The Deepest South of All

by Richard Grant

  The two men hatched a scheme for Ibrahima to write a letter in Arabic to his relatives in Africa. Marschalk knows the US consul in Morocco and suggested forwarding the letter from there. But Ibrahima never wrote the letter, maybe because he was ashamed of the decline of his Arabic, or maybe because he was resigned to his fate. Only now in 1826, after seeing what happened to Susy, does Ibrahima decide to put pen to paper.

  Instead of a letter, which would challenge his rusty grammar, he inscribes the longest passage he can remember from the Koran. Marschalk puts it in an envelope and hands it personally to Thomas Reed, the US senator from Mississippi, with a cover letter attesting to the fine, dignified character of the “venerable old slave known as Prince.” The letter also contains a major error, or misunderstanding: “He claims to belong to the royal family of Morocco, and the object of his letter, as he states it to me, is to make inquiry after his relations and with the hope of joining them.”

  Senator Reed himself carries the letter to the State Department in Washington, DC. Then it crosses the Atlantic and reaches the desk of the US consul, Thomas Mullowny, in Tangier, Morocco, who has little else to do and finds it intriguing. He secures a meeting with the emperor of Morocco, who listens carefully and reads the Arabic inscription. It is impossible to determine the nationality of the man who wrote it, but he is clearly a Muslim, and perhaps a Moroccan. The emperor makes his decision. The enslaved man must be freed, and he will pay whatever it takes.

  Mullowny then writes a letter to Henry Clay, the secretary of state in Washington, DC, advising “most earnestly” that the slave known as Prince be sent to Tangier and “restored to his King and family.” On July 10, 1827, the chief clerk of the State Department takes Mullowny’s letter to the White House. President John Quincy Adams reads it and, mistakenly writing Georgia instead of Mississippi, instructs the State Department to write a letter to Andrew Marschalk, telling him to “ascertain the price for which he [Prince] could be purchased.”

  It’s unclear if Ibrahima initiated, encouraged, or went along with Marschalk’s belief that he is a Moroccan prince, but the misunderstanding works with almost miraculous power. The slave known as Prince, a part-time seller of corn and sweet potatoes at the Natchez market, now has Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams on his side, two of the most powerful men in the world.

  | 11 |

  On the evening of the Royal Ball of the Pilgrimage Garden Club, I put on a tuxedo and went with some of the ladies to see another performance of the Tableaux. The production was running more smoothly now, although the air-conditioning went out in the building, and a projector broke, and many of the performers made mistakes. Jeremy Houston’s replacement as Ibrahima just stood there with his prayer rug, failing to kneel and bow towards Mecca. I wondered if he was frozen with stage fright, or if praying to Mecca offended his Christian beliefs.

  I was surrounded in the audience by Pilgrimage Garden Club members, and I got out my notebook and started writing down what they were saying.

  “She’ll never make Court now her mama pitched such a fit.”

  “That sweet boy is gay as a maypole, bless his heart.”

  “Remember when they set a skunk loose during the Hunt Scene and the dogs went crazy?”

  “Remember when they fed Ex-Lax to the dogs?”

  “Not that those dogs need any help when it comes to pooping onstage.”

  “It’s an important part of being Queen, being able to glide across that stage in your crown and gown, like there’s roller skates under your hoopskirt, and avoid the dog poop at the same time.”

  “So they’ve done away with the amputees that Greg Iles put in. I think we all know the Civil War was bad.”

  “Is that the Bonnie Blue?”

  “Yeah, every bit as Confederate as the rebel flag, but no one ever waved it at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert.”

  “Aw, doesn’t the Queen look so beautiful?”

  “And look at the King, oh my Lord. Don’t you love a drunk King?”

  * * *

  After the performance, it was a short walk to Stanton Hall for the Royal Ball, an all-night party thrown for the King and Queen and paid for by their parents at an approximate cost of $25,000. Once again, the guests were all white, and the staff were all black, but this time I was expecting it. I would have been surprised to see a black guest or a white bartender. Once again, the grandes dames held court, and the younger women abased themselves in front of them, but now I knew many of these women as individuals.

  Kerry Dicks was there, and our conversation found its way to her great-aunts in the 1930s. “You could make a very twisted sitcom about those women and their maids,” she said. “Three of my great-aunts never married, and they all lived together at Airlie with their maids. You’ve seen how it is with Ruth Ellen and Lizzie, how they’re basically devoted to each other. Well, this was the opposite end of the spectrum. My great-aunts and their maids hated each other’s guts. They called each other ‘darkies’ and ‘white old bitches’ to their faces. My aunts later found voodoo dolls in the walls of the kitchen with hair tied around them.”

  Once again Regina was circulating through the crowd, following her antennae and instincts, picking up hints and information, dispensing reassurance and favors, gliding past some troublemakers and assuaging others, hardly bothering to talk to any men because they were irrelevant. The immense dining table in the immense dining room was heaped with Southern food in elegant tureens and serving dishes, and then demolished by hundreds of people in tuxedos and ball gowns. Alcohol flowed in prodigal quantities. People danced to an R&B band in a tent on the grounds, and a Southern breakfast was served after midnight. Chase Brakenridge, the King of the Pilgrimage Garden Club, was wobbling and wavering, stumbling and swaying, but still doggedly drinking and managing not to fall over.

  Around one in the morning, Regina’s son Luc called the only taxi driver in Natchez, a white man known as Pulley Bones. A group of us climbed into his taxi outside Stanton Hall. He drove us to the edge of the bluff, then made a steep descent on Silver Street to the Under-the-Hill Saloon, an old, battered, scarred establishment right on the edge of the Mississippi River. As we walked through the door, in our tuxedos and ball gowns, a group of musicians led by the tremendous Brint Anderson was playing a thick, swampy, gumbo-dripping version of Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie.”

  Everyone else was dressed in casual clothes, or biker apparel. There was a short man in a cowboy hat who was rumored to have screwed a pony. No one batted an eye at our group, or fifteen more people who came into the saloon from the Royal Ball. I had read enough local history to know that we were participating in a venerable Natchez tradition. The sons of the antebellum aristocracy, dressed up in their tailored finery, would often round out the evening by “going down the line” to the rough saloons, brothels, and gambling dens in Natchez Under-the-Hill.

  * * *

  Nineteenth-century travelers were almost invariably shocked by the squalid, depraved scenes they encountered in this part of Natchez, and the heaven-and-hell contrast to the life of colonnaded elegance up on the bluff. Captain J. E. Alexander published a typical description of Under-the-Hill in 1833:

  The lower town of Natchez has got a worse character than any place on the river; every house seemed to be a grog shop, and I saw ill-favored men and women looking from the windows. Here the most desperate characters congregate, particularly in the spring of the year, when the upcountry boatmen are returning home with their dollar bags from the New Orleans market. Dreadful riots occur—eyes are gouged out, noses and ears are bitten and torn off.

  New Orleans boasted about the sinfulness of its waterfront, and Vicksburg claimed to be even more wicked. Memphis and St. Louis were no slouches either when it came to vice and violence. But for the boatmen, steamboat captains, professional gamblers, and travelers who decided these matters, Natchez Under-the-Hill reigned supreme for nearly fifty years as the bloodiest, wildest, most debauched place on the entire Mississippi River.
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br />   Picture hundreds of boats bobbing in the river next to a wide muddy shelf of ground covered with shacks on stilts, and buildings on blocks. Rough-looking boatmen yelled elaborate curses at each other as they tried to maneuver their crafts in and out of the landing. The flatboats were broad rafts with cabins on top, typically loaded with sacks of grain, barrels of whiskey, live pigs and turkeys, wagons, horses, sometimes shipments of manacled slaves. The keelboats were bigger and more elongated, with crews of twenty-five men or more, all thirsting for booze, women, and hell-raising action after long, isolated days on the river.

  The culture among Mississippi River boatmen in those days was defiant, belligerent, individualistic, self-aggrandizing—an exaggeratedly masculine expression of the American frontier spirit. It is best recorded in the half-horse, half-alligator folk tales of Mike Fink, a legendary boatmen and brawler, and the descriptions penned by Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi.

  Rough-and-tumble fighting was the boatmen’s recreation, a sport transplanted to the American frontier by the Scots-Irish. The object was to gouge out your opponent’s eyeball with your thumb, tear off his ear with your teeth, rip off his genitals, strangle him to death—whatever it took to declare an unequivocal victory. Most opponents would quit after losing an eyeball, but some would just get mad and fight even harder.

  Bragging was their art form, delivered at roaring volume, accentuated by swinging arms, a clacking together of bootheels, and claims to the body parts of various wild animals. “I am a Mississippi snapping turtle; have bear’s claws, alligator teeth, and the devil’s tail; can whip any man, by G---d,” as one traveler recorded it. Contemporary observers were stunned by the virtuosic obscenities, but sadly, Victorian sensibilities prevented any of them from being accurately published. Mark Twain, who passed through Natchez many times as a cub steamboat captain and has a small guesthouse named after him on the riverfront today, left us a satirical account of verbal jousting between two boatmen:

  Whoo-oop! I’m the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpsemaker from the wilds of Arkansaw—Look at me! I’m the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the smallpox on my mother’s side!… I take nineteen alligators and a bar’l of whiskey for breakfast when I’m in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I’m ailing!… Blood’s my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen!—and lay low and hold your breath, for I’m bout to turn myself loose!

  Then the Corpsemaker’s opponent makes his declamation, cracking his heels together three times, and announcing himself as the “pet child of calamity”:

  Whoo-oop! Bow your neck and spread, for the kingdom of sorrow’s a-coming! Hold me down to the earth, for I feel my powers a-working!… I’m the man with the petrified heart and biler-iron bowels! The massacre of isolated communities is the pastime of my idle moments, the destruction of nationalities the serious business of my life!

  In addition to the flatboats and keelboats operated by these fierce characters, there were barges, skiffs, ships, and, from 1811, paddle-wheeled steamboats with filigreed balconies, chandeliers in the dining room, and champagne flowing at the bar, where sharp-dressed professional gamblers with diamond stickpins waited for their marks. George Devol, author of the shameless 1887 memoir Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi, was a card sharp, swindler, and three-card-monte man who went up and down the river fleecing cotton planters and other suckers. He rarely needed to draw his gun when they challenged him as a cheat because he delivered such a devastating headbutt.

  Once disembarked from your boat at Under-the-Hill, you had to make your way through a filthy, reeking alley crowded with boatmen, cutthroats, dirty children, dogs and pigs. Then you emerged into the teeming chaos of revelry at the bottom of Silver Street. Drunks of all kinds staggered and strutted about—Choctaws, slaves with day passes, free blacks, fugitives from justice, slumming aristocrats with lace cuffs, white stockings, ruffled shirts, and enslaved valets or “body servants.” Prostitutes of every skin tone were in the brothels, to suit every taste, with whispered claims of “special attributes” in the women imported from Paris and New Orleans.

  Topless women leaned out of windows and beckoned. Musicians sawed on fiddles. There were peep shows, dance halls, gambling dens, a racetrack nearby. On one occasion, a naked sailor charged after a shrieking “mulatress” claiming he’d been robbed. The racket of tinny pianos, drunken laughter, shouting, yelling, and squawking parrots was constant, and the saloons were open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The only thing cheaper than the body of a woman, they said, was the life of a man.

  When the boatmen started fighting, it sometimes escalated into the “dreadful riots” described above by Captain Alexander. Broken jaws, gouged eyes, and knife fights were everyday occurrences. Several buildings were torn down during one free-for-all. Murders were commonplace, with the bodies shoved into the river, and no one had ever seen a thing when the lone constable, or after 1838 the Natchez police, came down the hill to investigate.

  The toughest, meanest, baddest son of a bitch in Natchez Under-the-Hill was a bearded, bullying riverman named Big Jim Girty, also known as No-Ribs. So many men had tried to stab him to death without succeeding that people thought he had an unnatural rib cage. They described a solid body-casing made out of bone as thick a man’s skull, or thicker, with no gaps where a knife blade might penetrate. Big Jim’s woman, Marie Dufour, was a strawberry blonde who ran a brothel and could reputedly open a beer bottle with her teeth and shoot off a man’s nose from a hundred feet. She and Jim loved each other hard, “if only for their unchallenged strength and their cold scorn for the universe,” according to Harnett Kane in his 1957 book, Natchez on the Mississippi.

  One night a group of gamblers decided to test the prevailing wisdom about Big Jim’s rib cage. They rushed him in the bar at Marie Dufour’s place and stabbed him before he could reach for his knife or gun. This time he went down bleeding and gasping like a normal man. Marie shot down two of the assailants and stood over her lover with a smoking pistol. When she saw that he was going to die, she reloaded and shot herself through the head.

  Another big character who frequented Under-the-Hill was John Russell, a fiery-tempered steamboat captain. He loathed the professional gamblers who kept fleecing his passengers. On one occasion, heading upriver from Baton Rouge, he stopped at Natchez with a delegation of preachers on board. A young minister, carrying all the delegation’s money, succumbed to temptation and went into a gambling joint near the river’s edge. The professional gamblers stripped him of every last dollar.

  Captain Russell marched into the joint and demanded the money back. The gamblers laughed. He threatened to use his steamboat to pull the whole building into the river. They laughed again. The captain set his black crewmen to work, attaching ropes around the blocks at the base of the building. “All right, let her go!” he roared. The big wheels started churning, and the steamboat slowly pulled away. When the building started to crack and tear, the gamblers ran out cursing, and the young minister got his money back. Greg Iles put the story in his Tableaux, although in his version the whole building gets pulled into the river.

  * * *

  The upper-town folk would stage periodic clean-outs of Under-the-Hill, usually in response to some particularly bloody or shameless incident. Coming down Silver Street in a heavily armed mob, they would lynch people, burn shacks, run men into the river, or tie them up and set them adrift in canoes. But what really cleaned up Under-the-Hill was the passing of the frontier, and the changing course of the river. As it flowed past Natchez, the Mississippi began to scour away more and more of the muddy flats until great slabs of land calved away into the river. Silver Street is still there today, with a few restaurants and shops, and the one remaining saloon where the cutthroats and prostitutes used to drink, but now these buildings
are at the river’s edge.

  One legacy of the old days is that bars in Natchez have no legal closing time. If the staff and customers are willing, the bars can stay open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. This would be unthinkable elsewhere in Mississippi, where religious fundamentalism is powerful, dry counties and blue laws are commonplace, and the sale and distribution of alcohol is controlled by a grasping, punitive state agency. Natchez is nicknamed the Little Easy because it has more in common with New Orleans, the Big Easy, than the rest of Mississippi. After Hurricane Katrina, there was a migration of gay men from New Orleans to Natchez because you could buy a fabulous old house for not much money, and because Natchez has always been gay-friendly.

  Perhaps the best example of the town’s laissez-faire spirit is the long career of Nellie Jackson, an African American woman who ran a brothel in the middle of Natchez for sixty years, until 1990, without any attempt to disguise or conceal it. The local bars used to sell T-shirts proclaiming I GOT IT AT NELLIE’S, and FOLLOW ME TO NELLIE’S with a set of footprints.

  At the annual Natchez literary-cinema celebration, I went to see the first screening of a documentary entitled Mississippi Madam: The Life of Nellie Jackson. At least 2,000 people were in the convention center, with dozens standing in the aisles, and dozens more crammed against the back wall. From the size of the crowd, the affectionate reminiscing about Miss Nellie before the film, and the opening few minutes, it became obvious that Natchez had not only tolerated this madam, but venerated her as a local treasure.