Remembering and Reimagining the “Old South” in Mississippi

Abstract

This essay highlights Natchez, Mississippi’s Confederate heritage tourism to illustrate interrelationships between memory, history, and imagination, and how performed commemorations critically shape nationalist ideals and beliefs. Memories—and the bodies that pass them—shape the politically charged terrain of imagined nations, which are uncertain and collectively negotiated. To illustrate the contested nature of historical memory and how performing the past reimagines and reshapes the present and future nation, I juxtapose the Confederate Pageant’s nostalgic, rosy-tinted view of the Old South with examples of contemporary Black-centered commemorations and heritage tourism in Natchez. The dissonance and tension between these opposing forces illustrate interrelationships between memory and history, how these are critical to sustaining nationalism, and how performed commemorations of the past—whether historically accurate or imagined—critically shape ideals and beliefs about race and the nation. I use Natchez to undergird broad questions about the nature of memory and history, which are axiomatically contested and fallible. I use examples of Black commemoration in Natchez to illustrate antiracist theories of historiography.

1. Introduction

Natchez, the original capital of Mississippi, was once the wealthiest city in the United States due to its slave trade and cotton plantations. Natchez’s long, complex history—and the conflicting ways it is remembered, commemorated, and performed in contemporary heritage tourism—offer insight about the lingering afterlives of settler colonialism and plantation slavery in the US. In this essay, I describe how Natchez Confederate heritage tourism, notably the Confederate Pageant, has performed “Lost Cause” memories of the “Old South” from the Jim Crow era through the present.1 To be clear: the Old South never existed; it is a Lost Cause invention.2 Nonetheless, Lost Cause memories of the Old South are enduring, potent, and pernicious. White women and children have been central to this project, illustrating their key role in shaping ideologies of race and nation, as well as the critical function of performance therein.3 Black residents have contested Lost Cause memories of Natchez, resisting white nationalist bias by creating their own performances, commemorations, museums, and sites of memory. Black and white residents have contested the memories of Natchez and struggled over how to present the city’s history. Over time, changes in how Natchez remembers its past reflect cultural conflicts and political changes, including shifting beliefs about race, gender, and the nation.

This essay explores the powerful role of performance in commemorations and sites of memory, and the ways performance can reinforce, destabilize, and/or reinvent history, reimagining the past through representations and narratives. I use the terms re-membering and rememory to theorize why and how performance and embodied memory are critical to sustaining Lost Cause mythologies of the Old South, and how they may also challenge, counter, and redress racist bias in heritage tourism and commemorations. To illustrate the contested nature of historical memory and how performing the past reimagines and reshapes the present and future nation, I juxtapose the Confederate Pageant’s nostalgic, rosy-tinted view of the Old South with examples of contemporary Black-centered commemorations and heritage tourism in Natchez. The dissonance and tension between these opposing forces illustrate interrelationships between memory and history, how these are critical to sustaining nationalism, and how performed commemorations of the past—whether historically accurate or imagined—critically shape ideals and beliefs about race and the nation. I use Natchez to undergird broad questions about the nature of memory and history, which are axiomatically contested and fallible. I use examples of Black commemoration in Natchez to illustrate antiracist theories of historiography. Ultimately, I argue that nonnarrative, affective, embodied, and performed archives and histories, plural modes of remembering, and collective cultural memories allow for a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of the past.

In the section titled “Methodology,” I outline my approach and briefly review existing scholarship on Natchez, explaining how/why centering performance provides unique insights justifying my argument. The next section offers theoretical scaffolding on performance studies, memory studies, and nationalism. These theories support my method and concluding argument about historiography. The section titled “Background” provides context on Natchez’s history and its role in colonialism and the development of the US. I follow with a section on “Natchez Confederate Heritage Tourism.” Confederate heritage commemorative performance in the Mississippi Delta began in the Reconstruction period, and the Natchez Confederate Pageant has been performed (in multiple iterations, under different names) for over ninety years. Obviously, it is outside the scope of this essay to offer a complete historical account. Instead, I provide a general description of the pageant’s aesthetics, highlighting how key performances by women and children reinforce white nationalist ideologies. The core concept is that while some aspects of the pageant have remained remarkably consistent, change has allowed Natchez Confederate heritage tourism to endure. White nationalism is a shifting, evolving modality, which is why performance plays such an important role in sustaining it. To this point, I highlight a few instances in the history of the Natchez Confederate pageant that reveal conflict and change over historical memory. In the second part of the essay, the section “Black Memory and History” first discusses problems and theories of Black histories and archives, then describes how Black activists have resisted white nationalist bias by creating their own performances, commemorations, museums, and sites of memory. I explain how these examples illustrate antiracist theories of historiography. I conclude with an argument for plural historiographies that privilege performed/embodied archives and collective cultural memory, arguing that these allow for a more complex and nuanced understanding of the past.

2. Methodology

As a performance studies scholar, I use an interdisciplinary method that draws from many fields, considering a broad spectrum of acts and actants as performing and/or performative.4

My research uses primary and secondary sources, archival ephemera, informal interviews, and field observations. I also rely heavily on existing scholarship on Natchez, mostly from scholars of history.5 In the past few decades, scholars have published historiographies of Natchez that reflect critically on racism and more accurately reflect the complexities of Natchez history. For historical context and background on Natchez, I have relied primarily on Jack E. Davis’s Race Against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez Since 1930 (Davis 2001), Susan T. Falck, Remembering Dixie: The Battle to Control Historical Memory in Natchez, Mississippi, 1865–1941 (Falck 2019), and articles by Steven Hoelscher (2003–2006). All three authors rely primarily on archival materials and primary and secondary texts, supplemented with interviews and observations. I have been well informed by these scholars’ historical research.

My method offers something new because it is primarily theoretical and privileges performance as the central point of analysis, to argue how performance creates meaning and shapes culture and ideologies. Other scholarship on Natchez offers thoughtful consideration of race and/or gender and/or class. I build on this foundation by interrogating other less developed topics. While the previously mentioned scholars implicitly touch on nationalism, I address it explicitly. In the US (as well as South Africa, which other articles in this special issue address), racial inequality and constructs of racial difference were integral to the development of the nation and nationalist ideals. This point is central here. Similarly, other scholars mention the role of children in Natchez without explicating their critical function in circulating racialized ideologies of the nation. I consider a broad range of actants as performing bodies. I analyze objects, landscapes, and architecture as performing and performative, discussing how they may circulate ideologies and how memory may be considered as a spatial and corporeal process.6 I focus, to a greater degree and more thoroughly, on how Black residents have resisted racist bias in Natchez in the past three decades. Other scholarship touches on this, but I offer a more diverse and thorough account.7 By emphasizing bodily practices and asking how performances produce/resist racist and nationalist ideologies, I offer a unique contribution. I ultimately model and argue for ways of remembering that are more nuanced, accurate, and inclusive.

3. Theory

My argument rests on two theoretical principles from the interdisciplinary fields of performance studies and memory studies.

3.1. Performance

The first precept, from performance studies, is that performance and performative acts create, challenge, and change culture, identities, and ideologies. Language, signs (such as gestures and images), and other systems of representation do not inherently convey meaning but rather negotiate meaning within unfixed relational networks. The German phrase Einmal ist keinmal (once is never) is apt: such representations are not legible unless they are repeated, rehearsed, and reperformed. A key tenet of performance studies is that culture, identities, ideologies, and everyday life are created through rehearsed and repeated performances. Richard Schechner describes these performances as twice-learned behaviors, which he likens to strips of film that can be clipped and rearranged to reconstruct meaning. Because of its centrality in producing culture and ideologies, performance can be a lens to examine virtually anything. Performative acts and utterances do not simply describe or represent; they do things; they make things exist as present. The tenet that performance creates culture, identities, and ideologies is central to my argument about the critical role of performance within race and nationalism: as abstract concepts, culture, identities, and ideologies do not exist per se but must be embodied and enacted.8 Further, because these are unstable, they rely on continual rehearsal and re-performance. Performed repetitions and repetitions-with-difference have the capacity to reiterate and reproduce ideologies as well as to challenge or change them.

3.2. Memory Studies

The second principle, from memory studies, is that axiomatically, memory and history are contested and fallible. History and memory are inextricably linked and depend on absence. History is always of the past, as is memory. Because history is reliant on memory, the problem of absence persists. Countless scholars have articulated this idea. Aristotle, Plato, Kant, and Heidegger all used the metaphor of memory imprinting on a “block of wax,” which preserves a distorted representation rather than the thing itself. History and memory cannot be defined as the noumena but always only phenomena or representations. (Later, I discuss how the concept of rememory troubles this conclusion.) Presence is dialectically dependent on absence; neither can be given an absolute identity. Some people, events, and sites are overly remembered; remembering relies on forgetting. Contemporary scholars such as Maurice Halbwachs, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Diane Taylor, Jan Assmann, Pierre Nora, Paul Ricœur, Paul Connerton, and Astrid Erll (to name just a few) all argue (in various ways) that cultural memory, sites of memory, and historic archives are ideologically limited, biased, and rely on exclusion and forgetting. Obviously, I cannot review the entire field of cultural memory studies within the scope of this article, but I will provide a précis of a few scholars whose theories influence my argument.

Astrid Erll, describing the history and core concepts of memory studies, states that cultural memory was invented as a theoretical construct when interdisciplinary scholars began taking a scientific, methodological approach to analyzing interrelationships between memory, history, and culture (Erll 2011, pp. 13–37; 2010, pp. 1–18). Memory studies differentiates between individual (cognitive) and social memory but acknowledges their co-constitutive continual interactions. A core concept is that individuals cannot independently remember: effectively, all memory is collectively and socially mediated. As Erll notes: “There is no such thing as pre-cultural individual memory; but neither is there a Collective or Cultural Memory… which is detached from individuals and embodied only in media and institutions” (Erll 2010, p. 5). Individuals’ memories exist within symbolic and socio-cultural networks and are influenced by their families, communities, and societies. Societies cannot sustain literal memories but symbolically construct a sense of shared past by privileging certain perspectives, selecting memories, and “versions of the past according to present knowledge and needs” (Erll 2010, p. 5). This is also true of nations.

3.3. Nationalism

Nationalism relies on shared memories, histories, and mythologies of the past. This concept is central to my argument about how performance, memory, and nationalism are interrelated. Nations cannot exist without nationalism, and nationalism cannot be sustained without remembering (or inventing) the past. Nationalism promotes the idea that nations are distinct. We imagine citizens to be united by a common language, culture, beliefs, geography, ethnicity, etc. But such distinctions are slippery, impossible to grasp. Ernst Renan’s seminal essay “Qu-est-ce qu’une nation?” proposes that nations, lacking unity, adhere through reiteration of mutual consent, a “daily plebiscite” (Renan 1882). (This is not unlike Benedict Anderson’s concept of nations as “imagined communities.”9) For Renan, nationalism is a civic process but also social, embodied, affective, and performed. Nations cohere and remain through embodied processes of repetition, performance, and memory. Renan notes the importance of shared memory: nations rely on ideals of heroic pasts. National solidarity is created through a shared sense that sacrifices were suffered in the past; this creates a willingness to sacrifice for one’s nation in the present. (This is a common trope in Lost Cause mythologies of the Confederacy.)

Hand in hand with remembering, Renan notes that forgetting and historical error are also necessary. This correlates with Erll’s description of how societies (and nations) rely on remembering and forgetting, and how history reflects the ideological interests of those in power. Performed memories of Natchez influence what is remembered and how people experience the past nation, which reflects and constitutes how they experience the present and imagine the future nation. Erll argues that because the past must “continually be re-constructed and re-presented,” there will obviously be variations and differences (Erll 2010, pp. 6–7). This supports my main points about Natchez: performance is critical in how Natchez reconstructs and remembers the past, and its historical memory has always been contested. I use the term re-membering to encapsulate these concepts.

The Natchez Confederate pageant is an example of re-membering, where performers embodying the past regenerate new citizens (members) of the future nation. The pageant embodies expressions of ideal citizenship and offers insights about the imaginary borders of nations that are uncertain and always under collective negotiation. The way nations live in our minds is incredibly powerful because nations only live in our imaginations. Nations may have some concrete markers, such as a common language or geographic boundaries, but these are insufficient to cohere citizens’ experience of belonging, which requires a cultural sense of nation-ness. A nation requires ongoing collective articulation—through cultural acts such as the Confederate Pageant, and through collective re-membering.

3.4. Collective Memory

Tracing the development of memory studies, Erll identifies Maurice Halbwachs and Aby Warburg as the first to name the phenomenon of collective and social memory in the 1920s; the study of cultural memory rose in the 1980s with Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire and Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory. Halbwachs and Nora both describe the relationship between memory and history oppositionally. Halbwachs considered memory less reliable than history. Erll notes that Halbwachs considered history abstract and “dead” and memory as more meaningful and “lived,” arguing for collective memory to mediate between these. Nora similarly situates lieux de mémoire between memory and history.10 Erll considers Halbwachs’ and Nora’s oppositional concepts of history and memory a source of dispute, characterizing this binary as an infelicitous legacy, a “dead end,” and the Achilles’ heel of the field (Erll 2010, pp. 6–7). Witnesses of the same event often recall it differently, and the truth or facts of historic events are frequently contested. Erll argues that focusing on what is remembered and authenticating singular narratives is less productive than focusing on how the past is remembered in a plurality of different modes. This supports the conclusions I ultimately make, suggesting more nuanced and inclusive historiographies.

Paul Connerton responds to Halbwachs’ theory of collective memory by articulating forms of collective/social memory in relation to corporeality and space. Our sense of “place memory” is dependent on our bodily relationship to space. He describes memory as performative and bodily; knowledge of the past lives through ritual performances. Echoing Renan, he argues that our experience of the present is dependent upon the past. Describing how societies remember and/or forget the past, Connerton cites forgetting as a key characteristic of modernity.11 Modern developments, such as transport (creating the ability to traverse space very quickly), architecture (cities that are too large for people to remember, the lack of walkable neighborhoods, and quick destruction/reconstruction of buildings), and capitalism (disconnection between labor and commodities), separate social life from spatial perception. Recalling Plato and Aristotle’s ontological/metaphysical distinction between memory as experienced versus recalled, as present versus a representation of something absent, we might frame Connerton’s definition of memory as illustrating a feedback loop between memory as corporeal, lived experience and memory as recollection/representation. This idea supports my conclusions about methodologies of historiography, particularly as related to Black historic and collective memory, which I return to later.

Paul Ricœur similarly describes memory as dependent on absence and always permeated with forgetting.12 While memory contains the potential for veracity, it also contains the potential for failure. Ricœur defines memory as existing. Memory’s presence is dialectically dependent on absence. Neither history nor memory can be defined as noumena but always only phenomena, or representations. Memory is a representation in the present of the past: while the object of representation (the referent) is absent, the representation is present as a trace of memory. Borrowing from Toni Morrison, I use the term rememory to describe how Black collective memory of trauma is corporeally experienced as present (Morrison 2019; See also Kovács 2021). I return to the idea of rememory in my discussions of Black histories and cultural memory.

Riceour defines history as constituted by three types of traces of memory: archival, affection (imprinted), and corporeal. The archive is already distinct from memory because it relies on testimony, which becomes history only when written. As I argue later, expanding this concept to include other forms of testimony can help address deficiencies in archives of Black history. Ricœur privileges testimony as a form of memory because he believes it can be verified and corroborated. Testimony that does not change over time and is similar to others’ can be considered reliable. Each type of history is marked by interpretation and narrativization, which render history explicitly ideological. The archivist interprets what deserves to be archived and how it should be classified. Interpretation and narrative create a fundamental ontological break between the experience of the historical event and its representation, the fact recorded as historical narrative. Ricœur’s critique of historic interpretation and narration as ideologically biased informs my conclusions, suggesting the benefits of nonnarrative historiographies.

Ricœur asks why some memories are overly remembered while others are forgotten, or less remembered (he compares France’s memory of the Holocaust to its relative forgetting of the Armenian genocide). History is marked by resistance and compulsion: social groups will block shameful memories and compulsively repeat others. This is quite evident in the Natchez Confederate Pageant: memories of violence against enslaved people or uprisings against plantation owners are suppressed; memories of pleasant events are remembered. Memories can be blocked, manipulated, or commanded. Blocked memories are permanent: although memory may not be accessible or present, the experience exists, remaining in the body. They are both present and absent: present as affect/sensation and absent as representation. Manipulated and commanded memories reflect on systems of power and authority. Authorized histories rely on official or authorized forgetting. State officials may command forgetting or forgiving of events.

Archives provide proof of absence; gaps and lacunae reveal more than what is present. As an example of authorized/commanded histories: the garden clubs that led Natchez’s Confederate heritage tourism and produced the Confederate Pageant enforced a narrow view of history by restricting which buildings were eligible for historic tours and creating city regulations that required tour guides and museums to present their scripted, sanctioned version of history. In Race Against Time, Jack Davis describes how the DAR and Daughters of the Confederacy lobbied the Mississippi State Board to enact laws reviewing history textbooks and mandating history textbooks that used racist slurs and stereotypes (Davis 2001, pp. 34–50). Pearl Guyton, a member of one of the garden clubs and head of the local high school’s history department, wrote a textbook that was mandated from the 1930s to 50s. It focused solely on Mississippi history, from an explicitly white nationalist point of view. The textbook enforced Lost Cause mythologies, promoting states’ rights and calling the Civil War the “War Between the States.” It emphasized goodwill and cooperation between the races, referring to Anglo-Saxons as the “purest stock” who protected “incompetent and uneducated” Black people and positively framing the KKK as defenders of the innocent. Ricœur suggests that official/authorized histories may be moderated by plural histories that offer critiques or alternate interpretations. This later occurred in Mississippi, when civil rights activists demanded a new history textbook (Eagles 2017). Linking Connerton’s idea of memory/forgetting as embodied in the spatial experience of place, I offer another example: the inner cover of the 1959 tour guide Natchez: Museum City of the Old South featured a map and directory on the inner cover that directed visitors towards plantations, white owned businesses, and entertainment, and away from less white, affluent, consumer-targeted areas, scripting and altering tourists’ spatial experience of Natchez’s past. The examples I discuss later of Black sites of memory illustrate how interventions in the spatial interface of the city shift the experience of Natchez. This supports my conclusion that plural representations and narratives of history can shift how we experience the past, understand the present, and imagine the future.

3.5. Summary

Using the theoretical principles of performance studies and memory studies and the concepts of re-membering and rememory, I argue that that Natchez heritage tourism illustrates a telescoping series of points: that memory, history, and imagination are interrelated; that performed commemorations critically shape ideals and beliefs about race and the nation; and that historiographies privileging performed/embodied archives and a plurality of collective cultural memories allow for more inclusive and nuanced understanding of the past.

4. Background

Natchez is a small city on the bluffs of the Mississippi River, just a few hours north of New Orleans. One of the oldest settlements along the Mississippi, Natchez was colonized by the French in 1716, two years before they settled in New Orleans. Before railroads and highways, Natchez was a key port for steamboats carrying enslaved people, cotton, and other goods. Largely spared during the Civil War, Natchez has more antebellum architecture than any other US city. I would guess that many Americans (excepting historians) have never heard of Natchez, but its significant impact on the nation’s development cannot be overstated. In the following section, I offer context on how that happened.

Natchez lies at the southern end of the Natchez Trace, which follows a geologic ridge line north, ending in Nashville. In prehistoric times, geological shifts created fertile alluvial plains and deposited multiple mantles of rich aeolian loess in the valley of the Mississippi River, with the thickest deposits of loess in the area near Natchez and Vicksburg (Ignatov 2001, pp. 76–93). Loess soil is a loamy silt, rich in quartz particles from the glaciers, with minimal clay. It filters and holds water well, contains many nutrients, and is better able to retain organic matter. With a high density of carbonous dolomite, Mississippi River loess is less acidic than most soil, making it better able to hold nutrients and more resistant to erosion (Conrad n.d.). It allows for diverse forms of life to thrive. The soil and geography brought the first animals and Indigenous Americans to Natchez. Precolonial Americans were attracted to the area because the elevated terrain and bluffs near Natchez were less prone to flooding than the Mississippi plains, and the soil was more productive than nearby areas, which mostly grew pine. Natchez is named for the indigenous tribe whose ancestors’ prehistoric ceremonial mounds provide evidence of pre-colonial American culture.

The Mississippi River and Trace secured Natchez’s important role as a point of connection and transit throughout the nation. Scholars estimate that the Trace is probably 8000–10,000 years old, one of the oldest trails in the US (Natchez Trace Parkway Association 2012, p. 8). Since prehistoric times, the Natchez Trace has been a conduit for migration, transit, and exchange. Animals trod a trail along the Trace seeking the salt springs along the Cumberland River. Indigenous hunters from many tribes tracked the game, establishing a path well before colonization. During the Woodland and Mississippian periods and earlier, Indigenous tribes built mounds along the Trace for burials and other ceremonial purposes, seven of which still stand.13 Around 1689, French colonists built a trading post to exchange goods with Indigenous tribes near the salt springs, which was named the French Lick.14 Soon after, the French settled in Natchez, which was originally named Fort Rosalie. During the 1700s, Natchez was claimed by Great Britain and Spain before it became part of the Mississippi Territory, then the United States.

The Mississippi River and its rich soil supported the conditions of plantation slavery, which supported the US as it became a nation. The area was particularly well suited to cotton farming, and the surrounding areas for timber and oil extraction (Ignatov 2001; Campanella 2020) (which later replaced cotton farming in Natchez).15 Traditionally, cotton farmers amend fields with lime to make the soil less acidic, but due to the loess, the area near Natchez was better suited. Geographer Richard Campanella argues that the Mississippi loess created not only a distinct geophysical region but also a cultural region. He notes that loess explains “why we have a legacy of plantation agriculture and slavery… the geography of loess corresponded with the geography of race. To this day, the loess regions … have higher percentages of African Americans.”16

Geophysical and cultural conditions laid and tilled the ground for Mississippi’s rise as the Cotton Kingdom, the bedrock of cotton plantation farming, allowing the new nation’s ascent as a global economic power (The Creation of the Cotton Kingdom n.d.). Geology demanded specific ways of farming (Hebron Moore 1986; Rothstein 1967). River farmers’ methods of growing cotton were distinct from other cotton farmers, whose methods promoted topsoil erosion and relied on animals (for fertilizer and labor). Traditional cotton farmers had to till and amend the soil each year, which river farmers did not. Because traditional cotton farming ruined land, farmers did not build the longstanding plantation homes that Natchez is famous for, instead creating rudimentary dwellings (log cabins) on fresh land, an expenditure of labor with less return on investment. While traditional farmers planted more varieties, river farmers practiced monoculture, producing only one variety of cotton, and later developing a hybrid short-staple cotton that was hardier, disease-resistant, and easier to pick (up to 250 versus 60 pounds/day). River farmers replaced animal labor with human labor and machine labor, creating a large-scale, capitalist model of farming.

While most farmers practiced small-scale subsistence farming, a very small percentage created large plantations reliant on mass slavery.17 In Natchez, this elite class of planters was called “nabobs.” “Nabob” references economically elite Muslims, as well as English colonists who returned after becoming rich in India; the term inextricably locates plantation economies within capitalism and colonialism. The term places Natchez within a transatlantic circuit linking the US, Europe, and Asia. In the 1700s, cotton, the leading international commodity, was mostly produced in India. As Great Britain colonized India, the British East India Company imposed regulations effectively creating a British monopoly on cotton, which lasted only until US plantation cotton took over the market. By the mid-1800s, massive plantations lined both sides of the river (Kilcer VanHuss 2021). Their geophysical location created a market advantage because they were able to easily transport goods via the Trace and the river.

The advent of steamboats secured the rise of the Cotton Kingdom (Gudmestad 2011). With tributaries feeding almost half the US, the Mississippi River became the gateway to the nation. Mark Twain describes the Mississippi metaphorically: “… the Basin of the Mississippi is the Body of the Nation. All the other parts are but members, important in themselves, yet more important in their relations to this.”18 Or, as historian Paul Schneider notes, “It’s impossible to imagine America without the Mississippi. The river’s history is our history” (Schneider 2013, p. 1). The Mississippi River and its rich loess soil laid the ground for Natchez to become a hub of plantation wealth, and later, the site of the nation’s longest-running Confederate Pageant.

5. Natchez Confederate Heritage Tourism

In the following opposing case studies of the Confederate Pageant and Black historic and collective memory of Natchez, I make two key points about how Natchez remembers the Old South. First, it exemplifies how ideologies of white nationalism rely on women and children.19 Women and children are key agents representing ideal citizens and the nation’s imagined futurity.20 The pageant and Natchez tourism rely heavily on white women and children’s performance to create and sustain Lost Cause ideals of the past. The pageant is an invented tradition; its memories of antebellum plantations are imaginary, but affectively resonant and persuasive, widely influencing beliefs about the past (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). While Lost Cause narratives of the Confederacy are particularly prominent in the South, images from Natchez heritage tourism circulated widely in mass media, reinforcing white nationalist ideologies across the US.21

Second: Natchez is a contested site of memory. The women who produce the Confederate pageant have consistently disagreed among themselves about how the past should be remembered and represented, and Black residents have disagreed with white bias in how Natchez heritage tourism remembers the past. First, let us look at how white women and children remembered the Old South.

Once an opulent gem, Natchez suffered economically from the Civil War, failing cotton markets, and industrial decline. During the Great Depression, ladies from two garden clubs shrewdly promoted Natchez tourism, which helped them escape economic ruin. In 1931, the ladies dressed in antebellum hoop-skirted costumes to offer tours of plantation mansions; this began the annual tradition of the “Spring Pilgrimage.” The Confederate Pageant premiered the next year. Natchez’s Confederate heritage tourism arose as a solution to economic difficulties—ironically by promoting memories of the town’s affluence and prosperity. For decades, the garden club ladies profited from remembering the past nostalgically. The pageant and pilgrimage present the past as a simpler, happier time, and the plantation as a place that was beautiful and prosperous. Natchez presented ideals of southern culture to national markets. Garden Club president Katherine Miller traveled the country showing lantern slides of plantation mansions and promoting Natchez tourism. Advertisements in mass media romantically glorified Natchez as “where the Old South still lives.”

Natchez capitalized on Lost Cause nostalgia along with traditional gender roles, which had broad popular appeal during a time of economic instability and anxiety about cultural changes. On the surface, Natchez was represented simplistically, but Steven Hoelscher and Susan Falck provide detailed, nuanced accounts of the complexity of the ladies and of Natchez itself.22 For example, some of the ladies were wealthy plantation owners, but many were not. Some were conservative, others progressive. While the pageant consistently presented Christian themes, Natchez was a haven for Jewish people, some of whom were original members of the garden clubs. (In a similar way, Natchez later became known as a haven for gay people.) The garden club ladies were shrewd businesswomen. The Depression worsened women’s already limited career opportunities. Tourism helped them to earn money while upholding traditional gender roles. It was extremely profitable. The pilgrimage netted USD 19,000 in 1935 (equivalent to more than USD 448,000 in 2025). A total of 25,000 tourists attended in 1940.23 Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Douglas MacArthur, and Eleanor Roosevelt were among the national celebrities who attended (Falck 2019, pp. 198, 206).

As white Americans’ economic and social status was threatened during the Depression, nationalist sentiment rose. Falck notes that despite (or because of) economic difficulties, by soothing whites’ anxieties, heritage tourism and nostalgia for the Old South became profitable industries. Natchez is the longest case study and best example, but Confederate heritage performances were popular beyond the Jim Crow South. Similar pilgrimages, pageants, parades, and balls were performed across the US—and still are. The first Confederate Pageant in 1932 was based on earlier versions, and similar pageants and Mardi Gras balls have been performed in the Delta since Reconstruction. For example, in an 1884 ball, the daughters of Generals Jackson, Lee, Davis, and Hill played “Confederate virgins” ritually paired with soldiers (Atkins 2017, pp. 91–92). This longstanding tradition was rekindled during the Jim Crow era, when most Confederate memorials were built, half a century after the Civil War. Women were key to such Confederate heritage initiatives (Southern Poverty Law Center 2022; Cox 2019).

The pageant presents vignettes of Natchez’s past through dance and tableaux. A few scenes reference actual historic figures or events (such as the wedding of Jefferson Davis and Varina Howell), but most scenes do not. Instead, they evoke a fuzzy, generic sense of the past. The highlight of the pageant is a procession of “royalty” where an imagined Confederate Queen is symbolically wedded to a Confederate General. The annual crowning of two youth as royalty is a ritual of surrogation that projects reproductive futurity, the imagined sense that the nation’s future has been secured through reproduction. Children represent idealized visions of the future. Other scenes from the pageant similarly emphasize romantic heterosexual pairings. The beloved Maypole tradition, in which the smallest children dance the Spring rite, clearly links themes of fertility and reproduction to ideal future citizenship, sentimentally suggested by sweet pairs of children in poofy dresses and velvet breeches, pointing satin slippers as they curtsy and bow.

Natchez illustrates how nationalism relies on women and children’s re-membering, a process where performing memory of the past nation replicates it and projects its futurity (playing on the slip between evoking a memory and regenerating a member, or citizen of the nation). The interrelationship between memory, imagination, and embodiment is quite potent. US nationalism has relied on imagined ideals of white women and children’s innocence to sustain systems of racial inequality.24 If we might naively imagine women and children to be “innocent,” the Natchez Confederate pageant shows how their bodies stage struggles over the evanescent terrains of memory. It is a potent example of how white nationalist ideology can be transmitted via soft, intimate, feminine modes and aesthetics. White nationalism can look aesthetically beautiful, remembered nostalgically through a misty-eyed waltz, but it is not innocent. Natchez shows how performances can have a powerful influence and scope far beyond the live event, circulating imagined memories of the past throughout the nation. Women and children reinforce white nationalist ideals by embodying, creating, and sustaining memories of the Old South.

The second key point is that Natchez is a contested site of memory. Performed commemorations and theatrical sites of memory reflect dissenting beliefs about the nation. The pageant was always a contested arena where women vied for status and authority. The clearest example is that in 1936, just a few years after the Natchez Garden Club produced the first Confederate Pageant, disagreements split the ladies, who formed a second garden club, the Natchez Pilgrimage Garden Club. To this day, the two garden clubs have maintained the vendetta, competing with each other.25 The garden club ladies have consistently disagreed about how to represent and remember the past. The pageant archives struggle over representing history correlating to societal change. For example, in early versions of the pageant, the garden club ladies recruited Black performers (often their servants) to sing spirituals and portray racialized archetypes such as happy fieldhands and mammies. But in the 1960s, Black people stopped complying, and for a few years, Black actors were replaced with actors in blackface. In 1986, the garden club ladies disagreed over whether including a Black ballet dancer would be historically accurate (Davis 2001, pp. 175, 268–69).

In the past few decades, producers have made many changes to purportedly make the pageant more inclusive. In 2001, it was renamed the “Historic Pageant” and has often been rebranded, although the finale always glorifies the symbolic wedding of a Confederate Queen and General. In 2011, producers marketed changes to the pageant as more historically accurate and inclusive. They briefly nodded to the Indigenous Natchez (played by white actors) who appeared at the top of the show and were immediately eradicated. They eschewed the rebel flag for less recognizable Confederate flags. And after almost fifty years of being all white, the pageant included a few Black performers (The Meridian Star 2011). (One represented William Johnson, a controversial figure. One of about 280 free Blacks in antebellum Natchez, Johnson was a successful businessman who owned plantations and enslaved others). Aiming to more accurately reflect Natchez’s history of slavery, the script was edited in 2017, and producers actively recruited Black performers. The following year (2018) Elena Rodriguez, who is of Puerto Rican heritage, played the Confederate Queen. For varying reasons, community members of all races were unhappy with the attempts at change. In the aftermath, disagreeing about how to proceed, the two Garden Clubs split up. Both claim to have quit producing the “Confederate Pageant” but now stage similar performances such as the “Magnolia Ball” or the “Soiree.” These events keep the romantic hoop skirts and some features of the Confederate pageant—such as the Sweethearts’ Waltz and the beloved Maypole dance—but have now scrubbed references to the Confederacy.26

The pilgrimage plantation tours are still going strong, but it is too soon to tell if the tradition of the Confederate pageant has died out or will be rekindled. Keenly aware of the rise of white nationalism and totalitarianism in the US, I remain watchful, my eye on Natchez, and the nation. And I offer a word of caution: it is easy to be judgmental of the garden club ladies, who sustained the tradition of the Confederate pageant for almost a century. Polarizing attitudes of disdain will not foster understanding or productive dialogue, but curiosity might. Let us remain inquisitive about why the pageant lasted so long. The obvious answer is that (perhaps more thoroughly than we realized) our culture is imbued with white nationalism. The ways white nationalism functions, and its aesthetic modalities, may be less obvious.

Women valued the ways the pageant gave them agency and how it provided an imaginative space for expression. What made the pageant tradition so popular, I suggest, is the way it links ideals of the nation and the family emotionally. Many Natchez families have performed in the pageant for generations; plantation homes commonly display portraits of previous generations costumed as Confederate royalty. Families, and domestic/intimate spheres, are not apolitical, and seemingly neutral social transmissions of affect—romance, sentimentality, and nostalgia—are extremely ideologically powerful. As Natchez demonstrates, change is difficult—easier said than done. Natchez thrived from Confederate heritage tourism for several decades, but (due to social changes and the proliferation of entertainment options) it is not as profitable now. I would like to be open-minded about what might replace the pageant and pilgrimage, keeping in mind that present-day Natchez is in economic decline. About one-third of Natchez residents live in poverty. Financial dependence on tourism raises the stakes as Natchez grapples with how to remember its past: what memories will tourists pay to experience?

6. Black Memory and History

Furthering my point about Natchez as a contested site of memory, I shift to focus on how Black people, who are the majority of Natchez’s population, have influenced historic memory. Before I offer some examples of contemporary Black approaches to historic memory, it is important to understand the challenges they face. I will begin by discussing problems in Black history and the theories/methodologies scholars suggest to address these problems. Then, I will describe how Black activists have approached historic memory and commemoration in Natchez.

6.1. Problems in Black History

Examining the ways Black activists have contested public memory in Natchez amplifies problems with history, memory, and archives that are particularly difficult for Black people. Those who seek less biased or more authentic evidence of Black history immediately encounter the problem of absence. Archives of Black history are riddled with absences, and traditional archives commonly treat Black people as fungible rather than individual historic subjects. Asking how to atone for the many unknown histories of Black Americans presents a Rumsfeldian dilemma: some absences may be known unknowns, but what of the unknown unknowns? Historians traditionally have treated written archives, particularly primary sources and narrative testimonies, as more felicitous or veracious than, say, a story quilt, or a flour sack,27 or any kind of intangible cultural heritage. But written archives of Black people are rare, particularly prior to Emancipation. Ricœur’s emphasis on collective testimony may be instructive, especially if we accept a diverse range of testimonies, such as stories from the oral tradition, familial/community remembrances, objects, and intangible forms of heritage such as ritual, song, and dance.

Meanwhile, exceptional examples of Black presence in archives are disproportionately remembered and historicized. Claudia Rankine argues that emphasizing successful Blacks creates only a thin veneer of antiracism by framing Black achievement as exceptional. William Johnson (who was added to the Confederate Pageant when they began including Blacks) exemplifies the problem. Johnson, who owned plantations and enslaved many other people, is overly remembered because he was a successful businessman who maintained detailed written records. His house is now a tourist site owned by the National Park Service.

Scholars approach these problems in Black history from different angles. Achille Mbembe argues that nations rely, more so than remembering their pasts, on consuming/denying the past/archives, which he terms “chronophagy.”28 He suggests we follow tracks, collect scraps, and reassemble remains to constitute new archives.29 Saidiya Hartman suggests reading archives against the grain (Hartman 1997). For example, in Out of the House of Bondage, Thaviola Glymph reads WPA interviews of enslaved people in the 1930s against the grain to offer evidence of white women’s violence in the domestic sphere of the plantation (Glymph 2003). Saidiya Hartman proposes “speculative fabulation” (Hartman 2008). For unrecorded or suppressed histories of enslaved people, one might use archival material and testimony to establish a reasonable schema of facts, then fill gaps with fictional supposition that is historically informed. Alternatively, the historian might choose to refuse closure, resisting filling in gaps, instead marking lacunae.

To privilege bodies and collective memory as archives of embodied memory/history offers solutions as well as problems. In Claudia Rankine’s words: “The body has memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight” (Rankine 2015). Rankine suggests intervening in the circulation of memories through what she calls living archives. Living archives are an ever-emerging collection of individual memories as well as those of friends/kin, embodied memories, and collective/cultural memories. But one of the problems of embodied memory of Black history, as Saidiya Hartmann has noted, is that memory of trauma—particularly generational collective trauma—is physically experienced as present. This is what Toni Morrison referred to as rememory. The ethics of performing or representing the violence of slavery and other trauma are hotly debated. One of the main difficulties with addressing Black history is how to represent traumatic violence truthfully without further injuring or re-inscribing trauma. Hartman argues that representing violence (she uses the example of Frederick Douglass’s description of his aunt Hester being beaten) effectively sensationalizes and reiterates the fetishized spectacle of violence (scene of subjection). (Fred Moten, in response, argues that refusing to represent such violence also reiterates its presence through its absence) (Moten 2003).

The longstanding question of memory’s presence is at the crux. Remember the metaphor of memory as a block of wax: Plato and Aristotle disagreed over whether memory is experienced/present or recalled as an imprint. For Plato, the imprint of memory signifies: the mark and its meaning merge. For Aristotle, the imprint and the referent are distinct. Aristotle distinguishes between memory that we experience or is evoked (mneme) and memory that we actively seek to recall (anamnesis). This key difference (is memory?) remains irresolute.

The concept of rememory considers memory as organic (lived, present). The science of neurology supports this with ample evidence.30 Riceour alludes to a third type of memory as corporeal. Unfortunately, he only briefly considers this, but I find it his most promising venture. While Ricoeur describes corporeal memory as present in the cerebellum and cortex, I maintain that the mind is in the body. Traces of memory, both individual and collective, exist throughout the body: in the amygdala and the limbic system, in the microbiome of the gut, in the telomeres. Collective memory, particularly of trauma (genocide, slavery, war), is what Aristotle called mneme and Morrison called rememory: embodied and present. Imagination and understanding (relied on for language and representation) are secondary processes to affect and sensation, which are primary. In other words, historical events are not perceived as text and certainly not narrative. For example, testimony from Holocaust survivors is fragmented, dissociated, non-narrative, and illogical. This reveals their experience, which cannot be accurately documented or recorded narratively. Historical/cultural memory is perceived as sensation, and as fragmented, partial images. These are re-experienced and re-lived, present in bodies. The least flawed way to approach historical/cultural memory is to refuse/resist narrative and instead focus on bodies: affect and sensation. To allow for Black memory of trauma, we need to accept nonnarrative, embodied, and sensory memories as valid archives of collective memory.

6.2. Black Approaches to Natchez History

Not unlike the garden club ladies, Black residents have also had conflicts about how and what to remember. Throughout Natchez’s history, Blackness has been an unstable, shifting category,31 and Black approaches to historical memory have not been monolithic or consistent. Black residents of Natchez have a long history of performing alternate commemorations and creating alternate archives and sites of memory. They performed Civil War commemorations shortly after Emancipation, well before whites began Lost Cause commemorations—at which point Black residents tamped theirs down to avoid retaliation. White people often invited/coerced Black actors to perform racialized roles (such as mammies) in Natchez tourism. Obviously, this kind of scripted performance under duress is different from Black-centered projects. In the past three decades, Black activists have significantly intervened in Natchez’s Confederate heritage tourism by creating performances, tours, museums, and sites of memory reflecting Black lives and experiences. Diverse perspectives shift how Natchez is remembered and performed. Contrasting the rosy-tinted, nostalgic memories of the pageant with Black residents’ memories creates dissonant perceptions of Natchez’s past, as well as the nation’s.

As previously discussed, archives of Black history are riddled with absences, and scholars grapple with how to atone for the many unknown histories that archives omit. But sometimes finding archival evidence of Black history is a matter of recentering, refocusing, homing in, or simply: care and attention. Two men from Natchez, Ser Seshsh Ab Heter-Clifford M. Boxley and Jeremy Houston, stand out for their ongoing work to reclaim Black history. Jeremy Houston attended Natchez High School, served two tours in Afghanistan, and suffered from PTSD. Since returning, he has worked tirelessly to change how Natchez remembers the past and has self-published multiple volumes on Natchez’s history. His book Straight Outta Natchez v.1 offers a concise and approachable history of Natchez. The book is one of the only histories I have encountered that identifies the original enslaved Africans in Natchez as members of the Bambara nation, an example of how care and attention are not owned by academics and how we may do well to listen more and say less.

Houston places himself within the historical trajectory of struggles for civil rights in Natchez. He directly attributes his potential to the teachers at his high school, which, in the 1980s, became the first desegregated public school in Natchez—three decades after Brown v. Board of Education. Houston’s book covers collage images of sites of Black history and important figures in Natchez history, such as author Richard Wright, Hiram Revels (the first Black US senator, elected in 1870), and Phillip West (elected the first Black mayor of Natchez since Reconstruction in 2004). In each collage, Houston places himself central to this web. Enmeshed centrally within, looking diagonally (both at and away from the viewer, as often done in theatre), he gazes determinedly. His gaze is mirrored by a regal portrait of Hiram Revels bearing a remarkably similar expression and a resolved set of the jaw.

Houston’s work—taking authority and agency over knowledge production by interjecting into the archive; self-publishing, a medium that can be quickly circulated, updated, and adapted; evoking his knowledge, experience, and history enmeshed within his place, and also mutably centered within a web of other Black people, their knowledges, histories, and experiences—exemplifies what Claudia Rankine calls a living archive. Houston’s texts also explicitly imbricate their reader, asking them to empathize and interact with the history. Engaging with readers seems to be Houston’s main purpose. He addresses the reader directly, asks them questions, treats the archive as a conversation, a work-in-progress of shared, negotiable understanding. For example, he asks the reader, “What if I told you the first person of African descent to become a United States Senator got his political beginnings in Natchez, would you believe me?” (Houston 2016, p. 6). Houston also engages with individuals by offering walking tours re-mapping Natchez’s sites of Black history. It has been difficult to designate Black-centered heritage/historic sites because of the garden clubs’ restrictions and the high cost of official designation. Houston’s Miss Lou Heritage Group and Tours features less documented Black-centered areas of cultural and historic significance. For example, St. Catherine St. originally was the terminus of the Natchez Trace, a route for trafficking enslaved people, but after Reconstruction, it became the residence of prominent Black professionals. Houston exemplifies what it means to create “living archives” of Black history.

Houston was profoundly influenced by Ser Seshsh Ab Heter-Clifford M. Boxley. Ser Boxley was born in Natchez and became a Civil Rights activist in the 1960s. An exceptionally committed scholar and activist, Boxley was the force behind many of Natchez’s changes. Boxley calls his work the “Equal History Campaign,” whose “main objective is to overcome the way white people have preserved, presented, and interpreted history so as to make it look like they accomplished all community developments ‘all by themselves.’ Equal history is a human right that the modern civil rights movement failed to address.” (Boxley n.d.). He was integral to establishing a memorial at Forks of the Road (erected in 2004), marking the site of the second-largest slave market. During the Civil War, Forks of the Road became a site of resistance for Black soldiers who joined the Union forces. Boxley also lobbied the Natchez Visitor Center to remove a biased and inaccurate painting of the Natchez Revolt and to update their displays, which they did in 2009. In December 2022, he donated his entire life’s research to the Mississippi State Archives, a monumental intervention in the archive.

While much of the invented “Old South” remains, in many ways, Black activists like Houston and Boxley have significantly intervened in the arche of Natchez, shifting its spatial interface to house different knowledge. The geography and architecture have changed how we know and experience present-day Natchez. In 1974, the older Natchez Historic Society created the Historic Natchez Foundation, which, in contradistinction to the former, promoted historic heritage and preservation of non-plantations (Davis 2000, p. 61). In 1990, the Natchez Literary Festival honored author Richard Wright, who is commemorated with multiple markers (1990, 1998, 2018) and has a highway named after him (2008). That same year, Black women created the Natchez Association for the Preservation of Afro-American Culture (NAPAC). The next year, the Natchez Convention and Visitors Bureau hired its first Black tour guide and then adopted a Black history tour developed by Historic Natchez Foundation member Mimi Miller. In the past few decades, several museums and sites of cultural heritage promoting Black heritage have been created, including the Museum of African American History and Culture (opened in 1991), the Blues Heritage Trail (beginning in 2006), and the Rhythm Night Club Memorial Museum (opened in 2010).

Along with many other Natchez residents, Boxley and Houston have altered the spatial interface of Natchez, interjecting into the arche. Black residents have also performed theatrical interventions. Holy Family Catholic church has a longstanding tradition of using gospel and traditional music to highlight Black history. In 1990, they began presenting A Southern Road to Freedom as an offering alongside Pilgrimage events; this was a renovation of a longstanding tradition predating the Confederate Pageant. Ser Boxley performs reenactments commemorating Black Union soldiers, and since 2008, they have performed a “Black & Blue Civil War Living History Program.”32 And Jeremy Houston’s play Isabella and the Prince dramatizes the life of Abdul Rahman Ibrahima ibn Sor, a West African (Fulani) prince who was enslaved in Mississippi for forty years before gaining freedom and returning to Africa.33 There is an affective appeal to the narrative of the tragedy/triumph of an African Prince. As a counter to Natchez’s self-made “royalty” of Confederate queens and Generals, there is a righteous dignity in asserting Black nobility. Natchez evokes ever-renewed feelings of what Germans call nachtraglichkeit and the French call apres-coup, of traumatic memories that only cohere as recollections after the war. In this perennially renewed afterwardsness, Boxley and Houston give the sense that the war never ended; they still fight its battles. Boxley and Houston, each a soldier in their own way, offer a counterpart to the Confederate pageant’s imagined heroes. And while Prince Abdul Rahman never actually made it home (he died before arriving), we may find a sense of affective catharsis in imagining that something about the US’s shameful legacy has been, if only slightly and embarrassingly belatedly, atoned for. In radical acts of hope, Boxley and Houston have committed to staying and changing Natchez, dreaming of its unrealized possibility to become something better, which they do by changing how we remember and imagine its past.

7. Conclusions

I have argued that performance plays a critical role in commemorations and sites of memory. Performance can reinforce, destabilize, and/or reinvent history. The concept of re-membering illustrates how performance and embodied memory are critical to sustaining Lost Cause mythologies of the Old South, but also inherently invites the potential for the nation’s past to be remembered differently. Black activists in Natchez have modeled how performative remembrance of the past may also challenge, counter, and redress white nationalist bias in US history. The most optimistic application of this concept is the idea that performing, remembering, and imagining the past differently allows for society to change—hopefully, as we see in Natchez, somewhat for the better. Of course, this is an incomplete project and an uphill battle. Antiracist modes of historiography can employ a multitude of interdisciplinary approaches. Antiracist historiographies must accept—or privilege, even—nontraditional methods, archives, and testimonies. Nonnarrative, affective, embodied, and performed archives and histories, plural modes of remembering, and collective cultural memories allow for a more accurate, inclusive, and nuanced understanding of the past. I encourage historians and scholars of memory to join me in this uphill battle. Fight the good fight.