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The town itself was and is small and slow. Because Clinton's father drowned in a freak accident before his birth, Bill's mother left him with her parents while she went off to New Orleans to become certified as a nurse anesthetist. Clinton's grandparents, Hardey and Mattie Hawkins, ran a grocery store outside town near the Rose Hill Cemetery. Clinton, who was often in the store as a child, remembers its clientele as half black, but his cousin Falva Lively says, "Oh, it was more than that. It was in what used to be called Niggertown." Clinton praises his grandfather for extending credit to poor black customers, but that was the only way to do business with people seasonally employed. Clinton also says he learned tolerance from his grandfather -- but it is a lesson the man did not pass on to his own daughter, Clinton's mother, who admits her prejudice toward blacks was not dispelled until late in her life. Clinton never played with black children, and the one ; black friend he remembers from Hope was his grandparents' maid Odessa. "I visited with Odessa years later. I remember rocking with her on her porch." Asked, he cannot remember Odessa's last name.
He lived among blacks, but not with them. He would have to grow, along with his region, in the stormy civil-rights days ahead. But he is at ease among blacks -- as Jimmy Carter was -- and they make up his most solid base of support in the state. He carries the black belt easily, with more than 90% of the African-American vote, in every election. Considered a moderate outside the state, he is opposed at home as "too liberal," too supportive of minorities.
Though he lost both parents -- his father permanently and his mother temporarily during the crucial years of his childhood -- Clinton's memories of Hope are fond. Uncles and aunts and cousins rallied round the bright little orphan left with his grandparents. He remembers being taken to various relatives' places of work, showered with compensatory kindnesses. His grandfather did a spell as a night watchman at one of the pine-tree sawmills. He would take Billy with him, let him play in the mill until the boy was tired, then put him in the backseat of his Buick to sleep. "I remember climbing the mountain of sawdust, how it smelled on those spring and summer nights -- such a vivid memory."
The supportive network of relatives and friends was typical of Arkansas clannishness. The state's white population is homogeneous and inbred. The base of its stable demographics was an influx of native-born Protestants from nearby states in the 19th century. It still has few foreign-born citizens -- or Jews (0.1% of the population) or Roman Catholics (3.1%, about a ninth of the national average). It is a Bible-reading and conservative state that passed one of the last creationism laws to teach an alternative to evolution.
Like many homogeneous societies, Arkansas delights in its eccentrics (think of England). Two of these were Clinton's mother and his Uncle Buddy. Virginia Kelley (nee Cassidy) is a free spirit who has outlived three husbands and goes to the racetrack with her fourth. In her home, not far from the large open Bible, hangs a sampler that says RACE TRACKS ARE THE ONLY PLACE WHERE WINDOWS CLEAN PEOPLE. She has maintained a career in nursing throughout her adult life.