We were joined by Tony Heidelberg, a lawyer, municipal judge pro tem, and one of the few African Americans in the Santa Parade. “I love it,” he said. “We’re doing a lot of good, and having a lot of fun doing it.” Now we heard the wail of police sirens, announcing that the ninetieth annual Natchez Santa Claus Parade was underway. We joined a long procession of vehicles led by the chief of police and the county sheriff. Patrol cars were positioned at various intersections, blocking off traffic, so we could drive through all the red lights in our path. We entered a low-income, mostly white subdivision, where the streets were lined with people. We honked our horns, rang a bell, hurled candy out of the windows, and shouted, “Merry Christmas!” Tony would add variations: “Alright now!” “Yes indeed!”
Exiting the subdivision, we drove down Highway 61 past Mammy’s Cupboard—Philip remembered when it was called Black Mammy—and turned into the wealthy Beau Pre subdivision. We all parked outside the 19th Hole and Golf Shop at the country club and swarmed on a spread of sausage rolls, sandwiches, and cocktails. I talked with Tony Byrne, who had been the mayor of Natchez for many years, and a good friend of Nellie Jackson’s. He had a kind Irish face full of character, and the red blazer of a former Santa. “Last year we gave away seventeen thousand dollars’ worth of toys and vouchers for hams and turkeys,” he said. “For a lot of those kids, it’s the only Christmas they’re going to have. And we get the warm glow of giving away other people’s money. So it works out.”
After thirty minutes, a bullhorn siren announced that the stop was over, and we scrambled to grab another drink and get back in our vehicles. Police officers at the gates of the subdivision waved to us and smiled as we drove past them. In the passenger seat, I lifted my Bloody Mary in appreciation and smiled back.
The next stop was at a private house downtown. A brunch party was in progress and would continue after we left. Kerry Dicks was there, and it turned out that she was the scandalous woman who had tried to ride in the parade. “My family started it,” she said. “And I just don’t see why possession of a penis entitles a person to ride, while possession of a vagina is a disqualification. Last year, a guy sneaked me into his vehicle. This year, I thought I’d try to make it official.” Tony Byrne and others on the Santa Committee were open to the idea of women riding, but a powerful cadre of older men, including Kerry’s uncle, thought it was an abomination. “He vowed to go to his grave before letting a woman ride,” she said.
The parade continued through downtown, with candy flying out of the vehicles towards children behind barricades, and came to a halt outside the Braden school building, where the payroll-bloated Natchez-Adams School District was headquartered. Our Santa already looked shaky and tired as he climbed out of the convertible and made his way into the building. “I hope I have the strength to get through this,” he said.
We entered an auditorium full of needy families, most of them African American. On the stage, Kerry and her cousin were waiting with bags of toys to give away to the children. Santa made his way to a chair onstage, and Kerry’s cousin began reading out the names of children, doing a pretty good job at pronouncing the creative ones—Ahmarrion, Pre’Shaunti, Kelvauntae, Ke’Aashia, Rundraneeka. Kerry led the children across the stage to meet Santa, then handed each child a brown paper sack full of toys.
I stood against the back wall, with the other tipsy white men in coats and ties, uncomfortably aware of how this would look to a critical eye. For us, it was a day of indulgence and privilege, of quaffing free cocktails in expensive vehicles, being temporarily above the law and feeling virtuous about helping the needy. For the families sitting below us in the auditorium, it was a day of accepting our paternalistic charity. On the other hand, it was hard to argue against the excitement on the children’s faces, or the value of a turkey to a poor family on Christmas Day.
In the early afternoon, we rolled through an impoverished black neighborhood, and some of the five-cent candy we threw ended up in the gutter, where children scrambled to retrieve it. The next stop was at Natchez Children’s Services, a group home and advocacy service dedicated to the prevention and treatment of child abuse. I handed the director, Cherish McCallum, a check for $2,500 from the Santa Committee. She was incredibly grateful, and I experienced that warm glow of giving away other people’s money, while the children clambered on Santa’s lap for photographs.
Then it was time for our fifth drinking opportunity of the day, at the old downtown railroad depot. A man named Dee had just shot a pigeon and was grinding its corpse under his heel. Fatigue was setting in, and Hyde said it was time to switch from breakfast cocktails to bourbon, or “brown whiskey,” as he called it (white whiskey is moonshine). A group of men at the bar were bragging on the safety record of the Santa Parade. “There’ve been a few dings and fender benders over the years, but we’ve never hit a kid,” one of them said proudly.
“And they will run out in front of you sometimes,” said another.
“Ninety years, not a single kid,” said a third.
The afternoon followed the same pattern as the morning, cruising through neighborhoods throwing candy, regular stops for more food and drink. I carefully tended and nurtured a bourbon buzz, trying to ride it for energy, but by 5:00 p.m. I couldn’t face another drink, and I badly wanted to go somewhere and lie down. Tony Heidelberg had already left, and Philip and Hyde Carby were ready to go home too. As I said my farewells, some people tried to shame me for quitting before the evening parties began. The real stalwarts, they said, kept going all the way to midnight mass.
* * *
On Christmas Day, Regina Charboneau invited my family for dinner at Twin Oaks. My wife Mariah and our two-year-old daughter Isobel had already been to Natchez several times. Among the first hundred words that Isobel learned to say were Natchez, Miss Regina, and Mississippi River. Ruth Ellen Calhoun had her dressed up in a hoopskirt before her second birthday and thought it would be a marvelous idea for Isobel to start receiving when she was a little older: “It builds such confidence in the little ones. They learn that they can talk to anybody.”
Mariah and I had talked about moving to Natchez. There were lovely old houses for sale on some of the prettiest streets in America, at very reasonable prices. I couldn’t imagine ever tiring of the view from the bluff, the magnificent trees, the flower-scented streets, the frog orchestras on summer nights, the generosity and hospitality, the stories that people told and the importance they placed on storytelling. Moving to Natchez would be a way to gently withdraw and live at a more human pace. Ultimately we decided against it, mainly because of the schools, but also the shrinking population, the remoteness and isolation, and the relentless gossiping.
To give an example, I cooked an Italian meal one evening for Glenn and Bridget Green at The Burn, their antebellum home. Regina and Doug Charboneau were the only other guests. Now I was hearing from Kerry, who heard it from a trusted source, that I had thrown a big dinner party for all the married gay men in Natchez, cooked them Indian food, then run away with Bridget Green for a dirty adulterous weekend on the Mississippi coast. I couldn’t help being impressed by the creativity at work here, but the idea of being perennial fodder for the Natchez rumor mill was not appealing.
On Christmas morning, while Isobel opened her presents, Mariah asked me what she should wear for a late-afternoon Christmas dinner at an antebellum home in Natchez. I had no idea and was too stupid to ask Regina. Mariah put on a pair of perfectly fitting red pants with an ivory sweater and arrived at Twin Oaks to find Regina and nearly all of the Natchez women dressed in chic stylish black. In the rest of Mississippi, women almost never wear black in the daytime except at funerals, and absolutely not on Christmas Day.
A few of the ladies asked Mariah where she was from. When she told them she was from Tucson, Arizona, and living in Jackson, they immediately lost interest in talking to her. It was Mariah’s first exposure to how snooty Natchez can be, and she was amazed by it. “It’s a small town in Mississippi,�
�� she whispered to me. “They act like it’s the center of the world. If you’re not from here, or writing about here, or talking about here, you don’t count.”
One of the guests was Peggy Pierrepont, from the old-money Pierrepont family in New York. She had relocated to Natchez some years ago. “I absolutely adore it here,” she said. “Most people are so incredibly kind.” She was also keenly aware of the phenomenon that Mariah had just observed. “Yes! There are people here who absolutely believe, who will give you detailed geographical and historical explanations that prove beyond doubt that Natchez, Mississippi, is the center of the world. I find it quite charming.”
Following my usual habits, I went into the kitchen, where Regina was assembling the feast. She was delighted to inform me that Debbie Cosey had decided to join the Pilgrimage Garden Club after all, and the board had voted her in unanimously. Now that Debbie had led the way, Regina was hoping that other African American women would join too. Having a properly integrated garden club running Pilgrimage tourism and preserving historic buildings would alter the racial atmosphere of the whole town.
The shrimp and corn chowder was made. So were the biscuits with orange marmalade butter. The grapefruit, apple, and almond salad was in the fridge, along with a chocolate crème brulée trifle to be served with bananas Foster for dessert. Roasting in the ovens were richly seasoned prime ribs, quails stuffed with mushroom dressing, and cauliflowers that she would serve with capers and lemon. Now Regina was frying oysters and duck-fat french fries, while catching me up to speed on the latest Tableaux developments.
She had overturned eighty years of tradition by withdrawing her club, and people were now comparing her to Katherine Miller leading the renegade homeowners out of the Natchez Garden Club in 1936. It was the second great split of the clubs, and to add to the drama, Chesney Doyle was defecting from the NGC and joining the PGC, in the full knowledge that her grandmother Lillie Vidal would be horrified and appalled.
The efforts by Regina, Chesney, and Greg Iles to bring black history into the Tableaux had failed. Contrary to rumor, the NGC was not going to bring back “Dixie” in their production, and while the Confederate flag would be paraded, it was going to bow down at the end to the US flag. But apart from these two details, it would be the old Tableaux all over again, romanticizing the white antebellum aristocracy, with no depictions of slavery and black history. Nor could Regina find a way to incorporate African American history into her Royal Evening at Longwood event, where the new King, Queen, and Court would be presented after the traditional dances, with the young men wearing the traditional Confederate uniforms.
“When I bought Twin Oaks, I tried to hire an interior decorator,” Regina said. “He told me, ‘You don’t need me. If something doesn’t belong here, the house will spit it out.’ That’s what it’s like with the Tableaux. You try to put slavery and black history in there, and it just spits it out. There’s no way to combine the two things in a way that isn’t jarring. This will be the last year for the Confederate uniforms though. When we do the Royal Evening next year, we’ll have them in military cadets’ uniforms.”
I said, “Why not just scrap the whole thing?”
“I’d love to, but it’s not that simple. The purpose of the garden club is to preserve these amazing old buildings, and that takes a lot of time and money. To organize all the different fundraising events—Spring and Fall Pilgrimage, Antiques Forum, Save-the-Hall Ball, and so on—you need volunteers, and they need an incentive. Getting their child into the Court has always been the incentive. Take that away, and the whole thing starts to fall apart.”
It was time to eat. The food was laid out on platters and serving dishes on the big antique table in the dining room, with candles glowing, the massive Audubon prints on the green walls, the punkah overhead, and the lingering spectral presence of the original owners and their slaves. There were too many people to seat at the big table, so we fixed our plates, as Southerners say, and took them over to three smaller tables set up in the front parlors. It was the best meal I have ever eaten on Christmas Day, by a considerable margin.
We were seated at the cosmopolitan table with some visiting Italians and Australians. They were perfectly nice people, but I didn’t want to hear about Italy or Australia, or how their vacations in America were going. I was eavesdropping on the table where the Natchez people had congregated. They were telling stories involving swords and pistols, a raccoon living in an antique tester bed, a man with six sons all named after Confederate generals, a woman named Mary Postlethwaite who was so hooked on genealogy that she slept in the basement of the courthouse among the records.
Now they were talking about an intriguing event at Longwood in 1866. Julia Nutt, the widow of Haller Nutt, one of the wealthiest slaveholders, invited thousands of emancipated slaves to the grounds of her half-built mansion for a picnic, and I wanted to know why, and what food she had served, and how the townsfolk had reacted. Natchez had hooked me and reeled me in. Like the ladies who gently shunned Mariah, I had lost interest in other places. They seemed dull and predictable. They all belonged to the same elsewhere, where time moved in an orderly progression towards the future, and the dead lay quietly in their graves.
After Christmas dinner, I climbed the creaking stairs and cleared out the last of my belongings from the upstairs rooms. Then we said our goodbyes. Driving back to Jackson through the winter woods and fields, with my wife and daughter asleep, I remembered something that Kerry Dicks had said in the cemetery with the sun sinking down into Louisiana. She didn’t know if Natchez had taken a small box and created an entire world inside it, or looked at a small box and mistaken it for the world.
| ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |
I found Natchez to be an extraordinarily generous and welcoming place. I feel a deep debt of gratitude to everyone who helped me, most notably the Charboneau family, Ron and Mimi Miller, Kathleen Bond, Jim Wiggins, Greg Iles, Kerry Dicks, Ser Boxley, Darrell White, Elodie Pritchartt, the Bergerons, the McCulloughs, Tommy Ferrell, Jeremy Houston, Darryl Grennell, the Jenkins and Carby families, Beverly Adams, David Garner and Lee Glover, Ginger and James Hyland, Jimmy the Cricket, Pulley Bones who was there when I needed him.
The best book ever written about Natchez, in my opinion, is Prince Among Slaves by Terry Alford, the story of Ibrahima. It was a constant companion during my time in Natchez, and I relied heavily on its superb research and storytelling.
More from the Author
Dispatches from Pluto
Crazy River
God's Middle Finger
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
© WILLIAM WIDMER
RICHARD GRANT is an award-winning author, journalist, and television host. He currently writes for Smithsonian, the New York Times, the Telegraph, and several other publications. His book Dispatches from Pluto was a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize. He is also the author of Crazy River, God’s Middle Finger, and American Nomads.
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www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Richard-Grant
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ALSO BY RICHARD GRANT
Dispatches From Pluto
Crazy River
God’s Middle Finger
American Nomads
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Interior design by Erika R. Genova
Jacket design by Rex Bonomelli
Jacket photographs © Nicola Lo Calzo/Series Casta. (left) Ser Boxley dressed as a Civil War soldier at the Forks of the Roads, site of the historical enslavement market in Natchez. (right) Bettye Jenkins dressed for the Natchez Pilgrimage Tour, Hawthorne House, Natchez.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941300
ISBN 978-1-5011-7782-8
ISBN 978-1-5011-7783-5 (ebook)
The Deepest South of All Page 23