I was ten when I first read Huckleberry Finn. I loved it then as much as I do now. I missed some of the subtler satire in it, but I did get that the message was that Huck realizes Jim is a human being just like him - which plenty of anti-slavery advocates at the time the book was set didn't think.

And I wasn't any less shocked when I switched schools and on the third day at the new school a girl told me that the reason she was so screwed up was that she had previously gone to a school with lots of black people in it. OF course, she didn't say "black people", she instead used a word that I saw all the time in Huck Finn.