I would stop in periodically at City Hall to interview Grennell, an even-tempered former microbiology professor with a penchant for quoting the poet Robert Frost. Handsome, bald, and light skinned, he worked out at the gym every morning with impressive results. He wore tight-fitting shirts and suits, and when he rolled up his sleeves, you could see brightly colored tattoos of orb-weaving spiders and tropical flowers. His body language was confident and masculine, and when he rested his jaw on his fist, or leaned forward in his chair to make a point with an outstretched hand, or hooked one leg across the opposing knee, it looked slightly exaggerated and actorly. You got the feeling that his muscles yearned to flex and bulge.
“The gym is a stress release,” he said, when I asked him about his political frustrations. “So is baking. I love to bake, and I give everything I bake to other people. I also enjoy frogging [hunting frogs], and going fishing. And believe it or not, I crochet, which is a great stress release.”
He wanted to end the racial divisiveness because he thought it was the only logical solution to the city’s problems, and the right thing to do, but he was also influenced by his family tree. Among his forbears were two prominent white men who had recognized their mixed-race children, and a white tax collector who married his black mistress. “I think of my white ancestors and relatives as part of my extended family because those were loving relationships. But I don’t think of myself as biracial or mixed, because I was raised all the way black.”
His father was a prominent civil rights activist who formed an organization called the Black Dot Club. “They had small black dots tattooed on their chests, and their job was to transport civil rights workers in and out of dangerous situations, including John Lewis, who is now a US congressman. My mom was pregnant with me when she was put on a bus, hauled off to Parchman, and abused by the prison guards.”
That was one reason why he had led the campaign for a monument to honor the survivors of the Parchman Ordeal. Darryl was proudly African American and he revered the civil rights movement, but unlike Ser Boxley, Phillip West, and Joyce Arceneaux-Mathis, to name three locally prominent examples, he didn’t resent white people for all the terrible things they had done in the past, and for the continuing racism in large swaths of the white community. Instead he took heart that race relations had come so far, without denying there was still a long way to go.
Darryl was the first gay black mayor in Mississippi, and one of the first in the nation, but he never presented himself that way or claimed that he had made history. He didn’t want to be defined by his race or his sexuality, believing that character and accomplishments were far more important. He openly acknowledged that he was gay, and planned to marry his partner, but he didn’t make a big deal about it. Most people in laissez-faire Natchez didn’t think it was a big deal either, although he had caught some criticism from conservative African American church ministers and their followers.
On the wall of his office, near the portrait of Ibrahima, was a framed first edition of Horton Hears a Who! by Dr. Seuss. Darryl found the book’s message of everyone coming together to save a community to be inspiring and politically relevant. I asked him why he thought Joyce Arceneaux-Mathis was so antagonistic towards him. Was it personal? A story was going around town that she had called him a “yellow motherfucker” to his face during a black caucus meeting at her house, referring to his light skin tone after she’d drunk a few glasses of gin. He had no comment on that alleged incident. “I really don’t know what she’s got against me.”
He thought it was possible that she didn’t like him because he was light skinned and gay, and equally possible that she disagreed with his efforts to move Natchez beyond race-based politics. “The problem with divisiveness is that it doesn’t lead to prosperity. It holds us back. We use up all our energy fighting over a pie that is getting smaller and smaller as our population and tax base declines. Trent Lott [former US senator from Mississippi] used to say that Natchez is the best-kept secret in America. I want to make it a treasure for the whole country to enjoy. To do that, we’ve got to tear down these walls of division, and I’m optimistic that we can do it.”
He was pleased to see whites and African Americans working together on a $25 million plan to develop downtown and attract more tourists, even though other African Americans thought it was yet another boost for the rich white part of the town. Darryl was also encouraged by the conversations about racial healing that were taking place in Natchez, his electoral victory, and his religious faith. “I’ve asked God for guidance. Things will happen when He wants it.”
* * *
One of Darryl Grennell’s biggest supporters during his election campaign was Greg Iles, the bestselling thriller writer and the most famous person in Natchez. He had just published the final installment of an epic 2,300-page trilogy about race, corruption, and murder in Natchez and Louisiana; all three books reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list and were being published in thirty-five countries. When he returned from his book tour, Iles invited me to his secluded country house to talk about politics and race relations in his hometown, and what he described as the “broken school system” that was imperiling its future.
Driving through the woods outside Natchez, I reviewed what I knew about Greg Iles. He was almost entirely nocturnal and had lost a leg in a recent car accident. He played guitar in a charity rock band with Stephen King and other bestselling authors. Some people in Natchez criticized him for being arrogant, but most people seemed to like and respect him, even if they disagreed with his outspoken liberal politics. It was obvious from reading the Natchez Burning trilogy that he was a true master of the page-turning thriller, and that he had thought deeply about the stubborn complexities of race in the South, where slavery had bound two peoples together in mutual antagonism and dependence, and the contradictions in that original relationship had never been resolved.
Reaching the entrance gates, I punched in a security code. The gates swung open and a smooth, winding road led me through forty acres of grounds to a large impressive house, just shy of a mansion and built long after the Civil War. Greg Iles, tall, in his late fifties, with reddish hair, opened the front door in jeans and a T-shirt. He had a neatly trimmed beard, black-framed glasses, and an engaging grin. “Come on in, man. I’ll tell you what I can. Natchez is a complicated little place with a lot of problems.”
I followed him into the kitchen. He was limping only slightly on his prosthetic leg and seemed full of energy and good cheer. He introduced me to his second wife, Caroline, who was considerably younger than him and pregnant with their first child. She gave a strong impression of being kind, intelligent, and down-to-earth. We all chatted for a while and ate from a cheese platter, then Greg led me down into his basement recording studio and writing room. It was a bunker, a masculine command center where day and night were banished, and he would write in a kind of manic fugue state for twenty hours or more at a stretch, sometimes thirty-six hours straight without sleep. There was a rack of expensive guitars and a fridge full of Tab sodas and Heinekens. I asked him about growing up in Natchez—when did he first become aware of race and racism?
“I don’t know how aware I was of the racism, but when I was five years old, there was a massive Klan rally a mile from my family’s house.” This was in October 1965 at Liberty Park in Natchez. Klansmen came from all over the South, and the press estimated that 3,700 people were present. “My dad walked me down there because he believed in witnessing historic events. There were thousands of people and it was chaos, and here’s what I remember. Not only the Klan robes on the men, women, and children. What is seared indelibly on my mind is the horses wearing robes. You talk about something scary. You see the horses in these ghost robes, and the men hollering, and the guns, and holy shit, man, I was five years old!”
His parents grew up dirt-poor in rural Louisiana, but they didn’t have the deep, implacable racism that is so common among impoverished whites in the Deep South, and so necess
ary to their pride and self-respect. They met at a small Louisiana college, where they both excelled academically. Then his father became an army doctor and they were stationed in Germany, where Greg was born.
“That was a blessing. These two Southern people who had grown up in a very insular way got exposed to Europeans, Yankees, people from all over America who were in the army. They traveled as much they could—Italy, Paris. But what impressed them the most was the aftermath of the Second World War, and the awareness of the Holocaust. When they came back to the South and moved to Natchez, and the civil rights movement started to happen, my father looked at it in exactly the same way as he looked at the situation of the Jews in Germany. He was in complete sympathy. So was my mother.”
Greg’s father treated more black patients than any other white doctor in Natchez, often without payment. He also treated a lot of Klansmen and kept his views to himself. He was the first white doctor in Natchez to hire an African American nurse and desegregate his waiting room, but it always weighed on him that he didn’t do more. “He was afraid of his family being ostracized or run out of town,” Greg said. “It was a legitimate concern in those days.”
Growing up in Mississippi in the aftermath of Jim Crow was similar to growing up in post-apartheid South Africa. The legal architecture of segregation and white supremacy was gone after a long, bitter struggle, and the children of both races were now feeling their way into an uncertain new reality that they were also shaping. One of Greg’s most powerful childhood memories, right behind the Klan rally, comes from his elementary school after desegregation, when the first three or four black students were admitted and the white students ostracized them. “I will never forget seeing those kids, standing alone, out on the playground, completely isolated. That is a kind of violence to a kid, and you could see so clearly what they were going through. It was a brave thing of their parents to put them in there, and black parents and kids had everything to gain, but, man, those kids have stuck with me my whole life.”
In the following years, more and more black children started entering the Natchez public schools, and more black teachers started teaching, until a racial tipping point was reached that caused whites to flee into the private schools. “It happened all over the South,” Greg said. “You had people who did it for the knee-jerk reason that they just didn’t want their kids going to school with black kids. Then you had people like my dad, who really wanted it to work, but saw the educational standards slipping. If you fill up a school with kids who’ve had an inferior education to date, you have to teach at the pace of the slowest kids. And some of those black teachers really weren’t qualified for the job.”
When he was in fourth grade, Greg Iles came home one afternoon and told his parents that his black teacher had misspelled something on the board and he had corrected her. He thought it was a funny story, but when his parents heard it, they yanked him out and put him in a private Episcopal school. “It’s a sad story, and I don’t like relating it. But it’s that anecdotal stuff that affects people’s decisions.”
I had assumed that the white flight from the public schools happened all at once, but he said there was an intermediate phase in the 1970s and 1980s that many Natchezians, black and white, remembered with pride and nostalgia. In that era, one public high school, North Natchez, was entirely black, and the other, South Natchez, was racially mixed and majority white with better facilities. According to Iles, “Both schools were powerhouse athletic schools statewide, and they both gave a pretty damn good education, by Mississippi standards I should stress.”
In 1989, Phillip West, now the head of the school board, led a lawsuit to shut down North Natchez and make South Natchez the single high school for everybody. Greg Iles thought Phillip West was an embittered, self-serving demagogue with the same disregard for factual truth as Donald Trump. But he had to admit that West and the other plaintiffs, “from a moral, philosophical, and ethical perspective,” had been entirely justified with that lawsuit.
The problem, as Greg saw it, was the result of that lawsuit. “As soon as they won it, many, many more whites left for private schools. South Natchez became predominantly black. I think it’s ninety-five percent now. The football team fell apart, and academically it became one of the worst schools in America. It doesn’t get any worse than an F rating in Mississippi. If you’re looking at this from the outside as a moral experiment, the lawsuit was obviously the right thing to do. But if you live here, and you want to put your kids in that system, you go, ‘Well, what was the point of that? You destroyed public education in Natchez.’ ”
Faced with the choice of paying private fees or sending their children to a failing school, many parents, black and white, were choosing instead to leave Natchez and move somewhere with decent public schools. It was one of the major reasons why the population was shrinking—Adams County had lost 17 percent of its people since 1980—and it also made it difficult to attract new businesses to the area. Greg Iles, who sent his children to a private school, had tried to lead a movement of whites back into the public schools, but it had gotten nowhere, even with his most ardently liberal friends. Again, it was the anecdotal stuff. “I can show you a video on my phone of a brawl at that school, right out in the open. It’s mostly girls hitting each other and ripping hair, no adults within sight for at least two minutes, just an out-and-out brawl. My friend is just not going to put his daughter into that situation.”
In the last few weeks, the simmering racial tension over the schools had boiled over into open conflict. Led by Phillip West, the Natchez–Adams County school board had tried to convince the voters to pass a $35 million bond for a new Natchez high school because the old building was in disrepair. The bond issue had been defeated, with the vote split on racial lines. Now there were demonstrators in the streets, lawsuits flying, threats of a boycott from the black community, explosive accusations on both sides.
The racial divide was swiftly turning into a chasm, and Greg Iles was concerned that racial violence could break out for the first time since the 1960s. Needless to say, most people in Natchez owned guns, including Iles, who has a large collection. It’s one of Mississippi’s defining characteristics: even the liberals are armed to the teeth.
* * *
For most people in the African American community, it was glaringly obvious why whites hadn’t voted in favor of the $35 million school bond. Their children were in private schools. They didn’t want to pay more taxes to improve a school that was over 90 percent black because they didn’t care about black children. Darrell White, the director of the African American museum, spoke about white voters with a look of deep disgust on his face.
“One hundred dollars a year was the average property tax increase,” he said, smoking a cigarette outside the museum. “You pay money so your children don’t go to school with ours, and you won’t pay a hundred dollars a year so our children can have a better school? You’re not going to invest because we still have a segregated school system that benefits and rewards whites. And then you get mad when some of us point out that this is racist. You start screaming and hollering, ‘How dare you call me a racist?’ ” He shook his head and ground out his cigarette butt with his heel.
For most people in the white community, it was glaringly obvious that a new building wasn’t going to fix the public education system, which was spending almost twice as much money per student as the private schools, and achieving far worse results. I interviewed a white teacher named Mary Ann Blough, who had taught in the public schools. She said that socioeconomic problems in the black community posed a major challenge for educators; Phillip West and other school board members often made the same point.
She singled out drug-addicted babies, fetal alcohol syndrome, malnourishment, and the many children who couch-surfed between various relatives. These were heartbreaking challenges, but she claimed that school administrators made no real effort to tackle them. “The people in charge blame the whites, blame the parents, blame the
teachers, blame the students, and now they’re blaming the buildings. The facilities are run-down because they haven’t maintained them properly. They say there’s no money for maintenance, but they spend a fortune on hiring consultant after consultant. Oh my God, so many consultants when we didn’t have any textbooks or paper.”
After the $35 million bond issue was voted down, the Natchez–Adams County school board, which had already spent $360,000 on architect fees for the new high school, basically ignored the result of the vote. In a special meeting announced only three and a half hours before it started, the board members voted to borrow $9 million to fund school construction and renovation and use their power to raise taxes in order to pay for it. They also approved another $25 million to be raised in the future.
Kevin Wilson, a white business owner with several properties in town, estimated that his taxes would increase by $20,000 a year. At the next school board meeting, he presented a petition with 3,338 signatures, calling for the $9 million loan to be put on a public ballot, so the voters could decide if they wanted it or not. The petition did not meet the legal requirement to overturn the board’s vote, so the board ignored it.
Phillip West then read out a statement saying that the opponents of the school board “do not care about the education of the children who attend public schools” because they had the same shameful mindset as whites fifty years ago, whereupon the meeting degenerated into an angry shouting match, with West hurling accusations of racism, and white people yelling back at him. Someone shouted that West didn’t care about taxpayers’ bills. He shouted back, “You weren’t concerned about the bills when I wasn’t allowed to go into the schools, when I was paying taxes. Don’t give me that BS.”
After West shouted down a middle-aged white woman, her son walked up to him and said, “I’ll drag your ass outside.” West kept ranting and pointing his finger as other board members tried to calm him down. Having called the white people racists, he then delivered a lower parting blow: “I’m a Christian, and evidently most of them are not.” The police were called, a fuming West was led out of the room by other board members, and the meeting was adjourned.
The Deepest South of All Page 19