On Location peels back the curtain on some of your favorite films, television shows, and more. This time, we take a look at Natchez.
A corseted woman standing on the porch of a grand antebellum home lifts her hoop skirt to reveal white tennis sneakers beneath. A pickup truck drives down Main Street with a man playing the steam organ perched happily in the back. These are not dream images, or ghosts, but vignettes from Natchez, a new documentary about the Mississippi town of the same name and the tourism industry therein.
Natchez has attracted tourists to its primo position on the Mississippi River ever since the boll-weevil knocked out its cotton crop. That was in the 1930s, less than a century after the Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction transformed the South’s enslaved laborers into sharecroppers. Today, visitors come for river cruises, the local garden clubs, which organizes pilgrimages in the fall and spring, and historic home tours powered by an antebellum tourism industry. It’s not dissimilar from, say, Colonial Williamsburg—a sort of living history LARP that can at times feel like a revisionist fairy tale.
Natchez, a new documentary about antebellum tourism in the town of the same name, depicts the tourism industry and its reckoning with—and, at times, lack thereof—the facts of American slavery, and how they have been omitted from house tours and other tourism experiences. Tracy “Rev” Collins, a reverend who leads local tours centering the stories of Black people, describes the situation in Natchez as follows: “It turns out that Millennials and Generation Z folks are not as interested in the antebellum story, the Gone With the Wind story, as the baby boomers are… Which is where I come in. I’m about to violate some Southern pride narratives with truths and facts.”
These words come about a half hour into Natchez, which is directed by Suzannah Herbert. While planning a road trip from Memphis to New Orleans with her mother, Herbert received a flood of recommendations from friends to visit Natchez. When she did so, Herbert felt tension between the surreal beauty of the place—rustling green willows, the historic homes preserved like dollhouses—and a sense of denial and confusion about a violent history. Herbert says, “I saw a community grappling with these questions of who gets to tell the country’s history. It’s a microcosm of the country as a whole.”
