Nonetheless, Regina was happy with Chesney’s script and pleased with this year’s production, although she and the PGC board saw plenty of room for improvement. “We took out the Virginia Reel because it sucked, and the other club got mad,” she said, identifying one of the unexpected catalysts. “In addition to two garden clubs, we have two dance studios in Natchez. One is theirs, the other is ours. Their studio produced the Virginia Reel, so when we took it out, they accused us of attacking their club.”
Regina and Chesney agreed that the main priority was to hire an artistic director, and two other theatrical professionals, to improve the amateurish quality of the production. The new hires had been approved by the PGC board, but now Regina and Chesney had received a snubbing letter from the president of the NGC. Not only had the NGC board voted against hiring the theatrical professionals—“We do not find the proposal a sound business venture at this time.” The letter also said that the Tableaux chairwomen, not Chesney Doyle, would now decide “all adjustments” to her script and “take full control of the production from this point on.” In other words, Chesney had been shitcanned by her own club, and she would now be replaced by Cheryl Rhinehart, who had directed the Tableaux in the old days before Greg Iles got involved.
This was the last straw for Regina. She announced that the Pilgrimage Garden Club was withdrawing from the Tableaux and would instead present its King, Queen, and Court at “A Royal Evening at Longwood.” She wasn’t yet sure what the Royal Evening would entail, beyond champagne and a spectacular setting. Longwood, a six-story octagonal mansion owned by the PGC, was arguably the most dramatic building in Natchez.
“I’ve got to put on something for the mothers,” Regina said. “They’ve been volunteering all year, and dreaming of their sons and daughters in the Court. The Queen has dreamed all her life about coming out in her dress, and I get that. We can make it clear that this is the last time if we have to.”
The PGC’s withdrawal left the Tableaux under the complete control of the Natchez Garden Club, but they had no script. Chesney Doyle, who compared the experience of directing her first Tableaux to “diving headfirst into a blender,” had written a letter saying that neither club had permission to use any part of her written script, or audiovisual program. Ann Gaude, who ran the dance studio affiliated with the Pilgrimage Garden Club, was so upset by the schism that she pulled out of the production. “I had her weeping on my sofa,” said Regina. “Even people who love the Tableaux are saying it’s over. Ann produced Ol’ Man River, Maypole, the Can-Can, and the Soirée. That’s a lot to lose from the production, but it’s not my problem anymore. I’m so glad to be out of it, even though I’ll go down in the history books as the one who ended it after eighty-one years of collaboration.”
People were comparing the split over Tableaux to the great sundering of the clubs in 1936, and the rumor mill was in overdrive. Regina was hearing that the NGC was going to take Tableaux all the way back to the old days, meaning no more African American performers, no mention of slavery, the return of the Confederate flag, and the return of “Dixie,” the anthem of the Confederacy, at the show’s climax. Helen Smith told me none of this was true, but Regina’s sources said that the NGC Pageant committee members were being careful not to mention their true plans in front of Helen.
Greg Iles was hearing the same rumors as Regina, and he was worried that Natchez was in for a major embarrassment: “If the national media get wind of it and come down here, they’ll have a field day. It’ll be Natchez, Mississippi, last bastion of the old Confederacy, and Phillip West and Joyce Arceneaux will be glad to tell them that we’re all a bunch of racists and nothing has changed in Mississippi.”
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Soon after he took office and hung Ibrahima’s picture on the wall, Mayor Darryl Grennell received a visitor from Liberia, Dr. Artemus Gaye. He was a refugee from the Liberian civil war in the 1990s — a conflict between the Americo-Liberians, descended from the black American colonists, and the indigenous peoples they had oppressed and exploited since the early days of the colony. During the war, Artemus Gaye found out he was descended from slaves in Mississippi.
He fled the violence and enrolled at Northwestern University, just north of Chicago, where he started researching his family history and discovered that he was also descended from African royalty: Ibrahima and Isabella were his seventh-great-grandparents. Dr. Gaye was now making regular trips to Natchez to find out more about his family tree and get to know his Mississippi cousins. It was a reminder that Ibrahima’s story did not end with his death. It rippled down through the generations on two continents and continues to affect people’s lives today.
From Liberia, a poignant detail has surfaced. When Ibrahima’s letter reached Timbo, announcing that the good people of America had liberated him from slavery and he was coming home, a caravan was sent to welcome him. It was laden with thirty pounds of gold, which Ibrahima would have undoubtedly used to buy the freedom of his children and grandchildren in Natchez. In one of his last letters, Ibrahima wrote, “Their emancipation would be paramount to every other consideration.” When the caravan reached the town of Bopolu in western Liberia, 150 miles from Monrovia, its leaders learned that the prince had died and turned their horses around.
Thomas Foster, who was the same age as Ibrahima, died of heart disease later that year (1829). His thirteen children inherited extensive cotton plantations and more than a hundred slaves. After the estate was divided, the American Colonization Society purchased Ibrahima’s son Simon, his wife Hannah and five children, and his brother Levi. The price was $3,100, which came out of the $3,500 that Ibrahima had raised on his costumed tour. The Society arranged their passage to Monrovia, where they reunited with Isabella after a separation of more than two years. Artemus Gaye is the direct descendant of Simon and Hannah.
If that caravan had continued to Monrovia and given the royal gold to the prince’s mourning widow, she could have easily purchased the freedom of her other children and multiplying grandchildren in Natchez. As it was, they remained in slavery until Emancipation in 1863, and Isabella died in Liberia without ever seeing them again. Beverly Adams is descended from the children who remained enslaved in Mississippi, and many more descendants are living in the Natchez area and Southern states. As Artemus Gaye discovered at his first family reunion in Natchez, the name Prince is still widely used in these families. If it was originally bestowed with sarcasm by young Thomas Foster, it has long since been reclaimed as a name that conveys pride in royal African ancestors. In fact, it was Ibrahima himself who first accomplished this by naming his second son Prince.
* * *
By the end of the Civil War, Foster Fields was a ruin. The house was deserted, or burned down, or a warren of freed slaves, depending on which sources you believed. Most of Thomas’s relatives had gone to Louisiana, Texas, or elsewhere in Mississippi, and most of the gravestones from the family cemetery went with them. But one afternoon in the thick, sweltering heat of August, following vague directions from someone who had seen it years ago, Kerry Dicks and I found what appeared to be the grave of Thomas Foster.
We were trespassing on the grounds of a private house, pulling away weeds, trying to read the blackened inscription on the gravestone, when a pickup truck drove up to us. A sticker on the window read HELL WITH THE DOG. BEWARE OF THE OWNER. The white man behind the wheel was wearing a gray T-shirt and smoking a cigarette. He looked tough, and probably armed, but not particularly concerned. In my British accent, I said, “Hi there. We heard that Thomas Foster, who owned Prince Ibrahima, was buried here somewhere, and we’re wondering if that’s the grave.”
“That’s what I figured,” he said. “And that’s him alright.”
We gave our names, and he introduced himself as Chris Gibson. “The Gibsons intermarried with the Fosters. A Gibson was the preacher at the Presbyterian church.”
“My family used to live at Foster’s Mound,” said Kerry, referring to the place where Thomas Foster’s br
other had lived. “The Junkins, on my mother’s side. My great-grandmother was born there.” This is a common form of exchange when Mississippians meet for the first time. They want to know about each other’s ancestors, and which families they married into. If kinship ties can be established, so much the better. If there was a feud in the past, it could get awkward.
“Come on up to the house and I’ll tell you what I know.” Gibson drove the few hundred yards, and we followed on foot.
Sweat seeped into my clothes. Sweat dripped off my earlobes. If that was Thomas Foster’s grave, I thought, this had to be part of Foster Fields. Ibrahima must have trodden this ground, heard these summer sounds of birds and cicadas, and worked in this punishing heat and humidity. Not for the first time since I moved to Mississippi, I tried to imagine picking cotton in a shadeless field from dawn to dusk, moving down the rows with the babies and toddlers on a nine-foot cotton sack, then trying to cool off at night in a sweaty, airless shack full of fleas and mosquitoes. Solomon Northup’s bed was a single wooden plank. More commonly, a slave’s bed was a few old rags on a dirt floor. Food was served in a communal trough, as if enslaved people were cattle or pigs.
Chris Gibson lived in an 1870 farmhouse next to a huge pecan tree with lightning scars. “Mother’s parents bought this property in 1957 with no idea of the connection to the Fosters. There was a couple named Creasy and George living in the old slave quarters, and they were part of the deal. You had to inherit them with the house. She’d iron clothes and work as a maid. They stayed on for a while until they built a house down the road.”
He pointed across his driveway. “The old slave quarters was right over there. It was a four-room house. They hauled it off to Frogmore Plantation in Louisiana and re-erected it as a historical exhibit. I don’t know if it was the prince’s house or not. It’s possible.”
“Where was Thomas Foster’s house?” I asked.
“The original log-cabin structure is under the grass of my driveway. The big house sat out past it a little ways. Slaves lived in it during the Civil War. When the Fosters came back, they threw a tantrum and refused to live where blacks had lived. That’s the story I heard. Foster’s fields extended in all directions from here. It’s mostly gone to woods now.”
He showed us an old cistern from Thomas Foster’s day, and a grist wheel that the slaves used to grind corn and flour. Then we walked back down to the grave, and he apologized for its overgrown condition. Gibson owned six businesses in addition to his job as a battalion chief with the Natchez Fire Department, and he was trying to keep up the old house as well.
He showed us two graves in a tangled clump of weeds, brambles, and goldenrod. One had a slim gray stone leaning back and tilting slightly to the side. Its inscription commemorated Thomas Foster’s daughter Cassandra Speed, the LATE CONSORT OF JOHN SPEED. She died at forty-four, and IS NOW GONE TO ENJOY IN HEAVEN AN ETERNITY OF INCREASING BLESSINGS AND GLORY.
Thomas Foster’s gravestone lay flat on the ground, and it took some work to make out the inscription. Kerry, an aficionado of cemeteries and tombstones, was sure that he had composed the words himself. HE LIVED IN THE DISCHARGE OF ALL THE DUTIES OF SOCIAL ORDER, it began, a clear reference to his slaveholding, AND EXEMPLIFIED THROUGH LIFE THE CHARACTER OF THE DOER OF GOOD AND WAS REMOVED FROM THE BOSOM OF HIS FAMILY TO THAT OF HIS GOD ON THE LAST DAY OF SEPTEMBER 1829. That was less than three months after Ibrahima died in Monrovia.
I thought of all the suffering and pain and misery this doer of good had imposed on his human chattels, and I wondered about the influence of his strongly held Calvinist religious beliefs. The more people he enslaved, the richer he became, and presumably the more certain he felt that he would enter the Kingdom of Heaven, because in Calvinism wealth was the surest proof that you were one of God’s elect.
I thought of the black and white children that had played together here, and all over the antebellum South, until the age of twelve when the black children were sent out into the fields. They were old enough to work now and feel the whip. A favorite game among the younger children was to sell each other on make-believe auction blocks, with one child playing auctioneer, and the others boasting about how much they were worth. Plantation children also delivered whippings to each other with flimsy switches, because children use games to neutralize what terrifies them. Standing there at Foster’s grave in the rich golden light of August, these visions conjured from history books were like hallucinations.
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Downtown Natchez was lit up beautifully for Christmas and hung with garlands, and the town displayed its eccentricity with two unique yuletide traditions. The first was Ginger’s Jeweled Christmas. As promised, Ginger and James Hyland had spent five weeks decorating 167 Christmas trees with her costume-jewelry collection. Paying guests were invited to tour the mad glittering spectacle with Scott Smith in his Jiminy Cricket outfit and then drink champagne. The second unique Natchez tradition was the Santa Claus Parade, which Regina Charboneau described as the only police-escorted drunk-driving event in America.
“You’ve seen how women dominate so much of what goes on here,” she said. “Well, the Santa Parade is men only. They start drinking early in the morning, and they drive around town and make stops at houses where women have laid out a big spread of food and booze. They descend like a horde of locusts—it all gets decimated in twenty minutes—and then they drive on to the next one. It goes on all day, then there’s a cocktail party for Mr. and Mrs. Claus, and another party after that. It’s usually on Christmas Eve, so generations of Natchez children have woken up on Christmas morning to find their father passed out on the couch with half-assembled toys all over the floor.”
“How do I get into the Santa Parade?” I asked.
“It won’t be difficult. But this is one of those rare occasions in Natchez where a woman can’t make it happen. You need a man to invite you.” She was talking about a straight white man. They were always around, but on the peripheries of the real action, and it was easy to forget that they existed. Twice I had asked Kerry Dicks if such-and-such garden club lady had a husband, and she’d looked confused, as if I was bringing up some obscure, irrelevant detail, and then answered, “I think he might be dead.”.
As Regina predicted, it wasn’t hard to get on the Santa Parade. I was invited by Miss Bettye’s grandson Hyde Carby, the lawyer who wrote the apology from the city of Natchez to the victims of the Parchman Ordeal. I asked him about the dress code. Did I need a Santa hat?
“No. Just a coat and tie, and a good strong liver.”
We met before dawn at Greenlea, the antebellum home of Philip and Stella Carby, Hyde’s parents. A large painting of Hyde in a Confederate officer’s uniform hung on the wall, from his year as King of the Pilgrimage Garden Club. The painting had come under family debate a few years ago because some African American lawyers were coming over to the house. Hyde would have gladly put it in the attic, but the painting memorialized a proud moment for his mother, and she wanted it to stay on the wall. Then Philip spotted a small Confederate flag in the painting that none of them had noticed before. That raised the stakes of the debate because the flag was a more charged symbol than the uniform. A family compromise was reached. The painting stayed on the wall, and an expert was hired at considerable expense to paint away the Confederate flag.
We drank a quick cup of coffee and climbed into Philip Carby’s big white SUV. The weather was cool and overcast. As he drove through the quiet streets, Philip said, “This Santa Parade has been going on for as long as anyone can remember. Hyde’s grandfather did it for seventy-five years, until he was ninety-four.”
Hyde said, “It’s a drinking party for men, escorted by cops, and it’s a party with a purpose. We throw out candy for kids, and we raise money for needy families. We’ll give out Christmas gifts for three hundred kids this year. Seventy-five families will get vouchers for a ham or turkey.”
About fifty vehicles were parked outside the Hotel Vue on the edge of the bluff. I
nside, a hundred men were knocking back Bloody Marys, screwdrivers, mimosas, and other breakfast drinks. Hyde explained that a new Santa is elected every year by the Santa Committee, and the men I was seeing in red blazers were previous Santas. They had the privilege of addressing each other as “Santa Claus,” and putting stickers on their vehicles, announcing the year of their Santahood. This year’s Santa, identifiable by his red coat and Santa hat, was in his eighties, and there were concerns about his stamina. “At least the weather is okay,” said Hyde. “Santa rides in a convertible, whether it’s ten below or raining.”
Tommy Ferrell, a former sheriff with a face like a bulldog, told me in grave tones that a scandal had occurred. “Ladies are allowed at the stops, but we had one try to join the parade this year. Fortunately her family got ahold of her and shut her down. If that ever happens, that a lady gets on the parade, and the wives find out, they’ll make so much trouble that’ll be the end of it.”
Tommy knew law enforcement people all over the country, from his time as president of the National Sheriffs’ Association. I asked him if he’d heard of anything similar to the Natchez Santa Parade. “There’s nothing else like this,” he assured me. “The mayor of LA was here one year. He said we were all crazy.”
Hyde walked out of the hotel with a salty dog (vodka and grapefruit juice) in a clear plastic cup, nodded to the police officers and sheriff’s deputies outside, and thanked them for the great job they were doing. I followed, holding a Bloody Mary. Dozens more men walked past the cops with breakfast cocktails and climbed into vehicles. Philip Carby doesn’t drink anymore, and he had agreed to do all our driving. I wondered about the other drivers. “It’s hoped that they refrain, but it’s not enforced,” Philip said. “If anyone has hit anyone, they’ve kept it quiet. I don’t remember any accidents.”
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