Thursday, November 3, 2011

Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in Hartford next door to Mark Twain

Jane took us on a tour, first  to Mark Twain's house where we walked all around and took pictures it is a great place and a crazy cool house made of different colored bricks with fancy High Victorian gingerbread everywhere.
 Then we went downtown to look at the old graveyard with headstones from the 1600s...and took pictures of our reflections in a gold colored office building we found nearby. After that we went to the Connecticut River.
In Mark Twain’s time at Hartford Harriet Beecher Stowe was the crazy lady who lived next door. Alzheimer’s. She would wander in and out of her neighbor’s houses not knowing what year it was or where. Despite the anti-slavery rhetoric, her 1845 book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”’s racial sterotypes drove another century’s worth of racism. Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”, more realistically honest in its portrayal of race relations, is practically unreadable now because of the use of  the "N" word. I tried to read it aloud to my kid and I couldn't do it, as brutally cold and habitually out of line as I am. But I still love the book. Jim is an honorable character, so is Huck. Uncle Tom, however is an insult to the reader. IMHO. 
The irony of this sculpture goes on and on.

This statue is displayed on Hartford's RiverWalk, a promenade in the downtown area overlooking the recently flooded Connecticut River, which was still brown and angry looking when Jane and I were there. 

Jane takes pictures that somehow make me look beautiful, I don't know how. Check the dimple on my little chin. I don't really have one, but I do think it makes me very attractive and feminine. Good for my self esteem

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