Yesterday was Passover Eve, and this is the first time in a long time that we are not celebrating it with our family. Everyone seems to miss it more than we realized. The Passover Seder is all about telling an ancient story of slavery and redemption, and 3,000 years later, it is still remembered, still rehashed, still processed. As we travel through the U.S. south, the more recent story of slavery is unfolding in front of us and it is evident that it is not yet done. It is still an open wound, the details of the story still being fought over. I hope it doesn’t take 3,000 years to heal.
We made our way north from Baton Rouge, towards Jackson. We stopped for one night in Natchez and then another night in Vicksburg. It now feels like we entered the deep south for real.
There is of course a definition of what the deep south means geographically, and we certainly are within that region. But the people and the general vibe feels different in a noticeable way since we left Baton Rouge. For one, we met several people who talked openly about “the war” when referring to the civil war. They were all white, and all talked about it as if it happened just last week. It was also clear that they feel like they were wronged, like they were occupied by an aggressor. And about slavery they say something like “well, it happened a long time ago, but it did happen. it is part of history, so there is no point thinking about it critically because it is a fact of the past”. This was said in two different tours we got of magnificent houses built by enslaved people. Orit’s theory is that this is their way of saying “let’s not talk about slavery”, which may very well be true. Clearly the issue of slavery and the civil war are still an open wound in the minds of many here.
One of the tours we got was of a beautiful big mansion in Natchez. When we booked the Airbnb (which is in a room in the former enslaved people’s quarters), we had no idea it was under that big mansion. The guide was also our host, the only resident of the house, living alone in a house that has 3 stories of 15ft ceilings, a ballroom, a formal dining room, a sitting room and many bedrooms. The house was packed full of antique china, furniture and artwork, and as the tour rolled on it became clear just how big the chasm between our progressive California views and his is. He was careful - he didn’t say anything that could qualify as outright racist. But he certainly dropped many hints and made plenty of statements that made it clear where he stood. He was for secession (“I’d do it tomorrow. We just need Texas to get off their butts and do it already”), refused to talk about slavery pulling the “it’s history” line (though we didn’t ask him to) and talked about how the family fortunes took a turn for the worse after the civil war. The lowlight of the tour was when he showed us the china in his bathroom, which included a container for perfume in the shape of a black woman. The head of the woman was the cap, and it looked like a monkey’s head.
The town of Natchez itself is a lovely tourist stop. It sits on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi, and therefore has nice sweeping views of the river. It is a stop on the route of river boats carrying tourists from New Orleans, so it has some decent restaurants and a lovely boardwalk where you can stroll and enjoy the vistas. Its downtown is fairly well preserved thanks to a pretty active local preservation non profit.
From Natchez we continued on to Vicksburg. If Natchez gave me a sense of the the ever present civil war, Vicksburg practically is still fighting it. This is the site of one of the major battles of the war which included a two month long siege. The city sits on the confluence of the Mississippi and the Yazoo rivers, and had a major train line serving it. The Vicksburg National Military Park still preserves the battle fields where the union and confederate armies duked it out all those years ago. There was a minor glitch when we got to our Airbnb because we arrived a bit early and crashed a wake that was taking place in the giant hallway and one of the sitting rooms of the big house. The slightly drunk old woman that was taking a breather outside invited us to come in and enjoy the food, but we passed. When we finally came back after everyone has left, we realized we were in a house of a similar layout to the one we stayed in the previous night, except this time we got the master bedroom. This is probably where the name comes from as well…
It was weird to be in a huge bed in the center of a giant room with very tall ceilings. The bathroom - a later addition as there were no indoor bathrooms when the house was built, and another room had to be converted to become a bathroom - was huge too. That night a big storm passed through the area, and at some point there was risk of tornadoes. The wind was blowing like crazy, the rain came down in huge downpours and lightning came every few seconds. It was quite a show. I tried to capture some of it but realized I still have a lot to learn as a photographer. Instead I have here the tornado warning I got on my phone.
In Vicksburg we also toured a local museum, which had a jumble of artifacts from the city’s past. One thing I didn’t know was the Coca Cola was invented and first bottled here, and some of the very early bottles were on display
But the real shock came when I walked into the museum store. It was full of confederate memorabilia and flags. There are obviously people that buy those things.
The next night we stayed in Jackson, in a nice Airbnb. Dinner was nice, and had a band playing bluegrass. I was excited for the next phase of our trip, where we’ll focus a bit more on music. I couldn’t help but think “Strange Fruit”, and Orit found Nina Simone’s wrenching rendering of it. As we were following the river down the highway through the cradle of the civil war, we listened to it in silence in the car.
(previous post here)