BOOK REVIEW: The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi by Richard Grant

The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi by Richard Grant is our book group’s next pick. It isn’t my usual type of read. It’s a journalistic travelogue, sort of a memoir of a place rather than a person. Grant has a talent for choosing absorbing anecdotes and reporting bits of dialogue that are wryly amusing, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.

Grant stumbled upon the Mississippi river town after meeting the Natchez native, cookbook author, and restauranteur Regina Charboneau at a book festival. She invited him to come visit. He did, and became fascinated by what he found. In Natchez, they kick the “Southern eccentricity” up a notch.

The town’s main industry is tourism. Once one of the wealthiest places in the South, the town is riddled with old Greek revival mansions/plantations. Upkeep on the buildings is expensive. So years ago, around the time of the publication of Gone With the Wind, the matriarchs of the town got the idea that they could charge tourists for an old South experience. The women dressed up in hoopskirts, served food and plenty of alcohol, and “received” outsiders into their homes. They called it the “Pilgrimage” and capped it with a bizarre theatrical production. At the end of the run, they would have a big party and present a “king and queen,” kids in their late teens or early twenties. The event took on a ridiculously outsized importance in the social and economic life of the town. 

Naturally, the fact that all the original wealth was based on slave labor was never mentioned by the participants. The people had “servants.” And all the usual rationalizations were trotted out.

Alongside the saga of the Pilgrimage and the two warring Garden Clubs that sponsor the event, Grant tells the story of one of the enslaved men, a man called Prince. He had been an African prince and war-leader until his army was defeated and the survivors were sold to slave traders. He worked on a Natchez plantation most of his life, until a weird coincidence brought him into contact with a white man who had known him in his previous life. That man started the ball rolling to get Prince freed and allow him to return to Africa.

The book is interesting and well-written. To fully appreciate the bizarreness of some of the anecdotes, you have to read the book. It presents many of the issues of overt and structural racism in a small town microcosm. It shows the small rays of progress. But also highlights how intractable the problems are.