It was long after dark when Henry Sweets brought me to Hannibal's Old Baptist Cemetery, "a graveyard of the old-fashioned Western kind."

No moon. Ragged weeds, crumbling gravestones. We tried to tread lightly, but it had been raining, and mud grabbed at our shoes. Down at the bottom of the hill, the Mississippi churned. I had to smile, because here I was, three decades removed from 11th grade, still slogging through American literature.