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| Natchez |
A poignant exploration of the US’ troubled relationship with its past, Suzannah Herbert’s widely acclaimed documentary Natchez focuses on the Mississippi town from which it takes its name. Famed for the tours it offers inside traditionally decorated antebellum houses, the town is a place where visitors come into contact with history, or various interpretations thereof. It’s an opportunity for them to gaze in awe at elegant houses and elaborate gowns, or to face up to the bloody truth about where all that wealth originated.
Meeting Suzannah to discuss the film, I remarked on the film’s opening shot, which sees a boat drift slowly down a broad, silvery blue river. It seems like the perfect way to settle viewers into the pace of life in the South, and set the tone for part of what follows.
“That shot is almost like a painting,” she agrees. “Natchez is just so beautiful, and we wanted to bring the viewer in to the beauty and to the fantasy that it portrays, to slowly peel back those layers and to show the truth there and the more complicated aspects of the town.”
There are some other shots later which seems to be very much in Gone With The Wind territory, with a big dress and sunset.
“Yes, that was definitely an influence. I mean, we described the film as Gone With The Wind meets White Lotus meets Night Of The Living Dead, so we definitely had those references in mind. And also we looked to a lot of fiction films to gain inspiration: Robert Altman's Nashville was one. Just because there's so many different voices and characters. And just like in the town and in the film, we had to figure out how to make that all work. And so we used Rev's van as a way to bring us about the town and drop us off at different tours and different houses, just like the van in Altman's Nashville does with the campaign speeches around town.”
The idea for the film began, she says, when she was invited to a plantation wedding.
“It really got me thinking about how we use sites of history and pain and trauma, how we use those today for entertainment and enjoyment, and what that means to us as a society and to people on the individual level as well. So I started doing a lot of research and reading. I'm from Memphis, Tennessee, so I started talking to a lot of family friends in Mississippi, and they all told me to go to Natchez. I had never been to Natchez. It's five hours from Memphis, but it's very much off the beaten path. It's not on a major highway. There's no airport.
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| Natchez |
“I went on a road trip with my mom, and went to all through the Delta, and then we ended up in Natchez. I was just so struck by the beauty and the pain that were in conflict with each other. It made me very uncomfortable, actually. I was like, ‘This is unsettling,’ just these two things in tension with each other. And I realised that tension is something that should be explored in the film, and to understand the community grappling with these issues, because they rely so heavily on historical tourism.”
I observe that everybody in the film is trying, on some level, to grapple with that legacy, but some of them don't really have any clue at all about what they're dealing with.
“Yeah. It was a spectrum, I would say. And there was a lot of cognitive dissonance happening, and people giving tours in the antebellum houses, sometimes without even realising the harm that they inflict when they say ‘servant’ instead of ‘enslaved person’, and how that immediately dehumanises the people who were enslaved, so it was a lot to navigate and to go between the different perspectives.
“I think people know the history. I think that people feel that it's too uncomfortable or that their tourists don't want to hear about it, they ‘just want to think about pretty things’. That's a quote in the film. But I think that's a cop out. I think that it's just white people having the privilege of not having to think about it and not having to acknowledge that the past directly affects our present day. That's really hard to accept, I think, for some, and to contend with, because it threatens their sense of self – and also the systems that uphold their positionality of power.”
There’s a moment in the film where somebody says that only 5% of people owned slaves, and it seems like everyone assumes that means that their ancestors didn't, and that they're somehow separate from the entire thing and haven't benefited from it.
“That's the danger of it,” she nods. “That's the danger, because everyone white benefited from the institution of slavery. I mean, it built the US into the greatest world power. So economically and socially, there's no denying it. I think that's why white supremacy persists, because it's more about the superiority of whiteness over people who aren't white. Black people versus slave owners.”
There are lots of interesting stories told be contributors to the film, such as the claim that the town was once home to more millionaires that anywhere else in the world. Was she able to verify things like that, or is it all oral history that the film draws on?
“It is all oral history,” she confirms. “But we did do some fact checking just to confirm that weren't going crazy with the oral history. But I think that's kind of the whole point of the film – well, one of the points of the film – that as a country and as a society, we learn history through tours and public sights and storytelling, and not so much through reading, you know, ten books about the Civil War.
“It's also through popular culture. Gone With The Wind, to this day, is still the highest grossing film of all time, adjusted for inflation. That just goes to show you how. How much of an influence it has on white police in this country and the ideas of the South and of the Civil War. I really wanted to make an antidote to that. Something that was in opposition to those mythologies.”
We discuss the way that the architecture of the houses speaks to the realities of the lives lived by their owners and the enslaved people kept there.
“There are so many different ways we could have gone into the topics,” she says. “For example, the punkahwalla is something that I never knew about. It's this wooden fan that would be over the dining room table in antebellum homes, and an enslaved child would have to stand in the corner and pull the rope. And the way that that architectural feature is talked about in many of the antebellum homes by the white homeowners is very dismissive, and it erases the humanity of the enslaved individual. And so the way that they talk about the punkahwalla, showing that in the film, but then showing the opportunity one might have if they take a different position on the punkahwalla – I don't want to give too much away, but the difference in perspective and the amount of nuance and storytelling and history that you can tell from the Black perspective is kind of astonishing, and it’s undeniable how important thinking fully about history is.”
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| Natchez |
There’s one point when people are talking about how someone whom they refer to as a servant was taught to read and write, and they remark casually that this shows how generous his master was to him, apparently not getting that the said master thought he owned that man and controlled every aspect of his life.
“Yeah, like that and then ‘Oh, look, our slave ran away. She must not have been happy.’ You know, things like that are just so harmful, as if it mitigates the fact that people didn't have any rights or freedom. It just perpetuates the idea that slavery was okay if you had a good master. And no, it was not.”
Some people are going to grasp what is revealed by these scenes and others are now. How did she decide which ones needed additional context? That, she says, was not an immediate concern.
“We don't add context until later. We let people do their thing until midway in the film when we start to get deeper into the history, and then I think that lightbulbs go off in people's heads because it's hard to not make those comparisons once you are exposed and confronted with the horrors of slavery. And the Forks of the Road, which was the second largest slave market in America, is right in Natchez. Almost a quarter of a million people were sold there. And talking about it in those terms and then hearing, five minutes later in the movie, a tour guide talk about ‘the slave must not have been happy’ – you're going to make those connections if you have an ounce of empathy.”
I ask what her experience at screenings has been like.
“Oh my gosh. It's been so incredible. We've screened the film all over the South, all over the country. People are excited after the film. They need to talk about things. They want to talk about it. They want to process it together. And I think that's what's so powerful about the film. It’s that it invites conversations and dialogue instead of telling you how to think. You know, it actually raises more questions than answers, and I think that it has a lot of layers, and people appreciate that and appreciate having an outlet to process the traumas of our past. The film really shows how it affects us as individuals today when we don't deal with it.
“Audiences have been really energetic and enthusiastic about the film, especially in the South. Actually, it's been great. And, you know, I'm Southern, so the last thing I wanted to do was to make something that put blame on the South as well. I think it's an American issue. It's just so concentrated in the South.”
There are parts of the community in Natchez that seem to be making progress in trying to reconcile their troubled history and have those conversations.
“Yeah, definitely. And it's inspiring to see the work that Kathleen Bond at the National Park Service is doing, and Barney [Schoby] at the Park Service, and Deborah Cosey who owns Concord Quarters, the slave quarters, and Gracie who wears the antebellum hoop skirt. Her ability to be open to another history than the one that she has been taught is really moving and really beautiful and I think shows people's willingness to have their minds opened and to see a different perspective.”
She hopes, she says, that the film can be part of a healing process for the country, starting the conversations that really matter.
Natchez is in US cinemas now.
