Having an American family strengthens Ibrahima’s reluctant attachments to the land and accelerates the dying of his own culture within him. Afraid of losing his literacy, with no access to books, pens, or paper, he takes to drawing Arabic letters in the dirt during work breaks. Isabella improves his English, but it never becomes as fluent as the six other languages he used to speak. Perhaps he can’t be bothered to put in the effort.
Meanwhile, the cotton gin has been invented, the price of cotton is rising, the textile mills in England are thirsting for it, the Natchez District is booming, and Thomas Foster is able to buy more land and more slaves. This enables him to grow more cotton, and to buy yet more slaves. He notices that Prince is the one they turn to when a problem arises, and Prince obviously thinks of himself as superior to the others. Even as he humbles himself in a cotton field, plowing, planting, chopping weeds and picking, he still retains an air of authority, and Foster sees a way to turn it to his advantage.
* * *
Apart from the slaves themselves, whose many forms of resistance include stealing, lying, breaking equipment, working slowly, running away, burning barns, and sabotaging crops, nothing gives Southern planters more trouble than overseers. One of the Natchez millionaires, Haller Nutt, who builds the great octagonal mansion known as Longwood, is driven to distraction by his overseers. They keep killing valuable slaves out of pure cruelty and ruining morale with rape. Nutt is compelled to write a book of rules for his overseers, and the most important one is this: “Above all things avoid all intercourse with negro women. It breeds more trouble, more neglect, more idleness, more rascality, more stealing and more lieing [sic] up in the quarters and more everything that is wrong on a plantation than all else put together.”I
Many planters decide that overseers aren’t worth it; almost two-thirds of the slaves in the South work without one. They are supervised instead by enslaved black men known as drivers, who take their orders directly from the planters and have the power to whip and punish. Even when a plantation has a white overseer, it usually has a black driver as well, working as second-in-command.
Drivers are the foremen of the labor gangs, and the authority figures in the slave quarters, responsible for solving disputes and keeping discipline. The bad ones are worse than overseers for cruelty, overwork, and rape. The good drivers are compassionate leaders and capable of running a plantation by themselves, except for the sale of the crop and other financial arrangements. Solomon Northup, a free black man kidnapped in Washington DC and enslaved on a Louisiana cotton plantation, is made a driver and given a whip. Like many drivers before him, he learns the fine art of delivering a fake whipping. The end of the whip cracks just short of the skin, and the slave completes the illusion by howling in pain, and complaining to the master about the severity of his punishment, and the horrible cruelty of the driver.
Thomas Foster decides that Prince will make an ideal driver. He never drinks alcohol, gambles, lies, shirks, or steals. The other slaves respect him. He understands how the plantation works. He appears happily married, although that is hard to determine. Despite his loving, affectionate, quick-witted wife Isabella, despite the playful antics of his children, despite his participation in the annual Christmas dances and feasts—the highlight of the year for slaves across the South—Prince is still known as a man who never smiles.
I. According to an interview with an ex-slave named Isaac Throgmorton, Haller Nutt fell prey to the temptation himself on his Winter Quarters plantation. When the woman’s husband objected, Nutt had him tied up by the thumbs and “whipped awful, the next morning he was dead.”
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On the opening night of Tableaux, Regina Charboneau ordered a cocktail at King’s Tavern to fortify herself for what lay ahead. She hoped that the production had now found the right balance of tradition, entertainment, historical accuracy, and racial inclusivity. But the rehearsals had been ragged, there were rumors of sabotage, and she had to be prepared for the possibility of a horrible, cringing catastrophe, for which she would be held largely responsible.
We were joined at King’s Tavern by Layne Taylor, the director of the Natchez Little Theater, a slim gay man with horn-rimmed glasses and blond hair. Something about the shape of his mouth reminded me of the actor John Malkovich. “It’s opening night, honey,” he said to Regina. “Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. That’s just an ironclad law.”
Regina summarized the new show for him: “We’re grounding everything in real history this year. We’re quoting from letters and diaries, and other original source material. We’re acknowledging the importance of slavery, but we’re trying to present it in a way that doesn’t leave people covered in shame or anger. I love Greg Iles, he’s a dear friend, but those clanking slave chains, people getting ripped away from their families on the auction block, it was just too much.”
“We’re not denying or excusing anything,” said Doug, “but we also want people to buy tickets and enjoy the show.”
Layne Taylor, in his theatrically expressive Southern drawl, told a story about bringing a group of friends from New York City to the old, unreconstructed Tableaux. They were bewildered by the maypole dancing, and the crowns and scepters, and genuinely alarmed when young men began charging around the auditorium with Confederate flags, aggressively whooping and howling.
“My friends asked me what they were doing,” said Layne. “I told them they were looking for Negroes. They want to string them up, but don’t worry. The Negroes are smart and don’t come here. So they’re looking for Yankees and Jews instead. They freaked out completely. They were all Yankees and Jews.”
Layne grew up on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta and went to a liberal arts college in Jackson in the 1970s. I asked him if it was difficult growing up gay in Mississippi at that time. “I never had a problem being me,” he said. “Mississippi was wonderful in the 1970s. We were expanding our minds with drugs and listening to great music. There was so much freedom because most people had no idea what we were up to.”
After college he moved to New York City and enjoyed success as a waifish, innocent-looking underwear model, working for Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. He went to some of Andy Warhol’s parties and was “glad to get out of there without catching some horrible disease.” He took a lot of drugs and hung out at the legendary nightclubs Max’s Kansas City and Studio 54, where he switched from downers to uppers and embraced the disco revolution.
Then he burned out on New York, came back to Mississippi, and chose Natchez. Why? “Obviously it’s beautiful here, and the old homes are fabulous. I get to work in theater, and it’s a very easy, accepting place to be gay, although the scene has been ruined by all the married Baptists who come out of the closet when they’re drunk and behave like beasts. The worst thing about Natchez is the lethargy. This whole town needs amphetamines. My friends are nearly all straight married women because they’re the ones who have the energy.”
Regina ordered a second cocktail and told Layne about some of the difficulties with the Tableaux. A hardening faction of Chesney’s garden club resented her inclusion of black history, and some were now describing the paid black performers as “mercenaries,” or so the rumor mill said. Meanwhile the unpaid amateurs kept spacing out and missing their cues, which was excusable in the small children, but not in the young adults, no matter how much they were drinking backstage. The computerized audiovisual system—the backbone of the whole production—was either glitchy as hell or being incompetently operated by someone they couldn’t fire because he had a powerful patron in the other garden club. Layne sympathized. He said, “Honey, I would have cut so many throats by now that we’d all be in prison.”
We finished our drinks and walked the few blocks to the city auditorium. Regina, as president of the Pilgrimage Garden Club, was staging a radical breach of protocol by not wearing a hoopskirt to opening night. They were just so heavy and cumbersome, “like trying to balance a dinette set on your hips,” as one woman described
it. Regina was wearing a long black brocaded dress, which her enemies would see as a typical piece of arrogance, and an insult to a hallowed Natchez tradition.
She led us through the front doors of the auditorium into the President’s Box, which was a partitioned row of folding chairs in front of the bleachers. Similar seating arrangements on the other side of the room championed themselves as the King’s Box, Queen’s Box, and Pages’ Box. A harried-looking Chesney Doyle came over to welcome us. Regina asked her how things were going. Chesney sighed, rolled her eyes, said nothing, and rushed back into the fray.
We were fifteen minutes early, so I took a quick walk behind the scenes. There were long echoing corridors and many rooms with doors that kept opening and closing. It was a parade of glimpses: ladies pouring vodka into red plastic cups, young men throwing back shots and climbing into costumes and uniforms, a group of African Americans keeping to themselves and talking in low voices, an elderly woman fastening her granddaughter into a hoopskirt dress that the woman had probably worn herself as a little girl. It occurred to me that the cotton-slavery-mansion boom in antebellum Natchez lasted no more than sixty years. And these theatrical celebrations of that era had now been going on for eighty-five years.
Stagehands marched through the corridors. Little boys milled around in velvet suits, like a herd of Little Lord Fauntleroys. The back entrance to the building opened, and in came two men with a pack of hunting dogs, including a gigantic basset hound. Walking back to the President’s Box, scanning the audience, I saw a lot of empty seats, very few tourists, and not a single African American. I had assumed that the family members of the black performers would be here, at least, but apparently they had chosen to stay away with the rest of the black community. This was a disappointment for Regina and Chesney, and the other white liberals, but not a surprise.
The mistrust and resentment of whites ran so deep and was so well-founded, especially for the generation that had fought through the civil rights era. Despite the recent changes, Tableaux was still an enduring symbol of white privilege and Confederate-worshipping racism in the black community. Staying apart was also just a habit that people of both races had inherited, and most preferred it that way. It was easier and more comfortable to stick with your own.
* * *
The auditorium darkened, then the lights came up slowly. A spotlight illuminated a young black man, who began singing “Ol’ Man River” in a rich, resonant baritone. The impressive vocal performance set off an argument in my head. He was portraying a stevedore on a steamboat, resigning himself to a life of servile toil—“Body all achin’ / And wracked with pain / Tote that barge! / Lift that bale!”—in a song taken from a mildly antiracist 1920s musical.
Paul Robeson had managed to infuse “Ol’ Man River” with black pride and protest credentials in his famous rendition, but the song had also been attacked for promoting a demeaning, humiliating stereotype and nostalgia for the Old South. I was disappointed by my own reaction to the song. Here was a talented young man singing his heart out, and all I could do was judge, criticize, nitpick, and argue with myself, rather than listen with open ears.
Now well-dressed African American couples were promenading around the stage. The women were holding parasols. It was Natchez in the 1930s. Regina whispered that whites and other ethnicities were supposed to be in the scene as well; there must have been a mix-up backstage. A male voice-over started narrating the history of Natchez through the PA system, as images and quotations followed each other on big screens mounted around the auditorium. I wrote down a quote from Greg Iles: “Natchez is unlike any place in America, existing almost outside time.”
Traditionally, when representing the Native American history of Natchez, the garden club ladies have shellacked a white boy in reddish-brown paint and sent him onstage with Davy Crockett pants, a feathered headdress, and a peace pipe. Chesney Doyle had attired two white teenage boys in faux-buckskin costumes and dispensed with the paint and feathers.
One boy portrayed a famous chief called the Great Sun. He moved his arms from east to west, setting the rising sun (a blood-orange spotlight) on its course. Then his brother, the Tattooed Serpent, handed him a document—a treaty with the French. In voice-over, a historian explained that foreigners had invaded their lands, and the Tattooed Serpent was trying to make peace. The destruction of the Natchez people and the theft of their land was dealt with succinctly: “The foreigners would prevail.”
Now came the colonial era. Teenage boys marched around in French military uniforms, then British uniforms. Boys in Spanish military uniforms were ready to march when the audiovisual system froze up and all the screens went blank. The teenage soldiers stood there, uncertain what to do. The entire production ground to a standstill. “Rats,” said Regina, showing impressive restraint with her choice of expletive. “The files are too big, they’re overloading the computer. This is exactly what we’ve been saying to Floyd.”
Floyd was the man operating the system, and he was a nervous wreck from all the last-minute changes that came raining down on him. What happened next was bizarre. After a painfully long wait, the blank screens came back to life, and they all displayed the same unsettling image. It was a jumble of white plastic heads with rectangular green eyes, and laughing mouths with teeth and pink tongues. Between the heads, cartoonish feet stuck out. They looked like goblin robots, or plastic doll babies with teeth, and they stayed there for many long minutes. Everyone sat stunned for a few moments, then began talking all at once. Was it malware? Was it a screen saver on Floyd’s computer? If so, why he would choose such a creepy one?I
Finally, the system rebooted, the show resumed, but Ibrahima’s scene had been skipped over, leaving Jeremy Houston high and dry backstage, and so had other African American scenes. Instead, we went straight into the traditional Tableaux dances. White children skipped around a maypole. Young men in antebellum costumes pretended to go hunting with real live dogs, including the giant basset hound I had seen earlier. Regina assured me that all the young huntsmen had observed tradition by drinking heavily before their performance. “They’ve been drunk for eighty-five years,” she said.
Now came the portrayal of slavery. In voice-over, it was described as a trade in “humans.” The forced migration to Natchez was a “thousand-mile river of people in chains.” Right as Ser Boxley began talking about the Forks of the Road, the glitch struck again, another group of black performers was left waiting in the wings, and then everything fell apart. I got up and walked around. I found poor Chesney Doyle standing in the foyer, peering through a small window at the wreckage of her production. “I can’t bear to go in there,” she said. “How’s Regina holding up?”
I went back to the President’s Box and found Regina more suspicious than upset. “Our key black actors, and our key black scenes, got cut,” she said. “That won’t sit well in the black community, at all, and Floyd’s such a Baptist that it wouldn’t surprise me if he did it deliberately. The other club never wanted those scenes in the first place.”
The production limped and stuttered on, plagued by technical difficulties, missed cues, and confusion, but you could sense Chesney’s earnestness, thoroughness, and professionalism bleeding through the mess. The script was meticulously researched and scrupulously accurate. The writing was sharp and stylish. She had interviewed experts for the various voice-overs. I felt nothing but sympathy for her. She had worked so hard without pay, under such fraught circumstances.
Somehow the audiovisual system started working again, and the latter stages of the production went off better. Natchez-born Varina Howell was married in a wedding scene to Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy. The approach of the Civil War was heralded by a young Confederate soldier racing around the auditorium. He was making the traditional bloodcurdling rebel yells, but instead of the Confederate battle flag, he was holding the Bonnie Blue flag of secession. This flag was also a symbol of white supremacy, and Confederate determination to keep blacks e
nslaved, but it had the advantage of being obscure. Unlike the Stars and Bars, it had never been waved at a Klan rally or flown from the back of a pickup truck.
On-screen we were informed that Natchez had voted heavily against secession, 1,072 to 233, but once hostilities broke out, many Natchezians did support the war with money and sons. Moving swiftly through surrender, occupation by the Union troops, and slaves running away to join the army, we arrived at Ser Boxley’s favorite moment in Natchez history. A regiment of the US Colored Troops, the Forty-Fifth Black and Blue, were ordered to take down the slave pens at the Forks of the Road.
Uniformed black actors dismantled a wooden pen onstage, and in voice-over we heard a letter written by an eyewitness, a soldier from Wisconsin: “This order was received just at evening and was hailed with the wildest enthusiasm by these men who had been chained, gagged, and whipped, and suffered tortures unimaginable within these same walls, and through that long night they worked with a terrible earnestness.…” Then a live black choir from nearby Alcorn State University sang, “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho / And the walls came tumbling down.”
Chesney had added a new section to the Tableaux titled “Reconstruction to Ragtime.” This enabled her to celebrate John R. Lynch, Hiram Revels, and other black leaders during Reconstruction, plus Bud Scott, the Dixieland jazz musician, and Richard Wright, the author. Jim Crow was briefly mentioned, then it was time to present the Pilgrimage Garden Club’s King, Queen, Pages, Maids, and Generals.
The lights went dark. A spotlight fell on an African American drummer. Then the house lights came up and the curtains opened to reveal the quintessential Natchez spectacle: Confederate uniforms and shimmering gowns, small boys with sabers, a young King who had clearly been drinking, the Queen with her glittering tiara and scepter, smiling bravely through her stage fright as she walked out with a fifteen-foot-long train behind her ivory gown, and somewhere in the audience a mother’s heart threatened to burst open with pride and joy.
The Deepest South of All Page 7