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Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore: Childhood and Murder in the Heart of America

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Hannibal, MO was a good place - a place Mark Twain would still want to write about and still call home. And Hannibal's crusade to retain its association with one of America's greatest authors continued even as its population pushed out and away from its 1926 civic monument to Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and it changed. The gewgaw attractions, souvenir shops and then Wal-Marts and Super Centers took their place as the source of the pulse of Hannibal's community. Another Hannibal writer and native, Ron Powers watched from his adopted state of Vermont. It was puzzling to Powers, but he watched from a distance.
Then one evening in November 1997 two teenagers cruised the Hannibal streets looking for something to do, not far from Powers own childhood home. Robie Wilson and William Hill drove up to a 61-year old jogger and "doored" him - pushed open the car's passing door into the jogger's face at 50 mph.
Six weeks later, another shock hit small town Hannibal when two more teenagers, Zach Wilson and Diane Myers, were arrested for the shotgun murder of Diane's sleeping grandfather, J.D. Poage.
Two crimes, two murders shattered the semblance of calm in Hannibal and sounded an alarm as far away as the mind of Pulitzer-winner Powers who feared he was seeing the collapse of something bigger, something far beyond the place they called "America's Home Town" in Missouri.
Powers left Vermont for Hannibal and undertook some frightening analysis of the forces that led to its violence and wrote Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore: Childhood and Murder in the Heart of America.

"With the supplanting of local merchants by corporate retail colonies at century's end, place had lost most of its morally regenerative force in heartland American life. The distinctive textures and the nuances of country and town life had stopped growing more separate. They had largely reconverged: subsumed into a larger, encroaching culture dedicated to the leveling of distinctions, and the allegiances and exaltations that such distinctions fed. `Place'," Powers says, "had been supplanted by `venue.'"

Powers describes the accused murderers and their culture, their families, their friends and their disconnect from moral mooring. As he does so he writes his own biography and weaves in references to life on the banks of the mighty Mississippi and the shore of a society eroding from a vision we often pretend to be true.
Powers' imagery is unnerving, at times described in stunningly fluid style, at others burdened by the author's attempt to find absolution for his own relationship with his late brother, Jim.
Powers writes an indictment of an America that has broken faith with its children. Not surprisingly there are questions unanswered, but this account blends a tail of two killings (and subsequent trials of the lost boys who committed them) with Powers' memoir of growing up.
There are no answers to why children kill. Yet, symptoms of community disintegration and the loss of social connection plague the country (latchkey children with over-scheduled parents, members of families distancing themselves from one another, families distancing themselves from their community, commercial sprawl next to neglected neighborhoods and a withering civic consciousness seem to be everywhere), and the cost is clear.
Powers writes with a mastery of language that sends readers back again and again to the top of his paragraphs. Tom and Huck is a dark and sobering book, but Powers' love for his hometown is enviable. This book is about social change that comes faster than anyone would like and the resulting struggle we all undertake to protect ourselves and those around us from that change.
Tom and Huck will help you understand your past and your present. You will better understand what young members of our culture see while we are not looking. There are shadows, but there is light. If there were means to require reading for American adults, this book would be on the list.

Ofttimes, an author brings a greater depth of understanding to a reading of his work than does a professional actor. Such is the case with Powers' reading of his latest offering, a sad but necessary visit to Hannibal, Missouri, the hometown he shares with Mark Twain.

The focus of this story is not a carefree, innocent childhood largely spent on the banks of the Mississippi, but rather heinous crimes committed by teenagers. Powers interweaves his personal odyssey, Twain's story, and the contemporary tragedies to form a compelling true tale which asks what has happened to our children?

The author, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and co-author of "Flags Of Our Fathers," interviewed the victim's relatives, neighbors, family members, and the teenagers themselves. Ace reporter that he is, Powers has delivered an accurate and astounding story. The current events are compounded by the author's own experiences at the hands of an abusive father, a Fuller Brushman.

This is not a pleasant tale, but it is one that needs to be heard. Few who hear it will remain unchanged.

- Gail Cooke

Ron Powers is concerned about the young people of the United States. He's not alone in that. His interest is immediate and rather local. He worries about the events in his home town of Hannibal, Missouri. Sorry, i should have typed "Home Town", since Powers accepts the assertion that his native city is the model for others in his country. "America's Home Town" implies a small municipality dominated by a white, middle-class, "God"-fearing, clean-living population. The images of such places dominated the media for generations. That image has been tarnished - in this case by the killings of two elderly men in Powers' birthplace. He went there to investigate what had happened. This book is the result of his journey.

With an expressive journalist's style, Powers depicts the demise of James Walker and J.D. Poage. The weapon that took the life of the latter was a shotgun. The first man was killed by - a car door. Both were "intentional" killings, although "premeditated" doesn't seem to apply. The distinction is important because Powers, in trying to delve into minds of the children who took those lives, understands the killings were nearly "mindless". They were events "of the moment" and Powers tries to explain the foundation of those moments. He is certain they could have been avoided. In order to learn whether there were any "decisive steps" in the lives of the four teen-agers who perpetrated the killings, Powers spends much time in Hannibal and the surrounding communities, interviewing victims' relations, the killers' parents and friends and attending the subsequent trials. What he learns is revealing - in many ways.

The growth of the US economy has resulted in severe dislocations in those traditional "values" associated with the "Home Town". Powers cites statistics of single-parent families or homes where both parents work. Sometimes the job is far from the outlying home, resulting in day-care centres running twelve to sixteen hours each day from six in the morning. These day-care centres are dismally underfunded and little considered even by parents. City governments are averse to providing resources to avoid the stigma of high taxes. Older children, past the traditional day-care age are at loose ends. Those unable to afford computers or video games lack even that electronic "baby-sitting" service. They are deserted to find their own way in uncaring communities. Without parenting, these children are left to their own devices for long periods. Drugs and sex are common escapes, as the children in this account demonstrate. Murder or mayhem become easily attempted ventures, as the story of these children illustrates vividly.

In following these children, interviewing their parents and the townsfolk, Powers has given us a stirring account of what the US has become. The murder of two men almost pales by comparison with the sequence of school shootings and other violent rampages that occurred in the same period. This being Hannibal, Powers can't avoid parallels with those two literary idols of small-town USA, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Both were young rebels in their own way, but even Huck chafed under the constraints of a society he claimed to reject. The children of today's Hannibal not only have fewer restraints, but the society around them provides an environment in which life has little value or meaning. The author hasn't any panacea for curing this situation. The book's chief worth resides in its being read by every parent in the country. It's advisable you read it, whether you have children or not. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Here's an easy-read look at today's society as mirrored by small-town life, current and past. Popular writer, Ron Powers, describes how he grew up happy in Hannibal, Missouri. He, too, recounts many of his personal advances in career and outlook there and beyond. At the same time, the author traces unsettling events surrounding two (more-recent) tragedies which traumatized the hometown and sent him back there for a detailed see-for-himself.

Painting it in calm pastel, he describes Hannibal-gone-by with its inviting street-level stores and friendly conversation, its new Tom and Huck statue, Twain's boyhood home, the over-the-Mississippi Mark Twain Bridge...as if readers were right there with him. Powers also contrasts, describing today's Visitor Hannibal, complete with auto-choked streets, strip malls, the fast-paced fast-food outlets, dinettes, apartments, condos and tourist caves.

He reports Hannibal's now a deteriorating small town with weathered buildings, broken-down family structures, closed up mom and pop shops, youth gangs and spreading crime. With Walmart and other big-box consumer magnets closing in, he takes understandable issue with their growing influence there. Add staggering crimes by four high-schoolers, and there`s a story to be told.

~But that's the book's challenge. What's the connect between two murders and an aging city? Unfortunately, it's never clear as author Powers over-spends his time detailing the two cases' legalities and their prime players. He goes heavy into the actual crimes, the courtroom drama, the verdict(s), the lawyers' slants, in-court statements, townspeople reaction, and predictable accounts the perpetrators' family and friends. He really needed to include obvious highlights of long-winded talks with the guilty parties?

Maybe great reading for student lawyers, in a less-than-compelling way, the "legal" overwhelms any sociology (opinion or otherwise) about deaths of two townspeople and a subsequent baffled spirit of "America's Home Town." Repeatedly, the author returns to the crime(s), the scenes, the perps, the labors of prison life for them. The "who," "what," "when," "how" are clear. More of the "why" would vastly improve the reading.

When Powers does tie in the unthinkable offenses and the decline of Hannibal, the book sails along flawlessly. ~But as we become encumbered by recurring recaps of courtroom goings-on and interviews with its lawyers, this edition goes flat. We might as well re-read protracted events in the O.J. court. Certainly, the murder trial(s) reveal little of why Hannibal is no longer the town it used to be...safe, serene, sensible. ~Or was it ever really that way? The author could have opined, but he didn't.

The author's all over the board. Powers flashes back and forth to his own youth, then here and there intertwines later biographic successes...yet he never fails to go back to even still more details of the teenaged culprits and even to the town streets where the killings happened. Maybe that's how reporters write whenever they have the opportunity. ~But it doesn't necessarily make for consistently smooth reading.

So, did crime help cause the town`s slowdown...or did the waning town help cause the crimes? The book is about Hannibal, yes, but the question's not unique -could be any other small town (or big city) in America, but Powers makes no justification why Hannibal is especially noteworthy

-other than that he once lived there. That's not reason enough.

Are we about consumerism or about community? Ron Powers had an opportunity to examine the link, but he chose to play reporter instead of opinionated guru about the changing lifestyles of his town and our culture. ~And, curiously, included is more than enough background on the author himself. Maybe it ought to be: "Tom, Huck...and Ron (the author) Don't Live Here Anymore."

The book covers plenty quickly, often becoming thin and patchy. There's little depth on Hannibal's town woes, the teen killers' motivations, or Ron Powers' private need to reveal his own history in these pages. Not a yawn, but (from its title) the book doesn't live up to the possibilities.

I have never lived in Hannibal, but I've visited many times and have family roots in the Mississippi Valley.

I thought this book was first-rate, combining sociological analysis, personal memories and interviews naturally and effectively. I don't really fault Powers for not proposing solutions to the problems he documents -- I can't think of any myself.

As Powers perceptively points out, the earlier pattern of small-town life, rich in community spirit, was itself dependent on economic conditions. An economy based on railroads, small-scale manufacturing, agriculture, and farm-to-market trade reinforced the sort of "Main Street USA" culture portrayed by Twain and (in ghastly parody) in various theme parks starting with Disneyland. Families in those days were strong not because people were better than we are now, but because in such an economy -- with child labor in both field and factory -- cooperation paid off.

The perfect economic human of the 19th or early 20th century was rooted to place, connected to local institutions, and enmeshed in a web of economic and social relationships with people s/he new face to face. The perfect economic human of our time is cruising an anonymous highway, looking for that same great burger from coast-to-coast. Connections to place, to the neighbors...? All that is now swimming against the tide in an economy which makes us into mindless consumers before our milk teeth fall out.

Definitely worth reading if you are interested in issues of community in America or in the culture of the Mississippi Valley.

Tom and Huck, of course, never lived in Hannibal but lived only in Samuel Clemens' imagination. Can a real town then be expected to live up to Samuel Clemens' or Ron Powers' mythical childhoods?

His book is based on two murders that happen in a short time frame--two of four teenagers are from Hannibal. Does this make the town a breeding ground for killers? Powers' lays out his case for indicting "America's Hometown" in great detail as he points out the failures but none of the successes.

His riveting, minutely detailed, and deeply researched book brings to life people and streets I know well. But it also arouses more questions than answers. If the churches, schools, social services, parents, neighborhoods, and the children themselves are failures--what are the solutions? He offers none.

Life in Hannibal nor in Missouri has never been idyllic as evidenced by Powers' references to the treatment of slaves, his own defining moment in the Sedalia pool hall, and my own similar racial experience in the 1960s at a southern Missouri city drugstore lunch counter where I was asked to leave because I was with a person of color--in this case, Hawaiian. In a decision echoing that of Lana Wilson (Zachary Wilson's mother), my own grandmother moved her family to a farm in Hunnewell to get away from the evils of city life almost 100 years earlier.

His indictment of Hannibal is a very troubling concept. However, the autobiographical sections that deal with the author's own obvious personal pain and search for forgiveness are perhaps the most troubling of all.

Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore, by Hannibal's native son, Ron Powers, is his latest commentary on the condition of the condition we're in.

I doubt that Mr. Power's own dysfunctional behavior, examined in great depth throughout the book, is the result of being raised in Hannibal. Geography is not to blame for the events in his life, or that of the Wilson boys.

Overall, the basic observation, from this intimate outsider, of Hannibal's "cut-rate" low-income segment of society appears to be reasonably accurate. The particularly dark subject he has chosen for this book is, unfortunately, a part of our local history. Sadder still is the realization that our community is not alone in this loss of innocence. Thankfully, though, that's not the whole story.

As a life-long Hannibal native, a wife of 17 years, a working mother, and part of a classic example of an "average" family in America's Hometown, I can assure you that everyday juvenile violence and drug abuse are not the norm in middle-class Hannibal. Abstract worries that I'll be murdered in my sleep by the adolescent living next door are not a part of my life here.

I'm sure, in comparison with the author's recollection of the ideal Hannibal he knew as a child, things have changed. Still, I find it rather disconcerting that he makes no apology for failing to mention the positive aspects of his, and my, hometown. Hannibal is a community rich in history, full of caring individuals, active civic groups, a fantastic Arts Council, community theater, and a top-rated public school system. We are a strong community with diverse industries. We have state-of-the art medical facilities, agri-business, a mature tourism trade, and over 5,000 well-paying manufacturing jobs in a community of only 18,000. The Provenance Project, an innovative fine-artist recruitment initiative, was the recipient of the Missouri Governor's Award for Economic Development in 2000.

Hannibal, like most rural communities, continues to face challenges daily. But, wonderful things are happening here, too. Read the book, then, come see for yourself.

Anyone who enjoys journalism as storytelling after the fashion of John McPhee, or who appreciates strongly voiced narrative nonfiction in the style of Tracy Kidder, simply must become acquainted with Ron Powers's work.

In TOM AND HUCK DON'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE (...), Powers brilliantly blends reporting, narrative and memoir to create a powerful chronicle of an American community under siege, a riveting crime story, a sad portrait of childhood in America, and ultimately a sort of hybrid memoir that brings home the themes of the book like a river coming home to the sea. This is Powers's greatest work yet.(...)

A compelling non-fiction work that rivals MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL. Its masterful writing weaves together three related themes: the author's own childhood experience in Hannibal, MO, the author's investigation of murders at the hands of teens, and Sam Clemens' growing-up story form a multi-level tapestry bound together by the Tom and Huck imagery in "America's home town." The urgent questions about how we are raising our children -- perhaps never more timely -- are presented with thoughtful perspective rather than didactic prescription. The author's own voice as the *reader* is perfect. His experience as media reviewer on CBS' Sunday Morning show shines through.