It seems a curious childhood, as we think of it now. Missouri was a slave State--Little Sam's companions were as often black as white. All the children of that time and locality had negroes for playmates, and were cared for by them. They were fond of their black companions and would have felt lost without them. The negro children knew all the best ways of doing things--how to work charms and spells, the best way to cure warts and heal stone-bruises, and to make it rain, and to find lost money. They knew what signs meant, and dreams, and how to keep off hoodoo; and all negroes, old and young, knew any number of weird tales.
John Clemens must have prospered during the early years of his Florida residence, for he added another slave to his household--Uncle Ned, a man of all work--and he built a somewhat larger house, in one room of which, the kitchen, was a big fireplace. There was a wide hearth and always plenty of wood, and here after supper the children would gather, with Jennie and Uncle Ned, and the latter would tell hair-lifting tales of "ha'nts," and lonely roads, and witch-work that would make his hearers shiver with terror and delight, and look furtively over their shoulders toward the dark window-panes and the hovering shadows on the walls. Perhaps it was not the healthiest entertainment, but it was the kind to cultivate an imagination that would one day produce "Tom Sawyer" and "Huck Finn."
True, Little Sam was very young at this period, but even a little chap of two or three would understand most of that fireside talk, and get impressions more vivid than if the understanding were complete. He was barely four when this earliest chapter of his life came to a close.
John Clemens had not remained satisfied with Florida and his undertakings there. The town had not kept its promises. It failed to grow, and the lock-and-dam scheme that would make Salt River navigable fell through. Then one of the children, Margaret, a black-eyed, rosy little girl of nine, suddenly died. This was in August, 1839. A month or two later the saddened family abandoned their Florida home and moved in wagons, with their household furnishings, to Hannibal, a Mississippi River town, thirty miles away. There was only one girl left now, Pamela, twelve years old, but there was another boy, baby Henry, three years younger than Little Sam--four boys in all.
THE NEW HOME, AND UNCLE JOHN QUARLES'S FARM
Hannibal was a town with prospects and considerable trade. It was slumbrous, being a slave town, but it was not dead. John Clemens believed it a promising place for business, and opened a small general store with Orion Clemens, now fifteen, a studious, dreamy lad, for clerk.
The little city was also an attractive place of residence. Mark Twain remembered it as "the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer morning, . . . the great Mississippi, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, .... the dense forest away on the other side."
The "white town" was built against green hills, and abutting the river were bluffs--Holliday's Hill and Lover's Leap. A distance below the town was a cave--a wonderful cave, as every reader of Tom Sawyer knows--while out in the river, toward the Illinois shore, was the delectable island that was one day to be the meeting-place of Tom's pirate band, and later to become the hiding-place of Huck and Nigger Jim.
The river itself was full of interest. It was the highway to the outside world. Rafts drifted by; smartly painted steamboats panted up and down, touching to exchange traffic and travelers, a never-ceasing wonder to those simple shut-in dwellers whom the telegraph and railway had not yet reached. That Hannibal was a pleasant place of residence we may believe, and what an attractive place for a boy to grow up in!
Little Sam, however, was not yet ready to enjoy the island and the cave. He was still delicate--the least promising of the family. He was queer and fanciful, and rather silent.