The Deepest South of All

by Richard Grant

  A growing number of visitors wanted to know the full, unexpurgated history of the town, no matter how painful or difficult, but we were still in a minority. The romance of the Old South was still the prime attraction for most tourists in Natchez. They tended to be white American retirees with the normal white American views about slavery: it was a long time ago, you can’t change the past, let’s not talk about it, let’s not think about it, don’t you dare make us feel bad about it.

  I talked with some senior citizens visiting from Louisiana and Illinois. They were complaining about their tour of Melrose, a 15,000-square-foot mansion operated as a house museum by the National Park Service. There had been far too much talk about slavery, and they had not enjoyed the tour of the restored slave quarters. They had also resented the black park ranger’s suggestion that they visit the Forks of the Road. “We all know it happened, so why do they keep shoving it down our throats?” one man said. “We’re on vacation,” said his wife. “Can’t they just let us enjoy the pretty old buildings?”

  This was exactly why some white people in Natchez wanted to keep slavery quiet. They didn’t want to upset the visitors. Talking about slavery was an offense against Southern hospitality, which requires keeping everything nice, and making sure that guests leave with the best possible impression. Of all the objections voiced against the inclusion of African American history in Natchez, this was probably the most common.

  Kathleen Bond of the National Park Service described the opponents of black history as a hydra with many heads, including the following: “Those who don’t want to examine the sources of their own family’s wealth and privilege, those who are in denial about the horrors of human trafficking on which the town’s prosperity is based, those who are unwilling to embrace a vision for the future that turns its back on the past ‘glories’ of Natchez, those who are trapped in the sanitized version of Southern history they were taught growing up.”

  Finally, there were those unrepentant bigots who thought that black history was as stupid and worthless as the race itself. They could be encountered drinking outside a saloon on the riverfront, in the comments section of the local newspaper, on social media, and in internet chat rooms, where they felt most unbridled and sometimes called for the re-enslavement of the N-words. Their rhetoric was loud and ugly, but they had no influence on the decisions being made about tourism in Natchez, and they were a small minority, judging by the fact that Darryl Grennell, a gay black man, had been elected mayor with 91 percent of the vote. There was white racism aplenty in Natchez, but most of it wasn’t hateful, and it didn’t preclude voting for a black man. It was subtler and more complex than that, and arguably more insidious because it was less easy to call out.

  * * *

  Jeremy Houston, who was playing Ibrahima in the Tableaux, had started leading African American heritage tours of Natchez, following Ser Boxley’s idea that black people were the only ones who should be telling their history. Jeremy was tall, lean, handsome, athletic. He had served two tours in Afghanistan, come home with post-traumatic stress disorder, and, like thousands of other veterans, learned that he could function best on low doses of marijuana. I would never have guessed any of this unless he had told me. He could get riled up about racial injustice, but his core personality was kind and gentle. Most whites in the tourism business supported Jeremy, admired his entrepreneurship, and also hoped that his tours would become more polished and professional as time went on. It was true that Jeremy’s presentations were a little ragged, and his punctuality could be erratic, but he was an engaging speaker, and his tours had a rawness and passion that made a powerful impact.

  They began at the Forks of the Road, with Jeremy stepping out of his van holding a set of slave chains with a neck manacle at one end, and wrist and ankle manacles at the other. “This is the Natchez reality tour, what I’m about to tell you, and not the Gone with the Wind fantasy,” he said. The chains made a sinister clinking-clanking sound. “White folks glorify these planters during Pilgrimage time. I guarantee you don’t see no whips or chains on none of them house tours.”

  He pointed towards Natchez Exhaust, and the Solar Eclipse Window Tinting shop, which bordered the small memorial that Ser Boxley had battled for so doggedly. “Looka here. This is where Isaac Franklin had his office. He was the kingpin, probably the richest dealer of enslaved people in the whole country. Theophilus Freeman was right over here. He’s the one that sold Solomon Northup out of Twelve Years a Slave.”

  Jeremy had the Natchez tendency to think of events that took place nearly two centuries ago as fresh, vivid, all-consuming, and he soon slipped into the present tense. “Now think about these planters walking around here shopping for an enslaved person like they buying a damn Ford Expedition, or a Ford Focus. That’s the mentality. ‘Hey, nigger, I need someone to iron my clothes. You good at that?’ Think about three hundred Donald Trumps walking around here shopping for niggers. ‘Look at that one, didn’t they shine him up nice? What if I buy that other one, will you make me a deal?’ ”

  That was a difficult image to unthink, and I wondered if Jeremy made the same presentation to all the white tourists. I was his only customer on that bright spring morning. His phone rang, and he answered, “Hey, big dog, whassup?… Ah-ight. Cool. Lemme holla back. Peace.”

  Then he went into more detail about the haggling. The price went down if whipping scars were on a slave’s back. This was taken as proof of a defiant, rebellious character, rather than cruelty on the part of previous owners, even though “clean backs” were rare. Males and females were separated into rows, then arranged according to height, with the smallest at one end of the row, and the tallest at the other. This meant that mothers were separated from their daughters and were more likely to be sold apart. Family separations were probably the most brutal, heartless aspect of American slavery, although many slaveholders claimed that blacks, being less than fully human, weren’t particularly bothered by it. “Fifty percent of the slaves in the Natchez District were sold away from their wives or husbands or parents,” said Jeremy. “Little kids, mamas wailing and crying, that’s how cold they were.”

  Then it was 1863, the Union army had occupied Natchez, the slaves were running off the plantations, the slave traffickers had fled, and the US Colored Troops were now in charge of the Forks of the Road. Among them was the grandfather of Richard Wright, one of the all-time American literary greats. In Black Boy, Wright’s shattering memoir about growing up under Jim Crow, he described how his grandfather ran away from his enslaver to join the Union army, for the express purpose of killing Southern whites, and managed to bag a few on his way to enlist.

  “First they used the Forks for a barracks and slept in the slave pens,” said Jeremy. “Then they got the order to tear it down and use the lumber to build a new barracks at Fort McPherson. Some of those guys had been here in chains, getting sold and whipped. Can you imagine how it felt to be a free man, wearing a United States army uniform, tearing this motherfucker down? They went at it all night long.”

  After the war came Reconstruction, those extraordinary thirteen years when emancipated slaves got the vote and elected black leaders to local, state, and national government; when black entrepreneurs started opening businesses, and black children started going to school. White Southerners have characterized Reconstruction as “the rape of the South” by invading carpetbaggers and corrupt, ignorant blacks, but among historians, only the neo-Confederates take that view. Eric Foner, the leading historian of Reconstruction, calls it “a stunning experiment—to fashion an interracial democracy from the ashes of slavery.” Nowhere in the South was that experiment more successful than in Natchez.

  We climbed into Jeremy’s van and rode slowly down the old St. Catherine Street, which he described as the “black Wall Street of Mississippi, back in the day.” He stopped outside the Zion Chapel AME Church and told me about its minister Hiram Revels, who was the first African American to serve in the US Congress, in 1870. He talked abo
ut John R. Lynch, born a slave on Tacony Plantation with an Irish overseer father and an enslaved mother. At the age of twenty-six, he too was elected to the US Congress and went on to have a distinguished career as a lawyer, writer, and military officer.

  Many black leaders in Reconstruction Natchez came out of the free black population and were well educated, well-intentioned, and highly competent. “Louis Winston had a white father and an enslaved mother,” said Jeremy. “He was phenomenal, but white folks don’t talk about him. He was a police, a tax collector, a longtime clerk of court, an attorney, and a planter.”

  Robert Wood also lived on St. Catherine Street. “He was the first black mayor, and he had a white father too,” said Jeremy. Hearing that sentence, my sense of logic once again rebelled against the deeply held American belief about race, that “one eighth of a specified kind of blood shall outweigh seven eighths of another kind,” as William Faulkner put it. A nineteenth-century Yankee traveler saw a woman with pale skin and blond hair working alongside the other slaves in the cotton fields of a Natchez planter. He asked the planter what could prevent her from living as a white person in the North. The planter said it was a question of manners and accent. Whatever race might be, it is certainly not logical or scientific. In Haiti, it was explained to me that “one drop” of European blood defined you as white.

  After Reconstruction came the backlash of Jim Crow, when white supremacy violently reasserted itself, aided by its white-robed enforcers in the Ku Klux Klan. African Americans lost the vote and all political power. They were subjected to a fanatical system of segregation and terrifying acts of violence—beatings, rapes, castrations, shootings, whippings—and public lynchings at which refreshments and postcards were sometimes sold, and human body parts severed for souvenirs. Mississippi had 656 reported lynchings between 1877 and 1950, more than any other state. “When I talk about this stuff to Europeans and other foreigners, it trips them out,” said Jeremy. “They don’t understand why white folks hated us that bad. They want me to explain it, and I don’t even know. That’s just the way it was, until we organized and fought back.”

  Jeremy was at his most animated when the time line of his tour reached the civil rights era in Natchez. He stood on a street corner, talking fast, gesticulating, pointing over there, pointing over here. “The Klan firebombed Mayor Nosser’s house right over there because he wasn’t racist enough. They blew up Wharlest Jackson, and there was pieces of his body all over my neighborhood, man! They shot and killed a black man named Ben Chester White who hadn’t even did nothing! Only reason they killed him was to scandalize Martin Luther King. They wanted to lure him to Natchez so they could kill him. It was serious, man. We had a boycott of all the white stores downtown, and we had the Deacons for Defense. Those guys are my heroes, man. They didn’t play.”

  I had never heard of the Deacons for Defense, and Jeremy was glad to tell me about them. They were local working-class black men who rejected the principle of nonviolence preached by Martin Luther King and the NAACP. They believed in armed self-defense and patrolled the black neighborhoods with pistols and rifles. Many of them had fought in World War II. They protected activists and civil rights workers from the Klan and the police, and they stopped and intimidated suspicious white motorists. They also beat up “Uncle Toms” who breached the boycott of the white stores downtown.

  “Are any of the Deacons for Defense still around?” I asked, hoping to interview surviving members.

  “I saw one at McDonald’s this morning and gave him maximum respect. Natchez had one of the most successful civil rights campaigns in the whole South. The boycott hurt the white merchants real bad, and the Deacons backed down the Klan. The city agreed to all our demands, and that was the end of legal segregation.”

  The biggest racial problem now, he said, was economic segregation. “White folks got the money and the nice houses. All the development is happening downtown. Ain’t no developing up in my neighborhood.”

  The tour ended at the African American history museum, housed in a fine old building on Main Street that used to be the post office. Like most of the African American tourism experiences available in Natchez, the museum was heartfelt, well-intentioned, short on funds, and amateurish. Darrell White, the director, didn’t like to work weekends, so the museum was closed when most visitors were in town. The windows were dirty, and paint was peeling off the ceiling. The collection was jumbled and ramshackle, with a heavy reliance on blurred photocopies, curling photographs, piles of books and magazines, and newspaper stories glued to pieces of warped cardboard.

  Ser Boxley had made a series of informative panels about the transatlantic slave trade, and a small display about the US Colored Troops. The collection included African masks and flags, and a replica of a typical African American house from 1930, with an old bed and an ironing board, and a mannequin in a long skirt. In the slavery section, another mannequin was leaning over a wooden cotton gin, and tucked away in a corner behind that display was a small exhibit about Prince Ibrahima—a blurry copy of his only portrait, another of King Sori’s tomb in Futa Jalon, a folded map of West Africa clipped to a piece of cardboard, and a small color photograph showing some of Ibrahima’s living descendants.

  I. Griffe: a common term of racial classification at the time, denoting the offspring of a mulatto and a person of fully African ancestry.

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  Sarah Foster, when her foot is suddenly clasped to the throat of this ragged, starving, blazing-eyed African, is at first shocked and confused. Then the symbolism makes itself clear. Prince has prostrated himself before her in an attitude of complete supplication. She feels flattered and empowered. She will enjoy telling the story of this moment for many years to come.

  When Thomas Foster arrives, his overwhelming emotion is relief. He no longer owes money on a slave who everyone assumed was dead. So powerful is his relief that he forgoes punishing Prince, despite the bad example that this sets to the other slaves. Ibrahima, seeing that renewed enslavement rather than torture or death will be the outcome, vows to accept his fate with as much grace as he can muster.

  Laboring in the tobacco fields, on his knees much of the time, transplanting seedlings, hoeing, cutting, curing the wretched leaves, is the most demeaning and monotonous toil that Ibrahima can imagine. In Futa Jalon, the Jalunke only work for their masters until noon. Then they are free to worship and work for themselves, growing cotton, raising livestock, and they have plenty. Here the slaves work from sunup to dark and have nothing.

  When spring arrives, Ibrahima is offended by the sacrilege of using a horse to plow a field. Allah intended the animal for nobler pursuits—riding, racing, nomadic herding, and war. But Ibrahima can’t help being impressed by the efficiency of a horse-drawn plow, and other tools and technologies in this new world. The wheel, for example, is unknown in West Africa. The only farm tools in Futa Jalon are a small hoe and a sickle. Seeing a watch for the first time, Ibrahima is astounded that such a contraption can be made by men.

  Thomas Foster works in the fields alongside Prince, Samba, and his original slave, Jesse, wishing he could afford to buy more hands, but pleased with these three, and Prince in particular. His behavior has been exemplary since his escape and dramatic return. He follows orders and works hard and efficiently. For months, he was completely silent, but now he has started talking to Samba in some guttural language. Most of the time his face is blank and expressionless, as if his mind is elsewhere, and he never smiles.

  In 1791, the third year of Ibrahima’s enslavement on Foster’s farm, the price of tobacco falls, so Foster plants cotton instead. Ibrahima is familiar with the plant and is perhaps able to pass along some knowledge about its cultivation, but cotton emasculates him, crushes his pride, drags him down to a new level of humiliation and misery. In Futa Jalon, growing cotton, and working with cotton, is a job relegated to the Jalunke women, the lowest of the low in the caste hierarchy.

  The following year, Foster sells 1,600 pounds of cotto
n and is able to buy a twenty-five-year-old man named Dublan. Three years later, he buys a twenty-five-year-old woman named Isabella, and three children under the age of ten that are presumably hers. Foster intends to get some more children out of her. It’s an obvious way to increase his labor force, and his assets, without capital outlay. It’s also well-known that a woman can pick as much cotton in a day as a man, and sometimes more. Moving down the rows, plucking the white bolls from their spiky casings, requires dexterous fingers and stamina, not muscle strength.

  Isabella is American-born, perhaps from South Carolina, and is attractive, affectionate, easygoing, and quick-witted. She practices folk medicine and is a strong Christian, in the Africanized version of the faith developing among the slaves. Soon after her arrival, she marries Ibrahima in a formal ceremony presided over by Thomas Foster, and not the usual jump-over-the-broomstick event in the slave quarters. Masters do sometimes control the breeding of their slaves, as if breeding their best mares to their best stallions, but there is no hint of that here, and every indication that the couple are attracted to each other.

  Isabella makes it easier for Ibrahima to endure his degrading, exhausting, impoverished new life. Children arrive and the joys of parenthood are tempered because the children can be sold at any time and are doomed to a life of enslavement. Simon is first, a year after the wedding, then another son, who they name Prince, followed by three more sons and three daughters.