Natchez MS reacts to antebellum home documentary | Entertainment/Life

NATCHEZ, Miss. — The tour began as many do in this historic river city: with shined silver, a grand chandelier and a bit about the antebellum house’s original owners.

But the current owner, Tammy Pack, skipped the hoop skirt.

Many of the historic homeowners who partake in Natchez’s annual Spring Pilgrimage don traditional hoop skirts, still, despite criticism that they romanticize a time stained by slavery. Standing before three dozen people — mostly women, mostly Boomers — in her dining room, Pack explained why she instead picked a slim, silky number. Construction on Pack’s home, long christened Holly Hedges, began in the 1790s.

“‘Why not consider dressing to the oldest period of our home?’” Pack said, quoting a fellow homeowner. “‘Your house is more ‘Bridgerton’ style, really’ …

“All I heard was I get a new dress without a hoop skirt,” Pack said with a grin. “Ok, you sold me on it!”

The ladies chuckled.

Each spring, Natchez gussies itself up as homeowners, many in costume, open their mansions to tourists hungry for the history — and, critics say, the myth — of the Old South.

This year, the old rite has new backdrop. A documentary titled “Natchez” interrogates the stories some of those tours tell with their costumes, their Black figurines and their talk of “servants,” rather than enslaved people.

“Natchez” tags along as Tracy Collins, a Black tour guide and Baptist pastor known as “Rev,” tells tourists what others don’t, leading them to the site of what was once the second-largest slave market in the country.

The film will soon get a wider audience: After receiving strong reviews at festivals and during its limited theatrical release, “Natchez” is now available on streaming platforms. Next month, it will air on PBS.

Residents of Natchez, pop. 14,000, have been grappling with the documentary, shot mostly in 2023, and its revelations — including, at the film’s climax, a white homeowner’s racist rant.

Some residents believe the film, which artfully stitches its narrative out of a collage of scenes and interviews, captured their community it all its complexity. “It’s what the world needs to know and see about Natchez,” said Deborah Cosey, who purchased Concord Quarters, a former slave quarters, restoring it and turning it into a bed-and-breakfast. “It’s us. It’s Natchez.”

Some who have seen the film say it ignores decades of efforts to tell the city’s complex history, ticking off the evidence: Signs noting historical sites of African American and Civil Rights history. Guides promoting those sites during tours. A monument, still in the works, that will bear the names of more than 8,000 Black men who served with the U.S. Colored Troops at Fort McPherson.

They argue that “Natchez” focused on recent transplants who don’t represent the city. “The dominant characters were NOT native Natchezians,” native Natchezian Mildred Amer wrote in a letter to the board of the Tribeca Film Festival, where the documentary premiered last summer. “I believe they were chosen to ‘get a rise’ out of the audience.”

Some don’t want to talk about the documentary at all, declining interviews, ducking calls and, in one case, slamming a door. A few have refused to see it.

But most folks in town are watching to see how “Natchez” the film affects Natchez the city — especially its tourism, especially during Spring Pilgrimage, a century-old tradition widely credited with rescuing the city from destitution.

Will tourists still come?

‘Buried with my hoops on’

If a spring extravaganza helmed by once-dueling garden clubs sounds silly, some Natchezians would agree with you. They are well acquainted with how it all looks, and not immune to self-satire and critiques.

During pilgrimage season, which runs through mid-April, local actors are once again staging “Southern Exposure,” a farce from 1950 about a fading dame named Penelope who opens up her once-grand mansion, Mayweather Hall, to wide-eyed, sticky-fingered visitors, who may be under the impression they’re on a regular guided tour.

Not so, Penelope declares with swelled pride, to great laughter from the sold-out audience at this year’s opening night performance: This, she says, is “a PILGRIMAGE!”

Later, on the brink of foreclosure, Penelope takes in a renter who is actually a writer from up North, eager to exploit her and the cliches of an old Southern town.

Natchez is used to reporters, filmmakers and authors dropping by, spending time, gathering material. Stories have been written, books published. Years ago, even Borat dropped by.

The popular mockumentary character, an inept Kazakhstan TV journalist created and portrayed by Sacha Baron Cohen, arrived for dinner at Lansdowne, still owned by descendants of the people who had the home built in 1853. “He wanted to have dinner with an old-fashioned southern family,” said Marsha Colson, past president of the Pilgrimage Garden Club. “It was clear what they thought they were going to get.”

Mint juleps were served, but Colson’s family didn’t take the bait — perhaps because they surprised Baron Cohen, she said, by being “open-minded, liberal Democrats.” They didn’t make it into the Borat movie.

But Colson is featured in “Natchez,” which she’s seen two times. “I will probably always be uncomfortable with it,” she said. After a screening in Natchez, folks asked director Suzanne Herbert whether the film would be bad for tourism.

“She thought it would help us move forward on racial issues …” Colson said. “Well, we’ve been working hard on that for many, many years.”

Colson, who is in her 70s, knows that for some, the skirts are a loaded symbol.

But when she tells the story of her house, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, she’s also telling the story of her family. “When I wear that dress, I’m representing my great aunt or my great-great grandmother.”

The garden club gave up the confederate uniforms. They retired the pageant. But they’re holding on to the hoop skirts, Colson said. “I’ll be buried with my hoops on.”

‘It’s going to bring them in’

A little after 9 a.m., outside a restored train depot perched on the bluff, Collins pulled up in a white van, lettering on its side: “See the REAL Mississippi.”

A man wearing a black cowboy hat climbed inside. Collins asked where he’s from.

“New York,” said Jeremy Dyckman, 40, settling into the first row. “I’m trying to run a marathon in every state. There’s one in Jackson tomorrow, so I’m in town for that.

“And I saw the movie that you did.”

Collins grinned, eyeing the cowboy hat. “Welcome to Natchez, man.”

Then he introduced himself, following a similar script Dyckman had heard in the theater. “I’m Tracy. I’m a local pastor — I’ve been at the same church for about 20 years — and a former county supervisor. I got elected and realized I didn’t know anything about what I represented. So I started this little pilgrimage to learn the history.

“And guys, I thought it was going to be a couple of weeks and a couple of books. That was in 2015.”

Though the film follows the paths of several people, a few of them intersecting, Collins is its star, its heart, its conscience.

Herbert, the filmmaker, met him the same way many tourists do: He “recruited me into his van,” she said in an interview. The Memphis native had been spending time in Natchez without a camera, attending parties, dinners and tours. “I was blown away by the tour and the history he was giving.”

In the end, Herbert and her team structured the film the same way Collins structures his tours, she continued, to “bring people into the fantasy and then slowly peel back the layers …”

The owners of Natchez’s historic homes “are doing what they’ve been doing for three, four generations,” said the film’s producer Darcy McKinnon, of New Orleans. “What they were taught to do and taught to say. They’re very protective of that, right?”

But by protecting a narrative that’s “not rooted in the facts of history,” she continued, those homeowners are shutting people out.

Cities that have embraced authentic and expansive versions of history, such as Birmingham and Montgomery, Ala., have thrived, McKinnon said. “Talking about hard history does not drive people away — and in fact, the younger generations, it’s going to bring them in.”

On its website, the film offers up its own visitors’ guide to Natchez, highlighting Melrose, preserved by the National Park Service, and the Museum of African American History and Culture, Rev’s tours and Cosey’s B&B.

But it leaves off several antebellum mansions shown in the film. It leaves off Choctaw Hall.

‘Threats on our lives’

Until the rant, “Natchez” offers a nuanced portrait of Choctaw Hall’s owner, David Garner.

Garner, who is white, charms tourists, champions LGBTQ causes and takes medication for Parkinson’s disease, which is robbing him of his voice. In 2014, Garner and his husband Lee Glover bought the home, built circa 1836, and furnished it with seven generations’ worth of antiques, according to a story in the Natchez Democrat newspaper.

Near the film’s end, though, Garner lets loose with several comments against Black people, repeating a slur. The film then shows him making racist jokes with visitors, some of whom laugh along.

By phone, Glover said he couldn’t say too much about Garner’s remarks, because of “possible legal things that we’re doing.”

He said Garner takes a medication that can make him “unfiltered.”

“We’ve gotten threats on our lives,” Glover said. “We’ve gotten threats about burning our house.”

Choctaw Hall is still part of the Natchez Garden Club’s spring tours. More than three years ago, after complaints and “well before the documentary,” the Pilgrimage Garden Club, which owns a tour agency, stopped representing Choctaw, Colson said.

Garner and Glover put their mansion on the market for $1.9 million in September, and it remains for sale. The film had “nothing to do with the decision,” they told the local newspaper.

‘This is the South’

For decades, two garden clubs helmed the tours. But now, with an Instagram campaign and Facebook ads, a third organization called Living History Natchez has entered the chat.

“We are not a legacy garden club,” its website makes clear, promising “stories long left out.” Pack, who dressed for “Bridgerton,” rather than “Gone with the Wind,” is part of that group.

“The garden clubs, they saved this town,” Pack said, and they continue to do important work. “Whoever tasked them with needing to somehow also be digital marketers — that’s asking a lot.”

Pack and her husband are the 15th owners of Holly Hedges, so they’ve had to research the home’s history, with help from the Historic Natchez Foundation, compiling a Google document that’s now 70 pages long. Pack had some names of enslaved people who lived there but no photos. So she had those names carved in wood, displaying them on an upstairs wall.

Enslaved people, she repeated, not slaves.

“You know where I learned that little piece of dignity?” she said. “In Natchez, Mississippi.”

On a whim, she and her husband flew to New York to see the film’s premiere at Tribeca, where it went on to win best documentary. “I’m not going to lie: I was white knuckling it …” she said. “Not about anything we said … but because we’re all worried: How is this sweet town going to look?”

But she found it to be a beautifully filmed ode to an imperfect city and a chance to have a deeper conversation.

Collins, meanwhile, doesn’t expect the documentary to change this town.

But the 61-year-old hopes it will boost business. His old van, dubbed “Precious,” has 260,000 miles on its engine and little cushion left in its seats. Most of the people who fill those seats are Baby Boomers, in town for mansion tours, and there are fewer of them these days, he said.

Lately, though, he’s been adjusting his spiel for the younger adults who are finding him.

God gifted him with a “spirit of discernment,” so he reads people’s clothing and body language. The questions behind the questions they ask.

After the cemetery and before the bluffs, Collins paused at a cluster of shotgun houses, where maids and cooks and butlers once lived. But he didn’t have the group exit the van until the tour’s end, at Forks in Road, a patch of land between bustling roads.

From the 1830s to the 1860s, this land was the country’s second largest slave market, a key piece of the domestic slave trade that made millionaires out of many Natchez residents. Once forgotten, it’s now a National Park Service site.

Collins’ shadow loomed over a small square of shackles and chains as he told the story of the 1.5 million enslaved people who walked some 800 miles to this site. “That iron,” he said, “is seasoned with flesh and blood.”

Dyckman, the visiting marathon runner from New York, tugged on the brim of his cowboy hat.

He had been moved by “Natchez,” the movie, buying a book the theater had recommended: “How the Word is Passed,” by New Orleans native Clint Smith. Later, when he realized the marathon would bring him within a day’s drive of Natchez, he decided to sign up for Rev’s tour.

He didn’t stay long in Natchez, didn’t tour any antebellum houses.

But before driving back to Jackson, he returned to Forks in the Road. He read the exhibits. He stared at those shackles. He considered the marathon he was about to run “just for fun.”

And the next day, as he ran those 26.2 miles, he thought about freedom.