The city of Natchez, perched on the banks of the Mississippi river, is in the heartland of America’s Deep South. For many thousands of enslaved Africans – if they made it this far – the ‘mighty Mississippi’ was the last leg of their enforced journey to the US cottonfields.
Suzannah Herbert’s compelling documentary gently but insistently teases out the enduring racist legacy of the slave trade, in this most genteel of cities, more than 160 years after Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation freeing the slaves.
Herbert tells the story through the city’s tour guides. Black ordained minister Tracy ‘Rev’ Collins is in many ways the film’s hero. As well as preaching and singing in church, he runs ‘Country Parks’ tours and gives his customers the real lowdown on the city’s historical involvement on the slave trade, the dashed hopes of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow segregation laws that ensured Black people in the southern states were still second class citizens as late as 1965. It’s fair to say not every customer appreciates his candour.
David Garner is one of Natchez’s erstwhile ‘aristocracy’ and, down on his luck, earns a crust from taking mainly White, mainly elderly tourists on a tour around his grand antebellum home. In the years before the American Civil War Natchez housed more millionaires than any other city in the country, but hard times have fallen on patricians like David. He is the personification of Southern gallantry for his guests with a self-effacing quip for every occasion. But Herbert and her crew are present and filming when the mask slips and David, presumably in frustration at his lowered status, resorts to the crude racist language of a redneck who never got past third grade.
Natchez is beautifully shot, evoking the gothic charm of the city’s ‘big houses’, the romanticism of the ageing Southern belles who populate the Natchez Garden Club and the grandeur of the Mississippi, the Father of Rivers, in its opening shot.
Without the safety net of a voice-over the film effectively unwraps the ugly tensions lying under the surface of this beautiful part of the world. A lengthy shot of Rev silently fuming after a local cracker calls him ‘boy’ needs no voice-over. Natchez bravely allows the participants to speak for themselves and is rewarded by their eloquence, even as some are condemning themselves out of their own mouths.
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