"The Arrival of the Clemens Family in Florida" at the Paris post office

We visited Paris, Mo., to see a recently restored wall mural in the town’s post office titled “The Arrival of the Clemens Family in Florida.” The mural, completed by Fred Green Carpenter in 1940, shows the Clemens family and its slaves entering Florida, Mo., where Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) would be born in 1835. “I increased the population by one percent,” he later wrote. “It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town.”

Locals recommended that we have lunch at Jonesy’s Café, 216 N. Main St., in Paris By our arrival at 12:40, Jonesy’s was out of the spaghetti special and all nine booths were filled with happily chomping and chatting (and some smoking) customers. So we stood for a moment, admiring the walls covered with hundreds of old photos, fly swatters, yardsticks, clocks, fans, trays and advertising signs, both national (“Drink Pepsi-Cola: A Nickel Drink Worth a Dime”) and local (“Heinold Hog Markets, Monroe City, MO”).

Jonesy's Cafe

Our brown formica table in the front window looked out on the two large sidewalk American flags that flanked Jonesy’s. I ordered a banana malt ($2.75) and double bacon cheeseburger ($5.75), ripped off a “napkin”—really a paper towel—from the roll dispenser on our table, took a big bite of the juicy burger and cast an admiring eye at the cook, whose tee-shirt read, “You fry it, I’ll eat it.”

Loren Ghiglione

Connie Ritter

Smiles and laughter come easily to Connie Ritter, 61, the second of 10 children born and raised in Monroe City, Missouri. But her face turns stern when she recalls the playground beside the Mark Twain birthplace museum in Florida, Missouri. She and other African American children played there, but they never entered the museum. “No one ever told us we couldn’t go inside. But we knew we couldn’t go inside. And now I work here.”

Ritter makes clear that times have changed in her 16 years at the museum, now part of Mark Twain State Park. More African Americans are employed at Missouri’s state parks. She has been promoted from tour guide through several positions to interpretative research specialist II. For a year, she served as acting administrator. “But that doesn’t help your mind and heart change. It’s a struggle to forget so you can heal.”

She says that, at the beginning, “Mark Twain wasn’t my cup of tea. I hated Mark Twain.” Why? “Because of Nigger Jim” in Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. “It took me awhile to understand what I understand about Huck Finn now” as an assault on racism. Today she cannot get enough of Twain: “I want to learn more. I want to learn more.”

Ritter has helped make clear the role of slavery in the area. Beginning last year, the museum introduced a display panel on slavery. Missouri, as the only slaveholding state west of the Mississippi, attracted slaveholding families from the East and South. All of the grandparents of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) owned slaves.

His parents, at the time of their marriage in Kentucky in 1823, owned six slaves. By 1835, the year of Samuel Clemens’ birth in Florida, Missouri, they had sold five of them. The family kept only Jennie, a slave who was flogged by Clemens’ mother for insubordination. The panel includes a quote from Frederick Douglass: “I didn’t know I was a slave until I found out I couldn’t do the things I wanted.”

The house Mark Twain was born in

Ritter says it is important to tell people the role and reality of slavery in an area of Missouri known as “Little Dixie.” The display’s reproduction ball & chain—a foot-wide, 7 ¾-lb. ball attached by a short chain to a slave’s ankle—makes clear the virtual impossibility of a slave picking up the ball and walking with it. “I can’t think of good slavery,” says Ritter. “I just can’t.”

Ritter, a divorced widow, has begun exploring the roots of her parents’ families, including the Summervilles, who may have changed their name to Summer to shed their slaveholding family’s name. She recalls asking her great-grandmother whether the family had come from slaves. “That was the wrong question. They don’t want us to talk about it,” Ritter says.

That attitude of former slaves and their descendants toward telling the truth about their past reminds Ritter of interviewing African Americans who worked on Mark Twain State Park as part of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal public works program for unemployed, unmarried men, 18 to 35, from relief families. “They didn’t want to talk on tape,” she says. “They told people what they wanted to hear. They weren’t being honest.”

The danger, says Ritter, is that “talking good”—the lie, not the reality—“becomes your memory.” Fantasy replaces fact. Ritter seems determined to not let that happen at the Mark Twain birthplace museum.

Loren

Karen Hunt

Finding archaeologist Karen Hunt is kind of a hassle. She’s hidden, sort of like the artifacts she and volunteers dig for during September weekends at the Mark Twain Archaeology Dig. It’s home to the former farmstead of John Adams Quarles, Mark Twain’s uncle. Twain spent summers on the farm, and here he became acquainted with the Quarles’ slaves. One in particular, Uncle Dan’l, might have been the inspiration for Twain’s character Jim.

To get to Hunt’s farmstead excavation site, she instructs us to pass Grandma’s Country Music on Highway 107 and look for a red and white building, meanwhile the road seems like it’s getting narrower with each turn. We drive right past Hunt, who is waiting for us in her gray pickup truck.

When we finally do arrive, instead of getting out of our vehicles for the usual introductions, Hunt jumps back in her truck and leads us a quarter-mile up the side of a steep hill. I was a little worried about our minivan, considering it had yet to perform in mildly off-road situations. (It was fine. Luckily.)

Hunt, 71, has dedicated her life to uncovering what’s beneath the ground on top of this hill, which provides a sweeping view of the landscape. Today it’s the glass shards from a broken window and the top of a candy dish; other days it’s a doll or a clay pipe.

“I’m just trying to say this is your missing link, people,” Hunt says. Most living history farms, she says, rely on speculation, but her work is moving beyond that. Ultimately, she says, it’s going to help verify Twain’s writings about the farm.

“Nobody knew this structure was there until I decided to prove it,” she says.

Hunt uses electromagnetic photo fields to diagram the farmstead. With this technology, she can map any structure that had been there for more than six months. As a result the site is a maze of colored tape and flags, which mark the walls, windows and doors of the Quarles farmstead.

As Hunt gives us the tour, she beckons us inside. “But you have to go through the door,” she says. It’s a joke, which I don’t realize at first thanks to her dry humor. The door she’s talking about hasn’t existed for at least a hundred years. It’s marked by two tiny blue flags stuck in the ground.

The Mark Twain Archaeology Dig site

Hunt reconstructed the two-story house that now sits on the property. Although much of the structure is new, the winding walnut staircase is from the 1830s, and the oak logs and wooden chinking on the interior are from the 1830s and 1850s.

Today a mother-daughter team in bandanas is scraping away at the dirt with little pointy tools, while another woman sits among buckets of dirt underneath a canopy tent. Two men in suspenders watch and work.

Hunt was introduced to the site in the early 1970s, and it floated in and out of her life until 1991, when she bought the property. No one had excavated it before. In fact, a couple had parked their trailer home on top of the house’s old foundation. They had no idea what was sitting under them.

Alyssa