Free Truman by David McCullough Page B

whenever the band played “Dixie.” The United Daughters of the Confederacy thrived, and such formal parties as attended by genteel young folk like Bessie Wallace and her friends were hardly different from those put on in Macon or Tuscaloosa, from the floral decorations entwining stair rails to the refreshments of chicken salad and charlotte russe. The biggest memorial in Woodland Cemetery was the Confederate monument. Portraits of Lee and Jackson were displayed prominently in many front parlors, and in summer Quantrill’s “boys”—grizzled, tobacco-chewing, Border War veterans dressed as if for church—gathered for daylong outdoor reunions, a portrait of Quantrill draped in crepe as their centerpiece. Often Jesse James’s brother Frank appeared for such occasions, causing great excitement.
    At school, one of Harry’s favorite teachers, Ardelia Hardin, who taught Latin, would describe for the class how her father had been hit three times during Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg and left for dead until discovered by Catholic sisters and taken to a Baltimore hospital, where, once recovered, he refused to swear allegiance to the United States and for this was imprisoned for the remainder of the war. “Harry always wanted to know about that,” Miss Hardin would remember half a century later, very pleased.
    Virtually the entire town was American-born, though nearly every black resident past the age of forty had been born in slavery. Immigrant Irish, Italians, Croatians, and other foreign, impoverished people of the kind crowding into the vile West Bottoms of Kansas City were rarely ever seen in Independence.
    Black residents lived in what was called “Nigger Neck,” a cluster of makeshift houses and shacks in a persimmon grove northwest of the Square. Blacks were unwelcome at most stores and were denied use of the town library. Black children went to a separate school—the Young School, named for the free-black wagonmaker of pioneer days, Hiram Young—and while white families like the Trumans might feel great, lifelong affection for their own black servants, words like “nigger” and “coon” were used as a matter of course in so-called “polite society.” And below the surface always lay a threat of violence, should any blacks forget their “place.” News of lynchings in the South were given lurid play by both local papers, invariably in the spirit that the victim only got what he had coming to him. The summer of 1901, the year Harry finished high school, the Jackson Examiner declared on its editorial page:
    The community at large need not be especially surprised if there is a Negro lynching in Independence. The conditions are favorable at this time. There are a lot of worthless young Negro men in town who do nothing. They do not pretend to work and stand around on the streets and swear and make remarks about ladies and others who may pass by. They crowd into the electric cars and become offensive….

    There were also in town, the editors were careful to add, many law-abiding Negroes “who are good citizens and who understand the truth of what we say as well as anyone.”
    Certain precepts and bywords were articles of faith in such a place, in such times, and nearly everybody growing up there was imbued with them, in principle at least:
    Honesty was the best policy. It saved time and worry, because if you always told the truth you never had to keep track of what you said.
    Make yourself useful.
    Anything worthwhile required effort.
    If at first you don’t succeed, try try again. “Never, never give up,” Harry’s father would say.
    Children were a reflection of their parents. “Now Harry, you be good,” his mother would tell him time after time as he went out the door.
    He appears never to have questioned such dictates, any more than he questioned the established inequality of black people. “In those days,” he would remember, “right was right and wrong was wrong, and you didn’t have to talk