* * *
Afterwards came the postmortem at King’s Tavern. Regina ordered a glass of red wine. “Opening night is always tough, and it’ll get better,” she said. “We had major technical difficulties. What bothers me is how many of our African American actors got cut out. Ibrahima, the Forks of the Road, the slave song. And the whites didn’t show up in the opening scene. Am I crazy? Or is something going on here? Were we sabotaged?”
Jeremy Houston, when I reached him on the phone, sounded gloomy and faraway. People had told him not to get mixed up with the Tableaux. He had countered that it was a chance to promote black history, and now, on opening night, they had sliced most of the black history out of the show. He found it impossible to believe that it was accidental. “A black man praying to Mecca in the Natchez Tableaux was just too much for some of those white people,” he concluded. He said he was going to quit the production, and he did for a while. Then he came back and delivered a few performances as Ibrahima.
Greg Iles had also been convinced that his Tableaux was sabotaged because controversial scenes kept going wrong, but ultimately he decided it was just incompetence, and he made the same case to Regina in a long, late-night phone call. Before the next performance, a new computer was purchased, loaded with the audiovisual files, and presented to Floyd. After that, the technical glitches disappeared, and the show began to run more smoothly, although ticket sales remained disappointing, and the auditorium was never more than half-full.
Chesney portrayed slavery using three elements: a brief voice-over from Ser Boxley about the Forks of the Road and the healing power of absorbing painful history; a line of black performers portraying slaves, being led across the stage by a white slave trader; and a live African American choir singing “Deep River.” I thought it was a decent attempt to do the impossible—there is no good way to portray slavery in an entertainment with crowns, gowns, and maypoles—but some white people were outraged that slavery was mentioned at all.
In one of the downtown antique shops, I got an earful of venom from an older couple. “I am so sick of hearing about slavery,” the man vituperated with quivering jowls. “It’s supposed to be about pretty dresses, gorgeous stage sets, dance numbers like a Hollywood musical. They’ve turned into a politically correct history lecture and blah-blah-blah, now we’re all supposed to feel bad about slavery. How is that entertaining? Why would anyone buy a ticket for that?”
His wife was equally enraged. Referring to black people and slavery, she snapped, “They started it. Now they want to blame us for it. It’s ridiculous.”
He said, “And what’s the point of having blacks in the show if they’re not going to sing Negro spirituals? Everyone loves a Negro spiritual. They need to take it back to exactly how it was. Oh, it was gorgeous. The costumes! The dances! People would come by the thousands. They’ve destroyed it with their political correctness. And they wonder why people aren’t showing up. It makes me sick.”
There were errors of fact here, as well as overt racism. Ticket sales had been declining long before Greg Iles made the first “politically correct” changes. This was because fewer and fewer tourists were coming to Natchez as the Gone with the Wind generation aged out, and because the Tableaux had declined from its glory days and had the production values of a seventh-grade play. Yet socially and culturally, it was still a powerful force in Natchez, capable of roiling the town into conflict, and shaping children’s minds. They absorbed the glamour and romance of the past, and performing in the city auditorium every spring gave them confidence in public situations. Tableaux marked them indelibly as Natchezians—people who thought it was normal to dress up as plantation belles and Confederate generals and be hailed as royalty.
* * *
The morning after opening night, Regina threw together an outdoor brunch for the Royal Court and its parents. Heavily syncopated New Orleans brass band music was playing through big Bose speakers in the back garden at Twin Oaks, as forty-odd white people tucked into biscuits, corn-bread muffins, pimiento cheese, fresh fruit, and grits with bacon, cheese, and onions. A poker-faced African American bartender mixed the Bloody Marys and mimosas, which were in high demand.
One of the biggest challenges for the King and Queen of Pilgrimage was the number of boozy brunches, cocktail parties, and late-night balls that they were required to attend—for a month straight—while also trying to attend college, maintain grades, and not get arrested for drunk driving. These realities were explained to me by Regina’s son Jean-Luc, whose portrait in a Confederate uniform had startled me on my visit to Twin Oaks. Luc, as he was known, now worked in the rum distillery with his father and dressed like a hipster distiller with a vest, flat cap, and long, full beard.
When Luc was King, Doug and Regina had hired a chauffeur to ferry him between his social-drinking duties in Natchez and his classes at college in New Orleans. “I spent a lot of time passed out in the back of that car,” he remembered. The parents of another Pilgrimage King had hired a small plane and a pilot to fly their son back and forth from Natchez to the University of Mississippi in Oxford. “You can’t explain it to the professors,” said Luc. “They just don’t get it, how important this is, how much it means to the moms and the garden clubs, the excessive drinking, the constant parties, none of it.”
This year’s King was Charles “Chase” Brakenridge, a business major at Louisiana State University. I already knew from the big spread in the Natchez Democrat that his uniform was a replica of the one worn by Confederate brigadier general John Hunt Morgan, manufactured by a historical reenactors’ clothing company in Corinth, Mississippi. His sword had a rebel flag on the blade, and the insignia of the Confederate States of America. “I’ve been doing this all my life,” he said. “I was so freaking excited when I found out I was going to be King. It’s such an honor, and I basically get to party for a whole month.”
Chase was standing next to his mother, Georgeanne Brakenridge, the power behind the throne. “This path started before he was born,” she said. “It started with me. I used to receive at Longwood and Stanton Hall. I was chairman of Flower Show for eight years. I was Big Maypole chairman for three years. I do Antiques Forum. The garden club has made me all my friends. My daughter, Lansing, lives and breathes this.”
Lansing, a junior at Louisiana State University, concurred enthusiastically with this assessment. She had dramatic red hair and was wearing an orange dress and a pair of radically underslung wedge high heels. “I was the bride in the Jefferson Davis wedding,” she said. “I danced Polka last night, and I was in the Court. This is my social life. I love all the brunches and cocktail parties. I just love it so much.”
Her brother, the King, said, “I stay intoxicated a lot. You have to. I was in Little Maypole, Big Maypole, Soirée, Lead in Soirée, Ring Bearer, and in the Court last year.” Now that I knew her children’s credentials, Miss Georgeanne explained how she had got them these roles, or “spots,” in the production: “You work for points. We have cards, and we write down everything we do as volunteers, and the Pageant Committee tallies them up. That’s how children get spots. But to be chosen as Page or King, that’s an honor from the board.”
“The board, not the committee?” I was scribbling hard in my notebook and struggling to keep up.
“Yes.” Yay-uhss. Speaking slowly and clearly, as if to a half-wit, she said, “The board of the garden club.”
I asked if they thought there was anything racist about the Confederate uniforms and rebel flags. Miss Georgeanne gave me an icy glare. Chase said, “All that stuff is just tradition. It’s what the King is supposed to wear.”
Regina’s younger son Martin, a left-wing progressive living in Brooklyn and working for Google, had gone through dark nights of torment over the Tableaux uniforms and sent me an essay about his conflicted feelings. Soon after marching in a Black Lives Matter rally in New York, he got on a plane, went back to Natchez, swallowed his disgust, and put on a Confederate general’s uniform in the Tableaux.
He considered sewing a swastika on the back of it. He experienced doubt, depression, and self-hatred during the rehearsals. Martin describes slavery as “an atrocity” that makes him feel “physically ill,” and he lives painfully with the fact that some of his ancestors owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy.
But he’s also an eighth-generation Natchezian who began performing in the Tableaux when he was seven years old. When he was asked to join the King’s Court, it seemed churlish and socially difficult to refuse, so he put himself through it. It was the first year of the Greg Iles Tableaux, which helped. Talking to the African American performers, he understood that it was much tougher for them to portray slaves than for him to portray a Confederate general. “I realized I needed to separate myself from the symbol, and step into a role,” Martin wrote. “That is not to say it was comfortable.”
I showed this interesting, thoughtful, well-written essay to various editors in New York and San Francisco. None wanted to publish it. They couldn’t get past the Confederate uniforms or understand why anyone would care so deeply about such a hokey old tradition. It was a postcard from a world that was completely foreign to them. In the Natchez garden clubs, mothers and grandmothers were still passing down the tiaras they had worn as Queen as treasured family heirlooms. Anything to do with Tableaux was front-page news in the Natchez Democrat, rehashed in the coffee shop, and swirled together with gossip and rumor. But even in the neighboring towns, no one gave a damn. It was just some weird old thing in weird old Natchez.
I. I later found out it was a Windows 7 desktop background.
| 8 |
The summer of 1807. Ibrahima has been enslaved for nineteen years, and despite the strength of his character, and his religious faith, it has exacted a heavy toll. The once-proud Fulani prince no longer takes any interest in his appearance. He neglects his hair and often looks weathered and dirty. Even fleeting moments of joy seem unavailable to him, such is the burden of his enslavement, and smiling remains an impossibility. His behavior remains obedient, however, and the cotton plantation runs smoothly and efficiently under his foremanship, piling up wealth for Thomas Foster and his thirteen children.
Foster now allows Ibrahima to grow vegetables in a small garden by his cabin and sell them at the market in the nearby town of Washington. He also gathers and sells Spanish moss, which is used in the area as a cool summer mattress. Ibrahima spends most of the gains from this small enterprise on better-quality clothes for his wife and nine children than the rough-spun garments that Foster provides.
Going to the market in Washington also allows him to meet other Africans and occasionally pick up news of his homeland. This is where he learned that his father had died, soon after Ibrahima’s own defeat and capture by the Hebohs. King Sori was succeeded by Ibrahima’s brother Saadhu, who reigned well until he was knifed to death by the leader of a rival faction. Many of Saadhu’s supporters and family members were also killed. Had Ibrahima remained in Timbo, chances were good that he would have been killed too, not that living as Foster’s slave was a better option.
One morning, Ibrahima makes the hour-long walk to market with a basket of sweet potatoes balanced on his head and Samba walking alongside him. A middle-aged white man riding past on a horse looks strangely familiar. “Go see that man,” Ibrahima tells Samba. “If he has but one eye, I have seen him before.”
Samba goes up for a better look and confirms that the man is one-eyed. Ibrahima rushes up to his horse and says, “Master, you want to buy some sweet potatoes?”
The rider studies him with his good eye. He asks Ibrahima if he was raised in this country.
“No, I came from Africa.”
“You came from Timbo?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is your name Abd al-Rahman?”
“Yes, that is my name.”
“Do you know me?”
“I know you very well. You be Dr. Cox.”
The Irishman jumps down off his horse, grabs Ibrahima in a bear hug, and whirls him around. Both men are giddy with shock and joy, and Ibrahima’s face, for the first time since his capture, breaks open into a big smile. The two men go to Dr. Cox’s lodgings. Ibrahima tells him about the Hebohs, the ambush, the Mandinka slavers, the Middle Passage, the grimness of his enslavement on Foster’s plantation. Now it’s Dr. Cox’s turn. He gave up the sea after his second shipwreck, went back to Ireland, married a fifteen-year-old, emigrated to America, and lived in North Carolina for seventeen years, where he raised five children and financially ruined himself through land speculation. He is here in Washington, the capital of the Mississippi Territory, because his friend Robert Williams has just been appointed governor.
A message is sent, and Governor Williams comes over to meet Ibrahima. Dr. Cox says, “I have been to this boy’s father’s house, and they treated me as kindly as my own parents.” The Irishman has been in the American South long enough to know that you never use the word man to describe an adult Negro male, even if he’s an African prince and the former commander in chief of an army.
The following morning, Dr. Cox rides out to see Thomas Foster. He tells the planter about his adventures in Futa Jalon, the extraordinary kindness and hospitality of King Sori, the friendship he formed with Ibrahima, and now the whole insane, marvelous coincidence of meeting him again halfway around the world twenty-six years later. Dr. Cox intends to purchase Ibrahima’s freedom and enable his return to Futa Jalon. What would be a suitable price?
Cox keeps making more and more generous offers. Foster keeps shaking his head. When Cox reaches $1,000, which he probably doesn’t have and is double the going rate, Foster says that he’s not selling Prince at any price. Why? Foster says that Prince will be more comfortable here on the plantation with his family than anywhere else, that freedom would not improve his happiness, and that it’s foolish to talk about returning slaves to Africa.
Foster does not find it particularly interesting or significant that Prince really is a prince. It’s far more important that he is an exemplary slave and a first-class driver. He sets a fine example to the other hands and commands their respect and obedience, which translates directly into high yields from the cotton fields, weather permitting, and the maximum number of dollars in Foster’s bank account.
Ibrahima’s downfall, as he and Dr. Cox now realize, is that he has made himself invaluable. If his character had been weaker and less shaped by the mosque, madrassa, palace, and military, if he had succumbed to the usual temptations of drunkenness, deception, shirking, insolence, breaking tools, or taking what was owed him in chickens because his life had been stolen, Thomas Foster would have almost certainly sold him after a brief negotiation.
In the span of twenty-four hours, Ibrahima has experienced his first moment of unbridled joy since the ambush, closely followed by bitter disappointment and a brutal reminder that his life is owned by another man. He withdraws again into steadfast fatalism, concentrating on his work and family, his position of dominance in the slave quarters, his small plot of vegetables. But things are different now. He has a friend among the white people, and he is famous. Everyone in the area, black and white, hears Dr. Cox’s story and accepts his confirmation that Prince comes from African royalty in the kingdom of Futa Jalon.
Cox stays in Washington and buys a house and eighteen acres. He establishes himself as a highly respected physician and continues his friendship with Ibrahima. The two men see each other often, with Cox providing companionship and small favors, such as a pen and paper, which enables Ibrahima to revive his literacy. He makes Ibrahima feel less isolated, forgotten, and severed from his past. For the rest of his life—he dies of an unknown sickness in 1816, nine years after his arrival in Natchez—Dr. Cox continues to offer Thomas Foster large sums of money for Ibrahima’s freedom, but they are always stubbornly refused.
Now that Ibrahima’s royal blood is an accepted fact in Adams County, the possibility arises that other white people might help him obtain his freedom, or send word to Futa J
alon, or publicize his story. A sympathetic newspaper editor has taken an interest, but Ibrahima chooses the path of passive endurance and stoic fatalism. He makes no effort to change his circumstances until he’s forced into an emotional crisis involving his daughter Susy and one of Thomas Foster’s deranged sons.
| 9 |
On the first day of Spring Pilgrimage, Regina Charboneau sat me down in her kitchen with a plate of biscuits. I was now a semipermanent resident in the upstairs rooms of her house, and she enjoyed telling people that she kept an Englishman in the attic. To understand the phenomenon of Pilgrimage, she said, I needed to understand its origins.
“So it was 1931, in the Great Depression,” she began. “Times were really hard in Natchez. The soil was exhausted, the boll weevil had ruined the cotton, and the railroads were taking over from the river, which had always been the lifeblood of the town. The old families were barely hanging on in their antebellum homes. Some of the ladies were selling eggs and vegetables to make ends meet. But they still had their maids, who were probably working for almost nothing, and they had kept up their gardens.”
She was interrupted by the piano-trill ringtone of her phone. Someone was freaking out about criticism of the Tableaux on Facebook. Regina listened for a minute or two. Then she said, “Do they want us to have small black children eating watermelon on the side of the stage again? What is wrong with people?”
She told the woman not to worry, it would all work out, and they would speak soon. She set down her phone. “Okay, where was I? Oh, yes, so there was a convention of Mississippi garden clubs in Natchez that year. It was scheduled for mid-March, when the azaleas are in bloom, but there was a late frost and it killed all the flowers. So now what are they going to do with these hundreds of people coming to Natchez? Katherine Miller, the president of the garden club, decided to tour them through some of the antebellum homes instead. I think the club had already been discussing it as a way to generate some income.”
The Deepest South of All Page 8