The Deepest South of All

by Richard Grant

  Following this debacle, Kevin Wilson sued the school board. Phillip West filed assault charges over the “drag your ass outside” threat, denounced Wilson’s lawsuit as racist, and went on another angry televised rant about white people at an NAACP meeting. At the next school board meeting, white protesters picketed the building and held up signs: OUR SCHOOL BOARD IS SNEAKY, WEST IS THE WRONG DIRECTION, and MR. WEST, I’M NOT RACIST. They received some encouraging honks and thumbs-ups from white drivers, and some rude hand gestures and race-based obscenities from black motorists.

  One of Kevin Wilson’s businesses was vandalized. Someone beat on the door of his stepson’s house at three in the morning, and then drove away. A white couple, John and Marcia McCullough, started a campaign to get the state education department to declare a state of emergency, take over the failing school district, and fire all the school board members. Concerned about violent reprisals, the McCulloughs kept loaded weapons close to hand.

  State takeovers of predominantly African American school districts happened with depressing regularity in Mississippi and nearly always followed the same pattern. After the whites left for private schools, or other school districts, educational standards declined as the influence of multigenerational poverty asserted itself, and payrolls became bloated from extravagant and often nepotistic hiring practices. The superintendent of one school district in the Mississippi Delta was found to have thirty-six relatives on the payroll, many of whom were collecting their paychecks without setting foot on school property. In poor African American communities with hardly any economic opportunities, the school system was primarily seen as a source of employment, and the more jobs it could furnish the better.

  Judging from payroll documents obtained through a Freedom of Information request, the Natchez–Adams County school district was functioning more like a patronage system than a normal American educational system. The district had over 700 staff, including teachers, for approximately 3,400 students—or one employee for every 4.9 students. There were 70 administrators, not including principals and assistant principals, for those 3,400 students. A typical American school district has about 50 administrators for 20,000 students.

  F-rated Natchez High, with 700 students, had four principals and four assistant principals, all making between $50,000 and $82,000 a year plus benefits. By contrast, the A-rated public high school in Tupelo, Mississippi, with 2,100 students, had just one principal, working with one assistant principal. My repeated requests to interview Phillip West and the other school board members were denied, so I don’t know how they would justify these hiring practices. In one public meeting, West said they needed more personnel, not less, because the district had so many impoverished couch-surfing children.

  The argument that whites didn’t care about the public schools in Natchez because their children were in private schools obviously had some validity, but it was strongly disputed by some of the white people I talked to. Greg Iles, a liberal Democrat, and John McCullough, a conservative Republican, saw the issue in exactly the same way. In McCullough’s summary, “Any white person who doesn’t care about the public schools is a fool. The whole future of this town depends on fixing the public schools, so we can stop our population decline and attract new families and businesses. If we can’t fix the schools, I’m afraid we’re going to lose the town.”

  * * *

  Mayor Grennell hated to see the town so angrily divided over the schools. It was the opposite of what his election was supposed to achieve. “It’s frustrating, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t have any power over the school board, and there’s no changing their minds, so I don’t let it stress me. I focus on the positive and put my trust in God.”

  There were some positive developments. A biracial group of prominent citizens, including Phillip West, was meeting once a week in private to talk about the schools and the divisions in the community. At the meeting I attended, West kept ranting and raving, but a timetable for progress was nonetheless hashed out with his agreement. A new organization, Natchez United, had formed with the goal of fostering racial unity and helping the public schools. Its leader, Dr. Marvin Jeter, was a white educator with an impressive track record of turning around failing schools in poor communities, both in Mississippi and Oklahoma. He had swept-back blond hair and was wearing an open-necked pink shirt with a gold chain when I met him for lunch at Cotton Alley Café on Main Street.

  “People are stuck looking at this as a black and white issue, when they should be asking, ‘How can our kids succeed in school?’ ” he said. “And it’s really very simple. It’s not part of the human condition to want to fail. If children know for an absolute fact that you have faith in them, that you genuinely care about them, and you’re not going to quit on them, they will succeed in school. And if they doubt any of that, they will look for a way to succeed on the streets instead.”

  Dr. Jeter had a PhD in education administration, and a ten-page résumé of high-ranking education jobs. He had learned that having faith in the students was the secret to turning a school around, but he believed another kind of faith was even more important. “The first thing we need to do is bring God back into the community,” he said, as if Natchez, a town of 15,000 people with 111 churches, was a wasteland of atheists and backsliders. “Only He can heal the deep wounds here. Unless the faith-based community comes together, anything we do will be a Band-Aid and the wounds will continue to bleed out. We’re working with Bishop Stanley Searcy, an African American minister that I know from Oral Roberts University. I’m praying Phillip West will join us, too.”

  Another faith-based group working on racial reconciliation was Mission Mississippi, a statewide organization founded by an African American minister in 1993. It provided a forum for black and white Christians to meet regularly, talk about race as openly and honestly as possible, and form biracial friendships while simultaneously strengthening their religious devotion. Beverly Adams, Ibrahima and Isabella’s descendant, was a member, but lately she had been struggling to retain her hope.

  “I believe in what we do at Mission Mississippi, but it’s hard work and slow going, and I’m concerned that we’re not having much impact on the community. Even on a personal level, it’s difficult.” Through the organization, she had formed a solid friendship with Helen Smith, a powerful figure in the Natchez Garden Club who lived in an antebellum home called Texada. Beverly had received there in a hoopskirt a few times, which had raised more than a few eyebrows among her African American friends, colleagues, and family members.

  “The other day Helen invited me to a party, and we’re encouraged to socialize in each other’s communities, so I went. I didn’t feel uncomfortable at the time, although I was aware that I was the only black person at the party, except for the men parking the cars, and the women working in the kitchen and serving the food. It was afterwards that it really hit me, and I started to feel really uncomfortable. Have you seen the movie Get Out? It was like that, just a whole lot of white people trying to be cool with the black person in the room, and it was just… I don’t know. I wished I hadn’t gone.”

  Mission Mississippi also encouraged its members to attend each other’s churches, but it was proving difficult to do. This was the main topic on the agenda at the first Mission Mississippi meeting I attended. “There’s a difference in church culture,” Beverly said to a group of thirty people. “We clap and shout and say, ‘Mm-hmm,’ and it gets loud when the preacher and the musicians are going all out. We can see white people trying to get with it, but they’re uncomfortable, and we’re uncomfortable in white church because it’s so quiet, and we’re thinking, ‘What’s wrong? Where’s the spirit?’ ” She suggested a new initiative: they should go as a group into each other’s churches one Sunday a month and arrange for pulpit swaps with black preachers in white churches, and vice versa. The idea was well received and plans were laid.

  It seemed to me as an outsider, raised in secular, multicultural London, that these e
arnest faith-based initiatives fostered healthy discussions and could only do good in a place where religiosity was so strong. But they also revealed how deeply divded the town really was, and how difficult it was to see things from the other group’s point of view. In the fight over the schools, for example, two sides were immovable in their clashing opinions. Almost no whites believed that a new school building would fix the public education system. Nearly all blacks thought their children deserved a school building that wasn’t falling apart, and that it was racist to think otherwise.

  Another example was Mammy’s Cupboard. Mission Mississippi had held a discussion about the towering Aunt Jemima–themed restaurant and pie shop on Highway 61. I didn’t attend that meeting, but heard about it from Kathleen Bond, a superintendent in the National Park Service and Mission Mississippi member. “Most whites at the meeting did find Mammy offensive, or at least problematic, but one woman saw it as a complimentary representation of African American cooking talents and hospitality, and another found it quaint,” Kathleen told me.

  Two African American women bluntly explained to the group what Mammy’s Cupboard represented to them: enslaved servitude was the proper role for a black woman, and everybody had easy access to what was under her skirt. One of these women would always try to distract her children when she had to drive past Mammy’s, in the hope of averting angry scenes in the car. That was something the white people hadn’t considered. No structure in town was capable of enraging their children in the same way.

  Beverly Adams accepted that change was hard for people, but she felt discouraged by the younger generations, who didn’t seem interested in making the effort. “These younger whites think racism has nothing to do with them. They say, ‘I never owned slaves. I don’t hate black people. Y’all need to get over this stuff.’ They don’t get it at all, what it’s like on our side. And the younger blacks don’t believe it will ever change. They think this is the way it will always be.”

  | 20 |

  Ibrahima and Isabella are the last passengers to board the Harriet, a handsome 275-ton ship anchored near Norfolk, Virginia, and chartered by the American Colonization Society for passage to Liberia. Already aboard and eager to depart are 150 free black colonists, described by a visiting journalist as “very orderly and decent people.… Many of them, except for the color of their skins, would have been valued members of society in the United States.” Over half of them are literate, most are skilled in various trades, and all are Christians. Part of their mission in Africa is to civilize the natives by spreading the gospel. Several ministers with the Society have made strenuous efforts to convert Ibrahima to Christianity, and while he has listened politely, his faith in Islam has never wavered. It is something that he will bring back to Africa intact.

  On February 7, 1829, the Harriet casts off from her moorings and rides the cold wind into the open ocean. Ibrahima and Isabella are free from the land of their enslavement, yet slipping even further away from their children and grandchildren. They still hope to see them again, reasoning that Thomas Foster is old and his heirs will sell if the price is right. Ibrahima has left the $3,500 from his fundraising tour with the Society for this purpose, and he yearns for the day when his American family will be reunited in the kingdom of his forefathers.

  The smell of the Atlantic Ocean, the pitching and rolling, the flapping sails and creaking timbers, evoke memories of the cramped horror voyage on the Africa forty years ago. But this time he is a guest of the US government with a handwritten passport from Henry Clay, and he and Isabella are berthed in a comfortable stateroom. While he was in New York, Ibrahima sent a letter in Arabic to his brother in Futa Jalon, saying that the good people of America have liberated him from slavery, and that he will be returning home shortly. What an astonishment this letter will cause in Timbo, from someone long since given up for dead.

  Ibrahima has no plans to claim the throne, resume military command, or take any part in governing his country. Instead he intends to establish himself as a trader between Futa Jalon and the colony in Liberia. For thousands of years, bound captives have marched in misery along the trade routes of West Africa, but Ibrahima’s experiences have convinced him to disavow the trafficking of human beings. One of the most challenging tasks he has set himself, upon his return to Futa Jalon, is to convince his relatives and countrymen to give up this lucrative trade, which is a key source of guns and gunpowder.

  After thirty-seven days at sea, with favorable winds and all passengers in good health, land is sighted. Cape Mesurado, on the Liberian coast, comes into focus as a narrow strip of beach and a broad band of lush green vegetation. For Ibrahima, this is a homecoming. But the great majority of the colonists were born in the United States, and many of them are shocked by the naked Kru boatmen who paddle out to meet the Harriet. The African American colonists will also be surprised to learn that the Kru refer to them as “white people.”I

  Disembarking at the port of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, their eyes are comforted by more familiar sights. The town has a hundred houses built in the Anglo-American style, a church, a library, and a jail, which contains a miscreant Englishman who tried to escape his debts. Hundreds of colonists come down to the docks to greet them, with the women in formal dresses and men wearing frock coats and top hats. The Society’s agent in charge is a white American named Dr. Richard Randall, a former army surgeon who Ibrahima met in New York and entrusted with the letter to his brother.

  Dr. Randall, who is suffering the after-effects of a fever and finding it difficult to walk, tells Ibrahima that he sent the letter with a Mandinka messenger to Timbo, and is still waiting for a reply. Ibrahima immediately writes a second letter and sends it via Freetown, Sierra Leone, which has good connections with Futa Jalon, and Dr. Randall sends news of his arrival up the rivers.

  The Society provided Ibrahima and Isabella with a house frame, but when it’s unloaded from the Harriet, another colonist insists that he paid for it and refuses to let it go. A promised keg of nails also fails to arrive. This leaves the elderly couple facing the torrential downpours and chilly nights of the rainy season in a flimsy bamboo shelter, with no prospect of building a house. A far more serious oversight concerns a letter that fails to arrive in the Harriet’s mailbag. Written by the Society’s board, the letter said that Ibrahima and the other new arrivals should be immediately moved to Millsburg, an inland town with a much healthier climate than fever-ridden Monrovia.

  Within a week of landing, one of the Harriet’s passengers is dead. All the crew members fall sick, and one dies. Within a month, seven more colonists are dead. Then the fever claims Dr. Randall. Within a few months, thirty of the new arrivals are dead. Ibrahima falls sick too, but recovers. He gets a letter written to New York warning that Monrovia is a death trap, and he makes plans to depart for Timbo as soon as the rainy season is over. Dr. Randall’s replacement has agreed to spend $500 on supplies for the journey. All the arrangements are in place.

  As soon as he reached African soil, Ibrahima began praying to Mecca five times a day, and following all the prescriptions and commands of the Koran. Now he starts reading and writing in Arabic again, and manuscripts pile up in the bamboo shelter during this grim season of rain and funerals. He also plans out his business enterprise. Most of the trade with Futa Jalon goes through Freetown in Sierra Leone, but with his royal connections in Timbo, and goods from his merchant friends in New York, Ibrahima feels confident that he can steer a good portion of the trade further south through Liberia. He can make a handsome profit by supplying his people with guns, powder, tobacco, linen, sugar, combs, knives, and other goods. In return, he can get ivory and gold from Futa Jalon and export it to America with palm oil and rice produced in Liberia.

  Sometime in late June, with the rain lashing the bamboo walls, torrents rushing through the streets, and more people dying of fever, Ibrahima contracts diarrhea. He thinks nothing of it, but it takes hold and weakens his entire system. By the time he calls the doctor, it is to
o late, and Ibrahima knows it. One of his final requests is for his manuscripts to be sent to Timbo.

  It is tragic that he comes so close to returning home, and as the life drains out of him, he must wonder what on earth will become of Isabella, marooned in a sickly outpost on an unfamiliar continent, without her husband, children, and grandchildren. On July 6, 1829, at the age of sixty-seven, Prince Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima dies in Monrovia with Isabella at his bedside.

  I. In pockets of the colony, some of the African Americans establish large plantations and build Greek Revival mansions, which they fill with African servants. Some whiten their faces with powders, to further emulate Southern slaveholders, and impose forced labor and indentured servitude on the indigenous Africans. Even in the 1940s, their descendants wear hoopskirts and top hats to formal occasions.

  | 21 |

  Even in the garden clubs, which most African Americans regarded as bastions of white supremacy, some people were trying to bridge the racial divide and work towards reconciliation. Regina Charboneau was determined to racially integrate the Pilgrimage Garden Club, even though she could think of nothing more horrifying to its founders. It would be a historic moment for the city, a landmark of racial progress, and a personal coup. She thought the PGC board was ready for black members, and if some women in the rank and file couldn’t handle it and defected to the other club, then that was where they belonged.

  Regina was convinced that the Natchez Garden Club was more racist and more attached to Confederate trappings than the PGC. “But they’re not all racists,” she clarified. Chesney Doyle, the Tableaux director, was one obvious exception. Another was Helen Smith, Beverly Adams’s friend from Mission Mississippi. Regina was now hearing rumors that Helen was attempting to integrate the Natchez Garden Club, and while Regina didn’t think that was possible, it added a step of urgency to her own efforts.