In her embrace of morbid, crazy stories, and her ironic pride in being a citizen of Natchez, which she described half jokingly as “an open-air lunatic asylum,” Kerry went a little further than most, but the attitude was fairly commonplace. Elodie Pritchartt, who was a generation older, relished the weirdness in her hometown and could talk about it for hours. Among the upper crust, there was a definite pride in Natchez’s reputation for eccentricity, and people often became defensive when it was suggested that other places in the South might be equally eccentric. Brett Brinegar, the head of the annual Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, had tried living in Savannah, Georgia, another town renowned for eccentrics. “It was way too normal for me,” she said. “I couldn’t handle it.” On a weekday evening at Elodie’s house, over cocktails, I met Wayne Bryant, a middle-aged gay man steeped in Natchez lore and garden club history. He enjoys visiting Savannah, but when I asked him if it was as weird as Natchez, he was insulted by the question. “Not in a million years,” he huffed.
When the garden club elite gathered at cocktail parties in each other’s antebellum homes—the basic unit of social interaction—they would tell one outlandish story after another, and invariably start conjuring up the extravagant characters of the past, such as Katherine Miller, the founder of Pilgrimage. The most extravagant character of all was probably Buzz Harper. He died shortly before I got to Natchez, but he was talked about so often that his presence lingered. He drove a Rolls-Royce and often wore a full-length mink coat, spats, and a huge diamond stickpin. He was six feet four, although people would often exaggerate this to six feet six, or six feet eight, with unusually long limbs and an immaculate silver ponytail. He ate his steak raw, lightly seasoned with salt and pepper, and he was a close friend of Anne Rice, the bestselling author of vampire novels.
My friend Tom Ramsey, who grew up in Vicksburg, sixty miles upriver from Natchez, told me that Buzz Harper was “in the outer stratosphere of gay.” Tom, now a chef in New Orleans, used to work in a Vicksburg menswear store where Buzz Harper bought clothes. Entering the store, Buzz would take off his pale gray kid gloves and drop them on the floor for his manservant to pick up. The manservant wore a black suit and tie and a bowler hat and appeared to have some Asian blood. Then Buzz let his cane fall—an ebony cane with an ivory wolf’s head—and the manservant rushed to catch it before it hit the ground. Buzz would then extend his long arms backwards like an Olympic ski jumper, and his mink coat would slide off into a furry puddle on the floor. As the manservant picked up the mink, Buzz would strike an elaborate quartered pose like Marlene Dietrich and start discussing the details of his next four-piece suit—a three-piece suit with a matching car coat.
A few years later, Tom and a friend bumped into Buzz Harper on Royal Street in New Orleans. Buzz, in his usual suit and tie, massive cuff links, and giant stickpin, was accompanied by a short German bodybuilder in knee-length spandex shorts, combat boots, a tank top with the German Imperial eagle emblem, and small, round, black sunglasses. The German stood there saying nothing and holding four Airedales on a leash.
“Are you going to introduce us to your friend?” asked Tom.
“Oh,” said Buzz. “That toy doesn’t speak a word of English.” Then Buzz asked to see the bottle of wine that Tom was carrying. “My dear boy, I can’t stand to think of you drinking those dregs,” said Buzz, and peeled off a $100 bill.
Wayne Bryant was Buzz Harper’s personal chef for two years. The job required great flexibility and speed of execution. “He’d have no plans in the morning,” said Wayne, stroking Versace the dog on Elodie’s couch. “By the evening we’d have twenty-four for formal dinner with servants, and it might be a Monday night, and everyone would end up playing the tambourine and singing gospel songs.”
Buzz was an interior decorator and antiques dealer by trade, completely unscrupulous in his business dealings, but otherwise kind and generous with courteous Southern manners. “He would offer to resize women’s rings and replace the jewels with fakes,” said Wayne. “He sold a twenty-carat Burmese ruby for $70,000 to my husband’s mother. She had it appraised and discovered it was glass. You know, Buzz’s wife is still alive and living in Palm Springs.”
“Wife?” I said.
“Oh, yes. They were cousins. I don’t know if Bobbie and Buzz were ever legally married, or if it was a ruse so Buzz could look more respectable and gain better social entrée. He came from Newport, Arkansas, and he was the judge there in this tiny little town that might have had a red light, until he got thrown off the bench. No one knows why.”
Nor does anyone know how the disbarred judge from small-town Arkansas and his cousin-wife found their way to Vicksburg, where they bought an antebellum mansion called Cedar Grove. From Vicksburg, it was logical to come downriver to Natchez, where they lived in three different antebellum homes that Buzz lavishly redecorated. It crushed him that the garden clubs never put one of his homes on tour during Pilgrimage.
“You can’t go and vomit chintz and expect to be put on tour,” said Wayne. “Buzz used to say, ‘Once you go rococo, you never go back.’ He had these big blackamoor statues. Choctaw is what Buzz’s home would look like if he were alive, blackamoors everywhere and the dining room table set twenty-four/seven. I don’t know what it is about Arkansas that breeds these strange fellas who come to Natchez to show off their china.”
It was Buzz Harper who persuaded the famously tanned actor George Hamilton to buy property in Natchez and nearby Church Hill in the 1980s, allegedly in a money-laundering scheme for Imelda Marcos, the kleptocratic first lady of the Philippines. Buzz also recruited a string of young gay men from bars and clubs in New Orleans and brought them up to Natchez, where they became known as Buzzettes. He held breakfast parties that were designed to showcase his grand entrance, descending the staircase of an antebellum mansion in a long flowing robe. Wayne Bryant, Kerry Dicks, and several other people described Buzz Harper as the gayest man in Mississippi, and being dead was no impediment to this honor.
* * *
Southerners are a storytelling people, and Natchez contained a vast trove of Southern Gothic stories. To check the truthfulness of these stories was usually impossible, and you had to assume that they had been embellished. On the other hand, when it was possible to check the facts, the wildest stories were often true in every last detail—the fiery demise of the beloved whorehouse madam Nellie Jackson, for example. Or the “Goat Castle” murder of Kerry’s great-great-aunt Jane Surget Merrill, which kept the whole nation riveted in the 1930s.
Jennie Merrill, as she was known, came from the old planter aristocracy, and she had been a famous beauty in her youth. In 1876, when she was barely a teenager, her father was appointed US ambassador to Belgium, and the family moved in the most elite European circles. After her father’s death, she returned to America and based herself in New York City for the next twenty years, working with the photographer Jacob Riis on his crusade for tenement reform. In her mid-thirties she moved back to Natchez for a quieter life and started up a semi-clandestine affair with her second cousin Duncan Minor.
Miss Jennie was known in Natchez for a sharp temper and strange habits. She refused to stop for red lights in her Model T Ford or accept traffic tickets from the local police, who gave up trying. Her fashion sense remained stuck in the 1890s—mutton-sleeve dresses and small, tilted Empress hats. As she got older, she became reclusive, seldom leaving Glenburnie, her antebellum home and estate. She saw almost no one except for the African American servants and workers, who she treated imperiously, and her cousin-lover Duncan Minor, who visited every night.
The neighboring antebellum estate, Glenwood, was occupied by Dick Dana, a once-aspiring concert pianist who had smashed his hand in a window-sash accident (according to most accounts) and had undergone a complete mental collapse (undisputed). He had given up bathing and shaving, and he often wore nothing except a burlap sack with a hole cut out for his head. He had staring eyes, a foot-long beard, and was known as Wild Man
by local African Americans. Dana spent most of his time climbing in the big trees that grew on the property. He liked to swing on vines and perch on high branches. People remember him howling at the moon for hours.
At the time of the murder, in 1932, Dick Dana was fifty-three. Glenwood, a two-story Greek Revival mansion that had been his childhood home, was filthy, rotting, and inhabited by a herd of goats. He lived there with another eccentric, Octavia Dockery, an unsuccessful poet, who looked after Dana or at least kept him fed. She was in a long-running feud with her aristocratic neighbor Jennie Merrill, and while class tensions were involved—Jennie thought Octavia was trash, and Octavia resented it—the feud was mainly about goats.
Since both parties refused to build a fence, the Glenwood goats would wander across the property line into Glenburnie and wreak havoc in Miss Jennie’s flowerbeds. The police had been called on numerous occasions, but Octavia Dockery refused to restrain her goats, so Jennie Merrill had started shooting them when they came onto her property. In apparent retaliation, Dana and Dockery persuaded an itinerant black man named George Pearls to rob Miss Jennie’s house. In a scuffle during the robbery Jennie Merrill was shot and killed.
Her body was found a hundred yards away, dumped in a thicket. Dana’s and Dockery’s fingerprints were discovered inside Miss Jennie’s house, and they were charged with the murder. George Pearls left Natchez that night and was later shot and killed by a deputy sheriff in Arkansas for resisting arrest. He had the gun that killed Miss Jennie in his possession when he was shot, and was convicted posthumously of murdering Jennie Merrill. Then Emily Burns, his temporary girlfriend, who was at the scene of the murder but otherwise innocent, was put on trial as accomplice to murder and swiftly convicted by an all-white jury.
Even though their fingerprints were inside Glenburnie, even though Dick Dana, who almost never washed his clothes, was washing stains out of a shirt when the police arrived, Dana and Dockery were not indicted for any crimes. The press called them Wild Man and Goat Woman, and Glenwood was nicknamed the Goat Castle. It was an unbelievably squalid ruin, as photographs confirm. The chimneys had fallen down, the roof leaked, the columns were crumbling. Several windows were broken and the front gallery was rotting away.
Inside, the house was ankle-deep in animal droppings, dust, filth, and debris. It was full of cobwebs and infested with rats, mice, fleas, and other vermin. The dust lay so thick on old magazines that their titles couldn’t be read. Chickens nested on bookshelves. Cats, ducks, and geese lived in the house. The goats had eaten most of the rare-book collection and stripped off the wallpaper as high as they could reach.
Dana and Dockery subsisted on goat meat, which they cooked on bedsprings in the lovely old marble fireplaces, often using antique furniture for firewood. The Goat Castle Murder, an irresistible tale of aristocratic decay and eccentricity in the Deep South, was a front-page story for weeks all over the country, and it made news in Europe, where a few elderly princes and dukes probably remembered the young American beauty Jennie Merrill.
The first Natchez Pilgrimage had taken place in the spring of that year. Now, in the fall of 1932, thousands more people came down the long unpaved road to Natchez to see the Goat Castle and meet Wild Man and Goat Woman in person. Dana and Dockery started charging a twenty-five-cent admission fee. She cleaned up the house, but not too much, because she knew the squalor was a draw. So, of course, were the goats. They could be seen chewing the cud on the second-story balcony, and peering out through broken windows at the crowds.
Dick Dana began performing for the visitors on a dusty out-of-tune piano that geese had been roosting in, and there are still a few people in Natchez today who remember his demented musical performances. One of them is Margaret Guido, the current owner of Glenburnie, who reports that the ghosts of Jennie Merrill and Duncan Minor are active in the house, but not causing any trouble: “I’ll feel her come behind me when I’m ironing, and I’ll just say, ‘Oh, Jennie, is that you?’ ”
After Duncan Minor died in 1939, from natural causes, ownership of Glenburnie passed to Kerry’s grandfather, and there was another violent death. “My grandfather had a maid there called Old Flora, who lived in a slave cabin, and I’m afraid this stereotype only gets worse,” Kerry told me one afternoon in the cemetery. “She was a witch doctor and would draw magical symbols in the driveway with a broom. I can’t remember her husband’s name, but he was a drunken wife-beater, and he came for her with a shotgun one day. She ran up into the big house and slammed the front door shut, and he was so drunk that he slipped climbing up the steps and shot himself dead. That’s the story that I grew up with.”
In the 1970s, Kerry’s father had a druggy hippie commune in Glenburnie. His name was Ian Dicks, and Kerry describes him as a “brilliant man who was totally nuts.” When she was eight years old, he hung himself in the Homochitto National Forest, outside Natchez. By the time the body was discovered, it had turned black, and people initially thought that an African American had been lynched.
“Then there was my grandmother.” Sitting on a stone wall by a grave, Kerry poured another glass of wine. “She threw a party on the same day that her ex-husband married someone else. She invited a whole bunch of people, and then she went into her bedroom and shot herself through the head. Yeah. My great-grandmother committed suicide five years later, on the anniversary of her daughter’s suicide. She jumped out of a window—or perhaps fell out—but given the timing, I seriously doubt it.”
I gave Kerry my sympathies, not sure what else to do.
“It’s okay. It’s an interesting legacy. I quite enjoy the Gothic details. But, yeah, that’s me, descended from slave drivers and suicides, just a ball of confusion and repressed sexual violence, going to cocktail parties.”
* * *
There were so many parties, especially during Pilgrimage. A typical Saturday began with mimosas and Bloody Marys at a morning brunch party. Then there would be a choice of lunch parties at tour homes, and cocktail parties in the evenings. Some of these parties were planned and catered with servants and bartenders. Others were impromptu.
One Sunday afternoon, I was invited to a gathering at Elodie Pritchartt’s house, but the other guests canceled, so she texted her godmother, Valerie Swinney Bergeron, to see what she was doing. Valerie was a larger-than-life character who loved gin and gossip, carried a bright pink pistol in her purse, and was reputedly a crack shot. She had a heavily sprayed helmet of hair with a Cruella de Vil streak, and she laughed like a short burst of machine-gun fire. Her brother had cut off his own penis during a drug episode, and she referred to him as No-Weenie Swinney. Valerie was in the mood for company, so Elodie and I went over to Pleasant Hill, an antique-filled 1840 Greek Revival where Valerie lives with her husband John. Architectural historians describe it as a “cottage,” but it has seven bedrooms and three bars.
Valerie flung open the front door in a pair of voluminous white palazzo pants, gold sandals, and a blue blouse with an anchor motif. Her trademark hairstyle was marvelously immobile. “I can’t stand it another moment!” She spoke fast at high volume. “I need a divorce from this awful man today! The Saints lost, Ole Miss lost, I had three martinis at lunch and I’m having a hard time spitting them out. Come inside, my dears. Behold the awful man. Let’s have a drink.”
John Bergeron, a dignified businessman with horn-rimmed glasses, a neatly trimmed white beard, and a patrician South Louisiana accent, rose from the antique sofa, utterly unflustered by his wife’s histrionics. He made us all drinks, then sat back down and scrolled through his gold iPad, making occasional laconic remarks.
Valerie was dreading the imminent approach of her seventieth birthday. “I’ll wake up on the morning of my seventy-first year and turn into a hag, but I’ve always wanted to drive a tugboat, so I’m doing that with Carla Jenkins,” she said, referring to Miss Bettye’s daughter. “When I turn seventy-five, I’ll go skydiving.”
“You already have the helmet for it,” said John.
Valerie was mad about a photograph that Elodie had posted on social media. It showed Valerie wearing a hoopskirt with a pink Android phone in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other. “I could be a target for the blacks if they see it,” Valerie said. Elodie laughed. “I’m serious,” said Valerie. “A black woman came up here when I was wearing my hoop and she said, ‘Why do you perpetuate this?’ I said, ‘What’s this?’ She said, ‘You know, this-this-this.’ I said, ‘Are you referring to my fashion statement? Do you know who Queen Victoria is?’ ”
“Was,” corrected John from the couch.
“I said, ‘She’s the woman who invented this fashion to hide her fat white ass. That was in the 1800s when this house was built. We’re historical reenactors.’ That woman marched down off the porch. They will not let go of the idea that this is about the Civil War, and slavery, and being racist. They cannot appreciate how beautiful these homes are, and what they do for the local economy.”
Having said her piece on that subject, Valerie tried a sip of rosé, then switched back to gin and began gossiping furiously about Katherine Miller and various dead relatives. At one point she leapt to her feet, furious at some man buried decades ago. “You son of a bitch,” she snapped. “You need to be slapped halfway into next week and shot through the eyes. And I’m the woman to do it, goddammit. Shrinking-violet time is over and it’s not coming back.”
She turned to me. “If you don’t think Southern women are the best, you need to raise your standards.” Then she turned to John, who was placidly swiping through photographs of Angelina Jolie on his iPad. “I can’t stand to be married to you for another single minute! This time it’s really over. I’ll see you in court.”
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