Stories
The story of
the Stevenson family
I was six years old when my family moved to Carthage and then a year later to Neosho, in the Ozark hills of Southern Missouri. From my earliest memories, I was influenced by the landscape and people of this region. In Carthage I used to go fishing in a nearby stream with the caretaker of the telephone company across the street (Chestine Motley) and his nephew (BJ?) and pan-fry the fish as soon as we caught them. And I went to play baseball with BJ and his neighbors on the other side of town, and the other side of the tracks.
After I moved to Neosho and started going to school I could no longer play with kids like that. After all, they were Negro and Negro kids had their own school on the other side of the tracks. The racism of the old South already left a scar which hurt me even though I did not yet understand it. Later on, in Sunday school, the superintendent Mr Hurlburt took down the Bible and read us a passage which he interpreted to prove that the "Niggers were born to be slaves."
But my parents, who were from the North, gave me good values. When I went home from Sunday School they explained patiently to me that I did not need to believe everything I heard in church and Sunday School, and that there are different ways to interpret the Bible. My parents' belief in the dignity of all and their rejection of racism was illustrated a few years later when my Mother invited a high level representative of the US government's welfare programs to Neosho, only to find out that no hotel or motel would accept a Black person like her. My mother canceled the visit and went to St Louis to meet her instead.
Eventually in 1954, in response to the Supreme Court decision, the Neosho schools were desegregated. On a trip back to Neosho in 2004, Lindsay and I met a Black woman working at the County Historical Society who had grown up on the North end of Neosho and had gone to the Black school. We drove by there to see the old school which is still there.
My recollection was that the county between us and Arkansas, McDonald County, had an official sign on the county line that said "No nigger ever spent the night alive in McDonald County." For a long time, people told me I was exaggerating, but on a visit to Neosho with Kiki in April 2013, we met a man from Purdy who said, "Yes, the homemade sign was often put up, and just as often taken down. But on the city limits of Purdy, it stayed up." Besides, when I worked on the Pleasant Valley ranch, we had a bulldozer operator working on clearing the back acres who boasted of a lynching in which he had assisted. "We drug him to death tied to the back of our truck 'cause he had the nerve to drink from the white man's water barrel." And this man was a fundamentalist preacher on weekends !
As I grew into my teenage years, I wanted to escape from this part of the country where people blamed the "New York, Jewish, Nigger-loving, Communist bankers" for their problems.
Old post card of Noel
I loved the countryside, especially down in McDonald County around Noel where I used to go with my father and my friend Wayne Myers to disover and explore caves (In 2012, I caught up with Wayne living on a remote farm in Maine and reminisced about our childhood). Reading Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain brings back childhood memories of cave exploring! And a few years later, we would track across the fields with a 22 rifle trying to find a rabbit to shoot.
Going to sleep on the warm summer nights, my brother and I would listen to the whistle of the Frisco railroad on the other side of the valley, or the broadcasts of the St Louis Cardinals baseball game coming from one of our neighbors, or the sounds of a rodeo or carnival in the arena in the valley below.
After I went to college in New York and my parents moved to Massachusetts, I did not visit Neosho for many years until 2004 on a nostalgic trip with Lindsay along Route 66 which went through nearby Joplin. A few years later, returning for the 50th reunion of my high school class, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the old racist prejudices were not as bad as I recalled. Perhaps, I had been exaggerated them in my memory, and in any case they had changed for the better. My classmates, for the most part, had traveled through most of America, and many of them throughout the world, and their attitudes seemed relatively open and unprejudiced.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of the Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme