The Deepest South of All

by Richard Grant

  According to Duncan Morgan, the old tolerance of relationships between white men and black women continued into the 1930s and 1940s, even as Jim Crow anti-miscegenation laws took hold in Mississippi and the rest of the old Confederacy. He remembers interracial couples living together openly in the 1940s. They would go to the Northern states to get married because it was illegal to marry across the color line in Mississippi. Then they would come home to raise their children in Natchez, which was segregated and white supremacist, but still fairly lenient and broad-minded when it came to miscegenation. “They were very solid, respectable families,” said Morgan. “Nobody bothered them until the poor white trash started coming here.”

  In the late 1940s and 1950s, the first factories opened in Natchez. Poor rural whites from the surrounding counties flocked into town for those jobs and soon stocked the ranks of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan. They were mostly Scotch-Irish dirt farmers and sharecroppers. Their people had reaped none of the economic benefits of slavery. What they had was extraordinary resilience and a fierce, bristling, touchy pride, which was largely based on their alleged superiority to the only people below them in the social hierarchy.

  “They had the hatred and meanness towards blacks that one associates with overseers and slave catchers,” said Duncan Morgan. “Some of them were probably descended from overseers and slave catchers who were put out of work by Emancipation. They were inflamed by the sight of black-and-white couples openly raising their children together. What had been tolerated here for many generations became much more dangerous, and more taboo. People had to be more discreet or go up North, and it really wasn’t talked about, at least not in the white community.”

  In Natchez today, the walls of silence that built up around the subject are crumbling, and the taboo is falling away. Miscegenation in the past is not an abstract concept, like it is in most of the country, but familial. “The town is full of black and white cousins who are just now getting to know each other,” said Mimi Miller. “It’s become almost fashionable to claim your black cousins and bring them to the coffee shop or invite them to a family reunion.”

  Motivated by a sense of generational guilt, moral duty, and a desire to heal racial divisions, the two sisters at Elms Court, Anne MacNeil and Beth Boggess, tracked down some descendants of a slave that their great-grandfather had impregnated and invited them to a family reunion. Twenty years previously, that would have been socially unacceptable in Natchez. Breaking another powerful Southern racial taboo, they invited their African American guests to join the white people in the swimming pool.

  The African American mayor of Natchez, Darryl Grennell, is descended from two prominent old white families, who have now claimed him as a cousin. On another branch of his family tree, he’s descended from a white tax collector who married his black mistress. “I think of my white ancestors and relatives as part of my extended family,” Grennell says, “even though I was raised black and my parents were civil rights activists.”

  One of my regular lunch companions in Natchez was an African American woman named Beverly Adams. She was the director of student services at historically black Alcorn State University, and the host of a local talk-radio show. She also enjoyed acting. She had appeared in the Greg Iles Tableaux and portrayed Isabella in a PBS documentary about Ibrahima called Prince Among Slaves. That experience had permanently altered her sense of identity.

  “I had never heard of Ibrahima until they started making that film,” she said. “Then I found out from the researchers that I’m a direct descendant of Ibrahima and Isabella.”

  “How did that feel?”

  “There was pride in having African royalty in my family, and sadness because of what happened to him—it’s such a sad story, and really a difficult story for me, because I’m also a direct descendant of the family who enslaved him. I already knew about them. In my family, they were always called the Rapist Fosters.”

  Learning of the connection, one of the Foster descendants, a spry octogenarian called Nan Foster Schuchs, invited Beverly to a Foster family reunion. Over the strenuous objections of her family, and strong criticism in the black community, Beverly accepted the invitation and met the descendants of the people who had raped her ancestors and ruthlessly exploited their labor. Nan welcomed her with such warmth and honesty that an unlikely friendship formed between the two women, and they were now doing presentations together for tourists and curious locals, taking turns to tell the story of Ibrahima, Isabella, and the Foster family.

  “It’s so hard for black people to let go of bitterness, that Anglo people gained so much wealth on the backs of our people and treated us as badly as they treated us, but it has to be done to move forward,” Beverly told me. “We have to talk about these things, no matter how difficult it is, and then I truly believe it can get better. Nan Foster and I have taken a small step in the right direction.”

  I suggested that there were similarities to South Africa, which had instituted “truth and reconciliation” hearings after the end of apartheid, based on open and honest discussion. Mississippi was also a post-apartheid society, I said, facing many similar issues.

  Beverly was quick to correct me. “It’s not just Mississippi. The North is segregated too. This is work the whole country needs to do. White people need to understand the bitterness we feel about slavery. There’s pride that we survived the whole experience and came through it with dignity, and then successfully fought for our civil rights, but a lot of white people act like it’s no big deal, or we should be grateful for what we have now. They haven’t even begun to understand.”

  I. According to the historian Martha Hodes, in her book White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South, it was a rare but persistent phenomenon and the sex was usually coercive and an expression of white power. One technique, employed by plantation wives and their daughters, was to threaten a rape accusation if the man refused their sexual advances.

  | 14 |

  April 1828. The steamboat Neptune churns its way north against the full force of the Mississippi River in its annual spring flood. A small, basic, noisy craft, with belching steam pipes and a paddle wheel on one side, the Neptune is nothing like the magnificent floating palaces that will ply the river in decades to come. Standing on the deck, free at last, but heartsick over their children, Ibrahima and Isabella observe the passing floodscape—clumps of unhappy cattle on tiny islands, marooned farmhouses, drowned forests, sheets of outspreading water where the riverbanks used to be.

  They pass Memphis, a small settlement on a bluff, founded nine years previously. They reach the confluence where the clear waters of the Ohio River join the muddy Mississippi, just south of Cairo, Illinois, and they make the northeasterly turn into the Ohio. Twelve days out from Natchez, the Neptune docks at Cincinnati and they disembark.

  This is the first big American city that Ibrahima has seen, a thriving river port ten times the size of Natchez, with grimy red-brick buildings and warehouses full of flour, pigs, and whiskey, waiting to be shipped downriver to the Lower Mississippi Valley. It is also the first place he has ever been, in Africa and America, where slavery does not exist and is forbidden by law.

  Walking through the busy streets, in his white-turbaned costume with yellow boots and a scimitar fastened at his waist, Ibrahima causes a sensation, and his story proves irresistible to the three Cincinnati newspapers. A bona fide African prince, taken captive in his youth, enslaved for nearly forty years in Natchez, is now on his way home to become a prince again and perhaps assume the throne as king. In Cincinnati, Ohio, it translates into instant celebrity.

  Ibrahima welcomes the attention and the publicity because he urgently needs money. The State Department sent just enough to pay for his passage to Washington, but Marschalk spent half of it on his Moorish costume, and no provision was made for Isabella’s travel expenses. The State Department doesn’t even know of Isabella’s existence, let alone that she’s on her way to Washington, and intending to join her
husband on his voyage back to Africa. Learning of this predicament, the Daily Gazette makes a plea to its readers: “It is earnestly hoped that the citizens of Cincinnati will contribute what may be necessary to aid her in that journey.”

  To garner the contributions, Ibrahima parades through the streets, a “grave looking elderly personage in Moorish dress,” as another newspaper describes him. His eye-catching appearance, in combination with the excited, sympathetic newspaper coverage, generates more than enough money to continue the journey, and it plants a seed in his head. Maybe he can do the same thing in other places and raise enough money to buy his children out of slavery.

  In late April, Ibrahima and Isabella board another boat and travel up the Ohio River for 370 miles to Wheeling, West Virginia. Then comes an exhausting, bone-shaking, joint-inflaming week on the public stagecoach through the ragged roads of Pennsylvania and Maryland. By now, newspapermen all over the Northeast have caught wind of his story and are tracking his progress and spreading his fame. Perhaps inevitably, they are also sensationalizing the facts, publishing inaccuracies, leaping to faulty conclusions, and then arguing about them.

  Ibrahima is dubbed “The Unfortunate Moor” and the “Prince of Timbuctoo.” The rattling public stagecoach is described as his own luxurious private carriage. Since Ibrahima’s father is dead, the notion takes hold that the “King of Timbuctoo” is returning home to claim his rightful place on the throne. A fist-thumping editorial in a Philadelphia newspaper demands it: “He is entitled to the Throne!” But all the publicity is welcome, no matter how inaccurate, because it increases his fundraising opportunities.

  When he gets to Baltimore, he meets with William Swaim, the sympathetic assistant editor of an antislavery newspaper called Genius of Universal Emancipation. Explaining to Swaim why he needs money urgently, Ibrahima loses control of his emotions. In the next issue, Swaim publishes an account of Ibrahima’s story and a plea for contributions: “Though this victim of ruthless misfortune has lately stepped into the enjoyment of his natural rights, he has children remaining at Natchez. While he related to us this painful truth, the tears gushed from his eyes and rolled down his cheeks.”

  By pure coincidence, Henry Clay, Ibrahima’s champion in the State Department, is passing through Baltimore at the same time, so Ibrahima approaches him in a hotel and introduces himself. The secretary of state is a tall Kentuckian famed for his charm, wit, and charisma, and he greets Ibrahima like a friend. Clay promises to help in any way that he can and advises him to proceed directly to Washington and meet with President Adams. Ibrahima tells an acquaintance that he is “highly delighted” with Henry Clay.

  Leaving Isabella in Baltimore, Ibrahima catches an uncomfortable stagecoach to the nation’s capital. Washington is a smaller city than Cincinnati, and apart from the Capitol building, nothing about it is impressive. The White House is only partially built. Pennsylvania Avenue is a weedy unpaved road with chunks of stone thrown in its mudholes. The city has no sewer system, and no lighting at night. And for Ibrahima, it is a return to legalized slavery.

  In addition to its 2,000 resident slaves, Washington is a major regional hub for the slave trade, and enslaved men, women, and children are kept in pens and dungeons all over the city. Visitors from the North and Europe are shocked to see processions of chained and manacled human beings being led through the streets of the young republic’s capital.

  Ibrahima chooses a quiet, low-key hotel called Williamson’s Mansion House on Pennsylvania Avenue, where he has heard, correctly, that he will be treated as a gentleman. On the rainy morning of the fifteenth of May, he walks the two muddy blocks to the uncompleted White House and joins the group of people waiting to ask favors of the president. When Ibrahima’s turn comes, he is ushered into an office on the second floor, where John Quincy Adams, a short, bald, stocky man with a cold austere manner, examines his visitor with dark penetrating eyes and greets him in an unexpectedly high-pitched voice. Ibrahima, who was born to be the leader of a nation, does not feel intimidated by President Adams and regards him as an equal, even though Adams has all the power in this encounter, and Ibrahima has a lot of explaining to do.

  Also in the room is Samuel Southard, the secretary of the navy, who is charged with arranging Ibrahima’s voyage to Morocco. Now Ibrahima has to inform these gentlemen that he is not, in fact, a Moroccan prince and has no wish to go there. He wants to go to Liberia instead, then proceed overland to his homeland of Futa Jalon, not far from Timbuktu. And one more thing: he will also require passage for his wife.

  Describing the meeting in his diary, President Adams writes a slightly confused account of a confusing situation: “Abdel Rahman is a Moor, otherwise called Prince or Ibrahim, who has been forty years a slave in this country. He wrote, two or three years since, a letter to the Emperor of Morocco, in Arabic, in consequence of which the Emperor expressed a wish that this man might be emancipated and sent home. His owner, residing in Natchez, Mississippi, offered to emancipate him on condition that he should be sent home by the Government. He came in while Mr. Southard was with me, and we had some consultation how and when he should be dispatched to his home, which he says is Timbuctoo.”

  The only reason Henry Clay and President Adams took an interest in Ibrahima’s case was to improve diplomatic relations with the emperor of Morocco. The president could have easily ejected Ibrahima from his office as an impostor and a time waster, or sent him back to Natchez, but Adams takes the shifting ground in his stride and agrees to the unexpected request from his unusual visitor.

  Knowing that he will never have such extraordinary access to power again, Ibrahima then attempts to push his luck even further. As Adams writes in his diary later that day, “He has left at Natchez five sons and eight grandchildren—all in slavery; and he wishes that they might be emancipated, and be sent with or to him.”

  It is hard to discern what the president really thought of this petitioner in his “native costume,” who was not a Moroccan prince after all and did not appear grateful for the government’s help in securing his liberty, or its largesse in offering to fund his repatriation, but instead kept introducing one problem after another that he expected the government to solve—a wife, a completely different destination, a total of thirteen children and grandchildren. Of all the favor seekers in the White House on that rainy morning, the elderly Muslim from Natchez, with his claims of royalty, exotic costume, dignified manners, and limited Afro-Mississippian English, must have seemed the most entitled, the most improbable, and perhaps the most pathetic.

  President Adams promises a decision about the children and grandchildren at a later date, and that appears to have been the end of the meeting.

  | 15 |

  Kerry Dicks had a finely tuned appreciation for the Southern Gothic side of Natchez. She could see it with detached irony and describe it with morbid wit, even though she was not observing from a safe comfortable distance. Murder, suicide, eccentricity, madness, and dark transgressive behavior in decaying antebellum mansions were all part of her family inheritance. She would talk about it while drinking wine among the graves in the Natchez cemetery.

  Even at the height of summer, the wine was always red. White wine has its virtues, but its color lacks vibrancy and gravitas, and it seemed disrespectful to drink it with the dead. Before opening the bottle, Kerry would walk me through the beautiful old cemetery, with its live oaks and cedar trees, marble monuments and mausoleums, and introduce me to various dead people. On our first visit, she took me to a plain stone marker inscribed LOUISE THE UNFORTUNATE with no further information.

  “She came to Natchez to marry her beau, but he died on her,” said Kerry in her un-Southern accent. “She started out working a few jobs on the bluff to support herself. Then she made a slow and sad descent Under-the-Hill, starting out as a waitress, I think, and ending up as a lady of the night. Either the doctor who treated her when she got the clap, or a priest, or one of her clients, took up a collection when she died so she could b
e buried up here, as a kind of return to respectability as a corpse.”

  At the grave of the Yellow Duchess—Katherine Lintot Minor, 1770–1844—Kerry turned bitter and scornful, as if they’d had a falling-out recently. “That batshit crazy bitch was supposedly buried with a bunch of gold in her coffin to keep the whole color-scheme thing going. Ugh. And look at the inscription. Doesn’t it make you want to puke? You know she wrote it herself.”

  The inscription read IN ALL THE RELATIONS OF LIFE SHE WAS AS NEAR PERFECT, AS MORTALS ARE PERMITTED TO COME.

  Kerry knew a lot about coffins, death, and decay. As a teenager, she had enjoyed playing Ouija board in the cemetery at night, and she had started coming here as a toddler. “I have pictures of me in diapers, eating sandwiches, and drinking water from the spouts that you use to fill the vases on the graves. It’s a family propensity, apparently. My uncle tells a story about this frail old lady called Cousin Agnes, who would wake him and my dad up before dawn, and they would get in the Cadillac, with a big, silent black man behind the wheel, and drive out here to the cemetery. They were little boys, nine and seven, maybe even younger.”

  She took a sip of wine and smiled at the craziness of it. “Cousin Agnes would unlock the family mausoleum, get the black guy to pry open one of the coffins with a crowbar, and show them a moth-eaten Confederate uniform with a decayed corpse inside it. She would smoke a cigarette and say, ‘Boys, that’s your great-great-so-and-so.’ I’m not sure how much skin he had left then—he’s all bones now—but he still had an impressive beard. Then they would get back in the Cadillac, and she would drop the boys off back in their beds. This happened numerous times.”

  Cousin Agnes was Agnes Marshall, whose husband dropped dead during a big party at Stanton Hall. She was mortified that he might spoil the party by dying, so she got people to remove his body and continued drinking and socializing. Then she went on to another party, which turned into a wake for her husband.