The Deepest South of All

by Richard Grant

  He is found lying facedown on the ground by a group of men from the Fulani people.I These Muslim warriors, traders, and cattle herders are tall and slim with delicate features and coppery skin. Their hair falls to their shoulders in long braids, which symbolize their Fulani identity and masculine pride. Dr. Cox is almost certainly the first white person they have ever seen. Unsure what to do with this strange being, who looks like a man dipped in milk, they take him to their king in Timbo, a town of 8,000 people in the highlands of Futa Jalon, in what is now Guinea. The sick, exhausted Irishman arrives in a town of conical huts, hedged courtyards, thriving schools and markets, a mosque surrounded by orange trees, and a fortified citadel overshadowing everything.

  The Fulani used to be nomads, following the seasonal rains and grazing with herds of cattle and sheep. Now they have mostly settled in towns, but they retain the old nomadic contempt for digging in the dirt. Farming in Futa Jalon is the allotted task of the Jalunke, a low-caste, non-Muslim people who some historians describe as serfs, and others as chattel slaves because they can be sold.

  The king’s name is Sori, and he has come through brutal wars and rebellions to consolidate his power. Following the Islamic code of hospitality to strangers, he gives Dr. Cox a house to stay in and a nurse to treat his wounds. Over the next few months, the Irishman recovers his health and forms a friendship with the king’s favored son, a highly intelligent and capable young man named Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima. Earlier in the year, only nineteen years old and commanding an army for the first time, he won a great victory against 6,000 warriors of the Bambara people, a rival ethnic group. He tricked the enemy into entering a huge cane thicket and then set fire to it. One of the few survivors was the Bambara war chief. When he saw Ibrahima, he announced that he had been defeated by a boy and deserved to die for this disgrace. Ibrahima’s men obliged by decapitating him with a sword.

  The Irish doctor and the Fulani prince ride horses together and work at learning each other’s languages. They are both well-educated, literate men. Ibrahima spent most of his teenage years at Islamic schools in the cities of Jenné and Timbuktu, studying geography, astronomy, mathematics, law, and the Koran. He can read and write Arabic and speak five African languages fluently.

  Dr. Cox is a scientific rationalist with a warm, tolerant, slightly eccentric spirit. As an unbeliever, he sees Islam as no worse than Christianity, and he enjoys the company of these elegant, cultured Fulani Muslims, and the kindness and hospitality they show him. As an honored guest of the royal family, he is given a young woman to take as his wife and almost certainly fathers a child with her, before deciding to return to his own people. King Sori gives Dr. Cox enough gold to pay for passage on a ship, and clothes to wear for the journey.

  After saying his heartfelt goodbyes, the one-eyed Irishman heads back down to the coast with an escort of fifteen Fulani warriors. Sori has instructed these men to leave Dr. Cox if a ship appears, and to be careful not to get captured and sold into slavery. By outlandish coincidence, Dr. Cox gets aboard the same ship that brought him to Africa and sails away to Europe. He remembers his Fulani friends with great affection for the rest of his life.

  * * *

  Over the next few years, Prince Ibrahima marries and has a son. It is a time of peace and prosperity in the turbulent, war-torn history of his people. The herds multiply and trade flourishes. The Fulani pack up caravans of hides, gold, ivory, and slaves that they capture in raids on other tribes. They trade them on the Rio Pongas to a cruel, drunken trader named John Ormond, originally from Liverpool, England, now living in a small fiefdom with many African wives.

  In return for their goods and captives, Ormond supplies the Fulani with red silk and other luxury items, and guns and ammunition, which have become essential tools for survival. An arms race is taking place across West Africa, financed by the trade in gold, ivory, and slaves. Those who lag behind risk being annihilated or sold into slavery by their enemies.

  The Rio Pongas is a deep river with a long estuary. Slave ships sail upstream to Ormond’s station, bringing guns and other trade goods, then sail back down to the coast with their miserable human cargo bound for the Americas. In 1787, this trade breaks down because the Susu people, and what Ibrahima calls the Hebohs,II start attacking and plundering the ships. In early 1788, at the age of twenty-six, Ibrahima leads 2,000 warriors, including 350 horsemen, down from the highlands to avenge these outrages and reopen the trade route.

  The campaign begins with triumph after triumph. Ibrahima’s army attacks and burns one Heboh town after another without losing a man, because the cowardly infidels run away and hide. He declares victory and rides back towards the highlands with his men—a decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life.

  The Hebohs are not cowardly or defeated, but concealed in ambush at a steep, narrow pass. The Fulani horsemen dismount to lead their horses up the trail, and soon afterwards the Hebohs open fire with their guns. Looking around him, Ibrahima sees “men dropping like rain,” as he later describes it. He jumps on his horse, but is immediately surrounded.

  “I will not run from a Heboh,” he declares, and dismounts with a sword concealed in his robes. He kills the first warrior that approaches him. Then he gets whacked across the head with a rifle.

  When he regains consciousness, Ibrahima finds that his hands are tied, his clothes and sandals are gone, and most of his army has also been taken prisoner. The Hebohs march them barefoot for a hundred miles to a group of Mandinka traders. These tall, slim, dark-skinned Muslims are specialists in trading captives to European slavers. Ibrahima, who speaks their language and shares their religion, makes a last-ditch attempt to halt the voyage of no return.

  He announces his royal blood and status. He promises the Hebohs that his father, King Sori, will pay an exorbitant ransom for his freedom: one hundred cattle, as many sheep as one man can drive, and as much gold as one man can carry. The Hebohs, fearing Ibrahima’s vengeance if he regains his freedom, sell him to the Mandinka traders for two flasks of powder, a few muskets, eight hands of tobacco, and two bottles of rum. The Mandinkas then drive Ibrahima and the remnants of his army to the Gambia River. Their usual method is to tie the captives together at the neck, forming a coffle, and then whip them along like livestock.

  In the words of Henry Louis Gates, professor of African American studies at Harvard, the “overwhelming majority” of African slaves in America were originally sold into bondage by other Africans. Many black Americans find this difficult to accept or understand: How could our own people sell us into slavery like that? But there was no concept of “our people” in Africa at that time. Africans didn’t think of themselves as black, Negro, or African. They were Fulani, Bambara, Mandinka, or whatever ethnic-linguistic group they belonged to. The idea that black people share a common identity was created by the experience of being enslaved together in the New World, on the basis of their skin pigmentation and the newly invented fiction of “race.”

  White people were similarly invented. Europeans coming to America boarded ships as Germans, Poles, English, French, and so on. They soon learned that in America they had a new privileged identity based on something they had scarcely considered before: the pale color of their skins. Coming to America transformed them and their descendants into white people, just as all the different African ethnic groups, as they crossed the Atlantic in those nightmarish slave ships, were being transformed into black people.

  * * *

  At a Mandinka village on the banks of the Gambia River, Ibrahima is sold again. The buyer is John Nevin, the tough, wary, heavily-armed captain of the slave ship Africa. He buys fifty captives to add to his cargo and immediately claps the men in irons. He knows that these are not slaves who will obey his will, but warriors who will seize any opportunity to attack their captors and take over the ship.

  Ibrahima is chained by the ankle to another prisoner and packed into the choking, airless, brutally overcrowded hold. It contains 170 men, women, and children in
cramped and poorly ventilated compartments, which are soon fetid and reeking with the smell of human excrement. Only the children are able to stand up, and certainly not Ibrahima, who is six feet tall.

  The ordeal of the voyage seems interminable to him, but the crossing is faster than normal, with, miraculously, only a few deaths. Normally, losses of 15 or 20 percent are considered acceptable because the profits are so good, and it’s a high-volume business. Roughly 14 million people are shipped during the transatlantic slave-trade era, which lasts from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century, with approximately 11 million surviving the passage.

  When the Africa reaches the Windward Islands, Ibrahima is sold for the third time. He is now the property of Captain Thomas Irwin, who speaks English with an Irish accent, like Dr. Cox, and packs fifty-seven human beings into the hold of a small schooner bound for New Orleans, 2,300 nautical miles away. Fourteen people die on this voyage, probably from disease.

  Arriving in New Orleans, Ibrahima is greatly relieved to stand up, breathe fresh air, and walk around a little, but he is thoroughly unimpressed by his first look at American civilization. With only 5,200 inhabitants in 1788, New Orleans is considerably smaller than Timbo and has recently suffered a devastating fire. Only two hundred houses on the outskirts are still standing, and the rest is a carpet of ashes and mud. Ibrahima spends a month here with the other captives, including Samba, one of his former military commanders, who has been with him since the ambush.

  Then Captain Irwin loads them onto another boat, and they travel three hundred miles up the wide brown Mississippi River in the midsummer heat and humidity. The riverbanks are lined with a vast, dark primordial forest. Strange beards of moss hang from the trees. Creatures that look like crocodiles slip off the banks into the murky water. Except for the occasional small farming settlement, hacked out of the forest, the land appears almost uninhabited by people.

  Then a verdant bluff comes into view on the right-hand side of the river, and the wooden towers of a fort. This is Fort Panmure de Natchez, the Spanish headquarters of the Natchez district. The town itself is minuscule, with maybe two dozen buildings. Most of the district’s 1,926 residents live out of town on plantations along the creeks.

  As the boat comes into the muddy landing under the bluff, Ibrahima, the favored son of King Sori, sees a small group of sweaty, pale-faced, bearded men. They size up the Africans like beasts of burden. Strong backs are at a premium with the tobacco harvest coming in.

  I. One of the largest ethnic groups in the Sahel and West Africa, also known as Fula and Fulbe.

  II. Scholars have failed to identify them with certainty. According to Terry Alford, Ibrahima’s biographer, it might be a corruption of habe, which the Fulani use to describe non-Muslim slaves, strangers, and pagans in general.

  | 3 |

  Natchez today has a dwindling population of 15,000 people, approximately 55 percent African American and 44 percent white. Its factories have closed down, the local oil industry has declined, the school system is dysfunctional, prompting residents to leave, and the tourists don’t come the way they used to. The old river town—two years older than New Orleans and proud of it—used to have a strong and well-respected Jewish community, but that is almost gone now. The garden clubs have declined in power from their heyday in the mid-twentieth century, when they were dubbed the Hoopskirt Mafia, but they still dominate the social life of white high society and control a large share of tourism, which is the biggest industry in Natchez. And the two garden clubs are still feuding with each other, as bitterly and irrevocably as ever.

  When I arrived, the conflict between the Pilgrimage Garden Club (PGC) and the Natchez Garden Club (NGC) was in its eighty-fourth year. Regina Charboneau, as president of the PGC, the bigger, richer, more powerful and aristocratic club, was both embarrassed by the feuding and exasperated with the behavior of what she called “the other club,” as if its name were too foul to pronounce and might cause an outbreak of boils and string warts.

  As she explained it while venting in her kitchen one morning, the other club represented a lower stratum of the class hierarchy, and it was poisoned by jealousy and feelings of inferiority. Regina also accused the NGC of being more racist than the PGC, although she readily admitted that her own club contained plenty of racists as well. Neither club had a single African American member. Until recently, it would have been unthinkable to invite one. Regina was now trying hard to recruit black members, but every woman she had approached had turned her down.

  The ladies of the NGC tended to see Regina and her club as arrogant, divisive, and domineering. Some of them referred to members of the Pilgrimage Garden Club as Pills—bitter in the mouth, and hard to swallow. In many cases, the enmity was passed down from mother to daughter to granddaughter, like a family heirloom. In addition to vicious rumor-mongering and snubbing each other in social settings, the two clubs had deployed lawsuits and financial chicanery against each other. They had padlocked mansions so tourists couldn’t gain access during Pilgrimage. They had carved insulting graffiti into furniture and used laxatives to ensure that the other club’s King and Queen would be presented on a stage covered with fresh dog excrement.

  With Spring Pilgrimage fast approaching, and rehearsals underway for the controversy-racked Tableaux, which required the two clubs to collaborate, Regina’s kitchen was a vortex of rumor, intrigue, and drama. It came pouring in by text, phone call, and email. It burst through her kitchen door as wide-eyed, immaculately coiffed women arrived to vent their frustrations, sob and weep, or impart some smoking-hot piece of gossip: “The poor woman is about to lose her mind because her daughter was removed from the Court, but what she did expect after those topless photographs in the tavern?”

  And Regina was always cooking, managing the crises and sifting the gossip for truth while stirring a pot of gumbo, or a veal-stock demi-glace, or pulling out a batch of her famous biscuits. Natchez is the self-proclaimed Biscuit Capital of the World, with an annual Biscuit Festival, and Regina was recognized by the New York Times and most local opinion as the town’s Biscuit Queen. Her biscuits were delectably flaky and fluffy with a golden-brown crust, and she would serve them to me with homemade jams and preserves when I came down the old creaking stairs for breakfast.

  “I believe about thirty percent of what I hear,” she said during a brief lull one morning. “The Natchez gossip machine is really a phenomenon. We should have anthropologists down here studying it. Some of the worst stuff comes out of a Pilates class that the over-eighties ladies go to. They have a saying that what goes on in Pilates stays in Pilates, but it never does. It comes roaring out of there like a tornado and causes all kinds of damage. Then there’s prayer gossip, which is even worse.”

  I had never heard of prayer gossip, so I asked Regina to explain it. “Okay,” she said, putting her palms together. “So you’re sitting there in a prayer group with your friends, and you go, ‘Jesus, I’d like to pray for a dear, dear friend of mine, because I’m just worried sick about her. She’s been seeing a married man, and I mean every day. What if her husband finds out?’ That was me they were talking about, and all I was doing was having coffee with the guy, in a group of people, at the Natchez coffee shop. By the time they’d finished praying about it, I was having a torrid affair and my marriage to Doug was on the rocks.”

  I asked her for another example. Assuming a more high-pitched, feminine, and exaggeratedly Southern voice than her own, she pressed her palms together and said, “Lord, I’d just like to pray for someone who is so dear to my heart. Her drinking has gotten so bad and I’m worried sick about those two poor children, the boy twelve years old and the girl just turned nine.”

  The prayer gossipers never mention anyone by name, Regina explained, but they drop clues, and the town was small enough that the others could guess who they were talking about. “The guessing probably makes it more fun,” she said. “You’re sitting there pretending to pray, and you’re thinking, ‘Now, who could th
at be? I bet she’s talking about so-and-so.’ ” Then Regina’s phone went off again with its piano-trill ringtone, and another woman came bursting through the kitchen door: the other club was threatening to sabotage the Tableaux by kicking out the African American performers, and one of them had compared Regina to a Nazi. “I have a secret weapon,” said Regina when the woman left. “I don’t care what anyone thinks of me. I know a lot of people say that. But I actually don’t care.”

  * * *

  One Friday morning, I came downstairs to find Regina cooking for 24 dinner guests that evening, and 140 wedding guests the following morning. Renting out Twin Oaks for wedding receptions, and doing the catering herself, was one of the income streams she had created from the house. She didn’t seem flustered by this enormous culinary workload, even though Janet was absent and Regina had no one else to help her, and the gossip and the drama were pouring into the kitchen at the usual pace. Eight courses of gourmet Southern food with a strong Louisiana influence were beautifully presented at both events with souvenir printed menus, beautiful flower arrangements, and a limitless supply of wine and liquor.

  Somehow she also managed to run the bed-and-breakfast, King’s Tavern, and the Pilgrimage Garden Club, an organization with 650 members, interminable meetings, and an annual operating budget of $1.2 million. As president, her responsibilities included the renovation and upkeep of Stanton Hall, and the spectacular octagonal mansion known as Longwood. She oversaw the Carriage House Restaurant at Stanton Hall, the annual Antiques Forum, the ticketing and promotion company Natchez Pilgrimage Tours, and Pilgrimage itself. Twenty-four antebellum homes were “on tour” this spring, and something always had to be dealt with or improved upon. Some of the ladies would lead the tourists into deep thickets of family genealogy and keep them there interminably. And several tourists had complained recently that a gay man in one of the mansions was throwing the N-word around.