The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi
4.5/5
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About this ebook
Natchez, Mississippi, once had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in America, and its wealth was built on slavery and cotton. Today it has the greatest concentration of antebellum mansions in the South, and a culture full of unexpected contradictions. Prominent white families dress up in hoopskirts and Confederate uniforms for ritual celebrations of the Old South, yet Natchez is also progressive enough to elect a gay black man for mayor with 91% of the vote.
Much as John Berendt did for Savannah in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and the hit podcast S-Town did for Woodstock, Alabama, so Richard Grant does for Natchez in The Deepest South of All. With humor and insight, he depicts a strange, eccentric town with an unforgettable cast of characters. There’s Buzz Harper, a six-food-five gay antique dealer famous for swanning around in a mink coat with a uniformed manservant and a very short German bodybuilder. There’s Ginger Hyland, “The Lioness,” who owns 500 antique eyewash cups and decorates 168 Christmas trees with her jewelry collection. And there’s Nellie Jackson, a Cadillac-driving brothel madam who became an FBI informant about the KKK before being burned alive by one of her customers. Interwoven through these stories is the more somber and largely forgotten account of Abd al Rahman Ibrahima, a West African prince who was enslaved in Natchez and became a cause célèbre in the 1820s, eventually gaining his freedom and returning to Africa.
With an “easygoing manner” (Geoff Dyer, National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of Otherwise Known as the Human Condition), this book offers a gripping portrait of a complex American place, as it struggles to break free from the past and confront the legacy of slavery.
Richard Grant
Richard Grant is an author of nonfiction books, a journalist, and a documentary film writer. His last two books, Dispatches from Pluto and The Deepest South of All, were New York Times bestsellers. His previous books include the adventure travel classic God’s Middle Finger: Into the Heart of the Sierra Madre and American Nomads, which was made into an acclaimed BBC documentary with Grant as the writer and star. Currently a contributor to Smithsonian magazine, Grant has published journalism in Esquire, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Originally from London, England, now a US citizen, he has traveled extensively and written books about Mexico and East Africa. After several years of living in a remote farmhouse in the Mississippi Delta, an experience chronicled in the multi-award-winning Dispatches from Pluto, Grant is living in Tucson, Arizona, with his wife and daughter.
Read more from Richard Grant
Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Crazy River: Exploration and Folly in East Africa Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Give It No Thought: Know the Cause Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
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Reviews for The Deepest South of All
34 ratings8 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Long time visitor to Natchez, Less emphasis on racial divide
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Enjoyed this very much. I want to visit Natchez now.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This was an awakening book - for me, a white (in an area of very predominately white) Wisconsinite, anyway. Let's put it this way, if you saw any male person of color in the 70's, it was a Green Bay Packer. Seriously. However, I must say, we were all brought up to respect. Plain and simple. I obviously empathize and have respect for all races. Like so many of us do.But to be faced with a picture of the present South AND the past South together It's damn near interchangeable. What a damn shame. It certainly clarifies the political crap going on these past 6 years! I would highly recommend. Especially if you grew up sheltered from the hatred. You'll root for the Prince and be disgusted by the idea of a garden club.Discussion and respect needs to happen.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I did not like this book, it really should have been 2-4 different books.
(Is this really a Richard Grant book? I loved God’s Middle Finger, Crazy River, and Dispatches from Pluto. This book is just a mess.
Where is the humor you used to seem to have)? At the very least this should have been two totally desperate books:
One book about slavery
and one book about the people of Natchez and all their craziness.
These two subjects should never have been combined into one book. Also there is no real beginning or ending in this book.
If you want to write a book about slavery go for it. Write about what a horrendous despicable practice it was, how awful the people were treated. How a specific region of this country benefited by it and a select group of white people got obscenely wealthy because of it.
It was nice that the author included the fact that African slaves were often captured and sold by other Africans who were from a different tribe and saw nothing wrong with the practice, but the author continues to grind away at the guilt everyone must feel regarding what happened. I would remind the author no one wants to be lectured to, especially by a man from Britain. If you Mr Grant somehow are under the misguided notion that your country was any different than America, I suggest you spend some time in the Caribbean, specifically Barbados and Jamaica. We won’t even touch your country’s handling of South Africa and it’s legacy or India!
There is one fascinating story about a slave who is actually an African prince and what happens to him.
This alone would have been a great book!
As for the rest of the book- pretty much every other chapter-is nothing but gossip and hearsay about the crazy white people of Natchez, the rival lady’s garden clubs, the one upping of others, and their ridiculous pageants, behavior, and complete insensitivity to what their ancestors did and how they behaved.
There is no doubt that racism exists, there is no doubt it is ignored, there is no doubt some members of the white Natchez community are living in complete denial, or are insane. But this book only covers an overview of the topic.
As if all this wasn’t enough to cover,
The author then tackles the the problem of schools and education in general in Mississippi and in Natchez in particular. For the record the problems are nearly insurmountable, nepotism seems to be far more important than providing an education. This also could have been its own book.
Then for some strange reason the author interviews Greg Iles a mystery author who lives just outside Natchez, who is typical of liberals in that he believes much more needs to be done for the black community, the people, their schools etc. and more money needs to be spent but voted against raising property taxes to spend more on the schools and was pulled from the public school while growing up and sent to a private school because the public school was so bad, and won’t send his kids to the public schools and lives in a gated house on 70 acres of land.
This type of book is not where solutions will be found and it is far to short to accurately detail all the problems and ironies of life in Natchez. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book has lots to say, and says it with humor and style. It is a fascinating bunch of stories, an insightful examination of American race relations, and a very funny book. The subject is the Mississippi town of Natchez -- population just 15,000, but much larger in history, and in much much larger in its own mind. Natchez once had more millionaires than anywhere else in the United States. Their wealth came from the slave-based cotton economy, and they built beautiful houses, around which the town's current culture and key industry -- tourism -- is based. The contradiction between a culture that glorifies the Old South, and the racial reality upon which that South was based, is the fundamental subject of the book. But it is not a sociological examination. It's a series of stories about very interesting people, Black and White, and about their relations with each other. It illustrates the difficulty of racial relationships, even given good will on both sides. Beyond that, it's written with a keen journalistic eye and a deep knowledge of Natchez. Terrific read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I love fiction, but honestly, the non fiction titles are the ones that stay with me the longest. I've enjoyed previous works from Richard Grant and was quite excited to listen to his latest - The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi. Grant has been described as a travel writer, but I think I think his writing encompasses more than just the physical. His locales are explored through the inhabitants - their history and stories. More of a sociological feel if you will. A transplanted Londoner, Grant makes his home now in Mississippi. "Natchez, Mississippi, once had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in America, and its wealth was built on slavery and cotton. Today it has the greatest concentration of antebellum mansions in the South, and a culture full of unexpected contradictions."Grant introduces us to many of the citizens he meets at a party in the first few chapters. Eccentric is a descriptor that can be used many times in this book. Many of the residents seem so quirky as to be fictional - but they're not. Much of the modern day Natchez is told through the 'war' of the two garden clubs - and their yearly ritual celebration of Natchez history. It's an over the top historical presentation that glosses over the fact that Natchez was the second-largest slave market in the US, second only to New Orleans. The antebellum mansions play a large part in depicting the selective history. Author Greg Iles is referenced as trying to make changes in this long held tradition. And the contradictions mentioned are definitely there - Natchez's mayor is a gay black man who garnered ninety one percent of the vote to take office. Yet, there isn't a black member in either garden club and black history is not presented in the 'Tableaux'. Grant meets and interviews both black and white inhabitants of Natchez and gives the listener a broader picture of this complicated city through their thoughts and history.Told in alternating chapters with the current time, is the story of one slave - Abd al Rahman Ibrahima, a West African prince sold into slavery in the late 1700's. His story is heartbreaking, but fascinating. And his story is just one of millions.The Deepest South of All juxtaposes the history and current day climate of Natchez, providing a look inside this enigmatic and yes, insular city. Grant's writing is always a treat to read. But, I did choose to listen to this latest. The reader was Matthew Lloyd Davies. His performance was excellent and he interpreted Grant's work really well. He has a British accent (remember, Grant is British) that is charming and easy to understand. His voice is quite versatile - he presented many characters and each was a different and believable voice. His reading has movement and he captured the emotions and tenor of the book.Curious, quirky, fascinating and most definitely thought provoking. The Deepest South of All makes for timely reading and listening.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I don't think this will be as beloved as Dispatches from Pluto, as least among Mississippians, for two reasons: 1) there are more people from the Delta than there are from Natchez; but also 2) although both books contain plenty of both concepts, this book spends more time on the moral ambiguity of race relations and slightly less on performative eccentricity. But that's what I think makes this a better, or at least deeper, book about the South--as the title slyly hints at.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Being a Mississippi girl, I could not wait to get my hands on this book. And this book…it nails it. The historic south is commingled with the new south…unique and doable…in most instances. There are still some “grand guards” out there which refuse to let go of the “Old South”. Richard Grant shows how and where they are in Natchez.When I was a young girl, I would read books about slavery. They would always reference “down south”. I kept thinking they were talking about the Mississippi gulf coast. (Well, I was young! ) I had no idea they were talking about where I lived. Boy, did I learn a thing or two when I got older. This book touches on that and delves deeper into the slave trade and the practices of slavery in and around Natchez. It also touches on the wonderful characters of Natchez and how they strive to have a mix of the old and the new.This is a well written book with lots of history about slavery and the mix of culture in Natchez, MS. Natchez is a beautiful, historical town. Everyone needs to visit and enjoy!I received this novel from the publisher for honest review.
Book preview
The Deepest South of All - Richard Grant
| PROLOGUE |
One summer night in Natchez, the old Mississippi river town that once boasted more millionaires than anywhere else in America, I walked past antebellum mansions and moss-hung trees to a Victorian house on a side street. The front-door knocker was the metal head of a cat with the tail of a steel mouse between its teeth. When I knocked the mouse against the doorplate, Elodie Pritchartt’s dog Versace, a half-pug, half-beagle mix, began barking hysterically. Elodie dealt with Versace and then opened the door. A blogger who writes about the loveliness and lunacy in her hometown, she was dressed all in red, with her graying hair cut short, a glass of bourbon resting in her hand, and a big, friendly smile that contained a glint of mischief. A cocktail party was in full swing behind her.
She introduced me to the guests. An older gay man called Norbert had a kind of studied pomposity and a partner who didn’t say much. A beautiful young archaeologist named Kerry Dicks was telling a story about a friend of her father’s, a very nice man who thought that characters from children’s books were coming out of the wallpaper and talking to people.
Holding court and smoking a cigar on the back deck was a woman named TJ, wearing a man’s suit and tie with her dark hair slicked back. Her partner, Laurie, was sweetly feminine in a floral print blouse, and she beamed with pride as TJ told story after story about flat refusing to take any guff.
Elodie poured me a huge measure of bourbon and handed me a printed note card that she had found while going through some old boxes. It dated from the civil rights era and reflected the panic of white people in Natchez at the prospect of black people voting: HELP! HELP! HELP! TOTAL WHITE VOTER REGISTRATION is necessary for our very survival.
Elodie, an anti-racist liberal, was passing out these cards as ironic party favors.
She told a story about a woman she knew who was obsessed with helicopters and had fallen in love with a serial killer. He was in prison for killing prostitutes and had been arrested with a severed breast in his pocket. It was a desperately strange story and my head was starting to swim. Then a man named Denver started talking about the former mental hospital that he lives in for part of the year, and the various people that have taken up residence there without his permission. One of them is a professional magician. I don’t know where he came from, but he says it’s against the magicians’ union rules for him to do any housework, or clean up after himself, so long as he’s wearing his magician clothes,
Denver said. So he wears his black magician clothes all the time. He can do magic, but no physical labor. He says he’s like Picasso.
He’s a charlatan!
snapped Norbert.
Denver continued, Then there’s the No-Necks. There’s a mother and her daughter, and a little redneck boy—
Sluts! Slatterns!
Norbert yelled. You go to bed in the master bedroom and it’s full of pubic hairs.
That’s a problem,
Denver admitted. We don’t know who’s been sleeping in my bed. But anyway, the little redneck boy—
He should be arrested. Incarcerate the trash!
Calm yourself, Norbert. He’s not even ten years old.
He’s a vicious little shit.
Other tenants included an Andrew Jackson impersonator and two bishops who perform funerals for $500 and walk around in full regalia. They’re frauds,
said Norbert. One of them got ordained in Canada and ordained the other one. The porcine bishop drank an entire quart of single-malt Scotch because he says that’s all he can drink.
Kerry Dicks asked how many rooms were in the building. He has six bedrooms and fourteen chandeliers,
said Norbert acidly. It sounded like a crazy short story that Flannery O’Connor might have written, but Denver and Norbert and some of the other guests insisted that it was all true. There’s still graffiti from the mental patients in the attic and enough air-conditioning units up there to chill a piece of meat,
said Denver. Why they would need to get the attic down to forty degrees I have no idea. Most of the graffiti is religious, and the windows are plexiglass so the patients couldn’t smash them and escape.
I struggled to make sense of the incoming information. Why had Denver, a highly educated and sophisticated man, decided to make his second home in a decommissioned lunatic asylum in Mississippi? Why had he allowed a lazy magician, the No-Neck rednecks, and two fraudulent bishops to live in this home without permission? Why did he continue to do so? Why would a mental hospital need so many air conditioners in the attic?
But there was no opportunity to get answers to these questions because Elodie was now telling a story about her boyfriend Tommy’s grandfather, who was the only white doctor in the Natchez area who would tend to black patients during the Depression. One night he was helping a black woman in childbirth and it was going badly wrong,
said Elodie. She was going to die. He knew it, and she knew it. She had a little boy already, and she said, ‘Please take care of my son.’ And that’s what Tommy’s grandfather did. They named the little boy Rooster and they raised him on the back porch. There was a big old trunk out there and he slept in one of the drawers. Isn’t that just the most wonderful, beautiful story?
He slept in a drawer? On the back porch?
said Denver sarcastically.
It was the Depression!
said Elodie. Tommy’s dad—the doctor’s own son—slept in a drawer too because they’d rented out the house to boarders.
I said, Rooster? Why not George or Henry? Why did they name the boy after a chicken?
Meanwhile, Versace the dog was experiencing terrible flatulence. Oh my Lord, that stink would drive a buzzard off a gut pile,
said one of the men. Kerry picked up one of the HELP! HELP! HELP! cards and used it as a fan. When Norbert and his partner got up to say their goodbyes, she took stock of the situation: Okay, the queens are leaving, the dog is farting, and I’m fanning myself with white-supremacist literature.
Elodie poured more drinks and told a story about her late father, a conservative who found himself unable to vote for McCain and Palin in 2008: Daddy thought Obama was a better candidate, but he couldn’t bring himself to vote for a black man, so he abstained and went to bed early on election night. I stayed up and watched the whole thing. I went into his bedroom the next morning and told him the result. Daddy let out a big sigh of relief and said, ‘Thank God that nigger won.’
Elodie and the other guests convulsed into laughter. Then Denver started talking about the Magician’s three-year stint in federal penitentiary for hacking bank websites, and his little clamshell computer that had lines of code constantly running across it. The Magician could get internet when we had no internet,
said Denver. He got paid good money every year to go to DEF CON—the underground hackers’ conference—and he would go by bus or train, so he wouldn’t have to show his driver’s license. He insisted he was just going there to perform magic tricks.
Then there was Denver’s eccentric heiress friend, Miss Christine, and the Kabuki ladies, and the Acrobat, and it wasn’t clear if they lived at the old mental hospital or showed up there for the Christmas parties. I sat there shaking my head, wishing it would stop, but the weird stories kept on coming. Denver’s cousin Edward has over two hundred Studebakers on his property and a sign that reads THIS IS NOT A JUNKYARD. IT’S A MORGUE.
Then Denver got his phone out and started scrolling through photographs, and there they were, even stranger looking and more improbable than I had imagined them: the charlatan bishops, the Magician in his black clothes, the No-Necks, the Kabuki ladies, who were white women in rice-flour makeup, and some kind of neo-Confederate militia that showed up at his parties in military uniforms and drank up all the booze.
It’s just the South,
he said, as Versace let out another atrocious fart and the women fanned themselves with HELP! HELP! HELP! cards. It’s just the South. There’s no point trying to explain it.
| 1 |
I first heard about Natchez from a chef and cookbook writer named Regina Charboneau. I met her on the opening night of the Hot Tamale literary-culinary festival, which took place in a repurposed cotton gin surrounded by bare fields in the Mississippi Delta. The hulking old tin structure was hung with chandeliers and furnished with banqueting tables. Wineglasses and silverware glinted on white tablecloths. There were artisanal charcuterie stations, hundreds of well-dressed people milling around, a small army of bartenders pouring free wine and liquor.
Regina and I were both signing copies of our latest books at the author tables. I had written a true account of moving to rural Mississippi as an Englishman chewed up by New York City. Regina had published a handsome cookbook about the local cuisines along the length of the Mississippi River. She was warmhearted, witty and cosmopolitan, with a natural air of authority. She wore vintage cat-eye glasses and her dark hair in a bob. For many years she had owned a fashionable restaurant and a blues club in San Francisco, and her friends included Lily Tomlin and the Rolling Stones.
Now she had sold everything in San Francisco and moved back to her hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, where her family has lived for seven generations. I confessed that I knew nothing about Natchez, although I recognized its name, which rhymes with matches, from an old Howlin’ Wolf song. Natchez is wonderful,
she said. We’re known for our history and our antebellum homes, and we’re very different from the rest of Mississippi. People often describe Natchez as a little New Orleans, but it’s really off in its own universe.
Her husband Doug, a native Minnesotan—they met in Alaska while Regina was cooking at a bush camp—poured me a shot of the white rum he was distilling in Natchez. It tasted raw and alive and faintly of tequila. They showed me photographs of their house, an antebellum Greek Revival home named Twin Oaks with white columns and Gothic-looking trees. You must come and stay with us,
said Regina. I’ll cook, and there’s always a party, and you can do a book signing at King’s Tavern.
This was her latest restaurant, housed in one of the oldest standing buildings in Mississippi, circa 1789.
This was an impossible invitation to refuse, and soon afterwards I drove to Natchez for the first time. The town is tucked away in a remote corner of southwest Mississippi, on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. The nearest airport is ninety miles away in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and there’s no passenger train or interstate-highway connection. To get to Natchez, you’ve got to be going there, as Mississippians often say, because it’s not on the way to anywhere else.
Country roads took me through a gently undulating landscape of woods and pastures, with occasional shacks and farmhouses and small fundamentalist churches. Scrolling through the radio, there was a babble of preachers, white and African American. I passed a derelict gas station with a forlorn sign:
PUMPING TO PLEASE
SOUL FOOD
Soon afterwards I entered the scruffy, unremarkable outskirts of Natchez. It was the usual Southern strip of fast-food joints and tractor-supply shops, easy loans, dollar stores, gas stations, and churches. There was a Mexican restaurant, a basic-looking supermarket, a swooping overpass leading to the Walmart.
The road to King’s Tavern took me through an African American neighborhood that looked poor and tired. I pulled over to read a historical marker and a chill went through me. I was standing on the site of the second-largest slave market in the Deep South, a place known as the Forks of the Road. I could see a small memorial on a side street, and I walked over to take a look.
There were a few illustrated panels and a set of manacles mounted in a concrete block. The panels were thoughtful, informative, and deeply unsettling, with reproduced historical drawings of slaves, slave traders, and newspaper advertisements for the human commodity: Negroes! Negroes! Just received, an addition of TWENTY-FIVE likely young field hands—Also, a fine Carriage Driver and Dining Room servants, for sale by R.H. ELAM, Forks of the Road.
Tens of thousands of people were sold here. They were transported by riverboats up and down the Mississippi. They were marched overland all the way from Virginia and Maryland to the booming new cotton frontier in the Lower Mississippi Valley, of which Natchez was the capital and the epicenter. The men were bound together in wrist chains and neck manacles and forced to march the thousand miles in lockstep. The women were usually roped together and the children put in wagons with the injured and heavily pregnant. These caravans of misery were known as coffles and flanked by men on horseback with whips and guns.
The slaves were told to sing as they marched, to keep up morale, but the coffle song lyrics that survive are mostly sad and mournful, because so many of the people singing had been sold away from their families.
The way is long before me, love
And all my love’s behind me;
You’ll seek me down by the old gum tree
But none of you will find me
As the coffle neared Natchez, the slave traders would stop and camp for a while. The human merchandise, which had not been unshackled for bodily functions or any other reason for months, was finally bathed, rested, fattened up, and made ready for sale. The women were typically put into calico dresses with pink ribbons at the neck. The men were dressed up in top hats, white shirts, vests, and corduroy velvet trousers. Pot liquor, the greasy residue of vegetables boiled with pork fat, was rubbed into their skin to make it shine. Thus prepared and ordered to step lively
to encourage their own sale, they were herded into the pens at the Forks of the Road slave market.
Prospective buyers examined teeth, hefted breasts, poked and prodded, leered, mocked, and humiliated in the usual way, but there was no auction block here. Purchasing a human being at the Forks was like buying a car today. You agreed on a price with the dealer, made a down payment, and signed a contract agreeing to make further payments until you owned the property outright. Only the very rich bought slaves without financing.
Considering the volume of suffering and degradation generated here, and the global economic consequences of slavery’s expansion into the Lower Mississippi Valley, the richest cotton land on earth, it seemed like such a modest little memorial: a few signboards, a set of manacles, a small patch of mown grass with flowerbeds. Most of the site was occupied by small businesses—a tire shop, a car wash—and low-income housing where all the tenants appeared to be African American, living on the same patch of ground where their ancestors were bought and sold.
I drove on past vacant lots, boarded-up buildings, nice old houses in need of paint and repair, a handsome Gothic Revival church. Then I crossed Martin Luther King Street, which appeared to be the demarcation line between black Natchez and white Natchez, and two different income brackets. Now the old houses were well maintained and freshly painted with attractive front gardens. The downtown historic district, originally laid out by the Spanish in the 1790s, was charming and lovely and from the high bluff there was a spectacular view of the Mississippi River.
Driving around, I saw some of the antebellum mansions for which Natchez is best known. The town and the surrounding area contain the greatest concentration of antebellum homes in the American South, including some of the most opulent and extravagant. Looking at these Federal, Greek Revival, and Italianate mansions, their beauty seemed inseparable from the horrors of the regime that created them. The soaring white columns, the manacles, the dingy apartment buildings at the Forks of the Road, the tendrils of Spanish moss hanging from the gnarled old trees, the humid fragrant air itself: everything seemed charged with the lingering presence of slavery, in a way that I’d never experienced anywhere else.
I parked outside King’s Tavern, a two-story building of brick and timber, still recognizable through its restorations as an eighteenth-century tavern. Pushing open a stout wooden door, I came into a low-ceilinged room with heavy beams, exposed-brick walls, and a bar made out of whiskey-barrel staves. Regina Charboneau hugged me like an old friend.
She led me up a steep, narrow staircase to the room where I would sign and sell books. I set out my wares and greeted my customers. They were far more sophisticated than I was expecting in a small, isolated Mississippi town. I talked with an extremely well-read woman who had lived all over the world before coming back to Natchez, where she grew up. The way of life here, she had decided, suited her best.
Asked to describe it, she said, We’re house-crazy. We adore old homes, antiques, throwing parties, making it fabulous. Gay men love it here. Natchez is very liberal and tolerant in some ways, and very conservative and racist in other ways, although I will say that our racists aren’t generally hateful or mean. Nor do they think they’re racists. There’s still a lot of denial in the white community about the fact that this whole town was built on slavery. Most black people don’t like thinking about slavery either, although they’re acutely aware of it.
She talked about the insularity of the town, and the singularity of its culture. We look more to New Orleans than the rest of Mississippi. The Catholic influence is strong in both the black and white communities. We’re obsessed with our history, but it’s often a self-serving mythological version of that history. Genealogy is big. And there’s a whole spectrum of behavior that we refer to politely as ‘eccentricity.’
I wondered aloud if Natchez might be an interesting place to write about. She made me swear to keep her out of it and warned me against bird-watching: A lot of outsiders come down here like bird-watchers, studying the inhabitants, observing their quirks and colorful plumage. Well, guess what: the birds are looking right back at you. And sooner or later, one of them is going to talk ugly about you.
Gay couples wandered through and were greeted warmly and casually. Regina brought me a platter of slow-cooked, peppery brisket with horseradish on wood-fired flatbread, and a glass of good Spanish wine to wash it down. My antennae were swiveling. Natchez didn’t remind me of anywhere else. I liked it here, yet I felt a creeping sense of unease. King’s Tavern is allegedly haunted by the ghosts of murdered women and children, but that wasn’t it. Slave coffles were still marching through my brain. Greasy rags were polishing dark skin. The past had split open like a badly stitched wound and was leaking into the present.
Do you have a suit and tie?
Regina asked, as I packed up my unsold books. There’s a party tonight at Stanton Hall. I think you’ll find it interesting.
You should have warned me.
I said, standing there in dark jeans and boots. I do have a sports coat.
That’ll be fine,
she said. You have a British accent.
We drove to Doug and Regina’s house as darkness fell on the town. I caught glimpses of a church spire, graceful old houses that could have been in New Orleans, a 1950s malt shop that still had its white and colored takeout windows, although they were no longer observed. Then we pulled in through trees and old brick walls and parked behind an 1852 Greek Revival home. This was Twin Oaks, and my room was in a long, low wooden building across the walled garden, now functioning as a stylish and comfortable bed-and-breakfast for tourists.
I put on my sports coat and walked up to the big house. An owl hooted, fountains trickled in the darkness. I climbed some steep stone steps and opened the door into the kitchen. There were three big refrigerators, a six-burner restaurant stove, ice-cream makers, bread machines. Regina poured some wine and led me through to the next room, which had comfortable modern sofas and a television. She pointed to a painting of a skinny white man with spiky hair and a guitar. I like to say we’re the only antebellum home in Natchez with a self-portrait of Ronnie Wood,
she said, referring to the Rolling Stones guitarist, who had given her the painting. He has his issues, of course, but he’s really a sweet man.
She led me through another door, and I stepped back in time. Apart from the electric lightbulbs in the chandelier, Regina’s magnificent dining room contained very little evidence that the twentieth century had occurred. An antique table was set with gorgeous antique china and glassware. The walls were green and hung with enormous prints of the birds that John James Audubon had shot and then painted during his time in Natchez in the 1820s. An odd contraption hung from the ceiling, a carved wooden board of some kind.
That’s a punkah,
Regina explained. It’s a type of fan that came to Natchez from British India via the Caribbean. You see a lot of them in Natchez homes.
"In Natchez, you only use the word home if it’s antebellum, said Doug.
If your house was built after the Civil War, it’s trashy to call it a home."
In British India, a junior servant called a punkah wallah pulled the rope to keep the punkah fanning the air. Here, the task was performed by house slaves, then