The Deepest South of All

by Richard Grant

  Meanwhile, Ibrahima stays close to Foster’s farm, perhaps up a tree, racked with hunger and going through the greatest existential crisis of his life. He can think of nothing more abhorrent than being enslaved in the fields of a primitive infidel farmer, and if he goes back to Foster’s place, an agonizing punishment seems certain. Runaway slaves in this land are routinely whipped to a bloody pulp, maimed, mutilated, sometimes roasted alive. But he cannot survive in the forest, and there is no way back to Futa Jalon, or any other kind of freedom. And the Koran says that suicides will not be admitted to paradise.

  Religion guides his decision to return to Foster’s farm. Islam is a fatalistic creed, in which each person’s life is written in advance. Nothing happens to a believer unless Allah has willed it. By accepting his cruel fate as Foster’s slave, Ibrahima decides, he is accepting Allah’s will and fulfilling his duty as a Muslim.

  Sarah Foster is sitting in her house sewing when she hears something, looks up, and sees Prince standing at the door with his clothes in rags and a wild, tortured look on his face. She assumes that he has come to kill her, and her survival instincts compel her to stand up, smile, and hold out her hand in welcome.

  He touches her hand briefly. Then he lies down on the floor, takes one of her feet, and places it on his neck. In West African warfare, this is a sign of complete submission, usually followed by a spear-thrust to the heart. Lacking English, he is trying to communicate to the Fosters that they can have him back as a compliant slave, or kill him, torture him, do whatever they want to him.

  | 5 |

  The first time I saw Ser Seshsh Ab Heter-CM Boxley, he was sitting on a bench outside the Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture on Main Street. His eyes were closed and his broad, rugged, white-bearded face was angled upwards for maximum exposure to the spring sunshine. He still radiated physical power and strength of character in his late seventies, and he was wearing a kente-cloth dashiki and holding a traditional African fly whisk. There were brass rings on his fingers and beads around his wrist. Amulets and masks hung from his neck on leather cords. He had the air of a warrior in repose, and his battlefield was the intersection of history, memory, and tourism.

  For most of the twentieth century, Natchez had marketed itself as a romantic vision of the Old South, with slavery so sanitized that it almost disappeared, and the rest of African American history ignored completely. You could still take tours of Natchez that hewed to this model—Pilgrimage was almost unchanged—but there was now a consensus among tourism leaders that African American history needed to be recognized and included. No one had fought harder for this cause than Ser Boxley.

  I walked up to him and introduced myself. He opened his eyes, made some small talk, nicknamed me Ricardo, and then began firing out rhetorical questions: “Are you here to see the monuments to chattel slavery and the denied humanity of our ancestors that the white folks call antebellum homes? Will you stay for Pilgrimage, Ricardo, to see the white folks dress up like enslavers and go to great lengths not to mention the African-descent people whose stolen labor built this town?”

  He asked if I was staying in one of the local chattel-slavery monuments.

  I said yes, at Twin Oaks.

  “Sure. Regina’s house. Send her my regards. She can do her thing, and I’ll do mine. I’m on a twenty-two-year campaign for equal history commemoration. The garden clubs will give you the idea that white folks did everything around here. Sometimes they get slick and talk about ‘the servants’ quarters,’ but that’s as far as it goes.”

  “Do you want them to talk more about slavery during Pilgrimage?”

  “Aw, hell no!” he thundered. “As Dr. Runoko Rashidi says, ‘You know you’re in trouble when you allow the same people who have historically oppressed you to tell your history.’ We’ll tell our own story, whether the white folks like it or not.”

  This was the launching pad for a strident, impassioned monologue that went on for nearly two and a half hours. It poured out of him like a river and swept aside all my attempts to ask questions, challenge assertions, or seek clarifications. He made long declamations on the history of the slave trade, the innate superiority of traditional African cultures, the history of black resistance in America, the perfidy of his enemies, the Civil War, racism in Natchez, and the story of his life.

  He was born and raised here as Clifton Boxley, but that sounded like a plantation name bestowed by an enslaver, so he had Africanized it. Ser is an Egyptian word meaning “highly respected person.” He left Natchez as a young man and spent thirty-five years in California working as an anti-poverty campaigner and activist. In his spare time, he traveled extensively in Africa. On the coast of Ghana, he communed with the spirits of the ancestors in nineteen different slave dungeons, where they had been held captive by European flesh merchants before the horrors of the Middle Passage. He understood that Ghana was his true spiritual homeland, and he was planning to move there permanently when he started receiving communications from dead people who had been enslaved in Natchez.

  “The ancestors said to me, ‘Who is going to speak up for us? Who will tell our history and reclaim the humanity that was stolen from us?’ So I came home. I started researching and writing grants. I started protesting and battling the white-supremacy power structure, and I refused to quit like they thought I would. I sacrificed everything in terms of monetary or social benefits, or housing, but that’s alright. I’m working for the ancestors, not for materialistic reasons.”

  His greatest accomplishment had stopped me and stunned me on my first visit to Natchez. Ser Boxley, more than anyone else, had succeeded in getting the Forks of the Road recognized and commemorated as a historic site. The fact that the second-largest slave market in the Deep South was in Natchez, by the Lemon Delight car wash, the muffler shop, and the custom-sidings place, had been almost completely forgotten in the local community, the state of Mississippi, and the nation at large.

  His campaign included a national letter-writing drive to raise funds, repeated protests in Natchez and Washington, DC, and securing a grant from the Mississippi state legislature. But in the end, it all came down to pressuring a recalcitrant white man to sell a piece of property. “It was a whites-only beer garden from the Jim Crow days and a gravel parking lot. We fought tooth and nail over it. I don’t know if the ancestors got on his ass or what, but he finally came up to me and said, ‘Okay, I’ll sell it if you find some land with timber on it for my son.’ We found the land, he sold the site, and we commemorated it with a libation ceremony.” This is an ancient Pan-African ritual in which drinks are poured on the ground to honor the ancestors.

  Having commemorated the Forks of the Road, Ser Boxley turned his attention to the role of the US Colored Troops (USCT) in the Civil War and founded a group of historical reenactors known as the Black and Blue. Dressed up as enslaved people and uniformed USCT soldiers, sailors, and nurses, they perform living-history presentations and once gate-crashed a Confederate reenactment. Since moving to Mississippi, I had become accustomed to the Civil War fixations of many white people, with battles and troop movements discussed in fanatical detail, and a general sense that it had all taken place in recent memory. In Ser Boxley and his group, I encountered the same phenomenon among African Americans for the first time.

  Ser Boxley was convinced that the outcome of the War, and therefore the end of slavery, had been decided by the 178,000 African American troops (runaway slaves and free Northerners) who fought for the Union from 1863 to 1865. Most historians would give at least some credit to Abraham Lincoln for ending slavery, but Boxley was allergic to white saviors: “The Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, except for that clause allowing enslaved people to become freedom fighters for the Union army. Lincoln wasn’t no Great Emancipator. It was the US Colored Troops who turned the tide of the war and allowed African-descent people to emancipate themselves.”

  Ser Boxley had now moved from the sunlit bench to the f
ront steps of the museum, and a small crowd had gathered. Two stoned young men lounged on bicycles, nodding along and saying, “That’s right.” Jeremy Houston, the dreadlocked young man who was playing Ibrahima in the Tableaux, listened with a respect bordering on reverence. Darrell White, the director of the museum, a slim, round-shouldered, scholarly-looking figure, stood there smoking a cigarette, looking defiant and proud. He too was a regular costumed performer at the Black and Blue events, and a leading activist for the cause of African American history in Natchez.

  Boxley and White portrayed their campaign as a fierce ongoing battle against the entrenched power structure of white supremacy. This had been mostly true in the early days and was now mostly exaggeration. They no longer faced any resistance from the city government: Natchez had a black mayor and a majority-black board of aldermen. The list of institutions that had supported black history projects in Natchez now included the US National Park Service, the Mississippi state legislature, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the Historic Natchez Foundation, the Visit Natchez tourism bureau, and the Natchez Trails tourism committee. Even the garden clubs, in their promotional brochures for Pilgrimage, were now encouraging visitors to tour African American historical sites.

  Natchez had a surprising number of white liberals, concentrated in the historic downtown area, and they all supported the commemoration of black history, in “telling the whole story,” as the phrase went, although Boxley didn’t trust them. “Liberals are the worst kind of white,” he said. “They are phony, and all about their own guilt and feelings. They will express their white supremacy by telling you what should be done. Don’t send me no white liberals. It ain’t their call.”

  He was equally scathing about African Americans who disagreed with his views, or his confrontational methods. They were all “Uncle Toms” or “house Negroes.” Perhaps overstating himself in the heat of a tirade, he derided all African American employees of the US National Park Service, in Natchez and all over the country, as “typical house Negroes, trying to ingratiate and cozy up, while the people in charge refuse to tell the truth about our history.”

  He attacked the Holy Family Catholic Church, where an all-black choir in Afrocentric costumes sang freedom songs about black history to predominantly white tourists during Pilgrimage. The spectacle disgusted him: “I don’t promote singing and dancing for white folks. That’s steppin’ and fetchin’. It’s that old ‘Come on, boy, sing me those good ole gospel songs.’ Well, fuck you, who do you think you are?”

  Boxley was an old-school freedom fighter, forged by the black power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. “I’m not a compromising type of Negro,” he liked to say. Pugnacious, belligerent, self-aggrandizing, he always needed a villain to battle against, and he hated to cede control or take advice. He pushed and shouted, then complained that he was not warmly received. His ranting made it easy for some people to ignore his message, and he was exasperating for others to work with, yet he commanded a lot of respect in Natchez, even from some of the people he had publicly scorned.

  In the words of Kathleen Bond, the white superintendent of the National Park Service in Natchez, “His absolute dedication to the Forks of the Road and the USCT has been so instrumental in turning the battleship of this town’s feelings about history and tourism. He is a prophet in the truest sense—pointing out how power has been abused, how shaky are the moral foundations of a town built on human trafficking, and how pernicious the racism that still runs through the veins of the community, running the gamut from hard-line neo-Confederates to the implicit bias lurking in the hearts of downtown liberals.”

  Ser Boxley was a flawed human being, like the rest of us, but his sense of commitment was pure and absolute, and the more time I spent in Natchez, the more convinced I became that he was essentially right. The town, and the nation at large, were still deeply wounded and deformed by slavery, and no healing or progress could occur unless this vital truth was recognized. But it was stubbornly resisted, and not just by whites. “Most black folks don’t want to think about slavery because it’s painful, and they feel ashamed, and this is where they go wrong,” said Boxley.

  I had to halt his monologue because I had another appointment. He shook hands, wished me well, and climbed with difficulty into a small, dilapidated pickup truck festooned with African artifacts and memorabilia. He rolled down the window and said, “The only way to transcend the pain, anger, shame, and sorrow of our history is to face the situation and experience it, to allow the humanity of the ancestors and their suffering to wash through us and settle into our spirit. Only then will we be free and begin to heal.”

  * * *

  Ser Boxley and others had succeeded in making the moral case for commemorating African American history in Natchez, but it was proving a difficult sell to the vacationing public. So much of that history was harrowing and heart-wrenching, sickening and disgraceful. It forced you to face America at its worst, in one of its loveliest settings, and this produced a strange, uncanny, dislocated feeling, as if you were admiring a gorgeous sunset over Auschwitz, or eating a picnic at a massacre site.

  Walking through the historic district one afternoon, almost intoxicated by the beauty of the buildings and the gardens in the honeyed light and soft, fragrant air, I stopped to admire a particularly handsome Greek Revival antebellum house. The Natchez Trails committee had placed a sign in front of it, helpfully describing its architectural features and the original owner, a banker named George W. Koontz. The sign also included a small newspaper advertisement placed by Mr. Koontz in 1850:

  TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS REWARD!

  Runaway from the subscriber on the night of the 12th instant, a negro woman named MATILDA, about 30 years of age, medium structure, color a dark griffe,I has a large mouth, rather thin lips, high cheek bones, and wears false hair, and has with her a good supply of genteel clothing. She is very intelligent and talks much of having gone through the Mexican war.

  So now the experience of being there was irrevocably altered. Not spoiled exactly—at least, not in my case—but made more sinister, difficult, complicated, interesting, and historically vivid. I was struck by the intimate detail of Mr. Koontz’s description, and I wondered about Matilda’s plan of escape. The Underground Railroad in Natchez was the Mississippi River. Did she intend to stow away or pass as a free person of color on a steamboat going to New Orleans, where she could blend into the free-black population? Or was she intending to go upriver to the free states? And how curious that she was in the Mexican War and apparently wouldn’t stop talking about it? Was she caught or did she make it to freedom?

  Natchez Trails, a biracial committee, included a number of slavery-related newspaper ads on its interpretive signs in the historic district. Along with reward notices for runaways, you could read job postings for overseers, and announcements of VALUABLE NEGROES FOR SALE and SLAVES! SLAVES! SLAVES! These little snippets brought home both the everydayness of human trafficking here—before the Forks of the Road was built, slaves were sold in downtown auction houses, on street corners and the courthouse steps—and the all-American salesmanship involved. The merchandise was described in glowing terms—“choice selections,” “a very lively lot”—available at the “lowest possible prices.” Other Natchez Trails signs featured period drawings and sketches: a girl being sold away from her mother on the auction block, two enslaved women with babies being whipped in a cotton field by a white man in a top hat. Coming across these reminders, as you strolled through the flower-scented streets, added to the impression that slavery still lingered here, as a haunt, an echo, a theme.

  The Nachee, or Natchez Indians, were the first to build a civilization on the bluff overlooking the great river. Early French visitors noted that their lordly tattooed chieftains, or Suns, kept war captives from other tribes as their personal slaves. When a Sun died, his head slave was strangled to death, so he could continue to serve his master in the afterlife. Further north and east, the Spanish explorer Hernan
do de Soto saw Native American slaves toiling in the fields of Native American masters. The slaves had their toes cut off, or their Achilles tendons severed, so they couldn’t run away.

  All over North America, when the first Europeans arrived, native tribes and nations were enslaving war captives. They exploited their labor with violence, inflicted cruelties, and bought, sold, and traded their slaves to other tribes. It was a traumatic experience to go through, but the offspring of these slaves were usually assimilated as full tribal members, and enslavement had nothing to do with skin color or physical characteristics. This was, broadly speaking, the normal form of slavery all over the world throughout human history. Race-based slavery, with children and grandchildren automatically inheriting slave status because of their skin color and phenotype, was far more unusual. It was practiced by some Muslim societies in North Africa and the Middle East, using black Africans as slaves, and on a grand new commercial scale by Europeans in the New World, also using enslaved sub-Saharan Africans.

  The French were the first to bring African slaves to Natchez, around 1720. The bluff subsequently passed into British rule, Spanish rule, and American rule, with black slaves as a constant presence. They toiled in fields of tobacco, hemp, and indigo until King Cotton swept all other crops asunder in the early 1800s, and Natchez became the center of a frenzied economic boom. More productive strains of cotton were developed, and a longer, crueler whip was invented—ten feet of plaited cowhide with a weighted handle—which tore its way through human flesh and extracted harder, faster work in the fields.

  In the 1820s and 1830s, new financial instruments were invented, enabling planters to mortgage their slaves for credit, and bankers to bundle these slave-backed mortgages into attractive packages for investors on the East Coast and in Europe—the ultimate commodification of human beings. Fantastic fortunes were lashed and levered into existence, and Greek Revival and Federal mansions proliferated in Natchez and its environs. In 1837, the slave-backed mortgage bubble burst and the price of cotton collapsed, but another wave of credit-fueled prosperity and mansion building followed in the 1850s.