THE DEEPEST SOUTH OF ALL

An award-winning British travel writer and journalist tells the story of an unexpected, powerfully revealing visit to Natchez, Mississippi.

Grant first learned about Natchez from Regina Charboneau, a native chef and cookbook author who invited him to visit her at the antebellum plantation home where she lived. As a resident of rural Mississippi, the author already knew that, like so much of the South, the city was a place where "beauty seemed inseparable from the horrors of the [racist] regime that created [it].” From the moment Grant set foot in Charboneau's home, it was clear just how deeply riven by racial issues Natchez really was. President of a “powerful and aristocratic” women's garden club in Natchez, the liberal-minded Charboneau had backed controversial changes to yearly historical reenactments (called “Tableaux”) that called for the miseries of slavery to be depicted alongside heavily romanticized stories of plantation life. Yet other disturbing traditions remained—e.g., employing African Americans to work as servers in the antebellum museum homes that drove tourist interest in Natchez. Grant tells delightful stories about the ongoing skirmishes between garden clubs—dubbed the Hoopskirt Mafia—and such Natchez eccentrics as the man who resided in a local mental hospital for part of the year. But what makes this engaging narrative especially timely is the way the author interweaves his excursions with the fascinating, ultimately tragic story of Natchez transplant Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima, an African prince who was sold into slavery and bought by a Natchez resident in the late 1800s. Grant chronicles how one of Ibrahima's female descendants had played the role of his wife in a historical reenactment. This richly layered book offers a multifaceted view of the culture and history of an American city that, in its history, reveals the roots of the racial conflicts that continue to haunt the American psyche.

An entertaining and thought-provoking memoir and sociological portrait.