The local customs surrounding miscegenation were particularly fascinating for Mimi Miller, the head of the Historic Natchez Foundation. The wife of Ron Miller, who was told to come back to Nellie’s when he wanted some pussy, Mimi is a living encyclopedia of Natchez history, with a phenomenal memory for genealogy. Over decades of burrowing into local records and archives, she has discovered an extraordinary degree of intertwining in the bloodlines of the old white and black families.
“Was it all rape?” I asked.
“That’s what I assumed when I got here,” she said. “Then I started reading the diaries and letters, which you have to regard with some skepticism, and the wills and court cases, which tell you more than anything. Unfortunately, there’s nothing from the enslaved women, and those are the voices you most want to hear.”
In the court records, she found cases where the slave owner had freed one of his female slaves, lived with her until he died, freed and educated the children they had together, then left the woman his property in his will. William Barland, a wealthy planter and downtown property owner, was one prominent example. “You can talk about the unequal power relations there and question if the woman really had any choice,” said Mimi. “But these were stable, affectionate, long-term relationships that greatly improved the lives of those women and their children.”
“How common were these relationships?”
“It was very common for white men, when their wives died of yellow fever, or whatever else, to take up with one of the enslaved women in the household, and a lot of those became lasting relationships. Natchez was highly unusual in that those relationships were out in the open and tolerated here, like they were in New Orleans, and hardly anywhere else.”
Having said all that, Mimi didn’t want to give me the wrong impression. These were interesting exceptions to the horrifying general rule. “White men were raping enslaved women all over the Natchez District, all over the South, in their homes, in the quarters, and out on the plantations. There was seduction too, if you can call it that. Offer a teenage girl a pretty ribbon or a few coins.”
The question of what to do with the “mulatto” children inevitably followed. Some fathers sold their own children in the slave trade, often under pressure from wives who couldn’t stand looking at the living evidence of what their husbands had done. Other fathers raised the children in their own households, to which their wives responded in different ways—with cruelty, with surprising kindness, and with incredible feats of self-deception. “Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own,” wrote the antebellum diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut. “Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.”
Natchez had an unusually large population of free blacks—1,400 during the 1830s—and most of them were freed by white fathers who had raised and educated them. The majority were poor, “peddlers, prostitutes, laborers, fishermen or woodcutters,” according to historian Clayton James in Antebellum Natchez. A few inherited wealth from their white fathers, and a few more became successful small businessmen and members of a free black middle class. As Jeremy Houston pointed out on his African American heritage tours, and Mimi Miller confirmed, these men became the leaders of the black community during Reconstruction because they had the education and the ties to white society.
At the Historic Natchez Foundation, Mimi Miller introduced me to an elderly African American brickmason named Duncan Morgan, a master craftsman who had worked on all the antebellum tour homes. He was related to several old white slaveholding families and bore this knowledge with ease, even with a measure of pride. Morgan was also a former president of the Historic Natchez Foundation, a ten-year board member at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and a revered authority on local history.
He was well into his eighties now, walking slowly, but still working with bricks and mortar, and very sharp mentally. His skin was light brown and his face was dominated by a large pair of glasses. I had heard that he was one of the few people in Natchez who could move with equal ease through the black and the white communities, and I asked him if that was true.
“I’ve always been very comfortable in my skin. It’s possible that I’m better known among whites, but everybody respects me, I hope, because I’m genuine. And in any given group, I might just be the most intelligent person.” He smiled to indicate that humor was intended with that last remark.
He was related to Anne MacNeil and Beth Boggess, the elderly white sisters at Elms Court, who had taken me deep into their family history during Pilgrimage. His great-grandmother was the daughter of a Surget, the Surgets being an extremely prominent family. His grandfather’s grandmother was born at Concord, the domain of the Yellow Duchess, as the mixed-race daughter of one of the Minor men.
Morgan gave me some more of his genealogy, then concluded, “I’m Old Natchez.”
I asked him what that meant.
“Old Natchez never embraced poor white trash, but if you were mixed, you were acceptable. If you trace it back, it’s all intertwined here. When I was growing up, black and white children played together as equals until they were fifteen or sixteen. Then a line of demarcation appeared, and I had to start calling the other children Miss and Mister.”
He remembers riding around town with his grandfather, who would point out houses and tell stories about the families who lived there. Being of mixed race himself, young Duncan found the stories about other mixed families particularly interesting. “In so much of the South, it was the white man going down into the plantation quarters, but it wasn’t like that here. Those relationships were more direct and out in the open. The fathers usually recognized the children and often freed the mothers so the children would be born free. We had a free black middle class here, which would have been an impossibility in the rest of Mississippi.”
“Was it always white men with black women? I asked. Did it ever happen the other way around, or was that too dangerous and taboo?”
“It happens now openly, black men with white women. It happened before the Civil War too, but it was very secretive. I don’t think the whites today know about it, but the stories were passed down through the black community. I would hear them from my grandfather and other people. It was mostly white women having revenge affairs on their husbands.”
I asked him to elaborate.
“The man would be having an affair with a mulatto woman, and his wife would get mad about it. She’d start having an affair with one of the lighter-skinned men in the household.I When she got pregnant, the baby would get passed off or disappear, or she would take a trip to Europe for several months. That was the usual way of doing it.”
The woman would come back from Europe without the baby, or with the baby and some far-fetched story. The child was from her cousin who had tragically died—her cousin in Spain or Sicily, which would explain the “Mediterranean” complexion. People would whisper about it, but whites would maintain the polite fiction and the next generation would learn it as fact. The house slaves, on the other hand, knew exactly what had happened, talked about it openly, and passed down the true stories.
I asked Duncan Morgan if he knew of any specific examples, but he didn’t. Mimi Miller had heard something about a handsome butler at Monmouth, but she didn’t have any names or corroborating information. The stories that Duncan Morgan had heard from his grandfather were probably the last dying echoes of these highly secretive affairs, although the living descendants were presumably still walking around.
* * *
From the Historic Natchez Foundation, it was two blocks to the former residence of William Johnson, a barber and businessman who was a pillar of the free black middle class before the Civil War. His mother had been owned by his father, Captain William Johnson, who petitioned the Mississippi state legislature to free their mulatto son at the age of eleven. In the petition, sounding like one of those conflicted slave owners who thought slavery was wrong, Captain Johnson expressed h
is desire to give “Liberty to a human being which all are entitled to as a birthright, & extend the hand of humanity to a rational Creature, on whom unfortunately Complexion Custom & even Law in This Land of freedom, has conspired to rivet the fetters of Slavery.”
Captain Johnson had already freed William’s mother, and his sister, who had married a free black barber. This was one of the few professions that free blacks were allowed to practice. They were not actually free at all, but subject to numerous laws and restrictions, and required to carry their papers at all times. They occupied a shaky middle ground between free white society and the unfree world of the enslaved.
William Johnson apprenticed as a barber with his brother-in-law, then gradually built up a small empire of barbershops in Natchez. The men whose faces he shaved, and whose hair he cut, were white and included some prominent citizens with whom he formed close relationships. He would go hunting with them and break a powerful racial taboo by dining with them. He would also help them find work for the mixed-race children that they kept producing.
The William Johnson House is a three-story brick building, and its current status as a National Park Service museum owes everything to a discovery in the attic in 1938. From 1835 until his wretched murder in 1851, Johnson kept a detailed diary about his life and the daily goings-on in Natchez. It ran to 2,000 pages in leatherbound volumes, which his descendants had put in the attic and forgotten about. Some historians describe it as one of the most unusual and significant diaries kept by any American in the nineteenth century.
His original wooden desk stands in the front parlor of the museum-house. He would stay up by candlelight when the rest of the household was asleep and jot down his earnings, loans, and expenditures, items of local news and barbershop gossip, and brief descriptions of his days. Johnson had no talent or ambition as a writer, and the diary reveals no deep, complicated thoughts. He was a conservative businessman who took the world as he found it and tried to get ahead while remaining honest in his dealings, and honorable in his reputation.
He loved to hunt, fish, ride, and gamble. He played dominoes and billiards and drank gin, brandy, Madeira, and champagne. He had a good library of books and kept up with current affairs through various magazine subscriptions. He traveled to New York and Philadelphia and particularly enjoyed his frequent trips to New Orleans, where free blacks lived under less scrutiny. His diary, published at 791 pages by Louisiana State University Press, is a long slog to get through because so much of it concerns small financial transactions, but it’s the most revealing record that exists about everyday life in antebellum Natchez, written from the perspective of a free man of color with a thriving business, a happy marriage, eight children, and up to twenty slaves.
The two biggest frustrations of the diary are that Johnson never records an emotion about his father, or an opinion about the morality of slavery. Born a slave himself, then freed, he appears to have had no qualms about enslaving others, and you can’t help asking yourself, Why not? Was he identifying white, as Ser Boxley believes? Was he engaged in some sort of self-deception? Among his books was a Bible-based defense of slavery—did that assuage his conscience or justify what he wanted to do anyway? Or was he just the ambitious product of a society that measured a man’s worth by the number of human beings that he owned? Johnson inherited seven slaves from his formerly enslaved mother, Amy, and bought the rest at various markets around Natchez.
Buisness Tolerable fair, I was at auction to day at the Sale of Mr. Philomel Greens, 20 hands. They were sold at the Court House in Lots or Familes.… I Bot an old man by the name of Ned for Only fifteen Dollars.” —February 27, 1850
Most free blacks did not own slaves, but mainly because they couldn’t afford them. Those that prospered usually did buy and enslave people. Like most slave owners who kept diaries, William Johnson recorded many annoyances and exasperations concerning the people he owned. When his slaves were obedient and efficient, he treated them well. He gave them money, praise, gifts, passes to the circus and the theater. He taught them how to read and write. And when they were disobedient, careless, or troublesome, he felt no compunction whatsoever about reaching for his whip.
From a modern perspective, the systematic whipping of helpless enslaved people is one of the most upsetting aspects of the regime, but attitudes towards whipping were very different in the nineteenth century. Husbands routinely whipped their wives and children. Navies flogged their sailors. Teachers flogged their students. All across the American South, whites were whipped in public for minor crimes. Frederick Douglass wrote that everyone in the South seemed to want the privilege of whipping someone else. Perhaps the saddest whippings of all were delivered by slaves to their own children. They knew that if their children were allowed to grow up sassy or disobedient, much worse whippings would be in their future.
William Johnson whipped his slaves with varying degrees of severity depending on the offense. “Good Flogging with Big Whip” and “very Seviere Floging” were at one end of the spectrum, and “tap or two with my wriding whip” was at the other end. When he heard something shaking the loft, went upstairs, and discovered a young male slave having sexual congress with a Muscovy duck he gave him “a Genteel whiping.”
One slave named Steven gave William Johnson more trouble and heartache than the rest put together. He stole, he shirked, he ran away to get drunk and would often end up in jail. To make it worse, Johnson liked him. Steven was intelligent and good company when sober, but he was an alcoholic and couldn’t stop himself from binge drinking. Johnson had tried giving him a hundred lashes, putting him on the chain gang, turning him over to be brutalized by the town guard, but none of it worked. He had tried kindness and lenience. That didn’t work either.
Steven’s behavior was a direct threat to William Johnson’s freedom, which could have been revoked for his failure to control a troublesome slave. So he came to the painful decision to sell Steven. The first time he tried, at the Forks of the Road, Johnson couldn’t go through with it, and he brought Steven home instead. On New Year’s Day 1844, having wept and lost a night’s sleep, he took Steven down Under-the-Hill and sold him for $600 to a Mr. Cannon heading downriver. “I gave Steven a pair Suspenders and a pr of socks and 2 Cigars, Shook hands with him and see [him] go On Bourd for the Last Time. I felt hurt but Liquor is the Cause of his troubles; I would not have parted with Him if he had Only have let Liquor alone but he Cannot do it I believe.”
Ser Boxley was outraged when the National Park Service decided to renovate the William Johnson House and turn it into a museum. In his view, William Johnson was not a part of black history because he thought white, owned slaves, looked up to whites, and looked down on blacks. Like many of Ser Boxley’s assertions, this was an oversimplification, but not without evidence to support it. When Johnson writes that his apprentice barber Bill Nix is a “pure pure Negro at Heart and in action,” he is not paying him a compliment. Johnson’s best friends were other successful free people of color, but he also had a close association with Adam Bingaman, a Harvard-educated planter-politician, and an ancestor of the two sisters at Elms Court.
Johnson would loan out his slaves to Bingaman when he needed extra hands. In return, Bingaman invited Johnson to graze his nag horses at his Fatherland plantation and breed them to his celebrated studs. The two men were avid horse-racing fans. Bingaman’s mixed-race family, by an enslaved woman named Aimee, had a close, affectionate relationship with William Johnson’s family. The two men were at the core of a small subcommunity of white men, black mistresses, mixed-race children, and free blacks, held together by mutual empathy and dependence. They looked out for each other’s interests, found apprenticeships and marriage partners for free black children and, in the case of Bingaman and Johnson, found genuine pleasure in each other’s company.
Adam Bingaman, top of his class at Harvard, fluent in six languages, a former Speaker of the Mississippi House and president of the Senate, ended up abandoning white society in Natchez.
He moved to New Orleans with Aimee and their mixed-race children, so they could live together more freely. William Johnson stayed in Natchez and continued to prosper. He bought a farm called Hardscrabble and got into a feud with his free black neighbor Baylor Winn, who had cut some timber on Johnson’s land without permission. On June 16, 1851, Johnson rode out to Hardscrabble with his son William, a free black apprentice, and a slave. Gunshots rang out and Johnson was hit in the lungs, back, and arm. As he died, he named Baylor Winn as his murderer.
The white population of Natchez was outraged, but a hitch in antebellum law prevented justice from being served: people with Negro blood were not permitted to give evidence against whites in court trials. Baylor Winn, who was indicted as a mulatto, convinced the court that his blood was white and Native American. That meant the three witnesses to the murder—Johnson’s slave, son, and apprentice, all of whom had African blood—couldn’t testify against Baylor Winn. So he walked free, even though no one in the court disputed the fact that he had murdered William Johnson in cold blood.
* * *
What is the legacy of all that miscegenation in Natchez, apart from its obvious genetic influence on the African American community? How is it remembered and dealt with? Did it continue after Emancipation and the Civil War, and how does it influence race relations in the town today?
The Deepest South of All Page 13