As a kid, surely, I must have read Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I must have encountered it again in studying American literature at university. The boy, Huck, tells us in first-person narration using the vernacular of the time, what it was like to be a runaway in a time when another runaway faced the same challenges but at much higher personal risk. But like a lot of folklore, this is a story we think we know well until it confronts us in a different context.