Richard Grant - The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

ALSO BY RICHARD GRANT

Dispatches From Pluto

Crazy River

Gods Middle Finger

American Nomads

Simon & Schuster

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New York, NY 10020

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Copyright 2020 by Richard Grant

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition September 2020

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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)

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

O ne 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 Pritchartts 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 didnt say much. A beautiful young archaeologist named Kerry Dicks was telling a story about a friend of her fathers, a very nice man who thought that characters from childrens 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 mans 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 dont know where he came from, but he says its against the magicians union rules for him to do any housework, or clean up after himself, so long as hes 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 hes like Picasso.

Hes a charlatan! snapped Norbert.

Denver continued, Then theres the No-Necks. Theres a mother and her daughter, and a little redneck boy

Sluts! Slatterns! Norbert yelled. You go to bed in the master bedroom and its full of pubic hairs.

Thats a problem, Denver admitted. We dont know whos been sleeping in my bed. But anyway, the little redneck boy

He should be arrested. Incarcerate the trash!

Calm yourself, Norbert. Hes not even ten years old.

Hes 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. Theyre 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 thats 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 OConnor might have written, but Denver and Norbert and some of the other guests insisted that it was all true. Theres 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 couldnt 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 Tommys 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 thats what Tommys 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. Isnt 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. Tommys dadthe doctors own sonslept in a drawer too because theyd 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 Im fanning myself with white-supremacist literature.