The Deepest South of All

by Richard Grant

  Then there was the Historic Natchez Tableaux, which was generating more stress than everything else put together. Whenever Regina’s phone rang close to midnight, it was almost invariably someone having a weepy crisis over the Tableaux. “It’s always stressful,” Regina said, while making a batch of crème-brulée ice cream. “Tableaux is an amateur theatrical production with children, live beagles, and overbearing mothers, and it requires us to work together with the other club. Some of the NGC women are wonderful to work with, and some of them are automatically suspicious of everything I want to do. I’ve been accused of siphoning off money, deliberately ruining other people’s lives for my own satisfaction, spreading false rumors, and acting like a dictator, all of it completely untrue.”

  In the small, shrinking, isolated world of the Natchez garden clubs, which nonetheless considers itself to be the center of the universe, a fantastic degree of importance is attached to the Tableaux. It’s a vital affirming ritual of this matriarchal society, a primary engine of advancement within it, and a vital mechanism for the garden clubs to secure volunteer labor. Pilgrimage, Antiques Forum, balls, social events, and ultimately the preservation of historic buildings, all depended on unpaid women volunteering their time, and knowing that the more time they gave, the more likely it was that their children would get into the Royal Court and hopefully become crowned King or Queen, whereupon their mothers could bask in the reflected glory. Without that incentive, the whole system would fall apart. A local attorney confided to me that several women had approached him over the years about suing the Tableaux committee because their children weren’t chosen for high-prestige roles. “I declined to get involved in that catfight,” he added. “Some of our ladies have mighty sharp claws.”

  The production is a series of skits and dances celebrating Natchez history and its white antebellum culture. Children begin performing at the age of three, with the girls dressed in pretty hoopskirt dresses and the boys in ballet slippers and velvet knickers, dancing together around a maypole. As they grow older, the children work their way up through a series of scenes and roles until, their mothers hope, they make it into the Royal Court with its uniformed Confederate generals and King and Queen. Each garden club has its own King, Queen, and Royal Court, and when they’re announced for the year, it’s a big front-page story in the Natchez Democrat, with the prior accomplishments of each member listed in detail: “Little Maypole, Big Maypole, Polka, Soirée, Page…”

  The Tableaux contains elements of Mardi Gras and elements of a debutante ball, but it’s a unique Natchez tradition that has been soaking in isolation, nostalgia, and liquor for eighty years. “The King and Queen register for gifts, as if they were going to get married, and they get a lot of nice stuff,” said Regina. “For the parents, it’s a very proud moment to see their children as King and Queen, but they also have to pay for a black-tie Royal Ball for five hundred people with a band and an open bar, which can cost $25,000. And there’s also a month-long series of cocktail parties for the King and Queen. The ability to hold your liquor is absolutely vital.”

  Outside observers were usually baffled by the Tableaux or stunned by its political incorrectness and amateurish production values. I had heard it compared to the Mel Brooks farce Springtime for Hitler, with Confederates instead of Nazis. “That’s what we’re trying to change, and we’re getting there,” said Regina. “We have African American performers now portraying black history. We’re finally addressing slavery in an honest way. We’re trying to get away from glorifying the Confederacy and the Civil War. This is touching all our most sensitive nerves about race, slavery, history, and the South, and some people are losing their minds. It’s making them furious. It’s making them crazy. They want it all just like it used to be.”

  * * *

  The production began in 1932 as the Natchez Confederate Ball. The garden club ladies had just invented Pilgrimage, which enabled them to dress up in their great-grandmothers’ hoopskirts and charge tourists to parade through their antebellum homes. The main purpose of Pilgrimage was to make money and bring people to Natchez. To entertain the visitors in the evenings and make more money, the ladies came up with a theatrical production that portrayed antebellum Natchez as a gorgeous fairy tale, culminating in a heroic celebration of the Confederacy on the eve of the Civil War.

  It made no difference that in reality Natchez had voted against secession and surrendered twice to the Union army. In the decades after the War, white Natchez had steeped itself in the romantic mythology of the Old South and the Lost Cause, which held that slaves were happy and grateful, and the Civil War was purely about states’ rights. The garden club ladies didn’t design the Pageant to advance this delusional view of Southern history. They believed in it utterly, like most white Southerners, and they simply wanted to show the visitors how wonderful and charming antebellum Natchez had been.

  The production featured white teenagers in hoopskirts and military uniforms waltzing against Old South backdrops, while “happy slaves” sang Negro spirituals and pretended to pick cotton. Small African American boys were positioned onstage and given slices of fake watermelon to eat. Young men waved the rebel flag, and then the King, Queen, and Royal Court of the garden club were presented, wearing Confederate generals’ uniforms and shimmering tiaras and gowns. The climax was a rousing chorus of “Dixie,” with all the audience members, Yankees included, required to stand for the old anthem of the Confederacy.

  The tourists, mostly from the Northern states and Europe, ate it up like ice cream, especially after Gone with the Wind came out in 1939 and became the biggest film in motion picture history. In the late 1940s and 1950s tourists thronged to Natchez by the tens of thousands. Selling tickets to the nightly performances of the Confederate Pageant became an important revenue stream for the garden clubs.

  In the 1960s, the African American cast members refused to carry on portraying happy field hands, mammies, and pickaninnies. The garden club ladies found this regrettable and misguided, but the show had to go on. At first, white performers dressed up in blackface to re-create these scenes, but that proved inflammatory in the black community. For the next five decades the Pageant was an all-white production that made no mention of slaves, happy or otherwise. In 2002, bending a little to the changing winds of public opinion, the Natchez Confederate Pageant was renamed the Historic Natchez Tableaux, but the content remained largely the same, an unapologetic celebration of the old slaveholding white South.

  Then, in 2015, the Pilgrimage Garden Club chose Madeline Iles as its Queen. Madeline is the daughter of Greg Iles, the bestselling thriller writer and Natchez’s most famous resident. Like her father, Madeline is a liberal, and she balked at the prospect of appearing in a crown and gown at the Tableaux, which she had come to see as horribly insensitive to African Americans and an embarrassment to her hometown. She thought about refusing the honor, but that would have upset her grandmother. So instead she leveraged her power. Essentially, she told the garden clubs that she would only be Queen if they made the Tableaux less racist.

  The production was suffering from slumping attendance and falling revenue, and this made the clubs receptive to modernizing and revamping it, especially when Greg Iles offered to write and direct it for free. He brought in local black performers, including two superb vocal talents: Tony Fields, the principal of Natchez High School, and Debbie Cosey, who was planning to open a bed-and-breakfast in a former slave quarters.

  Greg Iles was determined to tackle slavery honestly and directly, so he wrote a scene where a slave in chains is led to the auction block, and another scene portraying a secret slave wedding under threat from slave catchers. But he also had to include the traditional tableaux of little white girls dancing in pretty dresses, and waltzing white teenagers, which made for some jarring contrasts. As a compromise with the traditionalists, he left in the Confederate uniforms and flag, but added a new ending to unglorify the Civil War. Broken wounded Confederate soldiers returned to a ruined plantati
on and raised the American flag, saying that too many sons had died for nothing.

  Now, after two seasons of hard work without pay, and a hailstorm of criticism from local conservatives, who preferred the old Tableaux, Greg Iles had bowed out. “I hope this will be a model for racial cooperation,” he said to the newspapers. The new writer-director was Chesney Doyle, a local documentary filmmaker and NGC member. She intended to build on the progress that Greg Iles had made, and also hoped that the production would help bridge the racial divisions in Natchez and bring the town together.

  * * *

  Regina sat down with a glass of wine after another extremely hectic day. Although Chesney Doyle belonged to the other garden club, Regina found her excellent to work with. But a group of women in Chesney’s club were fighting progress and making things difficult. “They’re not happy about slavery being included,” said Regina. “They’re not happy about having black performers, and they’re really not happy about paying them.”

  Greg Iles had insisted on paying the African American performers, and Regina and Chesney both agreed that it was the right thing to do. White performers and their mothers were deriving social benefits from the Tableaux, they reasoned, but the reverse was true for black performers. They were catching withering criticism in the black community because the production had such a long history of glorifying the white antebellum South, stereotyping African Americans, and completely ignoring their suffering under slavery.

  In the garden clubs, it wasn’t the grandes dames who were arguing for a return to tradition, as one might expect. The older ladies, with a few exceptions, welcomed the changes and thought it was high time that the Tableaux was brought more up-to-date. Most of the criticism and complaints were coming from younger women with less privileged backgrounds. “They’re saying it’s unfair that ‘the blacks’ are getting paid, while everyone else is a volunteer,” said Regina. “And there’s a definite undercurrent that ‘the blacks’ are looking for special treatment and a handout as usual, and they shouldn’t be in the Tableaux because it’s not part of their ‘cultural tradition,’ and some of them are still mad at Chesney for bringing an African American child to their swimming pool. But anyway, we’re going to push on.”

  The situation was fraught and stressful, but Regina, Chesney, and many other people in town, black and white, also had a sense that progress was finally being made. Natchez had integrated its Tableaux. The essential wrongness of slavery was now being acknowledged in the former Confederate Pageant, along with a celebration of the town’s African American history after slavery. And for the first time, some of the local black activists had agreed to participate. “This is huge,” said Regina. “Ser Boxley used to stand outside the city auditorium wearing his Union army uniform to protest the Tableaux. Now he’s agreed to give us a voice-over.”

  Ser Boxley, she explained, was one of the most passionate, committed, and effective African American activists in Natchez, and also something of an eccentric. In his late seventies now, he either wore traditional West African clothing, or the replica Civil War uniform of a US Colored Troops infantryman. It wasn’t just white people in Natchez who enjoyed wearing antique costumes and impersonating the dead. There was also a group of black living-history performers and historical reenactors, and Ser Boxley was their leader.

  “For the longest time Ser Boxley wouldn’t come into my house because it was built by slaves,” said Regina. “But he wouldn’t admit it. He would say that he liked being outside in the fresh air, even when it was August and a hundred degrees and we’d both be dripping with sweat. Finally I called him on it, and he said it was true. Now he comes inside the house, but first he says a prayer for the people who were enslaved here. He used to be called Cliff Boxley, but he changed his name.… Hold on a minute, it’s a hard one to remember, and not the easiest to pronounce.”

  She swiped up one of his emails on her phone and showed me the Africanized name: Ser Seshsh Ab Heter-CM Boxley. A testy, uncompromising character, he had agreed to do a voice-over about slavery for the Tableaux, but he was still refusing to set foot in the auditorium, either as performer or spectator. Darrell White, the director of the Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture, had also agreed to record a voice-over, because the Tableaux was finally addressing black history in a way he could support, but he too was staying away from the auditorium. A young dreadlocked activist named Jeremy Houston was going a step further. He was going to appear onstage in the Tableaux and portray Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima, the Fulani prince who came to Natchez as a slave.

  | 4 |

  Among those watching Captain Irwin unload his Africans at the muddy landing under the bluff is a tall, dark-haired man named Thomas Foster. Twenty-six years old, the same age as Ibrahima, he is pious, solid and serious, with shrewdness and ambition, but very little education. He came to Natchez from South Carolina with his mother and three brothers, attracted by the land grants offered by the Spanish government. Soon after he arrived, Thomas married Sarah Smith, the daughter of a neighboring farmer, and two children followed in quick succession. Now, in the summer of 1788, his wife is pregnant again and he needs two slaves to work in the tobacco fields he has cleared and planted.

  Ibrahima catches Foster’s eye immediately. The long-haired, coppery-skinned Fulani has traveled six thousand miles in utterly degrading conditions, but he retains some of his aristocratic bearing and a look of obvious intelligence. Foster is impressed, in the same way that a buyer of horses is impressed by good breeding. After negotiating with Irwin, he settles on a price of $930 for Ibrahima and Samba, the former military commander captured at the same ambush. Putting up the one slave he already owns as collateral, Foster hands over $150 in silver and signs a promissory note for the rest. The deed of sale describes Ibrahima and Samba as dos negros brutos, two primitive untrained blacks. Leading them behind his horse, Foster takes the old Indian road to his farm, about six miles northeast of Natchez.

  Every captive suffers through a kind of social death in enslavement. Everything that forms your identity—language, culture, social status, family ties, kinship ties, friendships, ways of dressing and adornment—all of it is ripped away in a place where you don’t know how to survive and can’t speak the language. It’s always a brutal psychological shock, and for Ibrahima, it is particularly severe. He is the son of a great king and commander in chief of the kingdom’s army, with a wife and son in the citadel. He is a highly educated man from a society with a constitution and laws, and a people who consider themselves superior to everyone else, including Europeans. Now he’s led away behind a horse to a muddy little farm in the wilderness, with the stumps of cut-down trees poking up everywhere.

  Ibrahima can scarcely believe that anyone lives in such primitive conditions, let alone that such people are able to own him as a slave. Foster’s home, which he shares with Sarah and the children, is a crude log cabin chinked with mud and moss. Why do they live so far out in the forest by themselves? Why are their houses so poorly constructed?

  Soon after he arrives, Ibrahima makes a speech in which he identifies himself as a Fulani prince and offers Thomas Foster a ransom in gold to be paid by his father, King Sori, in Futa Jalon. Presumably, he gives the speech in Mandinka, which is then translated into English by one of the Mandinka slaves living on the neighboring farms. Foster listens with mounting skepticism to this fantastic tale. He has never heard of Futa Jalon, which does not appear on most contemporary maps. Perhaps mockingly, perhaps not, Foster gives his new slave the name of Prince. Then he fetches some homespun clothes and a pair of shears.

  When Ibrahima realizes that Foster intends to cut off his hair, a violent struggle ensues. In Futa Jalon, a man will only part with his hair if you kill him first. Foster eventually overpowers Ibrahima and ropes him to a tree. Then the long braided tresses, the fetishistic representations of Fulani pride and manhood, are sheared off into the Mississippi mud. Thomas Foster, although he has no way of knowing or understanding it, has given the
commander in chief the haircut of a little boy and delivered a devastating psychological blow. For resisting his haircut so violently, Ibrahima is locked up for three days. Then comes the next stage of his social death.

  It’s hard to exaggerate the contempt of the Fulani aristocracy for manual labor, and nothing is more degrading than farming, a humiliating drudgery performed by the lowly Jalunke. When Foster tells Ibrahima to start carrying freshly cut tobacco leaves from the fields, he refuses to do it. Foster brings out the whip, which is supposed to solve problems like this, but the whipping only deepens Ibrahima’s resentment and hardens his refusal to work in the demeaning fields. The two young men are now locked in bitter, intractable conflict.

  Foster has the option of whipping Prince three-quarters to death, which is known to break the spirit of most slaves. Castration is another popular remedy for intransigence, along with torture by fire or boiling water. But Foster isn’t that cruel, and he is also acutely aware of the mortgage he owes on Prince. Ibrahima has only one way to break the deadlock, and he exercises it first. He runs away one night into the huge, dark forest to the north.

  Notices of his escape are posted at the fort and in the taverns. Slave catchers are dispatched, but they find not a single track. As the days turn into weeks, Thomas Foster loses hope and various theories are advanced in the Natchez grog shops. Maybe an alligator or a panther got him. Maybe it was snakebite. Maybe he drowned in the river, or starved to death, or died of fever, or was killed by Indians. These are all highly plausible ways to die. No white man would even consider going into that wilderness alone and unarmed.