Natchez, MS

Sunday, March 1, 7 am
I'd been asleep for 2 hours. M had picked up the rental and a quad stack of coffees, the sky (in)lightening. Racers for Atlanta Marathon Wknd passed beneath our high-rise, LB one of them. We were slothlike, slovenly but out by 8 am. Kissed Greg the Peach goodbye, and M, Cousin, Neil and I set out on our road trip across the South.

A little backstory - I counseled M before we left for the Trials that I would do minimal research on our desired stop-overs, but mostly that I had zero opinions and wouldn't want to concern myself with any specs until after I raced. So he booked shows and would say things like, "You don't seem excited about such-and-such," and I'd be like, "Bish! I told you, no excitement until after the race!" And for months he'd been looking forward to Natchez - the setting of some of his favorite books, and the whole time I was thinking, "Ok, Natchez is for M, it's his thing. I've never thought about Natchez in my life. If it's awesome, cool. If it sucks, it's his fault." Let me tell you - Natchez was my favorite place. This is a compliment to M.

Atlanta was soft as we left, heading west on 20. It wasn't marked by a painter's palette of sage, olive, pine, moss - rather a steady line of soft brown highway flanked by pines. Pines on pines. Passed by Talladega Speedway & M squealed. Recalled the Talladega curse, perhaps a once-Indian burial ground or shaman influenced. Crossed the Georgia state line into Alabama. Cousin was asleep, propped in the back by a neck pillow, and we schemed all the things we'd tell her we did while she was sleeping when all we'd really done was read roadside propaganda which was heavily influenced by this one male lawyer.

First stop - Homewood, Alabama (suburb of Birmingham), where they use pine needles as mulch. On a single quaint street: Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal, Family of Faith Sunday morning church doors open, policemen ushering suited masses under a blue sky dappled. Stopped for breakfast at Ruby Sunshine's (because, morning margaritas); a round of irish cream coffees, ruby mimosas, bloody mary's. Our server, a bright blond bun with a sweet rococo. We started our food journey here - catfish & grits, southern breakfast with buttermilk biscuit, honey butter, grits with goat chz, fried green tomato, bacon, bananas foster pain perdu covered in rum-flambeed bananas & raisins with a side of corned beef hash and stuffed french toast with mardi gras glittered sprinkles of purple, green & yellow. We rolled out of there.

Passing through Boligee and I look back and Cousin is doing a spa treatment on herself, and it looks like the very thing I didn't know I absolutely needed. This is why my Cousin is my best friend - she does what she wants, and in being witness to it, I think like, Why not me too? I've fully conditioned myself to not need anything comforting. Save for wine, cheese, margaritas and flannel sheets. It's more of a hard edge, don't help me, manhandle the lawn-mower, weed the flowerbeds with bare knees on pavement kind of life for me. When I'm around her, I remember to take care of myself. And so, kindly (because we know how much this beauty bs costs), she hands over products and walks me through face wipe & serum & lotion and then Neil asks for a spa and lays his head in her lap and get's the royal. It's a series of photographs that I'm fond of.

I had a single request - take the Natchez Trace Parkway. The Nat'l scenic bi-way-green-way stretches for 444 miles through Mississippi, Alabama & Tennessee, originally bisecting the homelands of the Natchez, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations. It's vibrant. Andrew Jackson. Jefferson Davis. Ulysses S. Grant. Emerald Mound. Indian mounds. Mount Locust. Numerous ecosystems. Watersheds. We stopped at the Lower Choctaw Boundary, est. 1765 and site of the Red Bluff Stand. Neil laid on the earth to capture his surroundings. Wound our way leisurely through, braking for big waltzing fowls. By early evening we arrived in Natchez, MS.

"Established by French colonists in 1716, Natchez is one of the oldest and most important European settlements in the lower Mississippi River Valley. After the French lost the French and Indian War (Seven Years' War), they ceded Natchez and near territory to Spain in the treaty of Paris of 1763...The US acquired the area from the British after the American Revolutionary War...In Natchez, Mississippi, even the surrounding landscape beckons you toward a storied past, with roads cutting canyons through red-dirt forests, eventually arriving at the city's famous bluffs. Oak limbs spread wide...best known for its sumptuous historic homes, built throughout the 19th century when the region boomed with cotton. The incredible riches of that era are hard to fathom. But the town's wealth has always been matched with a certain wildness: for every planter, there was a river pirate; for every ornate garden, a wailing blues guitar."

We rented a riverside shotgun, close to the Natchez Grand Hotel and across from a riverboat casino. Brightly-painted, haggard cats asleep on the concrete out front, one room wide/several rooms deep, beginning with the living space, bedroom, kitchen, with a small bathroom tacked on in the back, backed up to a large, vacant field. The best feature - the bedroom held two beds that faced one another. We walked to the bluff outside our door to see the muddy Mississippi - there's this pleasant walking trail that sits up above the river - to 100 Main for a shrimp po'boy with remoulade, waffle fries and funnel cake fries drizzled with chocolate sauce and doused in powdered sugar. We rolled out of there, too, a tire growing between ribs and hips.

Took a funnel-cake-induced nap, walked to where the city itself began - "on the riverside strip of land known, suitably, as Natchez Under-the-Hill. The very first French colonists landed here in 1716. In the past, the neighborhood was bustling - and occasionally libertine, full of fishermen and grocers working next to bordellos and bars. Only one row of brick buildings has survived the river's floods, but these offer modern comforts behind a rustic veneer."

Down a steep hill, past older men with thick drawls outside the saloon, to Magnolia Grill (built to look like the original saloon that once occupied the spot); dark wood, dusty brick walls, cluttered with paraphernalia. I already needed a salad cleanse at this point, but we couldn't not and went for bayou egg rolls filled with Magnolia Jambalaya chicken, tasso, smoked sausage and Mississippi-grown rice with sweet chili sauce, a cup of shrimp, chicken & okra gumbo.

Per a description in one of the books at our place -

"Natchez-Under-Hill in the early 1800's could claim the dubious distinction of being the Devil's own personal workshop. Here a burly boatman from the River or dashing dandy from the Bluffs, with the loosening of his purse string, could purchase any or all of the products of Hell wholesale. In this place, during those lusty times along the Mississippi, the only thing cheaper than the body of a woman was the life of a man. 

Clinging like a malignant scab to the base of the Bluffs, Natchez-Under-the-Hill had no peers as the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Old Southwest. Only four or five muddy streets wide in its hellish hey-day, this city of sin was said to have kept the wheel of chance spinning day and night. More than once the flat rattle of shuffling cards had punctuated the passage of a whole plantation to some dark, river-tanned man with a set of skillful fingers. Under-the-Hill whole fortunes, and the people who made and lost them, were know to disappear with the same rapidity. 

Today all that remains of Natchez-Under-the-Hill is Silver Street and one pitiful row of broken buildings that stare, like hollow-eyed ghosts, across the restless ramblings of the muddy Mississippi." 

On the walk back we ran our fingers through the Mississippi to test its temp. Laid out on the leather couches of our living room and fell asleep to a southern murder mystery before climbing into our facing beds with their homemade quilts and iron wrought posts.

The next morning we fed the porch cats some leftover scraps, locked up, and drove over to the Natchez City Cemetery, admiring the antebellum houses along the way. Established in 1822 on the bluffs high above the Mississippi, it's graves revealed a deeper sense of the history, mystery and tragedy that befell Natchez. It's a garden of live oaks with green coats dancing in shadows, marble monuments, 19th-20th century ironwork. We'd heard about the Turning Angel statue, and sought to find her. There's a man named Rufus E. Case who was buried in his rocking chair pointed towards his home state of Louisiana; a woman's headstone which reads, "Louise. The Unforunate;" Florence Irene Ford's gravesite: a child of 10 who passed from Yellow Fever in 1871, whose mother constructed her grave with stairs that led down into a clear glass encasement so that she could spend time with her, and finally, the Turning Angel - known to watch people as they pass the cemetery at night. The story of her - on March 14, 1908 an explosion at the Natchez Drug Company killed 12 employees, including 5 young girls, the youngest of which was 12. The owner of the Co. purchased a lot at the cemetery and had the angel statue made in memory of the 5. We found her and them. Coins left at her feet. I photographed her at every angle, hoping to catch some of her magic.

We got hungry, stopped at a roadside eatery called Natchez Midtown Grill. You walk up to the window and give your order and walk around and come back to pick it up from the little window. I think it was the best po'boy I'd have - the Voodoo Po'boy with grilled chicken, steak, shrimp, onions, bell peppers and cheese for $10. As we waited M and I walked up the street to a little thrift shop and picked up a bright blue map of the Mississippi River (currently framed at home) and a book for Cousin. Dewayne Johnson signed his name in pencil on the picnic table outside. We ate our meal out of white styrofoam there, under gray sky and breeze.

Tried to check out Longwood - a 30,000 sq. ft., dome-topped 1820's antebellum octagonal mansion (feat. in True Blood), but was blocked by a little gate guy who was charging $40 a person to see it. Instead we drove past other stately, Corinthian columned homes. Someone said we needed to stop off at Roux 61, so, as we headed out of town and spotted one, we went in for another snack. A round of Roux Ritas (pretty sure I asked if there was alcohol in it, a faux pas I keep employing), some decadent shrimp and alligator sausage cheesecake ($10.95), served with thick cut & buttered texas toast, and a half dozen chargrilled Louisiana oysters with garlic, butter, herb sauce and parmesan cheese plus more grilled bread so thick forks stood up straight in 'em. I  look up and there's a stuffed beaver hanging out in a log in the ceiling.

Back on the road. Next stop - Baton Rouge, LA.