John smiled in an affectionate, long-suffering way. He got up from the couch on his old aching knees and poured us all another round of drinks. “Honey,” he said in that beautiful cultured drawl that reminded me of a fine aged wine. “This guy is a writer. He’s bound to be taking notes.”
He was right of course.
* * *
There was a man from Nashville named Scott Smith who dressed like Jiminy Cricket in a top hat, vest, and tailcoat. He worked part of the year as a tour guide in Natchez and found great amusement in what he called “the madness” that went on in the old houses. He was a good friend of Ginger and James Hyland, who had started running paranormal tours of their home, a palatial Italianate mansion on five acres called The Towers. Photography was not allowed, “out of respect for our Ethereal Inhabitants.”
Scott was on the front doorstep with a small group of paranormal enthusiasts when I arrived. He gave me a business card that said JIMMY THE CRICKET and told me to brace myself: “This is the most over-the-top home in Natchez.” When Ginger and James came out on the doorstep, Scott gave them a silver mirror from Nellie Jackson’s whorehouse, with Nellie’s name engraved on it—a true Natchez treasure. “After the fire, one of the whores stole it and sold it to Buddy Fly,” Scott said.
Ginger’s hair was blond, medium length, and carefully styled. It cascaded in little waves and curls and shone like pearl. She was wearing black slacks and a yellow blouse, and the aura of wealth hung around her like perfume. She was the only child of Lawrence Hyland, a brilliant engineer who helped invent radar and developed the Hughes Aircraft Company for Howard Hughes. She handed me her business card, which announced her as THE LIONESS. I guessed her age at seventy.
Her husband James was about three decades younger, with theatrical mannerisms and a slightly twitchy energy. He was wearing frayed-cuff jeans with tasseled black velvet slippers and twirling a golf club. A few years ago, James had gone through a nightmarish court trial after being accused of having sex with a fifteen-year-old boy. The key moment came when James’s attorney, Rusty Jenkins (Miss Bettye’s son), asked the accuser if James had any scars, tattoos, or notable marks on his body. The accuser stated that he couldn’t remember any, whereupon Rusty asked James to drop his pants and lift up his shirt. Visible to the whole courtroom was a dramatic ten-inch-long appendectomy scar running from his navel to his groin. James was found not guilty on six counts of sexual battery, and soon afterwards he married Ginger and changed his last name to Hyland.
Still twirling his golf club, James collected the tickets, opened the front door and led us inside The Towers, whereupon we gasped and wowed. It would take the rest of this book to adequately describe the lavishness of the interiors, or Ginger’s collections of antique furniture, jewelry, laces, glassware, Chinese gaming counters from the 1700s, inkwells, opera glasses, watch fobs, jeweled pens, ornamental pen wipes, wreaths of human hair. She had 350 beaded purses on display, and 500 antique eyewash cups. The assault on the senses, and the powers of comprehension, was overwhelming. The deluge of extravagant glittering visual information coming in through the eyeballs had a stupefying effect on the brain.
James stood in the blue parlor, with its blue silk wallpaper, blue-upholstered rococo furniture, blue peacock feathers, and a hundred other blue things, and he started describing the paranormal activity in the house. At first, he was lighthearted and jokey about it, but it soon became apparent that he and Ginger were true believers, and they had gone through some serious shit with the ghosts in their mansion.
“We’ve had furniture slowly gliding across the floor, flickering lights, and the piano chair will drag itself out into the middle of the room,” he said. Activity was strong in the music room, where Ginger had encountered her first true apparition after buying the house. “A solid black silhouette, it turned, it went to the wall, it exploded into vapor,” she said.
They attributed most of the paranormal activity to the tragic history of the Fleming family, the original owners of The Towers. “All their children died here,” said Ginger. “By gunshot, infected spider bite, horse accident, a cracked skull after slipping on the dining room floor. Kate died of pneumonia, aged seventeen. She laid out four days because her father couldn’t stand to bury her. Our bed-and-breakfast guests hear a man moaning, and we attribute that to Mr. Fleming. The music box plays by itself sometimes. Perhaps we can attribute that to Kate.”
The antebellum household was run by a slave known as Mammy Caroline, who was born in the governor’s mansion in Kentucky. “She was large and in charge,” said Ginger. “She had twin baby girls, and after the slaves and servants were liberated on Emancipation Day, she went down to the Devil’s Punchbowl, where thousands of freed slaves were congregating in a Union army camp. There were sanitation issues, and her baby girls died. She smuggled their bodies out in pillowcases and buried them here. Mammy Caroline was buried in the family cemetery, which was almost unheard of in segregated Mississippi. She smoked a pipe, and people still smell a sweet smoke here when the humidity is high.”
The Towers was a headquarters for the Union army during the Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant reputedly rode his horse up and down the hallway on Christmas Eve 1863, and his ghost was supposed to reappear every Christmas Eve, according to Natchez lore. “We can make light of that because we haven’t seen him,” said James. “But there is a young soldier who manifests.”
Another ghost was named Johnny. “We have a 1,700-square-foot master bedroom upstairs,” said Ginger. “I’d been getting disturbing reflections in the mirror, and then at two thirty in the morning, I hear a Weed Eater, and I see a light in the backyard. Then I see a gigantic orb, which resolves into a male figure, and he’s holding my Weed Eater, and I remember seeing the auburn stubble of his whiskers. He says, ‘I have obtained this equipment so I may acquire your attention.’ I asked him not to disturb my bed-and-breakfast guests. I told him we were at peace.”
James pointed to a window with his golf club. “Right there was a little girl with a big red ball. And the top-hat person, and those two women.” He was looking a little freaked out now.
Ginger had more experience with the spirit world; it had been necessary to perform an exorcism at her house in California. She assured James and the rest of us that the situation at The Towers was now in hand: “The spirits of the house become protective if you do a positive restoration. We had a ceiling medallion shatter recently, and the chandelier underneath it was completely undamaged. That medallion was in a thousand pieces, and each one was as hard as a rock. There’s no way that chandelier could be undamaged, but it was. So you see we’re working together now.”
“That’s right,” said James. “It’s really okay. We’re getting a much more comfortable, protective energy.”
“We’re sharing the house,” said Ginger. “I heard the two women talking to each other in the dining room. One had such a warm, beautiful, motherly voice. She told the other one, ‘It’s okay. We’re all one. We’re all connected.’ Tears poured out of my eyes. I’m a part of this property now. And the trees. I bless the house every night and turn it over to them, and it’s so loving.”
When the tour was over, I sat down with James and Ginger, and we drank some wine. James said, “In Natchez, it’s smarter to be more afraid of the living than the dead. This is such a gossipy, incestuous little town. We really don’t go out anymore, but stay here in our Shangri-la. The paranormal stuff gets intense sometimes, but it’s really okay.”
As I got up to leave, Ginger told me to come back at Christmas. “We’re going to have 167 trees this year, and they’ll all be decorated from my costume-jewelry collection. The whole house will be decorated, too. I promise you, you’ve never seen anything like it. My husband is an absolute genius when it comes to decorating.”
As I walked across the grounds to my vehicle, with the antebellum mansion glowing in the dark, and life-size bronze statues of elk and deer and bear looming up in front of me, the world beyond Natchez had never s
eemed so far away.
* * *
I came across a few different theories that attempted to explain the oddities of life down here. One I have already mentioned. Eccentricity is not only tolerated, but celebrated. It makes life more interesting and provides rich material to a storytelling people. So oddballs get free range, and bizarre behavior is not discouraged and even appreciated if it’s not too destructive. “We don’t put our crazy relatives in the nuthouse, like they do up North,” a retired librarian told me. “We put them in the front parlor and give them a cocktail.” Another woman phrased it slightly differently: “We don’t hide our skeletons in the closet. We set them down on the front porch and tie a bow on them.”
Other theories roped together the isolation, the heavy drinking, the obsessive ancestor worshipping, generations of first-cousin marriages, and the psychological pressures of Southern history. Those pressures exert themselves most powerfully on black Southerners, but white Southerners feel them too in a different way. They are required to reconcile their history of enslaving, raping, and lynching with their proudly held beliefs in honor, graciousness, and Christian decency. They have to deal, in some way, with the foolhardiness of secession and crushing defeat in a war they were convinced they would win. They have to square their well-earned reputation for kindness and hospitality with their equally well-earned reputation for violence and bigotry.
The traditional methods for dealing with these pressures have been evasive. White Southerners have denied the facts and created self-serving mythologies. They have blamed outsiders and blamed “the Negro.” They have hurled themselves into religion, craving innocence and absolution, and into the whiskey bottle, craving release and oblivion. All of these methods, it seemed to me, have a warping effect on reality and do little to prevent the buildup of pressure, which then expresses itself both in artistic creativity—Mississippi has produced more great writers and musicians per capita than any other state in America—and in blown psychological gaskets and erratic behavior.
The burden of history is made heavier because Southerners can’t perform the sleight of mind that comes so easily to Americans in places such as LA and Orlando. They can’t forget the past or pretend that history doesn’t matter. They don’t believe it’s possible to make a fresh start with a clean slate. In 1951, William Faulkner famously wrote that the past is never dead. It’s not even past. He also said that Southerners don’t study their history, they absorb it.
During one of our wine-drinking sessions in the cemetery, Kerry Dicks made a similar observation: “The trouble with Natchez is that the dead won’t die properly and let us get on with our lives. They just keep hanging around. They demand a seat at the table. They can’t bear to be ignored, so we have to talk about them all the time. The worst thing is that they won’t stop judging you. I don’t believe in ghosts—at all—but I can feel it physically when my dead ancestors are embarrassed by my behavior.”
Natchez, she thought, was being consumed by its past. “We resurrected our history in order to sell tickets and make money from it, but it’s more powerful than we are. It’s like we resurrected a monster and now we can’t control it. Sometimes it feels like progress is impossible, because the dead are running the show.”
| 16 |
May 15, 1828. Having said goodbye to President Adams at the White House and made his plea for the liberty of his children and grandchildren—tormented by their enslavement, he finds it difficult to think of anything else—Ibrahima walks down Pennsylvania Avenue to the head office of the American Colonization Society. Located in the downstairs rooms of a brick building, and decorated with West African handicrafts, it is directly across the street from where he is staying.
The Society was founded in 1816 by a Presbyterian minister from New Jersey. Its mission is to encourage and enable the mass emigration of free blacks to the American colony in Liberia on the west coast of Africa. Away from the pernicious influence of American racism, they will be able to reach their full potential as human beings and also spread the gospel of Christianity in the dark continent. The Society’s members include Northern abolitionists, guilty Southern slaveholders who want to free their slaves and send them “back home,” unrepentant Southern slaveholders who think that free blacks are an outrage and a menace, and sympathetic allies of free blacks including the antislavery lawyer Francis Scott Key. He is also a poet, whose best-known work is “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Set to the tune of an eighteenth-century English drinking song, it will later be adopted as the national anthem.
It was Cyrus Griffin, the disabled attorney in Natchez, who first wrote to the Society and suggested that Ibrahima would make an ideal candidate for repatriation. The Society’s leaders read his letter with great interest, and they have been following Ibrahima’s progress in the newspapers. Meeting the aged Fulani prince in person, they are delighted to find him exactly as they were hoping. John Kennedy, the office manager, finds him “truly dignified in his deportment & manner,” and “acute and intelligent on every subject.” One of these subjects is African geography. When Kennedy shows Ibrahima a map and points out Cape Mesurado on the Liberian coast, where the colonists have founded the town of Monrovia, Ibrahima points to Timbo and states correctly that it is less than five hundred miles away.
Home is within his reach now, but the prospect of never seeing his children and grandchildren again is agonizing. If he goes back to Africa without them, he tells the Society’s board of managers, he fears that he will die from misery, longing, and despair. He has heard nothing back from the White House, or from Henry Clay, who promised to help, so Francis Scott Key and two other men form a committee to find out what the government intends to do.
Henry Clay provides them an answer. The US government will pay for Ibrahima’s passage to Africa and meet his expenses during his stay in Washington, but it will not buy his children and grandchildren out of slavery. The administration doesn’t give its reasons, but they are obvious. Ibrahima is of no diplomatic value, and he is a political liability in an election year. President Adams is already under fire from the South for his antislavery views. If he were to spend taxpayers’ money on the mass emancipation of Ibrahima’s progeny, his opponents would seize on it gleefully and blow it up into a scandal. It would be a gift to his challenger Andrew Jackson, and the pro-Jackson newspapers.
Ibrahima absorbs this blow, which is powerful but not unexpected, and turns to his backup plan. He proposes a fundraising tour of Northern cities, to be arranged and publicized by the American Colonization Society. He can use his newfound fame, and the drawing power of his Moorish costume, to appeal for money to liberate his children and grandchildren, while simultaneously generating publicity for the Society and its colony in Liberia. The board approves this plan, and in the rush of enthusiasm and optimism, a number of thorny questions recede into the background. One of them is this: how much money will Thomas Foster require for thirteen people, in the unlikely event that he’s willing to sell them?
The first fundraising event takes place at a vast panoramic painting of Niagara Falls, displayed in a rotunda near the White House. It is said to be such an accurate depiction of the natural marvel that viewers get wet, and now they will get to meet a genuine African prince as well. The Society promotes his appearance at “The Falls” with a special announcement:
We are requested to state that Prince Abdraman [sic], of Timboo [sic], will attend, in Moorish costume, at the Panorama of the Falls of Niagara, today, from 10 o’clock A.M. ’til 6 P.M.—Where the public will have an opportunity of seeing this interesting Personage, who has been the subject of singular and extraordinary vicissitudes.
Admission is twenty-five cents, and the management has agreed to give Ibrahima half of the take. The prince who spent forty years as a slave is now a show-business novelty act. Sitting there for eight hours in his billowing white pantaloons, long blue jacket, and yellow boots, with a crescent on his turban, he signs autographs and astonishes many people—who ever heard of a
literate African?—by writing out the opening sura of the Koran in elegantly formed Arabic.
He makes similar costumed appearances in private homes in Washington, and on Capitol Hill, where he is given the honor of attending committee meetings. Even the slaveholding Southern politicians are impressed by his courtly, dignified manners, and Congressman Edward Everett of Massachusetts later declares, “If there was ever a native-born gentleman on earth, he was one.” Rather than collecting cash on the spot, which might appear grasping and tawdry, Ibrahima has a leatherbound “subscription book,” in which donors write down the amount of money they wish to give, to be collected by the Society’s agents at a later date. When Ibrahima presents Edward Everett with the subscription book, the congressman puts himself down for $5.
Then Ibrahima goes back to see President Adams with the subscription book in hand. Adams has been unable to supply taxpayers’ money to free Ibrahima’s children and grandchildren, but perhaps he will reach into his own pocket. It is the final meeting between the two men, and the president describes it briefly in his diary: “Abduhl Rahaman brought me a subscription book to raise a fund for purchasing the freedom of his five sons and his eight grandchildren, to which I declined subscribing.” Adams doesn’t say why he declined, but his office is besieged by petitioners every day, and he is probably tired of strangers asking him for favors.
Henry Clay is more amenable. Hearing of Ibrahima’s fundraising tour of Northern cities, the secretary provides him with a short but valuable letter.
Washington, 5th June, 1828
The bearer hereof, Prince, is a Moor, reduced to captivity near a half century ago. The Executive of the United States, has obtained him from his master, with a view to restoring him to his friends and country.
The Deepest South of All Page 16