Courtesy of Simon and Schuster and Richard Grant
When New York Times best-selling author Richard Grant first visited Natchez, the Mississippi he found there was not the one he thought he had come to know, the one he described in his 2015 memoir Dispatches from Pluto, which chronicled the author’s experiences trading a tiny New York City apartment for a 1915 farmhouse outside the flyspeck community of Pluto, Mississippi. The nuanced, affectionate portrait Grant drew of Pluto, its people, and the rich oft-misunderstood Delta culture that surrounds it, made Dispatches the best-selling book in Mississippi for two years and won its author a Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize.
In Natchez, Grant found a different Mississippi—a place of faded fortunes and deteriorating mansions; where race relations are complex, eccentricity is elevated to an art form, and a cryogenically frozen relic of high society still celebrating the Old South in hoopskirts and Confederate uniforms co-exists with a community progressive enough to elect a gay Black man for mayor with ninety-one percent of the vote. Confronted by this maze of contradictions, Grant was already thinking about another Mississippi book when he met members of an armed African-American self-defense group that faced down the Klan here in the Sixties, and learned of the West African prince sold into slavery before being freed by President John Quincy Adams. That Mississippi is the subject of Grant’s new book, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi. It will be released on September 1.
“The overall theme is that of a deeply Southern town finally struggling to confront the legacy of slavery. And to confront change. The weight of history is so heavy. I’m trying to suggest that Natchez is still living in the shadow of slavery.” —Richard Grant
The Deepest South of All is a different animal from Grant’s previous books, explained the author by phone from Tucson, Arizona, where he now lives. “This book is episodic, with alternate chapters about my experiences in Natchez interspersed with episodes from Ibrahima’s life.” He’s talking about Abdulrahman Ibrahim Ibn Sori, the African prince and Emir who was captured in Guinea in 1788, sold to British slavers, and ultimately enslaved by a Natchez cotton plantation owner named Thomas Foster for almost forty years. Between the chapters about Ibrahima, who rose to a position of overseer of the plantation, married a fellow slave, and fathered a large family—the descendants of whom still live in Natchez—the book recounts the author’s experiences mingling with the diverse cast of characters who call Natchez home today. These include: descendants of both Ibrahima and of Foster; society grande dames who own the antebellum mansions for which the town is famous, who continue to dress in hoopskirts and open their homes to visitors for the biannual Natchez Pilgrimages; members of feuding garden clubs who remain at loggerheads over depictions of antebellum life at the annual Natchez pageant; founders of the Deacons of Defense—an African American paramilitary organization that still meets regularly; and members of a prominent and progressive gay community striving to remake Natchez into an attractive destination in a post-plantation-tourism world. “The overall theme is that of a deeply Southern town finally struggling to confront the legacy of slavery,” said Grant. “And to confront change. The weight of history is so heavy. I’m trying to suggest that Natchez is still living in the shadow of slavery.”
Like his time in Pluto, Grant finds there’s much to miss about Natchez now that he’s moved on. “I miss the conviviality,” he observed, “and the storytelling. When the booze is flowing and the stories are getting more and more funny. I did a lot of laughing at the stories people told.” Asked whether he anticipated still being welcome in Natchez after The Deepest South of All makes its debut, he said, “That’s a very good question. I imagine that I’ve made some enemies. But I couldn’t tell you who that might be. I can’t help hoping Natchez likes the book, because I like Natchez.”
The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi goes on sale September 1. On August 31, all are welcome to join a virtual book launch and discussion with authors Richard Grant and Greg Iles (also of Natchez), hosted by Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.
squarebooks.com/event/deepest-south-all-richard-grant-and-greg-iles
