The Deepest South of All

by Richard Grant

  Former mayors, sheriffs, police chiefs, and priests talked on camera with obvious affection about a woman who ran an illegal and supposedly immoral business right under their noses for sixty years. Tony Byrne, who was mayor of Natchez from 1968 to 1988, said, “I just let her rock along. Then we became friends, basically.”

  David Armstrong, who succeeded Tony Byrne as mayor, heard a knock at his door one day in mid-December, soon after he had taken office. His administrative assistant came in and said, “Nellie Jackson’s here.” He was stunned, but asked her to come into his office. Miss Nellie was in a wheelchair, being pushed by two of her “girls,” as they were always known. She had a white poodle in one hand, and a fifth of Jack Daniel’s in the other.

  She said, “I’m here to present you with your Christmas fifth of Jack Daniel’s whiskey to not close Nellie’s down.”

  Armstrong had never heard of this long-standing tradition at the mayor’s office, but it didn’t even occur to him to object. “Miss Nellie, I can assure you, as long as I’m mayor, you will not be closed down.”

  The chief of police also got a bottle of whiskey or brandy at Christmas, and she baked a cake every year for the sheriff’s office.

  No doubt these gestures helped, as did her financial generosity with the Catholic church and a local home for abused children. But her main protection, according to the film, was that so many rich, powerful married men frequented her establishment, and she was rumored to have all their names in a black book. So potent was the rumor that it didn’t even matter if the black book existed or not.

  She was born into dire rural poverty in the now-defunct community of Possum Corner, Mississippi, in 1902. Her first marriage was probably strategic. It enabled her to move to the bright lights of Natchez in 1930, but soon led to divorce and an income quandary. Rather than supporting herself as a housekeeper, laundress, or nanny, which were the main forms of employment available to black women at the time, she went down to the small red-light district that still remained Under-the-Hill. After a few years—maybe prostituting herself, maybe running a brothel, and possibly bootlegging too—she was able to come up the hill and purchase an ordinary-looking family house at 416 North Rankin Street, two blocks away from where Regina Charboneau and her eight siblings grew up in a churchgoing Catholic family.

  The house had red-and-white-striped awnings and a twin-gabled roof. Customers would come in through the back door into the kitchen, then into the dining room, which had a jukebox and a dining table, and “girls” parading through at regular intervals. “Ooh man, some of the finest womens you ever met,” said Alonzo Green, a neighbor who ran errands for Miss Nellie and appears in the documentary. Another neighbor said, “She had the best, no rinky-dinky little old women.”

  Miss Nellie believed in variety for her customers, and her stable included white women, black women in a full range of skin tones, Vietnamese, Japanese, and the occasional German. But all the customers were white, and this was crucial to her survival. Even a rumor of a black man with a white woman would have got her closed down immediately, and almost certainly burned out by the Klan.

  Most of the girls traveled a nationwide circuit of brothels that encompassed Las Vegas, San Francisco, Houston, Detroit, and New York. They would spend three weeks or a month at one place, then move on. There were also “weekenders”: married women from the local area who turned tricks at Nellie’s on weekends, or when their husbands were out of town. Nellie’s accountant, who filed her taxes every year, described her business as a boardinghouse for young women, and Nellie would say that what the girls did in their rooms was their business.

  But in reality it was also her business. She took half their earnings and charged them $10 a day to stay in the house, and $1 more for towels. With the considerable profits that she made, Nellie supported one husband, then another, and took herself on regular shopping sprees in New Orleans. She liked to dress well and had a mink coat with her name embroidered inside. She drove a succession of white Cadillacs with a succession of white poodles on her lap, and she always carried a loaded pistol.

  Very few people—especially on the white side of town—knew that she was heavily involved in the civil rights movement in Natchez. Not only did she bail protesters out of jail and get activists released by calling her friends in the police department. At tremendous personal risk, she also became an informant for the FBI on the activities of the local Ku Klux Klan.

  The Klan was loudly and violently against the sin of prostitution and would burn crosses right outside Nellie’s house. But Klansmen were also some of her most ardent and regular customers, and they invariably wanted her black girls. When I met Tony Byrne, the former mayor, he told me that all the Klansmen he had known in his life were sexually fixated on black women. It was an integral part of their racism and hearkened back to the sexual privileges of white supremacy during slavery.

  After sex, feeling contented, confident, and incautious, some of the Klansmen would indulge in pillow talk with Nellie’s girls and spill secrets about Klan activities. These activities, in the mid-1960s, included burning, bombing, raping, kidnapping, murder, and mutilation. When their Klan customers left the building, the girls would then tell Mama Nellie, as they called her, what they had heard. At three or four in the morning, every night at the height of the civil rights struggle, two FBI agents would sneak in through Nellie’s back door. She would meet them in her lavishly decorated bedroom, give them beers, and relay everything she had heard from her girls that evening. Had the Klan ever found out she was informing, they would have burned down her house and probably killed her, too.

  Growing up two blocks away, Regina Charboneau was always impressed by Nellie Jackson, and the girls sunning themselves out front, and never thought of the business as scandalous or even unusual. “She would come riding past in a long white Cadillac with a mink coat and a poodle on her lap, and I just thought, ‘Wow, there she goes.’ And Nellie’s was the best place to go at Halloween. Everyone else would give you candy. Nellie would give you a roll of quarters.”

  “Your parents let you go trick-or-treating at a whorehouse?” I said.

  “Yes. They were fine with it. But on Sunday mornings, we would have to walk around three sides of the block so we didn’t pass Nellie’s on the way to church.”

  When Regina was older, she and Nellie became friends. “She came out to see me in San Francisco when the World Series was played there. She was so proud of me, as a girl from the neighborhood, and what I had accomplished with my restaurant. And she loved baseball. The walls of her house were lined with pennants from all the World Series she had gone to.”

  Ron Miller, the now-retired director of the Historic Natchez Foundation, a charming man with gentle manners, remembers going to her house one night with a group of visiting dignitaries from Washington, DC. It was after midnight and drink had been taken, as the Irish say. The visitors just wanted to see the legendary establishment, without engaging its services. So Ron drove them over there and knocked on the back door. It was opened by a beautiful young black woman. Ron said, “We just thought we’d come in and maybe have a beer or some-thing.”

  “Listen,” she said. “We don’t sell beer. We sell pussy. Now when you want some of that, you come on back.”

  On a hot July night in 1990, Nellie Jackson turned away twenty-year-old Eric Breazeale because he was drunk. Being drunk was against her rules. Furious with injured pride, he walked two blocks to the nearest gas station and purchased an ice chest. He took the ice chest out to the gas pumps and filled it up with gasoline. Then he walked it back up to Nellie’s, with the gasoline sloshing around and spilling over the sides onto his clothes.

  When he reached the door, he knocked. Miss Nellie opened it holding a pistol. He threw the gasoline on her, lit his cigarette lighter, and they both went up in flames. Breazeale ran across the street, looking like a ball of fire, as the brothel glowed orange in the night. A woman rushed over to help him as he rolled around on the ground. He told
her, “Ma’am don’t come down here. I used to be a nice-looking guy but I messed myself up now.”

  When the firefighters arrived, young women in lingerie were running around in the street, saying, “Miss Nellie’s still inside!” A firefighter named Karen Moseley found her at the foot of her bed, with her hair and clothes burned away and her skin shiny and unreal looking. Moseley bent down and heard Miss Nellie still breathing. Both Eric Breazeale and Nellie Jackson died of their burn wounds. She was eighty-seven.

  The house on North Rankin Street still stands, derelict and overgrown with vines, and there is talk of putting up a plaque to commemorate this historic Natchez landmark. “She was a very savvy businesswoman, to operate for that long as a black woman in an illegal business, especially during Jim Crow,” said Ron Miller of the Historic Natchez Foundation, over a glass of whiskey at his house. “She was also a kind, gracious lady, and a pillar of the community. She was much beloved here, although not without her detractors. As far as I know, that was the last establishment of its kind in Natchez. The long tradition of vice here is over.”

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  August 1827. When Andrew Marschalk receives the letter from the US State Department, he immediately rides out to Thomas Foster’s place. On the specific instructions of President John Quincy Adams, Marschalk asks Foster at what price Prince can be purchased, for his repatriation to Africa. The old planter refuses to sell, but he makes a proposal.

  Some years ago, says Foster, he told Prince that he was free to return to his native land if someone was willing to take him there and pay for all the expenses. Since the US government is now offering to do this, he will give Prince his liberty, without taking any payment, if Henry Clay and President Adams agree to one vital condition. Prince will only obtain his liberty when he reaches Africa. He will not be free in any part of the United States, and if the attempt to repatriate him should fail, he must be returned as a slave to Foster Fields.

  On this latter point, Foster says that Prince will be better looked after here than anywhere else in the nation—because of his own benevolence and feelings of gratitude towards his old driver, and because Prince’s wife, children, and grandchildren will be here enslaved for the rest of their days. If Prince is allowed to enjoy freedom on American soil, Foster says, it might have an improper influence on his family members, and a troublemaking effect on other slaves.

  Marschalk rides away and writes a letter to Henry Clay describing Foster’s proposal. Ibrahima, now sixty-five, is exhibiting more energy than anyone has seen in him for many years. The man who hardly ever smiles is now “beaming with joy” at the prospect of finally returning home, according to one acquaintance.

  Long, slow, frustrating months pass with no reply from Henry Clay. A disabled attorney named Cyrus Griffin, a newcomer to Natchez from the North, befriends Ibrahima and initiates a series of long conversational interviews about his life. Griffin, who takes extensive notes, realizes early on that Ibrahima is not a Moroccan prince, as President Adams and Henry Clay have been led to believe. He thinks this is a major problem that needs to be corrected, but Marschalk, its instigator, advises staying quiet since the wheels of power are turning. In his follow-up letter to Henry Clay, Marschalk makes no mention of Morocco and refers instead to Prince’s “native land.”

  In December 1827, after four months with no reply from Henry Clay, Griffin writes to the American Colonization Society, an organization that repatriates freed slaves to the new colony of Liberia in West Africa, only three hundred miles from Futa Jalon. He suggests that Ibrahima, or Abduhl Rahhahman, as he calls him, would be a perfect candidate. Two months later, a letter finally arrives from Henry Clay, stating that he and President Adams have agreed to Thomas Foster’s terms, and to please send Prince to Washington, DC.

  Thomas Foster and Ibrahima ride into Natchez together for the last time, remembering the day they rode in the opposite direction forty years ago, when they were both in the prime of youth, and one had just become the enslaver of the other. What an immensely profitable investment Prince has been. Under his management, the plantation has run so smoothly with such excellent yields. Only one slave ran away, and he soon returned.

  Now Thomas Foster signs a deed placing Prince in the custody of Andrew Marschalk, for the “sole and only purpose of his being transported to his native country by the government of the United States.” Ibrahima is technically still enslaved, but he experiences the moment as a wild rush of joy, a bursting open of the gates of freedom. For the first time since his capture by the Hebohs, he does not have to obey another man’s will.

  The joy is short-lived, however, because Isabella, his loving wife of thirty-three years, the mother of their nine children, is in agony at the prospect of her husband leaving. Seeing her pain and desperation to go with him, Ibrahima is tormented. How can he exercise his new freedom without breaking his wife’s heart, and living out the rest of his days in sadness and regret? He keeps asking Marschalk what he should do. Marschalk can’t come up with a good answer and now regrets his involvement in the whole business. Separating the devoted old couple, he writes, will surely “accelerate the death of both.”

  Finally, Marschalk goes to Thomas Foster, who tells him that Isabella is essential to the running of his plantation because she is the head midwife and physician in the slave quarters. But Foster also can’t bear the idea of separating the old couple, so he agrees to sell Isabella for $200. Ibrahima goes around Natchez asking for donations. He is so well liked and respected, and his story so well-known, that he raises $293 in a single day, with 140 people contributing. Thomas Foster then deeds Isabella to Andrew Marschalk under the same restrictions as her husband.

  * * *

  He calls himself Colonel Marschalk, honoring his brief military career, and one imagines that Mark Twain would have found him irresistible, for his thundering editorials, swollen sense of self-regard, supple sense of ethics, and natural-born hucksterism. Marschalk becomes so consumed by his role as Ibrahima’s savior that some people in Natchez, including Cyrus Griffin, the disabled lawyer, find him ridiculous.

  When Henry Clay’s letter finally arrives, Marschalk parades it around the market house, “boasting and gabbing from day light until breakfast, and up the street and down.” He tries to throw a farewell public dinner for Ibrahima, a ridiculous idea that gets nowhere. White people in Natchez are happy to give money to Prince and write glowing letters of introduction and recommendation for him, but the idea of dining with him, or any other Negro, is grotesque and absurd.

  Now, having booked tickets on a steamboat to Cincinnati and received authorization from Henry Clay to spend $200 on clothing for Ibrahima, Marschalk goes into a Natchez tailor shop and orders up a “Moorish costume.” This consists of a white turban with a crescent, a blue coat with yellow buttons, billowing white pantaloons, and yellow boots. Somehow a scimitar is found to complete the look. For Cyrus Griffin and others, the “tawdry dress” is a cringing embarrassment, but Marschalk thinks Ibrahima looks splendid and princely in his new getup. The newspaperman also knows that it will be useful for publicity and fundraising, and that a “Moor,” or North African, falls into an easier racial category for white Americans than a “Negro.”

  On the clear and unseasonably cool morning of April 8, 1828, Ibrahima stands at the landing Under-the-Hill and says goodbye to his children and grandchildren. He promises to buy their freedom as soon as he can. An atmosphere of dignified formality prevails. The sons say how pleased they are to see their parents freed, and how fortunate they are to have a decent Christian master. No tears are shed, but in their eyes is “a look of silent agony” that Marschalk can’t bear to witness, and which devastates Ibrahima and Isabella.

  On this bitter-sweet note, the steamboat Neptune churns upstream on the swollen Mississippi River, with Marschalk waving farewell from the landing, and the children and grandchildren struggling not to weep. Ibrahima and Isabella had never imagined that freedom could be so painful.

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  The advent of cheap, accurate, mass-market DNA testing has confirmed a difficult truth about African Americans. They are overwhelmingly the product of miscegenation, nearly all of which was beyond their ancestors’ control. Virtually no African Americans today can claim pure African descent, except for recent African immigrants. The five leading DNA companies have slightly varying figures, but taken together, they indicate that the average African American is about 75 percent sub-Saharan African, 22 percent European, and 1 or 2 percent Native American.

  By tracing paternal ancestry through Y-DNA, geneticists have found that a third of African American men today are directly descended from a white male ancestor who fathered a mulatto child in the slavery era, “most probably from rape or coerced sexuality,” in the words of Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor of African American studies at Harvard, and presenter of popular television shows on black genealogy. “White and black citizens are bound together in the most fundamental way possible—at the level of the genome,” he writes, and yet divided by the racial pseudoscience originally devised to justify slavery and perpetuated in slightly shifting forms ever since.

  Miscegenation was everywhere in the antebellum South, but it was also taboo, and often adulterous, so white society, and white women in particular, performed mental gymnastics to pretend that the abomination wasn’t happening, and certainly not on the scale that it actually was happening, even though the living, breathing evidence was all around them. In Natchez and New Orleans—laissez-faire river towns with a French and Spanish influence and a historical shortage of white women—the taboo against miscegenation was much weaker, and its inevitability more accepted. In both places, the extralegal system of plaçage allowed white men to enter into common-law marriages with black or mulatto women known as placées. Crucially for these women and their children, plaçage granted them inheritance rights to the man’s property and wealth, and the likelihood that they would be freed in his will.