had never had a job. As I thought about it, I knew the rest of the children would wind-up separated and farmed out in whatever kinds of situations. I knew I could not do that to them, so I put the gun away and gave up on any kind of relief.
Junior high school was a nightmare for me. With all I had going on at home, along with the social stigma of poverty and extreme nervous tension, I soon experienced a complete emotional collapse. A bully pushed me while standing in line to enter the lunchroom. It took five teachers to pull me off him as I sat on his chest, holding him by the hair, and beating him in the face. I was screaming at the top of my voice as they dragged me away. Thirty minutes later, I was still screaming and crying in the school office. They decided that there might be something wrong with me!
I was sent to a psychiatrist at the school board. After talking with me, she recommended a change of schools and a prescription for valium. God love her, I needed that valium. It was the beginning of an off and on love affair with drugs and later, alcohol.
My father was a framing contractor. The year I was fourteen, he took me out of school to help him frame three houses. Those were some of the worse months of my life. I could do nothing to please him. He didn't like the angle of the nail. I wasn't holding the hammer right. I couldn't saw a straight line. He kicked me in the stomach and knocked me off a scaffold eight feet above the ground.
"Just generally having a good time and enjoying each others company."
A week later, displeased with the way I was nailing rafters in the roof of a house, he hit me in the back of the head with his hammer handle. Hard.
I heard someone scream away in the distance, as I fell through the rafters into the house, bouncing off a scaffold where the brick masons were building a fireplace and landing on the concrete floor.
I never lost consciousness, I could hear him hollering for me to get up and go back to work.
The pain was terrible. I didn't think I could move and I couldn't see at all.
One of the masons was an elderly black man, who kept telling Daddy that he needed to take me to the hospital. That I was really hurt bad. He was an elderly black man and Daddy was a Klansman. Daddy told him to shut his damn mouth, or he would kill him.
The man continued to try to defend me and I didn't want him to get hurt because of me so, I told Daddy to wait a minute and let me go run some water over my head, that I couldn't see. He just kept telling me to get up and go back to work.
I knew where I was in the house by the voices. Though I still couldn't see, I was able to get on my hands and knees and crawl to where I knew there was a doorway into the backyard.
I was worried that I was now blind from the blow and that he would kill me to cover up what had happened. The whole time I was begging, God, please don't let me be blind."
I felt my way to a hydrant in the yard and began to run water over my head. I could feel the fracture with my fingers.
I began to see- just vaguely at first- but gradually my vision came back. I thank God, because I can't image what life as a blind person would have been like with this man, if he didn't kill me.
But, he was still hollering for me to get up and go back to work.
I managed to climb back up and attempted to drive nails, though I doubt that I drove ten nails all afternoon. I was still in a great deal of pain and it was a very hot day, but he didn't hit me again. Nor did he speak to me again.
That night I told my mother that I was leaving as soon as possible, before he finally killed me in one of his rages. He had held guns to my head and threatened to kill me in the past and I figured that I had better git while the gittin was good.
She agreed and two weeks after my fifteenth birthday, I walked away with the clothes on my back and five dollars in my pocket. I paid two dollars for a bus ticket to a town seventy miles across the state line and started hitchhiking to hell.
So, this is the story of a modern day Huck - addicted to crisis and adrenaline - with no thought for the future, but, with the devil to pay!
Most of this story is my own life fictionalized to protect the guilty as well as the innocent. Many events actually happened. Some are told just to illustrate the life- style and the thinking.
I accept full responsibility for the way I have lived and the things I have done. No one made me live the way I did, though I often let whiskey and, or drugs do my thinking for me. Bad mistake! Wounded animals are dangerous. Drunken wounded animals are really dangerous.
I also want to make it clear to everyone that I have freely forgiven my father for all that happened. In my quest for healing, it became clear to me that I could never be free of the past until I was willing to set him free. I resisted this for some time, but there came a night in my life when I cried for him, instead of for me. For the pain, the shame, and the fears that had made prisons of whatever lives each us had tried to build.
Daddy is dying with cancer as I write. I don't think he would like the idea of revealing the family secrets in a book for the whole world to read, but shame thrives in the dark and withers in the light. It is one thing to be ashamed of something you have done, but another thing to be ashamed of who you are, just because someone said you were not enough.
My Mother passed away in away in January, 2006. Mama, I don't think I said 'I love you" near enough.
To my Brothers and Sisters, We have made it this far. Please, don't give up. Don't settle back into the darkness and despair. Walk on faith and believe in love even when you can't see it.
To my children, whose love and trust I betrayed at an early age. Deeply wounded people do not make good parents. I see you struggling with the same issues. I wish you well on the journey. If I could make the trip for you, I would. I'm very proud of you for how well you've done so far.
To my ex-wife, who shall remain nameless out of respect for your privacy? You were the kindest person I have ever known. Please know that I know you did the right thing.
To Jesus Christ, who was there through it all. Always catching me at the bottom of the cliff, lest I be destroyed.
His patience is without end. His timing impeccable. His love overwhelming. All to the healing of a wounded heart. I love you, Lord. Thank you.
Huck's alcoholic father abandoned him after his mother died, and he was taken in by a local widow. His father would only show up, to abuse and torment Huck, when he got drunk. Finally, Huck faked his own murder to escape the man. He then set out on a life of freedom and adventure on the Mississippi river with a stolen raft and a run-away slave named Jim. Huck's story ends at about the age that mine really begins. His father has died and he is now free to return to the widow. There is a six thousand dollar inheritance from his mother's estate.
The book does not tell us whether he chose to go back or to set off on further adventures.
Some years ago, PBS bought the rights to Hucks story and produced a weekly television program featuring Huck as a young man who had returned to live with the widow and went to college. On the program, he was portrayed as a young lawyer, helping the downtrodden.
I just don't think PBS had a good handle on who this kid was. He might very well turn into Atticus Finch later in life, but to this point, he has known nothing but crisis and adrenaline. Freedom is all he's looking for.
Other than his friend Jim, Huck would appear to have little trust for people. He had become an accomplished liar with a real flair for doing whatever it takes to meet his needs. In his interaction with other people, he appears to be as much an observer as he is a participant, constantly looking for clues in order to determine who he should be. Perhaps the only reason for his trust in Jim is that Jim is a runaway slave who needs Huck as much as Huck needs him.
No, I think Huck was more likely to choose to continue his new life of freedom and adventure at that point. He would have no tolerance for confinement of any kind. He was so caught up in crisis living, that he would find it hard to live without the adrenaline rushes he was so used to.
My father didn't drink.
However, he was so brutalized as a child that he almost died from a beating when he was fourteen years old. His whole forehead is a mass of scar tissue from that beating. My grandfather beat him unconscious with a steel rod about 2 o'clock in the afternoon and left him lying in a field, where they had been plowing. His crime was plowing crooked rows. He lay there overnight. The next morning my Grandmother realized he had not come home that night and suspecting something was not right, went to the field and found him lying in a pool of blood, still unconscious.
I have heard many horror stories about the things that happened to him as a child, though not from him. I understand the shame and embarrassment that kept him from telling anyone what happened to him.
Today, he would be diagnosed as a case of post-traumatic stress syndrome. At that time, no one knew anything about such things.
He was 6'3" and 250lb's, a very powerful man. The few people I ever saw challenge him physically, usually wound up with a gun in their face or a knife at their throat. Once, when I was a small child, a man cut him off in traffic. He ran the man off the road and beat him unconscious. Then drove away and left the man face down in a ditch full of water.
The insanity began in my generation when I was three years old. I was playing with a ball on the front porch, when the ball bounced and broke a window. I remember my mother telling me that he would whip me when he came home from work. But, he didn't. He put me in the car and drove me out into the woods. He put me out of the car and drove away. Several hours later, I wandered out onto a highway, where a policeman picked me up walking. As it was a very small town, it didn't take them long to find out where I belonged. The story given was that I had been playing in the yard and must have wandered away.
The beatings and other torments would begin a little later in life, though I can't tell you exactly when. Only that I don't ever remember not being afraid of my father. He always said that he would kill all of us if we ever told the things that happened at home.
I was in the fifth grade and my brothers in third and second grades respectively, when we were beaten with a bullwhip, so badly that it couldnt be hidden. However, we were sent to school anyway. My middle brother began to cry from the pain of sitting and when the teacher put her hand on his shoulder to ask what was wrong, her hand came away bloody.
The police were called. They stripped us down and photos were taken. The whole family had to appear in a juvenile court, where my father was given a 90 day suspended sentence and told not to use the bullwhip again. This was the only time he was ever in trouble for this kind of thing.
I was pretty much an insomniac by the time I was twelve and plagued with depression and self-doubt. Being the oldest of six children, I felt very responsible for the well-being of my siblings and my mother, who by then had been hospitalized several times for "nervous break-down", but I felt powerless to protect them.
One day, after my father had thrown a full glass of iced tea in my mother's face- "glass and all- I had gone to a local Judge and told him about the way things were at home. He called my mother and asked if it were true. She admitted that it was, but refused to press charges out of fear.
Some months later, my father had my mother down on the floor with a pistol in her mouth and I decided the only answer was to kill him. As I sat in another room with a rifle aimed at his head through the doorway, my youngest brother came in and asked me, "Are you going to kill him?" I told him that I knew I would go to prison, but that I couldn't see any other answer. He asked me what would happen to the rest of the family.
My mother had a high school education and had never had a job. As I thought about it, I knew the rest of the children would wind-up separated and farmed out in whatever kinds of situations. I knew I could not do that to them, so I put the gun away and gave up on any kind of relief.
Junior high school was a nightmare for me. With all I had going on at home, along with the social stigma of poverty and extreme nervous tension, I soon experienced a complete emotional collapse. A bully pushed me while standing in line to enter the lunchroom. It took five teachers to pull me off him as I sat on his chest, holding him by the hair, and beating him in the face. I was screaming at the top of my voice as they dragged me away. Thirty minutes later, I was still screaming and crying in the school office. They decided that there might be something wrong with me!
I was sent to a psychiatrist at the school board. After talking with me, she recommended a change of schools and a prescription for valium. God love her, I needed that valium. It was the beginning of an off and on love affair with drugs and later, alcohol.
My father was a framing contractor. The year I was fourteen, he took me out of school to help him frame three houses. Those were some of the worse months of my life. I could do nothing to please him. He didn't like the angle of the nail. I wasn't holding the hammer right. I couldn't saw a straight line. He kicked me in the stomach and knocked me off a scaffold eight feet above the ground.
"Just generally having a good time and enjoying each others company."
A week later, displeased with the way I was nailing rafters in the roof of a house, he hit me in the back of the head with his hammer handle. Hard.
I heard someone scream away in the distance, as I fell through the rafters into the house, bouncing off a scaffold where the brick masons were building a fireplace and landing on the concrete floor.
I never lost consciousness, I could hear him hollering for me to get up and go back to work.
The pain was terrible. I didn't think I could move and I couldn't see at all.
One of the masons was an elderly black man, who kept telling Daddy that he needed to take me to the hospital. That I was really hurt bad. He was an elderly black man and Daddy was a Klansman. Daddy told him to shut his damn mouth, or he would kill him.
The man continued to try to defend me and I didn't want him to get hurt because of me so, I told Daddy to wait a minute and let me go run some water over my head, that I couldn't see. He just kept telling me to get up and go back to work.
I knew where I was in the house by the voices. Though I still couldn't see, I was able to get on my hands and knees and crawl to where I knew there was a doorway into the backyard.
I was worried that I was now blind from the blow and that he would kill me to cover up what had happened. The whole time I was begging, God, please don't let me be blind."
I felt my way to a hydrant in the yard and began to run water over my head. I could feel the fracture with my fingers.
I began to see- just vaguely at first- but gradually my vision came back. I thank God, because I can't image what life as a blind person would have been like with this man, if he didn't kill me.
But, he was still hollering for me to get up and go back to work.
I managed to climb back up and attempted to drive nails, though I doubt that I drove ten nails all afternoon. I was still in a great deal of pain and it was a very hot day, but he didn't hit me again. Nor did he speak to me again.
That night I told my mother that I was leaving as soon as possible, before he finally killed me in one of his rages. He had held guns to my head and threatened to kill me in the past and I figured that I had better git while the gittin was good.
She agreed and two weeks after my fifteenth birthday, I walked away with the clothes on my back and five dollars in my pocket. I paid two dollars for a bus ticket to a town seventy miles across the state line and started hitchhiking to hell.
So, this is the story of a modern day Huck - addicted to crisis and adrenaline - with no thought for the future, but, with the devil to pay!
Most of this story is my own life fictionalized to protect the guilty as well as the innocent. Many events actually happened. Some are told just to illustrate the life- style and the thinking.
I accept full responsibility for the way I have lived and the things I have done. No one made me live the way I did, though I often let whiskey and, or drugs do my thinking for me. Bad mistake! Wounded animals are dangerous. Drunken wounded animals are really dangerous.
I also want to make it clear to everyone that I have freely forgiven my father for all that happened. In my quest for healing, it became clear to me that I could never be free of the past until I was willing to set him free. I resisted this for some time, but there came a night in my life when I cried for him, instead of for me. For the pain, the shame, and the fears that had made prisons of whatever lives each us had tried to build.
Daddy is dying with cancer as I write. I don't think he would like the idea of revealing the family secrets in a book for the whole world to read, but shame thrives in the dark and withers in the light. It is one thing to be ashamed of something you have done, but another thing to be ashamed of who you are, just because someone said you were not enough.
My Mother passed away in away in January, 2006. Mama, I don't think I said 'I love you" near enough.
To my Brothers and Sisters, We have made it this far. Please, don't give up. Don't settle back into the darkness and despair. Walk on faith and believe in love even when you can't see it.
To my children, whose love and trust I betrayed at an early age. Deeply wounded people do not make good parents. I see you struggling with the same issues. I wish you well on the journey. If I could make the trip for you, I would. I'm very proud of you for how well you've done so far.
To my ex-wife, who shall remain nameless out of respect for your privacy? You were the kindest person I have ever known. Please know that I know you did the right thing.
To Jesus Christ, who was there through it all. Always catching me at the bottom of the cliff, lest I be destroyed.
His patience is without end. His timing impeccable. His love overwhelming. All to the healing of a wounded heart. I love you, Lord. Thank you.
