Stay At It: Faye Dant on Telling A Deeper Story in America's Hometown

Faye Dant joins Matthew Fluharty to discuss Black history in Hannibal, MO, and the inspirations behind Jim's Journey and her book Hannibal's Invisibles.

In this first episode of the new Art of the Rural podcast, meet Faye Dant. Faye is the founder and director of Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center, an organization with a mission to build cross-cultural understanding by documenting, preserving and presenting the history of the 19th and 20th-century African American community in Hannibal and northeast Missouri.

Faye grew up in Douglasville in Hannibal, one of the oldest African American communities west of the Mississippi River, and she is a fifth-generation descendant of enslaved Missourians and Civil War veterans.

As a community historian and the curator of the Jim’s Journey Museum, Faye is compelled to tell these stories of the ordinary and extraordinary Black community—and to honor their experiences on the walls of this groundbreaking museum. This vision powers her celebrated book Hannibal’s Invisibles, released in 2024 by Belt Publishing, the culmination of an Art of the Rural fellowship supported by the Good Chaos Foundation.

If you know about Hannibal through the writings of Mark Twain – or from James, Percival Everrett’s recent awarding-winning book – then you are in for a treat, as Faye offers the deep and often unseen story of the beauties and complexities of Black life in this community known as “America’s Hometown.”

Additional Resources:

• Hannibal's Invisibles (Belt Publishing)
• Jim's Journey website
• Jim's Journey on Facebook

We are grateful to folks across the country who have made tax-deductible contributions to Art of the Rural to make this conversation possible, and to the Ford Foundation and Good Chaos Foundation for their support of Art of the Rural’s media programs.

Transcript

Episode Introduction

Faye: My wish is that people will come to think of communities, not necessarily as the mayor or the city council people or the other stakeholders, if you will, but come to realize that it took ordinary people to contribute and to really make all this happen.

Matthew: Hello and welcome to the Art of the Royal Podcast. I'm Matthew Fluharty. On this podcast, we gather with artists and culture bearers from across rural America and Indian country to encounter their creative and cultural vision, to hear new stories about life beyond the city, and to be inspired to bridge divides across the places we all hold dear.

If you enjoy this conversation, please join us at artoftherural. org. Where you can also subscribe to our newsletter featuring resources, gatherings, and lots of links to exciting creative work happening across the country. You can also find us on social, and on Substack, at Art of the Rural. We are grateful to folks from across the country who've made tax deductible contributions to Art of the Rural to make this conversation possible.

And to the Ford Foundation and Good Chaos Foundation for their support of Art of the Rural's media programs. Today, I'm honored to share a conversation with author, historian, and curator, G. Faye Dant. Faye is the founder and director of Jim's Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center, an organization with a mission to build cross cultural understanding by documenting, preserving, and presenting the history of the 19th and 20th century African American community in Hannibal, in Northeast Missouri.

Faye grew up in Douglasville, in Hannibal. One of the oldest African American communities west of the Mississippi River, and she is a fifth generation descendant of enslaved Missourians and Civil War veterans. As a community historian and the curator of the Jim's Journey Museum, Faye is compelled to tell these stories of the ordinary and extraordinary Black community, and to honor their experiences on the walls of this groundbreaking museum.

This vision powers her celebrated book, Hannibal's Invisibles, released in 2024 by Belt Publishing, the culmination of an Art of the Royal Fellowship supported by the Good Chaos Foundation. If you know about Hannibal through the writings of Mark Twain, or from James, Percival Everett's recent award-winning book, then you are in for a treat.

As Faye offers the deep and often unseen story of the beauties and complexities of Black life in this community known as America's hometown. So please sit back and relax and enjoy this conversation with G. Faye Dant. And after listening, please be sure to check out her work at jimsjourney.org. 

Interview

Matthew: Faye, thanks so much for your time today. I'm really grateful for this conversation, and I'm wondering as a way to kind of open up our time together, maybe talking a little bit about how you frame the story of your own personal journey. You've spoken in interviews about growing up in Douglasville, a neighborhood here in Hannibal that holds the distinction of being one of the first and largest communities in the country founded by formerly enslaved people.

And you attended Douglass School until Hannibal Public Schools were integrated in 1959. And I know you've spoken about attending your first protest at the age of 12. And all of those are pieces in a much, much broader mosaic of your experience here in Hannibal. 

And I guess I'm wondering, like, as you look back at those formative years, what personal memories and community stories emerge as really significant from that period, and how those experiences can help folks understand the historical and cultural currents of Hannibal today? What feel like really important signposts in your own personal journey here?

Faye: Matt, as I think about growing up in Hannibal, I can't help but think about the fact that it was a very segregated community and that even long after the schools were integrated, we were still a very segregated in the sense that we stayed in our own neighborhoods and had our own friends and There wasn't, or at least for me, there wasn't a lot of reach beyond Douglasville or beyond the Black community.

My mom, post Integration, post Civil Rights Act, was still a maid. My stepfather still worked at a minimum wage job. My brothers still attempted to integrate Hannibal's athletic departments. They were very athletic, and they wanted to play on the Hannibal High School basketball team, and they wanted to play on the football team, and they wanted to run track.

But Hannibal was such that they weren't always welcome to do that. And so it was, um, it's just always been a struggle, and it's always been the kind of community that, that there were some barriers to the movement we could have had. As a matter of fact, uh, uh, as I think about that, I, I've been given that a lot of thought.

And one of the things that's come to me is that there are generations of Hannibalians, Black Hannibalians I'm thinking about now, that have stayed. That, that didn't migrate to the Chicago's or the Gary, Indiana's or even St. Louis, uh, uh, they, they stayed. They, their grandparents were here. Their great-grandparents were enslaved here.

Their parents went to Douglass. Their parents graduated from Douglass. They graduated from Douglas, they've even graduated from the Integrated School. But they stayed, and they made a way, and they made a home here. One of the things I do with Jim's Journey, and I want to always do, and always be mindful of, are the, I don't know that they felt like those were sacrifices, but I do want to uplift those people.

And I do want to say, thanks for staying, and thanks for dealing with it.

Matthew: I'm grateful for this perspective on just like the presence of integration in that moment of your journey. And it makes me think about, you know, being with you on the Hannibal's Invisibles book tour. The way you framed it was really important just for me to hear as well.

And you said during one of those conversations that Black Hannibalians were not clamoring to go to school with white kids. They wanted equal resources. When we think about regional history and just like how we can better understand that moment in a single community. I think sometimes the more popular narrative of some of these things loses sight of that. That was the goal.

Faye: That was it. That was all we, that's all we wanted. In fact, I have a photograph in the museum of a chemistry class at Douglass School. And there were five or six kids standing around a microscope. And coincidentally, it was the same five or six kids that then integrated the Hannibal High School.

And they walk into the classroom and they have dozens of microscopes. And they had just come from an environment where they had to share whatever the Hannibal public school system deemed Douglass was worthy of receiving. And if it met one microscope, 30 kids had to share, then that's the way it was. But, we did it, and they did it, and our teachers encouraged us to learn what we could from whatever resources we had.

And so that's, that's what I mean when I talk about a lack of resources. And the fact that we knew it, and it became crystal clear once we made that transition to the, white school system.

Matthew: What was it like at that point in your life to be going through that sort of high school experience post integration and then to think about what your future was like beyond high school?

Like what was that moment like for you as you were making those important life decisions and like thinking through the prospects?

Faye: It's not like the counselors at the school said, I see college in your future. It wasn't like we got that kind of encouragement from the school system. We got that kind of encouragement in our homes, in our churches.

I got that kind of confidence builder, if you will, from these other sources outside of the public school system. I know it's funny, and I talk about this in the book, Hannibal's Invisibles. Because I just happened to like to read, I was encouraged to read. I was the only kid in the family that got books for Christmas and for birthdays.

Based on that, there were some real high expectations for me. At any rate, it didn't happen at the school system. Unless you were an exceptional person. And then it was. The funny thing I've learned doing this research is that the first class that integrated was a high school class in ‘55, something like that.

When I looked at the yearbook from that time period, there were six Black kids from Douglass that made the honor society. That was amazing to me that, that, I mean, you know, you think you, it, while it was resourced the way it was, we excelled and we did what we could and people were taught, people learned.

You know, that, that was really interesting to me, and I know those people, and some of those people are the people that I'm describing, graduated. Went to college, came back, and kept contributing to the community in one way or another.

Matthew: And then post high school, you did leave after high school, right?

Faye: I did, I did. I went to community college here. We had a two-year school. So I went, I went to the community college. I got a degree in elementary education, then decided I did want more, and I wasn't interested in going to the University of Missouri, so I went away to, uh, Michigan. Joel, by that, my husband, also, uh, Hannah Bailey, and also, he was a third, fourth generation Hannibal person.

He had taken a job with Ford in Michigan, so I decided I wasn't going to Detroit, but I chose a school not so far from Detroit. Rochester, Michigan. It's called Oakland University. That's where I got my undergrad degree. And then we married, right after I finished college. I ultimately ended up in Ann Arbor, where I pursued and got a master's degree in planning.

Matthew: If I'm tracking the years ahead, y'all were in Ann Arbor, and then Y'all spent some time in Minneapolis and then Chicago, right?

Faye: That's it. You have it just as it happened. Joel was recruited. He was a, uh, an accomplished human resources person. So is recruited. We went to Minneapolis, and he went to work for Pillsbury, and then we went to Chicago when we moved to Chicagoland.

Eight years later, he again was recruited, and he went to work for a candy company there. It was called Leaf, but they made whoppers and paydays and all that kind of stuff. And we stayed in Chicago then for the next four years. 35 years. Suburbs of Chicago. What, I cannot claim, Chicago.

Matthew: You just enjoyed some time in Chicago.

Faye: Oh yeah, we did, and we had lots of friends in Chicago, and we attended events in Chicago. We were, we just didn't live there. We lived in the northeastern suburbs. My kids, if you can believe this, they went to a high school at the school called Stevenson. 5,000 students at their high school. They were all excellent students and all excelled and, you know, did well.

So it was good for them and it was good for us. And then when, uh, my husband and I retired from corporate America, if you will, we decided to come back home. His father had bought a farm here, and, uh, we came back and built on that farm.

Matthew: I know there's like so much we could talk about your all's life before that moment, but I'm like really curious about you all returning here, because that was in, I believe it was 2011?

Faye: 2011, we came back.

Matthew: You all came back, and then the founding of Jim's Journey was shortly after that, but to have had those experiences, you know, in all of those different places, to have left Hannibal and had all of those experiences, and then to return here…and I'm sure you visited a lot, but like, what did you find as someone who was living here solidly again? What was that transition like culturally for you?

Faye: To your point, we had visited often, and we did see the changes or, and or lack of changes. That, that Hannibal had gone through or had not gone through, but at any rate, we came back and it was, it was sort of easy for me making the change. I mean, you know, we had done a lot and experienced a lot, exposed our children to a lot.

And so coming back for me was just. Coming back, the traffic was better, it was cheaper, it was, you know, all sorts of good things like that. I missed my friends, but not, not so much, and I didn't, didn't necessarily miss all the, the, the museums and the concerts and, you know, all those kinds of things, because I had done them.

It was just time to come back, but I was disappointed in the fact that when I returned, Hannibal had not necessarily grown in terms of race relations, in terms of opportunities, in terms of recognition of the Black community, you know, and all those things. 

And so I came back, and I kind of liken myself to Twain. I blossom when I was away, so I came back and, and, and to see it hadn't blossomed. I got more involved and found myself wanting to contribute more to that and nudge people along, if you will.

Matthew: Was Jim's Journey an idea that emerged pretty immediately upon coming back here? Or did it take a while for that to feel like the path you were going to take?

Faye: Joel and I, when we came back, we were recruited to be on a couple of boards. And being the kind of people we were and the kind of exposure we had had. We immediately got involved in the community. Now I'm gonna be completely honest here in that sometimes we were the only Black people at these outings or these events.

But we were comfortable in that environment, it meant nothing to us. Now they may, I don't know how comfortable or uncomfortable they were, but there we were. I went to one exhibit, it was called Historical Hannibal. There was all photographs, and one of the things that they had to represent the Black community was a picture of our segregated school, Douglass School.

Then they had another picture of our oldest church, Athens Center Street Missionary Baptist Church. And I approached the curator to say that I think there's more to our story than that. I, I won't say that he was offended. But he did suggest if I wanted more, then I should probably go do it. That kind of got me thinking about a Black History Museum here in Hanover.

Matthew: What was community support like in those early years as you were building Jim's Journey? And as you were beginning to make connections with folks in terms of, uh, welcoming in photographs and archives and objects, how, how did the community relate to this thing that was clearly happening that, that you were really such a force behind?

Faye: Black people were very excited and very anxious and very Or, or else I wouldn't have this abundance of archives and so much so that I have to rotate things out to get everybody's things on display. The white community, I don't know, I guess they didn't, they didn't give it much thought. They didn't say, no, you shouldn't do it.

I did apply for a grant at one of our banks, our local banks. It was a grant to do a temporary exhibit in 2011. They denied me the grant, saying that they didn't think I'd be around that long. It was about perpetuity, that's the word that they used. At any rate, so I um, I skipped them and I went to the Missouri Humanities Council.

And they gave me my first 2, 500 grant to start Jim's Journey.

Matthew: So this is, say, like, year one of Jim's Journey. These relationships are being built with new folks, rekindled with folks who are part of the community, of your community here. And all of this is happening in a space where maybe there are institutions or funders who are wondering about, as you said, in their, in their own eyes, the long-term viability of this as an endeavor.

I think it's important for folks listening to this conversation to understand as well, like, that a significant part of the economy of Hannibal is run on Mark Twain tourism. And it, it really honestly blew my mind when I read that, I don't know the exact number, but it's like roughly a little under. 200,000 people visit Hannibal every year, right?

Faye: Every year.

Matthew: As Mark Twain tourists. So that's like such a significant economic force, but like it's a cultural force, because there's a certain kind of story the tourism industry probably wants to tell about Hannibal and about contemporary life right now. And I'm just like really curious about how in those early years, but even to fast forward to more recent years, how your work and Jim's Journey fit into that kind of ecosystem?

Because I think some folks might hear all of what I just shared and wonder, like, was there resistance to this as an idea at first? Because, you know, Black history and Black lived experience wasn't perhaps a part of the tourism narrative. Was that a, was that an accurate assumption or has that changed?

Faye: No, no, it was, they did not necessarily want, care about this story. In fact, I really fault them because I think it would have been a tremendous revenue stream. For them to reach out to Jim's Journey and, and to include me in their list of available resources, if you will. But they didn't. And I, part of it, I think, has to do with the fact that they get a certain amount of money from, from tourism.

And they don't want to share that. And I can't necessarily blame them for that. But to not want to tell this story, I do blame them for it. I've had numerous fights with tourism to say, why didn't you include me in this catalog or why didn't you include me in this list? Or why, why did you, did you accept that award, and there's yet no mention of Jim's Journey.

It was like, oh, we forgot, oh, we didn't think about it. And even the city, there would be opportunities to say, we have a brand new museum here in town, Jim's Journey. But it, it didn't happen that way. Everything had to be a struggle and everything had to be of my own doing. I had to reach out to Missouri Life or one of these other publications. To update them in terms of what we were doing or what we had accomplished or where we were going or where we wanted to go. I am, to your point, in my 11th year. And it's still, you know, it hasn't changed a whole lot. One thing, one of the things I say to people that visit Jim's Journey is that I'm not going to share with you a story of Tom and Becky.

I'm all about research. I'm all about the real people that impacted Samuel Clemens. And the life he lived and created in Samuel Clemens, an anti racist. That's the story I tell at Jim's Journey. And I have done that, not necessarily with the help of the tourism community.

Matthew: I think that's something that folks listening to this conversation would, like, immediately note is that regardless of how, how one feels about Twain, Twain himself directly addressed all of these things.

You know, Huckleberry Finn, like, is absolutely a significant work. As so many folks have written about, you know, it was an attempt by a white author. To convey Black vernacular speech. There you go. Essentially the first significant attempt to do that. And there's a lot of criticism, like, like, because that's a whole other conversation about that, about that book.

But it feels so ironic for an industry built around someone who spoke his truth with so much force and so much humor and so much wit to not see these connections. To not see these connections. 

Faye: See these connections! And then what added to that is the fact that I am 20 feet from what they have created and call Huck Finn's Home. I can look out the window at Jim's Journey and see this thing called Huck Finn's Home. Now, why 200,000 people would come to Hannibal and be interested in Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain, I should say. Tom and Becky and, and, and all of that. and have no interest in Jim. That baffles me. I have a hard time with that.

And I would think that they come because they like literature, and that suggests to me that they read, and they, you know, it's a whole different attraction to even show up here. But then to show up but not be interested in the entire story that that's built around the town and around Samuel Clemens. It's just, I don't know. I don't get that. But let me say in the same breath that I love the people I get. I get people at Jim's Journey that are interested in the story and want to share their stories. I, I claim this. That I'm probably the only museum in the country where people thank me for my service.

Like I've just served in a, uh, like I'm a military person or something. Thanks for doing this work. We appreciate it. I get that from everybody that visits Jim's Journey. So I'm pleased about that.

Matthew: I remember reading about how for an early Jim's Journey event you brought together A descendant of Huck Finn and a descendant of Jim. 

And that struck me as such a profound thing to do. Like, in terms of, like, demystifying, making it real and human and lived. You know, that there are people behind these stories that Twain was writing. And, like, those stories continue in us. How did that come about as an idea? And, like, what was that like for that to happen in the community?

Faye: When we opened Jim's Journey, it was, uh, September 21st of 2013. Let me back up to say that was phase two. Phase one was something called Hannibal's Life and History Project. And it was a temporary exhibit in the Hannibal History Museum. The people, they were very lovely people who invited me to put up a temporary exhibit since they knew that my real goal was to have a Black history museum.

I had it up for maybe a year, something like that. And then they were moving on, so I had to move on. That's when I had to do this research to discover that Samuel Clemens had based Jim of Huckleberry Finn on a real person, a man named Daniel Quarles. Researcher that I am, I continued to learn more and more about Daniel Quarles, and I learned that he had descendants in Texas.

So I reached out to the man that I knew, it's a man named Larry McCarty, he's a descendant of Daniel Quarles. He was very excited to come and share his story, his journey, because this is an interesting story in that he's a descendant of one of Daniel's children, a man named Harvey Quarles, who had been bought, sold, gifted, traded, and ended up in Texas.

And was indeed part of that first Juneteenth celebration. And he was happy to come and to tell that story. And so I was able to present him to the community. And then, now this is a little bit odd, but it was a man in the audience, raised his hand and identified himself as a descendant of Huckleberry Finn.

The family's name is Blankenship. And they still live in Missouri. There are some of them, he came from St. Louis. And there are still Blankenships throughout Missouri, I'll just say it that way, the state. At any rate, he self-identified, he agreed to take photographs. It was just a wonderful moment for me to think that here I am presenting to the community, Jim and Huck.

So I was able to do that. It was a great experience and one that won't be forgotten. Again, and we celebrate their participation every year. They don't come back, they'll, they, they didn't make it back for my 10th anniversary. But I'm sure I'll, I'll pull them together again for, for another event.

Matthew: That's such an extraordinary story.

Faye: I know, isn't it?

Matthew: Oh, gosh. That just gives you goosebumps, you know.

Faye: Blankenship. And Daniel Quarles, you know, Samuel Clemens identified Daniel Quarles as a prototype for Jim, finally, in his autobiography that didn't get published until 2010. And that was one of the things that bothered this man named Larry McCarty so much.

In that, while he made this claim that Daniel Quarles was indeed Jim, Samuel Clemens, by not allowing his autobiography to be published until a hundred years after his death, it gave McCarty some issues. Because I know this is where we come from, and I know this is the man, and so why don't you go ahead and say it, please.

At any rate, it was a great event and one that I love to think about, and love to share with people. And, and again, Jim's Journey is phase two. Like, phase one was this thing called Hannibal African American Life and History Project. It was a temporary exhibit. It was all Black people, all Black photographs of Douglass School graduates and some military people and, uh, you know, school children.

There was no connection to Twain. Recognizing that 97 percent of the tourists that come to Hannibal want to see a connection, I had to pull myself away from that and do that research to make that connection. And so I identified Twain, first white author, to give a Black person, an enslaved person, a presence in his literature.

Make him a man, a real man, an independent man, a smart man, a father, a husband. All those kinds of things, and so I came to appreciate Samuel Clemens for that. And then I did this other research to learn about some of his, uh, other anti racist kinds of, uh, things that he did. And I encourage people, write this minute, do not stop with Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.

Read some of Samuel Clemens’ essays. That's where you'll get a real sense for the kind of, uh, person he was and the kind of author he was. And the fact that not only was he an anti racist, but he was very philanthropic. He gave a lot back to the Black community. If you can believe it, he had a relationship with Frederick Douglass.

He had a relationship with the Fisk Jubilee Singers. I mean, there were people like that, that he interacted with and they'd try to support one another, you know, as, as they were both performing, if you will, which is what Twain was doing to try to make money and to try to make a living other than his books or in addition to his books.

Matthew: The work you've been doing here has been doing so many things, but like one of the things that's also been doing is Just turning the jewel a little bit for folks to understand all these other dimensions to Twain Which are pathways to understanding all these other dimensions to life in this region and lived experience in this region and You know, that makes me think, because that was my, very much my experience as well, just that feeling of like profound gratitude the first time that I entered Jim's Journey.

And it's overwhelming how palpable that story is in that space. And the kind of invitation that Jim's Journey offers to folks, like to make connections and to ask questions. I think sometimes when we're in spaces that are not the culture that we come from, we can be hesitant to ask questions. You know, Jim’s Journey really feels like a space where questions can be asked. You can come in there as yourself and ask questions and make connections and really learn a great deal.

I'm sure there's so many points of origin that lead to a book like Cannibal's Invisibles.

Faye: In 2018, Hannibal Bicentennial Celebration, I was recruited to be the person of color on that bicentennial committee.

You know, one person in a sea of, uh, of other touristy people – and these were touristy people – that wanted to see this bicentennial celebration turn out to be something awesome for Hannibal and a big money maker for Hannibal. I didn't necessarily come with them to that. I saw it as an opportunity to teach our history and to expose even more tourists and even more interested people in the Black history.

One of the things that I proposed, and this is 2018, was that I'm going to be doing a book and I'm going to call it Hannibal's Invisibles, The Illustrated Story. Because I knew that at that point I wasn't necessarily an author, but I was a gatherer of photographs and I was the person that, that could actually do the research associated with those photographs and with those people and, and for those people.

So I did, uh, Hannibal's Invisibles: The Illustrated Story. Colored Places, Colored Faces was another one of the working titles that I had. Again, that's 2018. And I got busy. I'm on the, uh, Juneteenth Committee. At that point, there was one committee. I had a leadership role in that celebration, if you will.

I did Black History Month, I did Dr. King's birthday, and I had the museum open six months out of the year. So, I was sort of busy and got distracted, and then in, oh, 2019, something like that, I decided that I was ready. to take this to the next level. And so I reached out to one of my benefactors, out of the rural, and I told them what I wanted to do, but that I needed help to do it.

I knew that while I was an okay writer, I needed an editor, I needed a professional to put this out right. Because I wanted it done well. Because I see Hannibal's Invisibles as a universal story. I hope that people won't think because Hannibal's in the name that it's just about Hannibal. And I hope that people beyond Hannibal will be interested in hearing this or learning more about this.

So I reached out, I got a grant, we found us an editor, and we began working on it.

Matthew: And there are a lot of books about Hannibal, but what's missing on that huge bookshelf are books about Black history and Black lived experience. There's a lot of gravity to being a person, I would imagine, like being an author who's bringing that story together in that kind of way for the first time.

in, in book form like that? So what was your creative process like, in terms of gathering all the stories and the material and the photographs that are present in the book? How did it all come together?

Faye: I believe I said this before, when I started Jim's Journey, when I decided to do a Black History Museum, I reached out to the community and folks started donating.

Part of what they donated was these photographs, hundreds of photographs. In fact, that book, I think it's over 200 pages, and that represents a lot of photographs. I would encourage people to tell me the stories behind those pictures, behind those photographs. You're gonna see a, a huge section on the military.

You're gonna see a, a good sized section on Douglasville. Douglasville, the homes and the businesses that were there in Douglasville. You're gonna see a huge section, obviously, on Douglass School, our segregated school. That's, that school existed for more than 80 years. And it graduated more than a thousand students.

One of the things I was, you know, trying to include is to tell people and expose people to things that represented those communities, those people. Like for Douglass School, I have secured a list of every graduate of Douglass School, and I love that. I have secured a list of, and it could be partial, I, I mean, you know, somebody will help me out or somebody will correct me along the way.

But every business, Black business, that ever operated in Hannibal. I have a list of, uh, every minister that ministered at all the iconic Black churches that were in Hannibal. And, and, and I, I, you know, I've just pulled all that together. I go back to research that I've been able to do, and I did it through newspaper clippings.

I did it through death certificates. I did it through our own city directory. Those have been published here since 1859. That's when the first one came out. We are very fortunate that those are digitized. Even more fortunate in that we had a publisher here for about 40 years, a Black publisher. And he published a colored city directory.

So I get to know who worked where, who lived where, who were their neighbors, what they were doing, what, uh, there's even a section that tells me what kind of jobs people had. In our 1927 city directory, there is a list that includes 70 cooks, 90 janitors. It also includes 12 mailmen. To nurses, the firefighters, and these are all the Black people.

Watchmen, and that was the slash, policemen that existed at that time. So I get to, you know, just tell folks about that and share all of that information. I had a woman that – a white female – that purchased one of the books, talked about how it, for her, it conjured up memories of her rural community. And she knows there was only one or two Black families that lived there.

But it made her reflect on what their life was like. Something that she had not thought about. I had another woman give me, it's actually a painting that her grandmother did of their yard man, is who she described him. But to me, I researched it and I found that he had run for the Black, for city council person.

He didn't win, but he had tried to be a city council person. And by the way, in 200 years, Hannibal's only had one Black city council person. And to think that she thought of him as her yard man, and yet to the Black community, he was way, way more than that. An entrepreneur, a person, a very independent thinking person, and a person that wanted to give back to the community.

That's why I did it. That's why I'm hoping people will be interested in reading this story and in learning more about the community that Samuel Clemens started to tell about in some of his literature.

Matthew: You've spoken about, about the stories in the communities that you feature in the book. As being a community within, um, you've written about it, about that quality, that regardless of where we're coming from, we can understand and appreciate that, hopefully also as readers, seeing the universal story that also is running alongside of that, and that feels like a really profound achievement for a work that's coming out of local place to be able to articulate those two things at once.

How have visitors to Jim's Journey and readers from beyond Hannibal, how have they responded to this book? What have you heard from readers?

Faye: I appreciate that comment. Matt, it's been, it's been pretty amazing. Black people, of course, love the book and love the telling of the story because for them, it conjures up memories of long gone people, long gone places.

I had one young woman tell me that her mom won't put it down. She brings it to the breakfast table. You know, she takes it. It's always kind of beside her. This is, again, a 90-year-old woman who's enjoying seeing her people have some presence, have a meaning in the history of Hannibal. In the place where she's called home for 90 years.

She showed her daughter and her grandchildren, her name in the list of graduates from Douglass. Her husband's military photograph, it's all those kinds of things that, that make it very real. I, I, again, I, I had a white woman from someplace in Illinois, she got back to me to say that for her, it made her go back to their family photographs and say, I wonder what I was thinking when I was six years old, or how I was looking, or what, what my life was like then.

And it, it just made her reflect on that a little bit. That, that's kind of one of my hope. It just makes you be more thoughtful about your life and your life experiences and how different they were from your neighbor, if you will.

Matthew: We've seen how the book has had these powerful impacts for folks. For you as a writer and a researcher, was there a significant moment in the creation of the book that stands out to you as a moment where?

It had that same quality of transcending itself, becoming more than just a book. Like there was something really human and lived.

Faye: We've talked a bit about the photographs and the folks that, and, and the fact that, that I had all these photographs that were donated to Jim's Journey and that I used in writing the book.

But, but in addition to that though, I was able to interview some people. And I interviewed, very deliberately, interviewed people who had grown up here and had left here. And people who had grown up here from generations and never left here. That, that, that's been interesting. It's been kind of an eye opener for me.

Because even the people that have left – and I will say this, very accomplished people. One of the people in the book that I interviewed was an assistant attorney general. He was appointed to that position by Bush. Baby Bush gave him that job. And then I had one, one very accomplished treasurer of a major, major Fortune 100 company.

And I had, you know, some very accomplished people that have left Hannibal and that I was able to reach back to. They were all able to tell me how their life experience here impacted them and contributed in some way to their success. The attorney general that I mentioned, he talked about how he had a history teacher at Douglass that taught him Black history way before it was popular.

He knew about the Tulsa riot. He knew about some things that they weren't teaching. And he was never going to get at the Hannibal public school system, the Hannibal, the integrated school system. You know, he was able to share that with me. The treasurer that I mentioned to you, he told me about his first job at one of the hotels here.

A big hotel. It was called the Mark Twain Hotel, as a matter of fact. It was where Samuel Clemens would stay when he visited Hannibal. At any rate, his grandfather was a cook there. And he loved working there because it meant on Sundays he would get this job. fabulous food that his grandfather never cooked at home, shrimp cocktail that he never got at home, but he'd get because he was, his grandfather was a chef and he was an employee at the hotel.

And that, that, that was part of his life experience and part of what he recalls about growing up here and working here and living here and then leaving here. He was also, he's a very accomplished man. He's one of the first guys, he got an offer from West Point and from the Air Force. He got offers from both of those institutions to attend school.

And then there are people that stayed. One woman that stayed, she turned out to be a pastor here. She graduated from college and went to work for a social security company, a social security administration, just didn't leave. Married a Hannibal man, they raised their children here. But she told a story about growing up in a household that, you know, was very crowded and, and this and that.

Ultimately, though, we learned that the man who owned this house was a cousin to one of the famous jazz singers. But at any rate, the, the, the reach that some of these people had that they weren't aware of, you know, all those kinds of learnings, those, those have been good. And it's been a good experience based on that.

And my book, I know, is in Australia, and I know it's in the, we, we get the Viking tourist ship in, and these are tourists from all over the world. And they come in, and they purchase the book, and so it's, it's fun to think about my stories or these stories being told in parts of the, that part of the community.

One woman promised to introduce it to her book club. Things like that. So, it's been good.

Matthew: Something I appreciate, I really appreciate with all of your work is the way in which, like, we can understand history as a pretext for the future. Jim's Journey is celebrating its 11th year as the book Hannibal's Invisibles is, at this point, circulating all around the world, you know, and certainly here on this continent, really making an impact with readers and communities.

I'm wondering what you hope for the stories that can be told about this community in the next 10 years. If we're looking back 20 or 30 years from now, what's your hope for this community in the next 10 years? How it can grow and develop?

Faye: My thought is that, or my wish is that, People will come to think of communities not necessarily as the mayor, or the city council people, or the other stakeholders if you will.

But come to realize that it took ordinary people to contribute and to really make all this happen. I always talk about how, when they talk about the founding of Hannibal, how a man named Moses Bate Bates, who they credit as the founder of Hannibal. He had four people, four enslaved people with him on that journey.

And these are the people that cleared the land and built the log cabin and did the heavy lifting. You know, it just takes more than the stakeholders to actually build a community and to make this happen. And we have to be strong, and we have to be resilient, and we have to be committed to wanting to get it done.

No matter what's in our way, because Lord knows there were a lot of hurdles. There were a lot of struggles. And I could have focused only on, on slavery. On the enslavement of people. But no, I want to talk more about the contributions. And the value add, if you will. The woman who talked about her Black yard man.

If you think about that. They had a lovely home. But it was because of him, the driver, people that drove by and felt high regard for them and, and, and how well kept their yard was and how isn't it lovely that they are in this community, a part of this community. But somebody else had to contribute to that.

At any rate, I just want people to know it wasn't just the powers that be. It was ordinary people making all this happen and continue to make it happen.

Matthew: That's a really powerful and beautiful Invitation to all of us to keep that in mind and to keep doing the work stay at it. 

Faye: Stay at it.

Matthew:  Stay at it. Yeah. Hey, I'm so grateful for your time, and I just really have one final question That's really just kind of a big open question, which is just like in in this moment that we're in it's this point mid november Here along the Mississippi River and Hannibal what's inspiring you books music food movies places What are the things that are giving you inspiration in this moment?

Faye: I don't know if the word can be inspiration…I don't know if I'm driven by inspiration. I'm probably driven by anger. And, and a need to let folks not go around here being confused about things. I'm always teaching, and I, I want every moment to be, to just work that way, and I take every opportunity to do that. Moved by anger.

Matthew: If I can ask a part two to that question. Because just for folks that are listening to this podcast, we're sitting here in a building just around the corner from Jim's Journey. in this extraordinary room filled with your artwork. And I feel really remiss that we haven't spoken about this yet because, you know, I really, just as one viewer, really relate to these images as part of the universe of all of your work.

And I'm wondering if you would mind just sharing a little bit about that, that artistic process. How long have you been doing this work? Has this work, the collage work that I fortunately had the chance to see that the viewers wouldn't have a chance to see…How did this work come about?

Faye: I do these things called photo collages. And again, I use images of family and friends or historical icons to tell a story. And I've done this for 50 years. It came about because I wanted my children to see in birthday cards, and Christmas cards, and all of that. I wanted them to see themselves reflected in those things. If I got a birthday card and I liked what it was saying, but I didn't like the image because the image wasn't Black enough, then I would cut out a face.

Of his grandmother, of his grandfather, or somebody, and I turned it into a Black card. And so I've continued in that. When we came back to Hannibal, there was a local art gallery. And I thought, I would like to be, have some of my work displayed in that gallery. And by then I had graduated to doing gift boxes and memory boxes and small images or pictures for people.

That again told a story. I have since grown to doing something, I don't know, the 36 by 45s. You know, if you can imagine, those are pretty good size. But that's what I do now. And again, I continue to try to tell a story. One of my favorites is a picture of a Black female in a kitchen preparing a meal for the white people who are in the other room.

Now, the woman is actually looking a little like Aunt Jemima, but it's Harriet Tubman. And I call the picture The Help. And the white people in the other room are watching Dr. Martin Luther King being arrested on their TV set. And they're surrounded by their children and their dog and, you know, happy times for them.

And there she is in the kitchen preparing their meal. And I guess it's happy times for her because she at least has a job. But I call that The Help and I, I hope people get that. When they look at that image. At any rate, I've been doing it now for the past, Oh, earnestly for the past probably five years.

I've been very fortunate. They have my images displayed, uh, kind of all over the country. I do Illinois, Tri State, I'll say it that way. And I do St. Louis, and I do, um, Iowa, I've had them displayed there. I do it, and I do it for me. None of my images are for sale. But, I want people to see them, because I want them to, again, make them think a little bit about the message I'm trying to give them about life in another time.

Matthew: Hey, Faye, thank you so much for your time today.

Faye: Thanks, Matt.