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  I have felt many times there a sense of place as powerful as if it were visible and walking and could touch me.

  —Eudora Welty, Some Notes on River Country

  | PROLOGUE |

  One summer night in Natchez, the old Mississippi river town that once boasted more millionaires than anywhere else in America, I walked past antebellum mansions and moss-hung trees to a Victorian house on a side street. The front-door knocker was the metal head of a cat with the tail of a steel mouse between its teeth. When I knocked the mouse against the doorplate, Elodie Pritchartt’s dog Versace, a half-pug, half-beagle mix, began barking hysterically. Elodie dealt with Versace and then opened the door. A blogger who writes about the loveliness and lunacy in her hometown, she was dressed all in red, with her graying hair cut short, a glass of bourbon resting in her hand, and a big, friendly smile that contained a glint of mischief. A cocktail party was in full swing behind her.

  She introduced me to the guests. An older gay man called Norbert had a kind of studied pomposity and a partner who didn’t say much. A beautiful young archaeologist named Kerry Dicks was telling a story about a friend of her father’s, “a very nice man who thought that characters from children’s books were coming out of the wallpaper and talking to people.” Holding court and smoking a cigar on the back deck was a woman named TJ, wearing a man’s suit and tie with her dark hair slicked back. Her partner, Laurie, was sweetly feminine in a floral print blouse, and she beamed with pride as TJ told story after story about flat refusing to take any guff.

  Elodie poured me a huge measure of bourbon and handed me a printed note card that she had found while going through some old boxes. It dated from the civil rights era and reflected the panic of white people in Natchez at the prospect of black people voting: “HELP! HELP! HELP! TOTAL WHITE VOTER REGISTRATION is necessary for our very survival.” Elodie, an anti-racist liberal, was passing out these cards as ironic party favors.

  She told a story about a woman she knew who was obsessed with helicopters and had fallen in love with a serial killer. He was in prison for killing prostitutes and had been arrested with a severed breast in his pocket. It was a desperately strange story and my head was starting to swim. Then a man named Denver started talking about the former mental hospital that he lives in for part of the year, and the various people that have taken up residence there without his permission. One of them is a professional magician. “I don’t know where he came from, but he says it’s against the magicians’ union rules for him to do any housework, or clean up after himself, so long as he’s wearing his magician clothes,” Denver said. “So he wears his black magician clothes all the time. He can do magic, but no physical labor. He says he’s like Picasso.”

  “He’s a charlatan!” snapped Norbert.

  Denver continued, “Then there’s the No-Necks. There’s a mother and her daughter, and a little redneck boy—”

  “Sluts! Slatterns!” Norbert yelled. “You go to bed in the master bedroom and it’s full of pubic hairs.”

  “That’s a problem,” Denver admitted. “We don’t know who’s been sleeping in my bed. But anyway, the little redneck boy—”

  “He should be arrested. Incarcerate the trash!”

  “Calm yourself, Norbert. He’s not even ten years old.”

  “He’s a vicious little shit.”

  Other tenants included an Andrew Jackson impersonator and two bishops who perform funerals for $500 and walk around in full regalia. “They’re frauds,” said Norbert. “One of them got ordained in Canada and ordained the other one. The porcine bishop drank an entire quart of single-malt Scotch because he says that’s all he can drink.”

  Kerry Dicks asked how many rooms were in the building. “He has six bedrooms and fourteen chandeliers,” said Norbert acidly. It sounded like a crazy short story that Flannery O’Connor might have written, but Denver and Norbert and some of the other guests insisted that it was all true. “There’s still graffiti from the mental patients in the attic and enough air-conditioning units up there to chill a piece of meat,” said Denver. “Why they would need to get the attic down to forty degrees I have no idea. Most of the graffiti is religious, and the windows are plexiglass so the patients couldn’t smash them and escape.”

  I struggled to make sense of the incoming information. Why had Denver, a highly educated and sophisticated man, decided to make his second home in a decommissioned lunatic asylum in Mississippi? Why had he allowed a lazy magician, the No-Neck rednecks, and two fraudulent bishops to live in this home without permission? Why did he continue to do so? Why would a mental hospital need so many air conditioners in the attic?

  But there was no opportunity to get answers to these questions because Elodie was now telling a story about her boyfriend Tommy’s grandfather, who was the only white doctor in the Natchez area who would tend to black patients during the Depression. “One night he was helping a black woman in childbirth and it was going badly wrong,” said Elodie. “She was going to die. He knew it, and she knew it. She had a little boy already, and she said, ‘Please take care of my son.’ And that’s what Tommy’s grandfather did. They named the little boy Rooster and they raised him on the back porch. There was a big old trunk out there and he slept in one of the drawers. Isn’t that just the most wonderful, beautiful story?”

  “He slept in a drawer? On the back porch?” said Denver sarcastically.

  “It was the Depression!” said Elodie. “Tommy’s dad—the doctor’s own son—slept in a drawer too because they’d rented out the house to boarders.”

  I said, “Rooster? Why not George or Henry? Why did they name the boy after a chicken?”

  Meanwhile, Versace the dog was experiencing terrible flatulence. “Oh my Lord, that stink would drive a buzzard off a gut pile,” said one of the men. Kerry picked up one of the HELP! HELP! HELP! cards and used it as a fan. When Norbert and his partner got up to say their goodbyes, she took stock of the situation: “Okay, the queens are leaving, the dog is farting, and I’m fanning myself with white-supremacist literature.”

  Elodie poured more drinks and told a story about her late father, a conservative who found himself unable to vote for McCain and Palin in 2008: “Daddy thought Obama was a better candidate, but he couldn’t bring himself to vote for a black man, so he abstained and went to bed early on election night. I stayed up and watched the whole thing. I went into his bedroom the next morning and told him the result. Daddy let out a big sigh of relief and said, ‘Thank God that nigger won.’ ”

  Elodie and the other guests convulsed into laughter. Then Denver started talking about the Magician’s three-year stint in federal penitentiary for hacking bank websites, and his little clamshell computer that had lines of code constantly running across it. “The Magician could get internet when we had no internet,” said Denver. “He got paid good money every year to go to DEF CON—the underground hackers’ conference—and he would go by bus or train, so he wouldn’t have to show his driver’s license. He insisted he was just going there to perform magic tricks.”

  Then there was Denver’s eccentric heiress friend, Miss Christine, and the Kabuki ladies, and the Acrobat, and it wasn’t clear if they lived at the old mental hospital or showed up there for the Christmas parties. I sat ther
e shaking my head, wishing it would stop, but the weird stories kept on coming. Denver’s cousin Edward has over two hundred Studebakers on his property and a sign that reads THIS IS NOT A JUNKYARD. IT’S A MORGUE.

  Then Denver got his phone out and started scrolling through photographs, and there they were, even stranger looking and more improbable than I had imagined them: the charlatan bishops, the Magician in his black clothes, the No-Necks, the Kabuki ladies, who were white women in rice-flour makeup, and some kind of neo-Confederate militia that showed up at his parties in military uniforms and drank up all the booze.

  “It’s just the South,” he said, as Versace let out another atrocious fart and the women fanned themselves with HELP! HELP! HELP! cards. “It’s just the South. There’s no point trying to explain it.”

  | 1 |

  I first heard about Natchez from a chef and cookbook writer named Regina Charboneau. I met her on the opening night of the Hot Tamale literary-culinary festival, which took place in a repurposed cotton gin surrounded by bare fields in the Mississippi Delta. The hulking old tin structure was hung with chandeliers and furnished with banqueting tables. Wineglasses and silverware glinted on white tablecloths. There were artisanal charcuterie stations, hundreds of well-dressed people milling around, a small army of bartenders pouring free wine and liquor.

  Regina and I were both signing copies of our latest books at the author tables. I had written a true account of moving to rural Mississippi as an Englishman chewed up by New York City. Regina had published a handsome cookbook about the local cuisines along the length of the Mississippi River. She was warmhearted, witty and cosmopolitan, with a natural air of authority. She wore vintage cat-eye glasses and her dark hair in a bob. For many years she had owned a fashionable restaurant and a blues club in San Francisco, and her friends included Lily Tomlin and the Rolling Stones.

  Now she had sold everything in San Francisco and moved back to her hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, where her family has lived for seven generations. I confessed that I knew nothing about Natchez, although I recognized its name, which rhymes with matches, from an old Howlin’ Wolf song. “Natchez is wonderful,” she said. “We’re known for our history and our antebellum homes, and we’re very different from the rest of Mississippi. People often describe Natchez as a little New Orleans, but it’s really off in its own universe.”

  Her husband Doug, a native Minnesotan—they met in Alaska while Regina was cooking at a bush camp—poured me a shot of the white rum he was distilling in Natchez. It tasted raw and alive and faintly of tequila. They showed me photographs of their house, an antebellum Greek Revival home named Twin Oaks with white columns and Gothic-looking trees. “You must come and stay with us,” said Regina. “I’ll cook, and there’s always a party, and you can do a book signing at King’s Tavern.” This was her latest restaurant, housed in one of the oldest standing buildings in Mississippi, circa 1789.

  This was an impossible invitation to refuse, and soon afterwards I drove to Natchez for the first time. The town is tucked away in a remote corner of southwest Mississippi, on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. The nearest airport is ninety miles away in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and there’s no passenger train or interstate-highway connection. To get to Natchez, you’ve got to be going there, as Mississippians often say, because it’s not on the way to anywhere else.

  Country roads took me through a gently undulating landscape of woods and pastures, with occasional shacks and farmhouses and small fundamentalist churches. Scrolling through the radio, there was a babble of preachers, white and African American. I passed a derelict gas station with a forlorn sign:

  PUMPING TO PLEASE

  SOUL FOOD

  Soon afterwards I entered the scruffy, unremarkable outskirts of Natchez. It was the usual Southern strip of fast-food joints and tractor-supply shops, easy loans, dollar stores, gas stations, and churches. There was a Mexican restaurant, a basic-looking supermarket, a swooping overpass leading to the Walmart.

  The road to King’s Tavern took me through an African American neighborhood that looked poor and tired. I pulled over to read a historical marker and a chill went through me. I was standing on the site of the second-largest slave market in the Deep South, a place known as the Forks of the Road. I could see a small memorial on a side street, and I walked over to take a look.

  There were a few illustrated panels and a set of manacles mounted in a concrete block. The panels were thoughtful, informative, and deeply unsettling, with reproduced historical drawings of slaves, slave traders, and newspaper advertisements for the human commodity: “Negroes! Negroes! Just received, an addition of TWENTY-FIVE likely young field hands—Also, a fine Carriage Driver and Dining Room servants, for sale by R.H. ELAM, Forks of the Road.”

  Tens of thousands of people were sold here. They were transported by riverboats up and down the Mississippi. They were marched overland all the way from Virginia and Maryland to the booming new cotton frontier in the Lower Mississippi Valley, of which Natchez was the capital and the epicenter. The men were bound together in wrist chains and neck manacles and forced to march the thousand miles in lockstep. The women were usually roped together and the children put in wagons with the injured and heavily pregnant. These caravans of misery were known as coffles and flanked by men on horseback with whips and guns.

  The slaves were told to sing as they marched, to keep up morale, but the coffle song lyrics that survive are mostly sad and mournful, because so many of the people singing had been sold away from their families.

  The way is long before me, love

  And all my love’s behind me;

  You’ll seek me down by the old gum tree

  But none of you will find me

  As the coffle neared Natchez, the slave traders would stop and camp for a while. The human merchandise, which had not been unshackled for bodily functions or any other reason for months, was finally bathed, rested, fattened up, and made ready for sale. The women were typically put into calico dresses with pink ribbons at the neck. The men were dressed up in top hats, white shirts, vests, and corduroy velvet trousers. Pot liquor, the greasy residue of vegetables boiled with pork fat, was rubbed into their skin to make it shine. Thus prepared and ordered to “step lively” to encourage their own sale, they were herded into the pens at the Forks of the Road slave market.

  Prospective buyers examined teeth, hefted breasts, poked and prodded, leered, mocked, and humiliated in the usual way, but there was no auction block here. Purchasing a human being at the Forks was like buying a car today. You agreed on a price with the dealer, made a down payment, and signed a contract agreeing to make further payments until you owned the property outright. Only the very rich bought slaves without financing.

  Considering the volume of suffering and degradation generated here, and the global economic consequences of slavery’s expansion into the Lower Mississippi Valley, the richest cotton land on earth, it seemed like such a modest little memorial: a few signboards, a set of manacles, a small patch of mown grass with flowerbeds. Most of the site was occupied by small businesses—a tire shop, a car wash—and low-income housing where all the tenants appeared to be African American, living on the same patch of ground where their ancestors were bought and sold.

  * * *

  I drove on past vacant lots, boarded-up buildings, nice old houses in need of paint and repair, a handsome Gothic Revival church. Then I crossed Martin Luther King Street, which appeared to be the demarcation line between black Natchez and white Natchez, and two different income brackets. Now the old houses were well maintained and freshly painted with attractive front gardens. The downtown historic district, originally laid out by the Spanish in the 1790s, was charming and lovely and from the high bluff there was a spectacular view of the Mississippi River.

  Driving around, I saw some of the antebellum mansions for which Natchez is best known. The town and the surrounding area contain the greatest concentration of antebellum homes in the American South, inc
luding some of the most opulent and extravagant. Looking at these Federal, Greek Revival, and Italianate mansions, their beauty seemed inseparable from the horrors of the regime that created them. The soaring white columns, the manacles, the dingy apartment buildings at the Forks of the Road, the tendrils of Spanish moss hanging from the gnarled old trees, the humid fragrant air itself: everything seemed charged with the lingering presence of slavery, in a way that I’d never experienced anywhere else.

  I parked outside King’s Tavern, a two-story building of brick and timber, still recognizable through its restorations as an eighteenth-century tavern. Pushing open a stout wooden door, I came into a low-ceilinged room with heavy beams, exposed-brick walls, and a bar made out of whiskey-barrel staves. Regina Charboneau hugged me like an old friend.

  She led me up a steep, narrow staircase to the room where I would sign and sell books. I set out my wares and greeted my customers. They were far more sophisticated than I was expecting in a small, isolated Mississippi town. I talked with an extremely well-read woman who had lived all over the world before coming back to Natchez, where she grew up. The way of life here, she had decided, suited her best.

  Asked to describe it, she said, “We’re house-crazy. We adore old homes, antiques, throwing parties, making it fabulous. Gay men love it here. Natchez is very liberal and tolerant in some ways, and very conservative and racist in other ways, although I will say that our racists aren’t generally hateful or mean. Nor do they think they’re racists. There’s still a lot of denial in the white community about the fact that this whole town was built on slavery. Most black people don’t like thinking about slavery either, although they’re acutely aware of it.”

  She talked about the insularity of the town, and the singularity of its culture. “We look more to New Orleans than the rest of Mississippi. The Catholic influence is strong in both the black and white communities. We’re obsessed with our history, but it’s often a self-serving mythological version of that history. Genealogy is big. And there’s a whole spectrum of behavior that we refer to politely as ‘eccentricity.’ ”