Hannibal had not overcome its segregated past. Separate black and white American Legion posts existed nearby each other. The town did not acknowledge a past of black-owned businesses in its historic district, including a hotel and a nightclub named Blue Heaven.

Henry Sweets, curator of the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum

The Boyhood Home and Museum was much more about the story of white kids—Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher— than about Huck Finn, Jim and Twain’s tussle with racism, Fishkin suggested. To help make her point Fishkin interviewed Henry Sweets III, the museum’s curator:

“Is Twain’s antiracism known here? Is it taught here?”

“It isn’t brushed under the rug,” Sweets is quoted as saying. “It just isn’t approached….The tie to Mark Twain for Hannibal is Tom Sawyer. The connection people feel is really Tom Sawyer rather than through any other of the writings.”

Fifteen years after Fishkin’s critique, we re-interviewed Sweets, who is in in his 33rd year as the Boyhood Home and Museum’s curator. He exhibits the eager enthusiasm of a Twainiac, taking out-of-town guests not only on a tour of the museum buildings, but also to local cemeteries to view Clemens family and slave graves, and an elevated lighthouse to look down upon the town and Mississippi River.

Sweets is a citizen of Hannibal. He grew up there, served as its school board president and won the Chamber of Commerce’s Pacesetter Award in 2010. He annually accompanies a friend, now 95 years old, in the Hannibal Cannibal road race, billed as one of the toughest in America, and, at age 62, still pitches for Arch Methodist Church in the church softball league. “My reflexes are good enough,” he says. “I can stop line drives.”

As for Fishkin, he says, “We don’t react to one person.” But he points to ways in which the museum’s presentation has evolved. Today’s museumgoer repeatedly receives messages about slavery as practiced in the Hannibal area and by the family of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain).

The boyhood home exhibit focuses on the issue of slavery in the Clemens family. A sign in a kitchen explains the tiny sleeping pallet on its floor: “Household slaves would not have beds. They would have slept on a…compilation of sheets, blankets, clothes or rugs….Slaves would have slept near the fireplace where they could tend the fire and have it ready to prepare breakfast.”

Sweets and other museum personnel devote time to addressing issues of race, past and present. Sweets says the museum plans to “change drastically” its justice of the peace building. The recent discovery of ledgers from the courtroom of Samuel Clemens’ father, a justice of the peace, might provide an opportunity to update the museum’s treatment of the legal system for local blacks.

The museum holds three one-week summer training sessions for third-grade through high school teachers to help them learn how to teach Twain writings that focus on such controversial topics as race.

Cindy Lovell, the museum’s director, teaches a course, “Prison Nation,” in nearby Quincy, Ill., about what has been called the new Jim Crow. She serves on the board of Community Partners for Reconciliation, with half black and half white membership, that seeks to eradicate racism in Hannibal.

The museum hosted a Partners for Reconciliation-sponsored anti-racism workshop. Lovell and the museum staff also are helping local black residents create a local museum that tells the history of Hannibal’s blacks.

The Boyhood Home and Museum now offers Wednesday through Saturday, morning and afternoon, free performances with admission by Gladys Coggswell as the black storyteller in Twain’s “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It.”

A street sign in Springfield, Ill.

But critics feel the museum could do more. Attorney Terrell Dempsey, author of a book on local slavery, lists several slavery sites in town, including a slavery auction building across from the museum’s interpretation center. Street signs of the kind found in Springfield, Ill, could draw attention to Hannibal’s early black-owned businesses and slavery sites.

Sharon McCoy, a fan of a two-disc CD, “Mark Twain Words & Music,” e-mailed Lovell to complain about one aspect of the CD, a museum fund-raiser. She applauded the quality of Jimmy Buffett, Clint Eastwood, Sheryl Crow and other artists chosen for the CD’s readings and songs.

But she pointed to the irony of a CD about the boy who became Mark Twain being “told in a way that excludes so many of the voices that impelled the boy to become Mark Twain.” Of the dozens of artists on the CD none is black.

Loren Ghiglione

Mark Twain Riverboat Captain Steve Terry

Think of Captain Steve Terry, the 52-year-old pilot-owner of the Mark Twain Riverboat, as a 21st-century Twain. Terry, as did Twain, loves life on the Mississippi. He earned his license at age 19, becoming the youngest pilot on the river.

Terry, as did Twain, tells river stories and resorts to river humor. I ask him what fish he sees on the Mississippi. “None,” he says, “They’re all under water.” His later answer: catfish, carp, buffalo and sturgeon.

Terry, as did Twain, pursues other businesses on the side. His Riverboat Excursions’ building also houses Terry’s Tax Service & Payday Loans, Broadway Photo Custom Digital Imaging and Black Tie Formal Wear.

Terry, as did Twain, harrumphs at railroads. In 1882 Twain returned to his boyhood home of Hannibal to discover unhappily that “the romance of boating is gone.” Six railroad lines converged there, and local youth rolled C B & Q and other railroad initials, Twain said, “as a sweet morsel under the tongue.”

As we head north from Hannibal on the Mississippi for a two-hour dinner cruise with Terry, a railroad train comes even with his 120-foot, 400-passenger riverboat. Terry bristles at having to slow and then wait until the train turns east over an upcoming drawbridge.

Despite his modern depth sounder, charts and radar, Terry calls himself “the biggest chicken on the river” and retains a respect for the threat from sudden 75-mph wind storms and “rain so heavy you can’t see the front of the boat.”

He recalls a post-prom trip where partygoers thought the boat, encased in fog, was moving up and down the river for three hours. But actually Terry just sat in one place a quarter-mile from the Hannibal dock.

Still, an evening on Terry’s riverboat, as Dan Tham’s video indicates, mainly brings to mind the river’s beauty—Twain’s words about “the marvels of shifting light & shade & color & dappled reflections.”

Loren Ghiglione

Hannibal attorney, author and amateur historian Terrell Dempsey

Hannibal, Mo., cheerily announces its intentions before you reach the downtown area.

“America’s Hometown.” It’s written on a stout, sky-blue water tower that looms over Highway 61, one of the tallest structures in Hannibal.

Terrell Dempsey, a Hannibal attorney whose practice sits on a downtown street mostly populated by vacant storefronts, speaks openly about some of the hypocrisy arising from the label.

“This is a place—and I know it isn’t going to surprise anyone—if you’re well-educated, you get out of.”

Dempsey isn’t shy about calling attention to the unsavory aspects of America’s Hometown. While much of the town’s livelihood depends on its ability to wrap itself up in the nostalgia of good natured, rabble-rousin’ Tom Sawyer and sweet, girl-next-door Becky Thatcher, the truth is that Hannibal has a very real history with slavery.

A few years ago, Dempsey began to investigate the town’s slaveholding past and published Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens’s World.

“I’m not a great historian,” he said, modestly. Dempsey’s office walls are plastered with 19th-century American photographs. “You didn’t need to be the brilliant detective to find all this stuff [about slavery]. It was consciously forgotten.”

In Hannibal slave owners had little need for slaves to perform backbreaking plantation work; rather they were used for domestic tasks and financial stability. A slave was an investment. Dempsey said to think about a slave as an equivalent to a 401k, although that doesn’t change the inhumanity of the institution.

“When you think slaves, you need to think like a pet,” he said. “Your dog doesn’t get a bedroom.”

In order to perpetuate the more wholesome myth of Tom and Huck, America’s Hometown has swept some things under the rug. Dempsey said there are certain things the town either forgets or doesn’t talk about, slavery being one of them.

Slowly, community groups are addressing race relations, and the Mark Twain Museum is exhibiting information about the Clemens’ slaveholding past.

“I don’t want you to have the impression that things don’t change here. They do. They just change in a different way.” It’s a “slower, less fluid place.”

Alyssa

Mary Lou Montgomery, editor-in-chief of the Hannibal Courier-Post

I managed to resist much of Hannibal’s historic-site hucksterism—the souvenir Mark Twain t-shirts and the ride on the Too-Too Twain. But I succumbed to the Mark Twain Dinette’s 12-foot-tall rotating mug of root beer atop a 30-foot pole.

I lunched at the Dinette with Mary Lou Montgomery, editor of the five-day Hannibal Courier-Post, and followed her lead, ordering a homemade root beer (free refills) and a Dinette specialty, the Maid-Rite, “loose ground beef…cooked and seasoned to lock in that perfect flavor.”

As the editor for 26 years of a 6,000-7,000-circulation daily in Southbridge, MA, with a population of about 18,000, I had questions for Montgomery. She’s in a similar situation: also the editor of a 6,000-7,000-circulation daily in a town of about 18,000.

Newsroom staff diversity? Montgomery volunteers that diversity is nonexistent on the Courier-Post’s staff of 5 ¼. “We don’t get many minority applicants in Hannibal,” she says. “Like none.” She mentions a young new hire, Dominic Genetti: “He’s the closest thing. He’s Italian.”

What’s news to the Courier-Post? Montgomery says she strives for thorough coverage of everything Hannibal. “Now we’re virtually all local,” she says. She recalls her first job at the paper in November 1975 as a part-time proofreader: “When I was a pup, we would run people’s dead deer photos. We’re back doing them.”

Investigative journalism at the Courier-Post? Montgomery loves a good story, investigative or otherwise, but she talks about the Watergate generation of journalism graduates who “were going to change the world” in the past tense. “If traffic accidents are boring to you,” she says, “you are in the wrong business.”

After recently being named editor of the year by Suburban Newspapers of America, she explained her philosophy of focusing on “real people, rather than official sources.” For Groundhog Day, children are invited to submit photos of their pets. For a running “Young Artist of the Day” feature, children are asked to send in their drawings.

“My motto is ‘Look what we can accomplish together,’” she says. “It is not ‘my’ paper, but rather ‘our’ paper. We belong to our readers.”

In a town where black residents once had to rely on the weekly Home Protective Record and other black newspapers for local news, Montgomery goes out of her way to include black residents as part of her reader team.

She reports on a reunion of students from Douglass School, the area school attended by black students prior to school desegregation in the late 1950s:”The textbooks were hand-me-downs from the white schools in town; and the science lab was so limited that a teacher and one student would perform an experiment, and others would watch.”

Montgomery was named editor—the first female editor in the Courier-Post’s 173-year history—in May 2000. She says she first “tried being a man,” carrying a day planner instead of a purse.

But in 2000 she also began working toward a Hannibal-LaGrange College business degree, which she earned in 2004 at age 54. She says she learned along the way an important life lesson: “I can only be myself and that’s good enough.”

What will be good enough, however, to guarantee the survival of the Courier-Post and other newspapers? When the paper started—in the era when Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) had a paper route and then worked as a printer’s devil for the Hannibal Gazette—“the newspaper age was dawning in America,” writes Ron Powers. Today that age may be dying.

Newspapers struggle to survive. They cut costs and seek new revenue sources.

“We charge for obits now,” Montgomery said. And the paper charges $10 for publishing a wedding photo, and an added fee if you want more than 150 words in your wedding story. Montgomery expects local businesses as well as the public to support the paper with advertising, not just to request news coverage.

Whatever newspapers’ future, Montgomery will remain devoted to them. She says, “I love newspapers. I love newspapers. I love newspapers.”

Loren Ghiglione

All aboard the Mark Twain! A video of our experience floating down the Mississippi.

Faye Dant shows off Hannibal's first black newspaper at the Hannibal African American Life and History Project.

In some ways the Hannibal, Mo., that Faye Dant, 62, grew up in no longer exists. Dant remembers when schools in Hannibal were still segregated. Around town, there was an unspoken knowledge of the places where blacks could go and where they couldn’t.

“We were not the kind of community that had signs,” she said. Businesses didn’t label themselves as white-only. “But we knew.”

Faye left Hannibal for college and bigger cities, places in Michigan and Minnesota, and then Chicago. She and her husband moved back to his farm in Hannibal two years ago. Although some things had changed in Hannibal, Dant still needed to acknowledge the past of the town’s black population—”the invisibles,” she said.

“I felt like these people needed to know they had a history in Hannibal.”

On September 10, Dant invited Hannibal to view the project she cooked up in less than six months. In the back of the Hannibal History Museum, Dant unveiled the Hannibal African American Life and History Project. Two hundred people, mostly black, attended. She guessed it was probably the only time that many black people had been downtown at once.

The exhibits on the mustard-colored walls are monuments to the triumph and the oppression of Hannibal’s black community. Dant called on residents to lend their photos, clothing, books and papers to the project. As a result the faces of Hannibal residents fill the room. There are collages of candid photos—the faces of schoolgirls, newlyweds, soldiers, weathered old men—each one meaningful in its own way. Dant made an effort to showcase prominent members of the black community, which include Olympic athlete George Poage and Hiawatha Crow, the first black person elected to the Hannibal City Council.

There’s also a glass case in the middle of the room that holds Jim Crow relics, stereotypical posters and painted wooden figurines.

Dant’s project is the kind you can sit down and absorb. She specifically added a couple of folding chairs, an easy chair and a church pew so people can stay awhile. The exhibit isn’t permanent though, at least not yet. She used a $2,500 grant from the Missouri Humanities Council to get started. But she’s still facing the challenge of paying the rent. She has to leave the museum space at the of the year, and she’s seeking $25,000 for a new exhibit space.

“I want a room and I want a building and I want this to live beyond me.”

Alyssa

"I've been allowed to be me," said Michael Gaines, president of the Hannibal Arts Council.

What’s it like to be gay in Hannibal, Missouri, a town of 17,606 that bills itself as America’s hometown?

Mary Lou Montgomery, editor of the Hannibal Courier-Post, says sexual orientation is not discussed: “It’s pretty quiet—not secretly hidden, not talked about in polite society.”

Attorney Terrell Dempsey suggests that sexual orientation is like race in Hannibal, “You just don’t talk about things.” Gays are tolerated. “Most gay folks will move to Quincy,” a nearby Illinois city, he adds. “It’s still outwardly hostile here.”

Michael Gaines, 43, the gay executive director of the Hannibal Arts Council, refuses to be melodramatic about what gays face in Hannibal. He says, “It’s not like they’re dumping people in the river.” He cites a gay worker at the local General Mills plant who “has worked there forever” and is open about his relationship with his partner.

But some gay men, Gaines says, “are giving up on who they are.” They do what they feel the community expects of them. They marry women and have families.

Gaines says he came late to addressing his sexual orientation. “That wasn’t the community’s fault,” he says, “That was me.” He had pursued a workaholic lifestyle: “I was about what I did.” He had taken no time for personal life.

He also had lived in fear, “which was really unfounded,” he says. He had grown up on a farm near Bethel, Missouri, a town of 121 people with a history as a religious community. His father was a deacon. Gaines says he had to address the “religious baggage I carried my whole life.”

After time in New York City, Austria, Italy and at the University of Missouri (where he obtained a degree in tourism development in 1990), he took a development job in Bethel and, a year-and-a-half later, his current position in Hannibal.

He also chose in Hannibal to be open about his sexual orientation. “I haven’t put an ad in the paper,” he jokes, “but I still just go about life.” He attends community events with his partner.

“I’ve been allowed to be me,” he says. His parents, he says, “proved they loved unconditionally.” He no longer faces “wanting to die everyday.”

“When I came to love myself,” he says, “I was okay.”

Loren Ghiglione

We drove two hours northwest of St. Louis and reached Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain spent his childhood years growing up along the banks of the Mississippi. My traveling companions informed me that to say downtown Hannibal didn’t have much in the way of nightlife was somewhat of an understatement. Tonight was different though. We were invited to a party on Main Street at the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum. After primping, we set off for a night on the town, eager to find out what Hannibal had to offer.

For five years, Cindy Lovell, a self-proclaimed “Twainiac” and executive director of the museum, had been thinking of a way to honor the 100^th anniversary of Mark Twain’s death. She wanted to rally a star-studded cast of actors, musicians and singer-songwriters to produce a double-CD and 40-page booklet that would chronicle Mark Twain’s life, from birth to death, through alternating tracks of spoken word and music.

Lovell called her longtime friend, Grammy Award-winning bluegrass musician Carl Jackson and told him about the idea. Without hesitation, Jackson agreed to co-produce the CD which they would call “Mark Twain: Words & Music.”

Tonight they celebrated their efforts, the culmination of “hundreds of hours of phone conversations, traveling, brainstorming and considering every possible idea.” Carl Jackson, accompanied by singer Val Storey, performed cuts from the new album, a sometimes riotous, sometimes moving experience that transfigured me from skeptic to bluegrass neophyte.

The twanginess, the Twaininess, the fable-like lyrics and the affected lilt of the singers’ voices were in my mind pieces of America’s identity. For a moment I thought we could stop our journey there. I came back to the United States after four ambassadorial months spent outside of the country. This night welcome me back to what I missed most about home. It was the perfect way to kick off the Twain trip for me.

During a song about the ink that flows through Twain’s blood, I had a visceral reaction, one of immense sadness, respect and curiosity for this man forever enshrined in American heritage.

Twain spent time in Germany and made cutting, hilarious remarks about the German language’s convolutions in his book A Tramp Abroad. “In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.” He loved Berlin, where I lived during the summer, so much that he sent his daughters to school there. And during the performance, I also found out that Twain also spent time in India, which he describes in his book Following the Equator. During his time there, Twain reflected on the Indian crow, one of my personal favorite fixtures of the Delhi sky. He describes the crow as the perfected reincarnation of lifetimes upon lifetimes of thieving, pranking, hoodwinking and gossiping. The unabashed and feathery avatar of a writer.

Even though I just got here and the road trip has only just begun, it feels as if I’ve been following this guy, one Samuel Clemens, ever since the summer began.

View from the upper deck of the Mark Twain Riverboat.