Photography by Iris Schmidt
Vivian Gibson
While Baby Boomers plan their retirement, Vivian Gibson, age 73, is embarking on her fifth career. After success in fashion, catering, import/export, and human resources, Gibson has become a highly praised author. Her debut, The Last Children of Mill Creek, a memoir, goes back to the presses this month after its first printing in 2020 sold out. Few first books do so, let alone literary nonfiction like Last Children.
What makes her memoir such a good read is that Gibson tells the story of a Black working-class family surviving in a segregated city through the eyes of an observant young girl. Think A Tree Grows in Brooklyn set in the 1950s Mill Creek Valley of St. Louis, a city within a city.
Last Children was lauded by the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets & Writers magazine, and the Missouri Humanities Council 2021 Literary Achievement Award. Such accolades are very unusual for a debut writer who did not emerge from an MFA program, academia, a newsroom, or a courtroom.
You never planned to write this book?
After retiring in 2015 from human resources at Big Brothers Big Sisters, I collected the notes I’d made over the years on napkins, scraps of paper, and in spiral notebooks and legal pads. After rereading them, I began to weave this story. I wrote without being self-conscious, simply writing from memory. I was afraid my writing wasn’t good enough, so I took a memoir writing workshop at OASIS. I’ve been surprised by the whole process. It changed my plans for retirement.
The city fathers declared Mill Creek Valley a slum when they began what became the nation’s largest urban renewal project in 1959. Twenty thousand people were forced from where they’d lived for generations to build Highway 40. As James Baldwin famously said, “Urban renewal is Negro removal.”
Nearly 12 percent of the families in Mill Creek owned their own homes. My grandmother had bought hers the year before. Sure, there were some dilapidated houses, but there were beautiful 19th-century mansions that had been turned into rooming houses, like the one at Lawton and Jefferson designed by George Barnett, who was the architect for the Missouri Governor’s mansion. General William Tecumseh Sherman’s house on North Garrison was another. When they built Highway 40, they could have saved three-quarters of the beautiful old buildings.
You have no bitterness about the destruction of Black homes that were, to borrow the phrase, “a haven from a heartless world.”
What good would it do me to be like that? In The Last Children, I wanted to tell the universal story of a normal family within a normal community. I wanted to tell the story of people like my grandmother. After she cleaned for a family in Clayton, she put their children to bed. Did that family even know the names of her children? I wanted to tell the story of what happens when the servants and blue-collar workers go home.
There seemed to be no tension between your parents, Randle H. and Frances Ross, who came from different social classes. Your mother’s father owned a grocery store in Alabama that was prosperous enough to send her to an historic Black college. Your father was the son of sharecroppers in Mississippi.
They both came up during the Great Migration and met here. Mother was lily white, and she and her sisters passed for white when they wanted to go shopping in the big department stores. Daddy was dark.
Daddy, to me, was heroic. He held two, sometimes three jobs. He was our provider. On top of working as a laborer for what’s now Bi-State, he was the janitor at our church and its music director. He hired the musicians, directed the men’s choir, and sang himself. He had a beautiful voice. He found a way to maintain his love of music. He taught us to fulfill ourselves. My mother was the same way.
Your mother raised eight children and created a thriving millinery business.
Mama made her hats from her bed and sold them to the ladies of Mill Creek. Hats are a major fashion statement to Black women. She didn’t want to work for the department stores who’d have exploited her. Mama made such beautiful quilts and crocheted pieces that we learned what it takes to do that. We learned to have pride in our work. We made our own toys. When I made mud pies, I sifted the dry dirt before shaping them like biscuits.
Your honesty is impressive in your telling the story of your mother’s son born before she met your father.
It was a hard decision to make. But I couldn’t deny my brother. Mama’s father took her baby and gave him to his sister to raise. Mama saw him all those years.
How was Mill Creek Valley a springboard for your careers? Your first was in fashion.
Mama taught me to sew, and I made my own clothes. I made clothes for my school teachers. Vashon High School had an industrial sewing program like O’Fallon Tech for whites. I sewed half the school day. I followed Seventeen magazine for style, and wore big round glasses that were the fashion then.
After going to Tarkio College, I studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York at night. During the day, I worked for McKinsey & Co. management company. In my spare time, I ran a millinery design business.
I have an associate’s degree from FIT in apparel design, a bachelor’s degree from Fontbonne University, and a master’s degree from Washington University in nonprofit management.
You ran an import/export business in Liberia until April 1980.
Last night, a friend and I were watching the news about civilians fleeing the fighting in Ukraine, and he said, “I can’t imagine being in that circumstance.” I said, “I can.”
In 1980, my then-husband and I and our toddler were living in a suburb of Monrovia, Liberia, where he worked for Chemical Bank of New York. Overnight, there was a coup d’état, and the president was assassinated. A week later, my husband called and said the bank hired a plane from Pan Am to get the ex-pat wives and their children out. I had 20 minutes to pack. I was so scared, I forgot to pack the diapers, and my baby girl flew home with a bare bottom.
You, your parents, and seven siblings lived in three rooms in your grandmother’s house heated by a potbellied stove. The Missouri History Museum has a composite of your home called the Ross House on the second floor. Since then, you’ve lived in a co-op on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and a house in Runnymede in Creve Coeur, and now reside in an elegant condo downtown. You chose the décor—taupe walls and upholstery and a cougar-print upholstered chair, all of which serve as a background for your colorful collection of African and African-American art. Your coffee table holds crystal candlesticks and a crystal vase of fresh flowers.
We were brought up creative and resourceful. It’s in my nature to make things. I take pride in how I live my life. I respect well-made things. If it’s my space, I want it to be mine. All of us in the family worked very hard. Judge us by how far we’ve come from Mill Creek Valley.
