The Deepest South of All

by Richard Grant

  I had minimal interest in architecture, antiques, china, silverware, and other decorative arts of the antebellum South, which were a big part of Pilgrimage. What fascinated me were the costumed people who lived in these old museums, the stories they told, the things they omitted, the way they were so consumed by the past that the present seemed like an afterthought. Pilgrimage for me was peculiar, intriguing, often racially insensitive, largely in denial about slavery, although finally starting to grapple with it, much like the old town itself. Each home was a new voyeuristic adventure because you never knew what to expect.

  Airlie, a genteel planter’s cottage, was built on a farm outside Natchez in 1790. Now it was surrounded by a poor black neighborhood of old cars, loose dogs, peeling paint, men clustered on street corners, others sitting by themselves on front porches. They raised their hands in greeting as I drove past them and turned through the gates of Airlie. Once again, an elderly black man on a lawn chair showed me where to park. Walking back towards the house, I stopped to talk to him. His name was Charles and he had a quiet, thoughtful, still quality. He wore thick glasses, a camouflage hunting cap, and the tusk of a wild hog on a beaded necklace. I asked him if he’d killed the hog.

  “No,” he said. “I let other people kill the hogs. They eat every part of them, including the testicles. I don’t eat the testicles. I don’t want anybody eating on mine, so I won’t eat on anybody’s. I eat the hams, ribs, and shoulders. I enjoy them. Once you start eating testicles, it’s like you’ve gone cannibalistic. I was reading about cannibals. They eat the heart and the eyeballs, so as to increase their prowess as a hunter, but I haven’t seen where any of them eat testicles, so I don’t know.”

  I said, “I had Rocky Mountain oysters once, which are fried cattle testicles. Something just feels wrong about chewing them up in your mouth.”

  “Mmmm-hmmm, that’s right. Well, I’m pleased to meet you, and you can just go on up the house now.” Then he sat back down in his lawn chair and picked up his ancient National Geographic magazine, as chickens walked about, and insects scratched their legs together in song, and the sun heated up the heavy humid air, and the sweat soaked through my shirt. I walked up to the house and reflected that it was only March.

  Airlie, a long low cottage with many windows and doors for ventilation, was used as a hospital during the federal occupation of Natchez in the Civil War. Now it belonged to Katie Freiberger, a lawyer and PGC stalwart, who was standing on the front porch in a hoopskirt. “It’s my family home,” she said. “So you’re going to see my big tacky TV and my kitchen sink.”

  In the front parlor, a young, hoopskirted woman, very pretty and badly hungover, as she later disclosed, was telling a group of tourists about some gold-colored antique chairs. They had belonged to the notorious Katherine Lintot Minor, also known as the Yellow Duchess. Originally from Pennsylvania, like so many of the slaveholding Natchez elite, she was a haughty commanding blonde who wanted everything in her world to match the color of her hair. She only wore yellow and gold, and that included the feathers in her hats and reputedly her undergarments.

  She was married to Stephen Minor, the last governor of Natchez under Spanish rule, and they lived in gilded splendor at a vast mansion called Concord, where only the slave quarters still remain. The drawing room had yellow walls and yellow carpets, with gold mirrors and cornices, and gold sofas and chairs. She rode around Natchez in a golden carriage with a golden interior, drawn by four claybank horses, which were the nearest thing she could find to golden horses. As the young woman now explained, the Yellow Duchess also insisted that her house slaves and carriage drivers be yellowish-skinned mulattoes, so they matched the rest of the accoutrements.

  When the tourists left, I introduced myself to the young woman and wrote down her name as Kerry Dix. She was forced to correct me: “No. Dicks, like the appendages.” She was having a tough morning. “I woke up with a god-awful hangover, and I lost my pantalets.” These are the ruffled leggings worn under a hoopskirt—essential garb when receiving because a lady never shows her ankles.

  Kerry, who sometimes introduced herself as Rose, depending on her mood and the situation, was working part-time as a freelance archaeologist, a “shovel bum,” and lately she had been digging in Italy and New Mexico. She was supposed to be digging in Tennessee right now, but the job had fallen through, so here she was back in Natchez again, going to cocktail parties and receiving in a hoopskirt, as if the town had refused to release her from its clutches. The homeowners paid her a small sum—it varied from house to house—but she wasn’t doing it for the money.

  She started receiving at the age of six. “I would stand by a ladies’ fainting couch, and I had a music box with golden honey hives and tiny bees. They let me tell about the music box, and then I would pretend to swoon and faint on the couch. The tourists ate it up. Then I graduated to a pair of yellow slippers that belonged to the Yellow Duchess. I was in Tableaux, the Court. I’ve got my problems with it—this whole town is like a Southern Twin Peaks—but you get indoctrinated so young. I played hide-and-seek at Stanton Hall when I was a kid. I thought seventeen-foot ceilings were normal.”

  Her family’s financial fortunes had dwindled away over the generations, but they had impeccably aristocratic Natchez blood, and that was enough to preserve their social status. Kerry was a direct descendant of David Hunt, who was known as King David because he owned twenty-five plantations and 1,700 slaves. She was also descended from the Surgets, another extremely prominent old family. “I must be related to fifty houses in Natchez,” she said. “It’s a miracle that I don’t have webbed feet and eyeballs on the side of my head because all the old families are so inbred. It was quite deliberate. They married off their first cousins to each other, to keep the money and the homes in the family.”

  Given the depths of her Natchez roots, I found it odd that Kerry didn’t have a Southern accent. Instead, she sounded vaguely like Katharine Hepburn and was sometimes mistaken for an Australian. “I promise you it’s not deliberate,” she said. “It’s like I have a speech impediment. I can’t even fake a decent Southern accent, even though I’ve been surrounded by them all my life.”

  “How does it feel to be descended from so many slave owners?” I asked.

  “Hmm. I’m different from most people here, who are always trying to make excuses for it, or explain it away, or say it wasn’t that bad. If I hear one more person say that the Irish had it hard, too! I assume my ancestors were either horrific bastards or somewhat horrific bastards, operating in an absolutely horrific system, and I avoid talking about slavery at cocktail parties because I want to be invited back.”

  When the tour ended, I stayed on for lunch at Katie Freiberger’s invitation, and for the next hour I sat and listened as the women told Pilgrimage stories and gossiped about the dead, and the black maid prepared the food in the kitchen. Much was said about Katherine Miller, the founder of Pilgrimage and the great-aunt of Elodie Pritchartt, one of the lunch guests. Katherine’s husband Balfour was a notorious womanizer, and Elodie told us about the time Katherine found him in flagrante with one of the maids. “Get that Negress out of my antique bed,” she thundered, and that was classic Katherine, to reference the antiquity of the furniture at such a moment.

  The women talked about hoopskirts, how uncomfortable they were, how dogs liked to get under there, and how a certain bold young woman had stashed a crouching boyfriend under her hoopskirt while receiving. When she started making “feminine noises,” she told the tourists there was a ghost in the house, and apparently they fell for it. They talked about the word receive, and one woman mocked it unmercifully, going into exaggerated Southern-belle mode to satirize its pretentiousness and unwitting sexual connotation. It was easy enough for outsiders to make fun of Pilgrimage, but the real experts at it were the insiders.

  * * *

  The most outrageous tour home in Natchez was Choctaw Hall, a colossal downtown mansion recently purchased and extensively redecorated by a
gay couple from Arkansas, David Garner and Lee Glover. David was the older one with the money. A tiny man with an immaculately trimmed white mustache, he had two wings of white hair that he swept up together and hair-sprayed into a kind of pompadour. He liked to pour bourbon on his ice cream and make colorful remarks in a slightly hurried, breathy drawl: “The South couldn’t function without rouge,” “I jumped on it like a chicken on a june bug.” Referring to a diminutive ancestor, he said, “On a sultry Southern summer day, he could stand in the shade of great-grandmother’s bosom.”

  Lee was tall, slim, and handsome, although he found himself wearing more makeup these days than he used to. He had dark hair and a bushy mustache, and when I arrived at Choctaw Hall, he was wearing a ruffled tuxedo shirt with a high collar and no tie, a gold bracelet on his wrist, and the gayest pair of black suede loafers I had ever seen. David liked to stir up trouble and be outrageous. Lee was the sweet, calm, rational one; he worked in a nursing home and helped with the downstairs bed-and-breakfast business at Choctaw. Officially, he and David were “business associates.”

  David was an interior decorator and event planner who had restored and run the antebellum Marlsgate Plantation outside Little Rock. The same theme of lavish period-appropriate excess had been applied to the interiors at Choctaw Hall: crystal chandeliers, a piano made in London in 1830, candelabras, red velvet curtains from Paris, massive gilded mirrors, rococo porcelain figurines. The dining room table was permanently set with a stunning display of antique china, stemware, and silver.

  David pointed to an oil portrait of his beloved grandmother. “She was the quintessential Southern grande dame, and ninety-three when that was painted. She told me, ‘I’m going to give you Cornelius in my will.’ Cornelius was her servant. I said, ‘You can’t do that. There was a war. Slavery is over.’ She said, ‘Nonsense, I’m giving you Cornelius.’ Don’t you love it?”

  Before I could say, “Not really,” he started denouncing the new Tableaux, “It was so gorgeous when I started coming here in the 1980s. They sang ‘Dixie.’ It was uplifting. Now they’ve taken out ‘Dixie’ and they’re leaning towards this blackism. It’s disgusting. History is history. I’m here to preserve it, not erase it.”

  A magnificent elliptical staircase led up through the four stories of the mansion, and we climbed it to the next floor. David talked about furniture that had belonged to Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and showed me an ancient jeweled sword. “Many a slop jar has been sold for a soup tureen, but this is the real thing. It puts antique dealers in a quiver. They just lose all control. We have a few more little trinkets to show. The drapes are Scalamandré, by the way. The best.”

  A notable feature of David’s interior decoration was the use of Venetian blackamoor sculptures, depicting African males in decorative servile poses, often with their torsos bared. One was holding up a table. “You couldn’t buy a Negro after the War, but you could buy a miniature,” David quipped. “We’re not politically correct,” he added redundantly.

  Then he showed me a first-edition of Jefferson Davis’s Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, which was laid out next to an antique Bible in a kind of shrine. “You can tell we love the Confederacy. Our vice president of the Confederate States was Alexander Stephens. He was about my size, a miniature little guy.” On the wall was a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the former slave trader and Confederate general who became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

  “What happens when you get black tourists through here?” I asked.

  “We don’t generally tell them who that is,” said Lee.

  “And of course they have no idea,” added David.

  I had met my first gay neo-Confederates, and they were not the only ones in Natchez.

  I. Not all Natchez stories are fact-checkable, but Janice Skipper confirmed this one by telephone, adding that Ruth Ellen had given her a “warm, warm welcome,” and that it had been a positive experience. “It made me joyful that my people have come so far.”

  | 10 |

  Thomas Foster, greatly helped by Ibrahima’s management, has ascended into a new income bracket. His plantation holdings, which he names Foster Fields, reach 1,785 acres, and he now owns more than a hundred slaves. He has built a fine two-story house and furnished it with imported mahogany and rosewood furniture.

  He is considered prosperous, but well below the aristocratic “nabob” elite, whose members own multiple plantations and often banks and railroads too, whose butlers or “body servants” bring them mint juleps in silver cups before a leisurely breakfast on the gallery. Foster does not go on shopping trips to Paris or send his sons to Harvard or stock his library with thousands of volumes. Foster gets all the reading he wants from the Bible and agricultural journals, and his wife Sarah remains illiterate. Their thoughts are dominated by money, cotton, slaves, religion, and their thirteen children, who set out into adulthood with all the advantages of education, social status, and financial security that Thomas and Sarah lacked when they were young.

  Their youngest daughter Caroline receives a full set of house slaves as a wedding gift from her doting parents. Another daughter gets two farms. Their son Levi moves to Louisiana, becomes a rich planter, and serves in the state legislature. James, “one of the finest-looking men in the country,” according to an acquaintance, returns from visiting Levi in 1833 with a gorgeous fifteen-year-old Louisiana bride.

  The following year, carrying his whip as planters do, James invites his wife to take a walk with him and suddenly starts whipping her about an alleged infidelity. He beats her and then stomps her to death. Ibrahima’s family is instructed to dress the body and bury it in the Foster family graveyard. James is tried for murder in Natchez. Freed on a technicality, he is then seized by a lynch mob outside the courthouse. Stripped, whipped, tarred, feathered, partially scalped, and very nearly hung, he escapes with his life and is never heard from again.

  The Fosters’ daughter Cassandra marries a man who, in her words, “contracted those habits of excessive intemperance and debauchery” and spends days lying in bed with “lewd and dissolute” women. But none of their children put Thomas and Sarah Foster through more hell than Thomas Jr. By the age of twenty-five, he owns two plantations and is a notorious drunkard and gambler with a highly unstable temperament. All the racial and sexual tensions of Southern slave society seem to bubble up and corrode his youthful brain.

  In 1820 he marries Susan Carson, the thirteen- or fourteen-year-old daughter of the Reverend James Carson, recently arrived with his family from New York. Three years later with two children born, Susan finds Thomas Jr. in bed with his slave Susy, who is almost certainly the daughter of Ibrahima and Isabella.

  After an initial show of guilt and repentance, followed by a crazed episode in which he chases his wife out of the house with a sword and threatens to kill her, Thomas Jr. openly and brazenly conducts an affair with Susy, ignoring the admonitions of his parents, and the horrified disgust of his teenage wife. This is more than a young rake slaking his lust in the slave quarters. Thomas Jr. throws parties for Susy and showers her with gifts, including his wife Susan’s clothes. In Susan’s words, he treats the “base wretch” Susy “with all the kindness and generosity of a wife.”

  Thomas Jr. keeps promising to reform, but he cannot stay away from Susy. She becomes more important to him than his wife and children, his parents and siblings, and his good name in society. Thomas Jr. is unquestionably in love with Susy, but we have no way of knowing her feelings about him. Susan mentions her sneaking out of the slave quarters to meet Thomas Jr. one night, which suggests that she is willing, but certainly doesn’t prove it, because she has no right of sexual refusal as his slave. It’s possible that she is using her agency to stay out of the cotton fields, and it’s not inconceivable that she is attracted to him or flattered by his obsession with her. Or she might be a helpless victim following orders.

  The situation at Foster Fields becomes so fraught and overheated that Thoma
s Senior sends Susan away to Natchez to stay with her father. When she returns to pack up some more clothes, Thomas Jr. stops her from taking a bonnet because he thinks Susy might like it. Then he shoves his wife out of the room and tells her that he wants nothing more to do with her. He just wants the children.

  “What do you want with them?” she asks.

  “To cut their throats,” he replies.

  The following day, feeling remorseful and unwell, Thomas Jr. changes his mind. He promises to sell Susy if Susan will come back to him. A bill of sale is drawn up at his bedside, passing Susy’s ownership to Thomas Senior, who plans to sell her far away. Two days later, heartbroken over Susy, Thomas Jr. changes his mind again and tries to wrest the bill of sale from his father. Thomas Sr. refuses to let him have it and tells his wayward son that Susy will be placed in irons and removed from the county.

  Thomas Jr. responds to this by going on a three-day drinking bender. Then he comes raging through the house with a knife, vowing to kill his family members if Susy is sold away. They manage to calm him down, and his father gives him an ultimatum: go home to your wife and children, or go off with your slave wench and say goodbye to your good name forever.

  On Christmas Day of 1826, Thomas Foster Jr. reaches his decision. He goes off with Susy and the rest of his slaves to one of his plantations in Warren County. He never sees his white wife or children again. Nor do Ibrahima or Isabella ever see their daughter Susy again. The whole saga has been a horrible torment for them because of their complete powerlessness to affect the outcome. They watch their daughter Susy disappear into the distance as the owned property and sexual obsession of an unstable, alcoholic gambler. These wretched, shaming events in 1826 have a motivating effect on Ibrahima, and he decides to make one last desperate, long-shot attempt to gain his freedom and return to Africa.

  He is sixty-four years old. On the plantation, he is no longer required to work as hard, and Foster has granted him more free time. One of his new, lighter responsibilities is to sell vegetables at the brick market house in Natchez, where he has become well acquainted with a local newspaper editor named Andrew Marschalk, a big, loud, talkative, energetic man with a swelling gut and voluminous chins. A few years before, Ibrahima went to Marschalk’s office and saw Arabic script in a printer’s grammar. Humbly requesting permission to copy it, he produced a perfect facsimile with pen and ink. Marschalk, who publishes strident defenses of slavery to keep his subscribers happy, but secretly detests it, became interested in Ibrahima’s case.