On Memory and Literature

My grandmother’s older sister Pauline Stoops, a one-room school teacher born in 1903, had lived in a homestead filled with poetry, which sat on a bluff overlooking the wide and brown Mississippi, as it meandered southward through Hannibal, Missouri. Pauline’s task was to teach children aged six to seventeen in history, math, geography, and science; her students learned about the infernal compromise which admitted Missouri into the union as a slave state and they imagined when the Great Plains were a shallow and warm inland sea millions of years ago; they were taught the strange hieroglyphics of the quadratic equation and the correct whoosh of each cursive letter (and she prepared them oatmeal for lunch every day as well). Most of all, she loved teaching poetry — the gothic morbidities of Edgar Allen Poe and the sober patriotism of John Greenleaf Whittier, the aesthetic purple of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the mathematical perfection of Shakespeare. A woman whom when I knew her was given to extemporaneous recitations of memorized Walt Whitman. She lived in the Midwest for decades, until she followed the rest of her mother’s family eastward to Pennsylvania, her siblings having moved to Reading en masse during the Depression, tracing backwards a trail that had begun with distant relations. Still, Hannibal remained one of Pauline’s favorite places, in part because of its mythic role, this town where Mark Twain had imagined Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer playing as pirates along the riverbank.

“I had been to school most all the time and could spell and read and write just a little,” recounts the titular protagonist in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don’t reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don’t take no stock in mathematics, anyway.” Huck’s estimation of poetry is slightly higher, even if he doesn’t read much. He recalls coming across some books while visiting the wealthy Grangerfords, including John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress that was filled with statements that “was interesting, but tough” and another entitled Friendship’s Offering that was “full of beautiful stuff and poetry; but I didn’t read the poetry.” Had Huck been enrolled in in Mrs. Stoops’ classroom he would have learned verse from a slender book simply entitled One Hundred compiled by anthologizer in 1916. When clearing out Pauline’s possessions with my grandma, we came across a 1920 edition of Cook’s volume, with favorite lines underlined and pages dog-eared, scraps of paper now a century old used as bookmarks. Cook’s anthology was incongruously printed by the Cable Piano Company of Chicago (conveniently located at the corner of Wabash and Jackson), and included advertisements for their Kingsbury and Conover models, to which they promise student progress even for those with only “a feeble trace of musical ability,” proving that in the United States Mammon can take pilgrimage to Parnassus.