I went to see Helen Smith to see if the rumors were true. A tall woman with an open, direct manner, she had lived in Iran, Scotland, and Dallas with her oil-business husband, before coming home to Natchez and moving into Texada, which her parents had restored in the 1960s. The house was built circa 1798 and had once been used as the capitol of Mississippi. Duncan Morgan had removed the worn exterior bricks from their crumbling mortar, turned them all around, and reset them in new mortar that precisely matched the faded original.
Helen sat me down with a cup of coffee in the front room. “The racism I saw growing up here, and the alcoholism, were the two main reasons why I left for so long. When I came back, I knew there had been progress. There was a doctor on one of the committees I joined, and he was black, and no one talked about ‘that nice black doctor.’ I thought to myself, ‘I can live in this place now. No one is talking about what a nice black man he is.’ ” That doctor was Rod Givens, one of Greg Iles’s best friends. A few years before, the Pilgrimage Garden Club had invited Dr. Givens’s wife to become a member, but she had declined, and that ended the first attempt at racial integration among the Natchez garden clubs.
Helen wanted to reach a point in Natchez, then in Mississippi and the nation at large, where people no longer use race as the primary identifier. “That’s the end goal of my work in Mission Mississippi, my actions and my prayers. Why should it matter so much?” When I asked her how much progress she had made, she said, “I’ve reached the point now where I can have lunch with black housekeepers and host mixed dinner parties.”
If you live somewhere urban, liberal, and cosmopolitan, that might sound like a pretty feeble marker of progress, but in the Deep South, eating together at the same table in someone’s home has proved one of the most difficult taboos to overcome. It has often been observed that black and white Southerners find it easier to have sex with each other than to eat supper together. “When we bought this house ten years ago, I had to warn my neighbors that some of my house guests would be African American,” said Helen. “I told them, ‘Don’t be surprised, don’t be alarmed, and do not call the cops.’ They’ve got used to it now, which is a small sign of progress in itself.”
Helen was “offended” that her garden club had no African American members, and the rumors were true. She intended to do something about it. As a kind of icebreaker in her campaign to integrate the club, she had taken Beverly Adams and two of her friends to a garden club function, and it had gone fairly well. “I don’t know if we’re ready for black members quite yet, but people are willing to talk about it now. It might be because nobody wants to ruffle my feathers. I’m in charge of repainting Magnolia Hall, and it’s costing a fortune.”
Magnolia Hall is the Natchez Garden Club headquarters and flagship building, and while it might stand out as an impressive mansion in any other Southern town or city, it looked rather ordinary next to Stanton Hall, as the ladies of the PGC were glad to point out. When the painting and restoration work was completed, or perhaps sooner if she sensed a shift in the winds, Helen Smith intended to make a proposal to her board: “Ladies, when you’re ready, we need to target seven to ten black families. We’ll serve them candlelit dinners at Magnolia Hall, and everybody has to serve them. We have to invite them en masse, not put a couple of people on the spot.”
Regina Charboneau, meanwhile, was trying to go through Beverly Adams’s sorority, an African American women’s club that held dressy social functions and did volunteer work for youth groups and other causes in the black community. Regina approached Beverly about doing a joint event with the sorority and the Pilgrimage Garden Club, maybe a fundraising dinner or a picnic benefit, with a view to future joint events, followed by invitations to join the garden club. Beverly wasn’t interested.
“I like Regina, and some of the other garden club women I’ve met, but only some,” Beverly told me. “With the others, there’s no mistaking their racism. It is written all over them, and that doesn’t mean that they’re evil, or lacking in other qualities, but as a black person, it just makes you want to stay away from that world. And from our perspective, there’s nothing pretty about the history that the garden club is preserving, and making money from.”
Beverly was astonished when I told her that Regina and Helen belonged to separate garden clubs. Her eyes widened when I talked about the rivalries and backbiting, the lawsuits and padlocks, and the feeding of laxatives to the hounds during Tableaux, so the other club’s court would have to step out through dog shit in their crowns and gowns. “That’s crazy,” Beverly said. “I thought there was one garden club. Two clubs? And they don’t get along? Why?”
* * *
I gained a deeper understanding of that question in the living room of Chesney Doyle’s mother’s house. Kathie Blankenstein was a second-generation stalwart of the Natchez Garden Club; she had been Queen during the Korean War. For my benefit, she had invited over another NGC member, Nancy Hungerford, the mother of Greg Iles’s pregnant wife, and laid out an amazing collection of scrapbooks from the early years of Pilgrimage.
Working through the scrapbooks, I found no critical coverage. Correspondents from New York, California, and London, England, wrote about the Natchez Pilgrimage in the same way as Mississippi journalists. They were charmed by the mammy costumes, the liveried butlers, the “pickaninnies” eating watermelon, and all the rest of it. It was a delightful glimpse of the Old South.
When I reached 1936, the headlines were about the “War of the Hoopskirts.” This was when the garden club ladies split into two opposing factions and began feuding and scorning each other, as they have been doing on and off ever since. “We in the Natchez Garden Club refer to the Pilgrimage Garden Club members as Pills,” said Blankenstein. Her tone was playful, but not entirely. They also used the term as an adjective. Talking about one antebellum home, Kathie asked Nancy, “Is it Pill?” When they referred to Katherine Miller, the main instigator of the Hoopskirt War, they called her “I, Katherine,” because of her exaggerated self-regard, and because that’s what the Natchez Garden Club had been calling her since the 1930s.
The War of the Hoopskirts was about money, although loyalty was also a factor. In the first four years of Pilgrimage, the garden club made $33,000 after expenses. Roughly $14,000 went to the owners of the antebellum homes, leaving the club with $19,000. Most of the non-homeowners wanted to use that money to buy and restore more historic buildings. The homeowners, led by Katherine Miller, wanted the lion’s share of the money because it was their houses that the pilgrims came to see. “We’ve got the merchandise on the shelf,” she would say, and explain how expensive it was to maintain an antebellum home. In June 1936, Katherine Miller led her faction out of the Natchez Garden Club and formed the Pilgrimage Garden Club, taking seventeen of the twenty-six tour homes with her.
“Essentially they were mad about money, and they had a big fight and put on separate Pilgrimages,” said Blankenstein. “I, Katherine, begged my mother to come over to the new club, but she was loyal and disapproved of what they were doing. As far as she was concerned, I, Katherine, had betrayed the Natchez Garden Club and fallen from grace. Oh, it was terrible. It broke up bridge clubs. It broke up lifelong friendships. My mother and her childhood friends ended up being bitter enemies until they died. And it was maddening. Those women had no loyalty at all! It was just a business to them, and they were social mavens. That’s why they went with I, Katherine.”
“We’re the original garden club,” said Nancy Hungerford. “Sometimes we can’t help feeling mad that they took so many of our homes away from us. And the Pills act so snooty sometimes, like they’re the real garden club, just because they’ve got more homes and money.”
Blankenstein said, “We did a bad thing, too. We had an injunction brought against them. We nailed notices to their homes saying they had to be closed. They sued us. It went to court. Tempers were flaring on all sides.”
A lot of the energy that went into the Hoopskirt War, and the Pil
grimage itself, stemmed from the fact that well-to-do white women didn’t work in those days, and they had black servants to do all the household chores. “You had a lot of very smart, energetic women who didn’t have enough to do until Pilgrimage and the Pageant came along,” said Hungerford. “They poured themselves into it. The Pageant was amazing in those days because all the girls were in ballet school. When they danced the Soirée, you could have put it in an MGM movie.”
I asked what the husbands were doing while all this was going on. Kathie Blankenstein smiled. “The husbands were sitting there miserably, enduring it, and writing checks. That was their role and it still is to a certain extent.”
* * *
With Beverly Adams and her sorority sisters out of the running, Regina was now pinning her integration hopes on Debbie Cosey, who she counted as a friend. Debbie and her husband Gregory had restored and remodeled the old slave quarters at Concord, the former domain of the Yellow Duchess, into a bed-and-breakfast. Regina’s board had now voted to include Concord Quarters as a Pilgrimage tour home, to be advertised in all the leaflets and marketing, and to receive a share of ticket sales. In the small, self-contained world of Natchez, this was big news—the first African American tour home.
“It’s a way for us to acknowledge slavery and allow an African American business owner to tell that side of our history,” said Regina. “And Debbie is wonderful. You’ll love her. You must go there and stay the night. And maybe you can see if she might be open to joining the garden club. I really think she might be ready.”
Debbie Cosey was wearing a loose-flowing dress with an African print, and her gray hair was natural. As Regina predicted, I did feel a strong rush of affection for Debbie as soon as I met her. She has a warm, earth-motherly charisma and a big personality that seems strong, extroverted, vulnerable, and sensitive at the same time. She was standing outside the old slave quarters with her husband Gregory, who smiled broadly, pumped my hand, and let his wife do the talking. It was their first morning on tour, in the Fall Pilgrimage, after nearly five years of renovating the building and gambling with their finances. “Oh Lord, I’m nervous, you’ll have to excuse me,” said Debbie. “I’ve never done this before. I’ve been in the hospitality industry all my life, but people always handed me a script. Okay, here goes.”
She took a deep breath, settled her nerves, consulted her notes through glasses, then started reciting the history of the building. The Concord Quarters was constructed in the 1820s, during the reign of the Yellow Duchess. For a slave quarters, it was surprisingly large and impressive, with an upstairs balcony and five stout white columns rising up to support the roof. “They built it like this to match the big house. Outside, it was a status display: ‘Look at me, I’m so rich even my slaves live in a big fine house.’ Inside it was nothing. There were dirt floors downstairs.”
The great mansion at Concord burned down in 1901, leaving only its magnificent curving, double-flight marble staircase climbing up into the air. In time, the staircase collapsed, weeds grew over the marble chunks, and all that remained of Concord was the old slave quarters, boarded up and forgotten as an African American neighborhood formed around it. “It was in really bad shape when we bought it, and covered in green,” said Debbie. “It was a big green monster, but we love architecture, and we could see its potential. We had to buy it, even though the bank wouldn’t lend us any money. We didn’t even know it was a slave quarters until my friend Mimi Miller told me.”
“How did that feel?”
“Oh, my. I knew I had to save it then. I got really busy. I got very emotional. I wanted to know who they were that lived here. A lot of black people were mad at me. They said, ‘You should just let it die,’ and ‘I didn’t know slaves had houses,’ and ‘Let it fall in.’ It was hurtful.”
Debbie led me inside. The rooms were small but beautifully decorated with antique furniture, cut flowers, Afrocentric art on the walls. The descendants of the family that had owned Concord, and its slaves, offered Debbie the original china from the big house, but she turned it down. “I don’t want Concord china in here,” she said to me. “I mean, come on, this is the quarters. I have my mother’s china in here.”
There was a strong sense that the house had been reclaimed and redeemed, and Debbie had performed ceremonies to help this process along. “I decided this was the Queen Mother’s room,” she said, standing in the largest bedroom and referring to the matriarch of the enslaved household. “I came in here, and I got out my Bible and I introduced myself. I said, ‘I want to save your house. My name is Debbie. I’m so sorry for what happened to you.’ ”
She showed me an ancient-looking shoe that they had found half buried in the dirt floor. She was certain it had been worn by an enslaved child. “My baby grandson put his arms out to be picked up by a ghost, right where we found the shoe,” she said matter-of-factly. After the Yellow Duchess died, an inventory of her property was compiled, and Debbie had obtained a copy of the original handwritten paperwork. The inventory included a list of all the furnishings in the famous Yellow Room, and 120 Negroes worth $43,325.
“The name of this house is Concord, meaning ‘harmony,’ and that’s how we want to live. We have chosen to live with the past. We hope to open a dialogue between white and black. We want to glorify the enslaved people of these quarters. Now, if you’ll follow me outside, I’m going to sing. I do that because I do that.”
We stood outside in the autumn sunshine, and the hairs stood up on my arms as Debbie Cosey sang the old gospel song “Oh, Freedom” in a stunningly beautiful contralto voice: “And before I’d be a slave / I’d be buried in my grave…” I knew the Roberta Flack version, “Freedom Song,” and Debbie’s rendition was every bit as powerful and impressive. By the time she finished, there were tears in my eyes. “I’m going to sing that for tourists,” she said afterwards. “And we’re going to do weddings, because we have got to bless a bride here.”
I spent most of the day at Concord Quarters and stayed the night and had some long conversations with Debbie Cosey. She yearned to know more about the slaves who had lived here, but all she had was a list of 120 names, with their ages and market values, and it didn’t specify which ones were the house slaves. She was also frustrated, and saddened, by her lack of knowledge about her own ancestors. She could only trace back her lineage to her grandfather, who was born into slavery in nearby Franklin County.
“I asked him who his father was, and he said, ‘Old Massa Jones. Now get on away from here.’ My grandfather had white silky hair, blue eyes, and big ears. He looked like a leprechaun, and all he knew was to work you, and work you, on his farm. It’s something to see at our family reunions. We’ve got green eyes and pointy noses. We have people that are black as a panther with blue eyes. My mother had nappy red hair and yellow skin. When I asked her about it, she would say, ‘Hon, Mama don’t know.’ ”
Debbie’s mother was a cook and a maid who worked for more than thirty years at Hawthorne, the antebellum home of Bettye Jenkins. “When I was young, I wanted a house just like that with canopy beds and a huge gallery,” Debbie said. “I loved Pilgrimage because I got paid cash money to make flowers. You know, in thirty years the Jenkins family never once gave my mother a ride home and never once came in our house. Just didn’t. But they did pay for my tuition at Alcorn [State University] and that meant a lot.”
When Regina proposed putting Concord Quarters on tour, a delegation of senior PGC ladies came to see the house and decide if it was worthy. One of them was Bettye Jenkins. “She latched on to me, we were both tearing up, and she said, ‘Debbie, I’m so proud of you!’ Jeanette Feltus was here, Ruth Ellen Calhoun, more than twelve of those old fogies! I don’t think any of them, bless their hearts, had ever been in a black woman’s house before. I couldn’t get over their enthusiasm. I thought they’d never leave! Anyway, here I am, on tour in the Natchez Pilgrimage. I’ve had a lot of criticism from black people, which I understand, but this is what we want to do, and w
e’re doing it, and it’s exciting.”
It seemed like an opportune moment to ask Debbie if she would consider joining the Pilgrimage Garden Club.
“Regina and I are friends,” she said. “We used to fool with people by telling them we were sisters. But no, I really don’t think so. I’d feel like a token.”
* * *
Regina was still confident that she could bring Debbie Cosey into the fold, but that would have to wait now because a major crisis had broken out between the two garden clubs. “Tableaux is falling apart,” said Regina, venting her frustrations in her kitchen. “I’m so sick of dealing with them. It’s like the evil, jealous younger sister who just cannot get past her hatred of her older, more sophisticated sister. It’s like a bad marriage. I keep thinking that if I do this thing, or that thing, that it will get better, but the truth is they hate us. They have such contempt for us. They call us Pills, for Chrissakes!”
The falling apart of Tableaux, like most historical events, resulted from long-term forces and unexpected catalysts. For years, it had been getting harder and harder to recruit children. Even in the golden age, it had been a struggle to get boys to dress up in frilly little velvet suits and prance around a maypole. It had usually required an indomitable maternal will because most boys hated it. Mothers these days were more likely to accept an adamant refusal from their sons and let them put their energies into sports or other activities. And the girls weren’t interested like they used to be, back when they were all in ballet school. “Now they want to play soccer and go on social media and study hard so they can get into college,” said Regina. Times had changed, even in Natchez where time is so resistant to change, and the Tableaux, despite the efforts to adapt and modernize it, was still an extraordinary anachronism.
The Deepest South of All Page 21