Ping. Ping. Ping-ping. Texts were coming in, but Regina ignored them. “So the ladies rushed around with their maids, moving furniture to cover holes in the floor, and rehanging paintings to hide stains on the wallpaper, and that sort of thing. A lot of the homes were in serious disrepair because people couldn’t afford to maintain them. One reason why they still had all the original antebellum furniture, and silver, and china, and drapes, and all the rest of it, was because they couldn’t afford to buy any new stuff. So the visitors arrive, and the ladies show them around their homes and talk about their family histories and point out things that might be of interest, and to everyone’s surprise, the visitors absolutely love it. They rave about it.”
The next year, Katherine Miller, a demanding, dramatic, brilliant, exasperating, motor-mouthed matriarch who was impossible to ignore, sent out invitations all over the country for a “pilgrimage of houses” in Natchez, and she persuaded the owners of twenty-six antebellum homes to “receive guests” for an admission fee. To enhance the theme of Old South nostalgia, the ladies dressed up in hoopskirts, and maids were outfitted like mammies. Black men, some of them wearing liveried uniforms retrieved from attics, were required to bow to the visitors as they entered the homes, like antebellum butlers, and small black children were hired for a few coins to fan the tourists and polish the mud off their shoes as they left the grounds.
Despite widespread skepticism among the local businessmen, it was an overwhelming success. Visitors from thirty-seven states found their way down the long, slow country roads to Natchez, Mississippi, and they spent $50,000 that the town badly needed. A new industry was born. The redoubtable ladies of the garden club had saved the town.
“They were extremely savvy when it came to marketing,” said Regina. “They traveled all over the country talking up Pilgrimage. There was a promotional film, and a national advertising campaign. They got a ton of media coverage. They got perfumes and china patterns and wallpaper designs named after Natchez. Eleanor Roosevelt came to Pilgrimage, and Douglas MacArthur. After Gone with the Wind came out in 1939, it got even bigger. In the 1940s and 1950s, we were getting tens of thousands of visitors. Now we’re down on those numbers by about seventy percent. Other Southern towns with antebellum homes copied our idea. Times have changed. But Pilgrimage hasn’t, and that’s something I’m working on.”
I asked Regina what she was going to do at Twin Oaks, which was coming “on tour” in a few days.
“A friend of mine is wearing a nun’s habit to play Cornelia Connolly, who lived in this house before she went off to a convent. I’ll serve cocktails and do a quick cooking class on how to make biscuits. I think what people really want nowadays is to eat, drink, and socialize in these old homes, and hospitality is what we’re really good at. I may not even wear a hoopskirt. Oh, God, even saying that, I can hear Katherine Miller climbing out of her grave to come and shoot me.”
Pilgrimage had gone through some changes over the decades. African Americans had quit portraying servile mammies, butlers, and pickaninnies. The drinking while receiving was greatly reduced, although some of the ladies and docents still enjoyed a covert cocktail known as a Mr. Clean. “It looks like a glass of ice water, but it’s straight vodka with lemon juice,” said Regina. “Very refreshing, apparently.”
There was also less embellishing and inventing than there used to be, partly because visitors were now in the dreary habit of checking things on their phones. Layne Taylor had told us a story about the actor Kevin Kline coming to Natchez for the fiftieth anniversary of Gone with the Wind. Layne took him to Monteigne, a stunning Italianate mansion on twenty-three acres. The owner, Mary Louise Shields, a steel magnolia who lived to be 109, showed Kevin Kline a quilt and said, “Now this belonged to Scarlett O’Hara.”
Layne is no stickler for factual accuracy, but this was too much for him. He said, “Honey, she’s a fictional character.”
Miss Mary Louise said, “We do believe that to be true.”
Layne lost his temper. “She’s from a fucking movie!”
She said, “Honey, if you’re not enjoying the tour, why don’t you step off the back porch?”
* * *
My first experience of Pilgrimage took place at Linden, which has been occupied by the Conner-Feltus family since 1849. This longevity of ownership is unusual. Most of the antebellum tour homes have changed hands several times since the Civil War, and an increasing number are now owned by out-of-towners keeping the local tradition alive. Linden is just a short drive from downtown, but its grounds are so serene that it felt like a trip out into the country. At the end of a gravel driveway, an old black man took my ticket, showed me where to park, and rumbled a welcome from somewhere deep in his rib cage.
The house has a long colonnaded front gallery, partially shaded by big trees with hanging beards of Spanish moss. A matching gallery is on the second story, with four columns rising up to support the portico. It struck me as a classic example of the grace and beauty achieved by antebellum architects and enabled by chattel slavery—a subject that was not mentioned at any point during the tour.
At the front doorway, I was received with tremendous good cheer by Mrs. Jeanette Feltus, who was known as Miss Jeanette at Linden and didn’t mind telling me and everyone else that she was eighty-four. She was wearing a green hoopskirt with a white blouse, and a long silk scarf with the two ends hanging down like a bishop’s stole. The twelve other visitors were all white and nearly all Southern women eligible for Social Security. One of them, a small, determined-looking woman from New Orleans, wore a purple T-shirt that announced in bold capitals WORLD’S HOTTEST GRANDMA.
Miss Jeanette gave us a brief history of the house and directed our attention to the decorative work around the front door, which has a fanlight window and its own set of four columns. “The doorway of Linden was copied for Tara, the fictional home in Gone with the Wind. The fanlight is Federal, as you can see.” She was referring to the Federal style of architecture, which was popular all over the country from 1790 to 1830.
Then we trooped inside, where three elderly hoopskirted women were receiving in three different rooms, all decorated exclusively with antebellum furnishings. “I’m Sybil,” said one of the ladies with a sweet, gracious smile. “I’m a Natchez antique too.” Could there be a deeper South? I wondered, taking in the hospitality and eccentricity, the sweetness and conviviality, the glorification of the antebellum past with the uncomfortable detail of slavery neatly snipped out and put away in a box.
Sybil directed our attention to a courting couch with a convex mirror that allowed the chaperone to “check on things,” without interfering too closely, and an antique clear-glass fly-catcher that drowned the flies in water. “Some preferred a darker glass so you wouldn’t have to watch the demise of the fly,” she said, then pointed to a receptacle of some kind. “Southern ladies would never show their ankles, but they would chew tobacco. That’s a lady’s spittoon.” Southern ladies, I thought to myself, had devised so many strategies to obscure the glaring fact that their men were screwing the slave women.
In the next room, we were greeted by a woman with an auburn bouffant. She was wearing a white hoopskirt with a salmon-pink blouse and a white shawl. In the slightly blurred photograph that I took of her, she looks like an antebellum ghost who has just floated down the staircase. She spoke with a deep, rich, raspy voice. She swiveled back and forth with her arms akimbo, gesturing to various paintings, items of furniture, and other artifacts—a Percy Faith album called Gone with the Wind with a photograph of Linden on the cover, a card table “attributed to” the famous furniture maker Samuel McIntire.
“We play bridge in this room, but do you think Miss Jeanette lets us play on this table?” She searched our eyes for an answer, then delivered the punch line: “No, she drags out the Walmart table.” I wondered how long she had been telling this joke, and how many times she would tell it this year during Spring and Fall Pilgrimages. Regina said that some of the ladies had b
een using the same lines for fifty years and might have inherited them from their mothers.
We moved on through the immaculate museum of Miss Jeanette’s bedroom, where a young blond woman told us all about the four-poster bed with its embroidered curtains. In the next bedroom, an earnest, lisping gay man in a bright blue sports coat described the architecture and the bed. By far the most exciting attraction for our group was a life-size cardboard cutout of Clark Gable as Rhett Butler.
“Ain’t he fine?” one of them said. Another batted her eyes at him and said, “Ooh, let me kiss those sweet lips.” A third said, “Oh, Rhett!”—drawing out the name in her breathiest bedroom voice. The World’s Hottest Grandma gave him a big kiss on his cardboard lips, provoking shrieks of laughter, and requests to do it again so the others could record it on their phones.
Miss Jeanette poked her head through a door. “Would y’all like some coffee? I don’t have any liquor out yet. Oh, the first day of Pilgrimage is always bedlam.” A tour bus had just arrived, and it was full of women who urgently needed a bathroom. “Honey, cross your legs, we’ll get you in as soon as we can,” Miss Jeanette called out to one of them. Then she dispatched a black maid to clean the upstairs bathrooms and told her to hurry.
When the tour was over, I talked for a few minutes with Miss Jeanette on the front gallery. She had been receiving at Linden for sixty years, having married into the family, and she had read as much as she could about antiques and architecture to make sure she had her facts straight. “Was the doorway really copied for Tara?” I asked.
“Look it up and see for yourself. The resemblance is unmistakable.”
Gesturing to the outbuildings, I asked if slaves had lived there.
“Why, yes, we had servants of course.” She put on a half smile that was like armored steel. “You couldn’t possibly run a big house like this without servants.”
* * *
Regina described Linden as the classic old-school Pilgrimage tour, and she suggested that I drive out to Elgin, the home of Ruth Ellen Calhoun, to see a slightly different approach. “You hear a lot of nonsense about Southern ladies around here, but Ruth Ellen is the real thing,” Regina said. “When I was growing up, I wanted to be Ruth Ellen so badly.”
Elgin is seven miles south of Natchez, and to get there, I drove down Highway 61 to Mammy’s Cupboard, the most startling work of local architecture. It’s a twenty-eight-foot-high statue of a black woman dressed like Aunt Jemima, smiling and holding a serving tray. She has horseshoes for earrings, and a door opens through the front of her skirt into a restaurant. Built in 1940, the establishment has come in for some criticism over the years, as you might expect. Many local African Americans find it extremely offensive, although others are regular customers, putting aside the fraught racial symbolism because the homemade pies are so good.
The owners of Mammy’s Cupboard responded to the criticism by the curious stratagem of repainting Mammy’s face. They lightened her skin tone a few shades to a yellowish color. I struggled with the logic. Why would a lighter-skinned mammy with a door through her skirt be construed as less controversial? If anything, didn’t lighter skin amplify the symbolism of slaveholder rape? I bought a postcard there, featuring the dark-skinned original mammy, and drove back across the highway towards Elgin.
A long, winding road led to a gravel driveway and two elderly black men sitting on folding chairs and showing visitors where to park. Half a dozen cars were there, and a tour bus was leaving. It was a warm, drowsy afternoon full of birdsong. The house was obscured behind trees, and as I walked up the driveway, it slowly and gradually came into view. Someone in the 1840s had quipped that Elgin looked like the “amen at the end of a long prayer.”
The two-story plantation house had clean simple lines, and matching galleries above and below. Standing by the front door with a group of visitors was a tall woman in her eighties wearing a green satin dress with a hoopskirt. A sense of grace, elegance, intelligence, warmth, and decency radiated calmly from her person. When I told Ruth Ellen that I was a friend of Regina’s, she exclaimed, “Oh, Regina is wonderful, the best president we’ve ever had. I love all the changes she’s making. We simply can’t go on pretending that slavery never happened, or that it wasn’t awful.”
Ruth Ellen talked openly about slaves in her tour, although she didn’t dwell on it. Her main focus was the diary of Elgin’s original owner, Dr. Jenkins, who came to Mississippi from Pennsylvania in 1835, married into a cotton-slave fortune, and established himself as a planter, doctor, and nationally renowned horticulturalist. Using his diary entries, Ruth Ellen took us through the history of the house until 1855, when Dr. Jenkins, his wife, and a large number of their slaves died in a yellow fever epidemic. The dreaded disease used to ravage Natchez regularly.
Ruth Ellen carried on into the Civil War, when three federal soldiers stole all the house’s silver and were court-martialed for it. Then she skipped forward to 2012, when an African American woman named Janice Skipper, a lawyer from Washington, DC, showed up at Elgin one day and said, “My people were here.” Ruth Ellen took Janice down to the old slave cemetery, where they found the grave of her great-grandmother. “She knelt down and rubbed the dirt,” said Ruth Ellen. “It was a very emotional moment for her.”I
“Did your ancestors enslave her ancestors?” I asked.
“No. My ancestors owned slaves, but I’m not a Jenkins descendant. My husband and I bought Elgin in 1975. He was a pediatrician.”
The old house contained many old things, but it wasn’t a rigorous antebellum time capsule like some. Ruth Ellen showed us some of the more interesting pieces, then she turned the tour over to Lizzie, her black maid, who stood waiting in one of the bedrooms in white pants and a white shirt. “I’ve been working for the Calhouns for fifty years,” she said. She didn’t look old enough for that to be true, as I pointed out. “I’m a health nut,” she said. “I eat fish, vegetables, and fruit. That’s it. And I exercise every day.”
She went into her presentation about the furniture and the old photographs and the jib windows, which you could open and step through onto the gallery. She shared some observations on raising the Calhouns’ children, and the importance of strictness. “I love those kids like my own, but love has an ugly side too. That’s what I would tell them. ‘If you break the rules, my ugly side will come out. Do you want that?’ ”
Lizzie managed the bed-and-breakfast in the old slave quarters behind the big house. An impressive building in its own right, it had two stories, thick columns, and an upstairs gallery. The richest planters would often house their “servants” in handsome buildings, mainly as a way to advertise their wealth. Lizzie also managed three rental properties that Ruth Ellen owned downtown, and she was a confidante, a kind of family member, and an inseparable companion. The two women were completely dependent on each other, and inevitably they sometimes got on each other’s nerves.
“After fifty years, you know when to shut up and know when to run,” said Lizzie. “Sometimes I tell her, ‘You want to fight, or you want me to do this work? I’m too old to do both.’ ”
Ruth Ellen laughed. “We are getting old, aren’t we, Lizzie?”
“Mrs. Calhoun, do you remember when birds attacked the house that time? Wasn’t that crazy?”
After fifty years of being woven so closely into each other’s lives, Lizzie didn’t feel comfortable calling her employer Ruth Ellen. She would always be Mrs. Calhoun.
* * *
Spring Pilgrimage was still the busiest, most lucrative time of year for the garden clubs, but the ladies yearned for the old glory days. Some could remember having hundreds of visitors packed into their homes and praying that the old floorboards wouldn’t buckle and splinter under the weight. They had accepted a certain amount of pilfering as inevitable and minimized it by tying fishing line around the silverware, and other techniques still in use today.
“Oh, it was marvelous,” said Miss Bettye Jenkins, in a resplendent yellow hoopski
rt dress in the spectacular hallway of her home, Hawthorne. “It felt like the whole world was coming to Natchez.” Now the ladies felt lucky to get eighty visitors in a day, and some were reporting a dismal twelve. One poor woman and her maid had spent weeks cleaning, polishing, rearranging furniture, hiring docents, preparing food and drinks, and then received only nine visitors on the first day.
Each home toured its visitors in a different way, reflecting the personality of its owner. At the Governor Holmes House, the emphasis was on costumed portrayals of historical characters. In the courtyard, I was pressured into dancing a jig with Layne Taylor as the gayest, flirtiest Andrew Jackson imaginable. Jackson moved to Natchez in 1789, traded in slaves and other commodities, and married the one true love of his life here.
At Elms Court, two elderly sisters took me deep into their family history. Twenty years ago, they never mentioned slavery in their tour. Now they addressed it openly, even though they found it difficult and agonized over one particularly cruel slave owner in their lineage. At Green Leaves, where enslaved Matilda with her high cheekbones and Mexican war stories ran away from George Koontz, and a sign now carries his runaway slave advertisement,I met some descendants of Mr. Koontz’s. The family has been living in the house ever since and has accumulated a vast collection of memorabilia, including hundreds of antique dolls, a sword from the Battle of Waterloo with a Civil War bullet hole through its blade, and a moldering seventy-year-old wedding cake under a glass dome.
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