Natchez is a pretty town. I had a feeling I could really grow to like it. It has many of the charms of New Orleans: beautiful old architecture, African-American and Cajun culture, great food, and (from the evidence I could find) a thriving music scene. But it’s a smaller, more approachable city, isn’t quite as overrun with tourists, and doesn’t have the over-the top, nonstop drunken frat party feel that makes NOLA less than appealing to me.
When people get old they start repeating themselves. I’ve seen this in previous generations, and I’m starting to notice it in myself. I’m afraid this is going to happen here in my blog. I apologize in advance, but here it is. As I said about Tupelo and Jackson, I regretted that I didn’t have more time to enjoy this city. I had to spend a day online, working at my old job, and I felt the pull of New Orleans, where I could visit my kid before turning North again. But there was much that I wanted to see here.
I wanted to visit the memorial at Forks of the Road, the site of a market where thousands of enslaved people were bought and sold. The Federal troops that arrived there in 1863 included a regiment of Black soldiers. Reports describe their enthusiasm as they tore down the pens where some of them had personally been chained, whipped and sold away from their wives and children.
CC Image via Wikimedia Commons, Taylor Pomeroy
I wanted to visit The Grand Village of the Natchez Indians south of town, a park and museum at the site where traditional rituals were performed atop ceremonial mounds recently enough to be recorded by early French explorers. Later, when the Natchez resisted the French land-grab, the colonizers retaliated with a massacre. The central ceremonial mound became an artillery emplacement. Scattered, with hundreds sold into slavery in the East Indies, the Natchez never surrendered. They kept up resistance, eventually settling among the Cherokee and Creek in North Carolina. When President Andrew Jackson began his Indian Removal policy, the Natchez joined the “Five Civilized Tribes” on what’s come to be called The Trail of Tears, a thousand mile forced march to the “Indian Territory” of Oklahoma. What’s left of the Natchez survive today as part of Oklahoma’s Muskogee confederation and in a few scattered communities in the Carolinas.
Thankfully I did have enough time to visit the cliff-side park that was once Fort Rosalee, the place where the Natchez attacked French forces, starting the war that lead to their dispersal. Later the fort was occupied by the British, then by American Revolutionaries, and then by the British again. After less than a year the Brits surrendered it to Spain, but something called the Treaty of San Lorenzo turned it over to the Americans in 1796.
Fortified by a bowl of excellent gumbo from a soul food place called Rolling River Reloaded I strolled down to the park, now a National Park site, and looked down the bluff. It was obvious why every military force wanted to hold onto this high ground. Beneath steep cliffs, the Mississippi flowed, now more than a half mile wide with its valley stretching out towards the setting sun. Though I could imagine French, Natchez, Spanish, English, American, or other troops far below, ready to lay siege to the town, what I saw was a casino, garishly illuminated and tarted up to look more or less like a steam-powered riverboat.
Image destroying the place you were “chained, whipped and sold” The mind boggles.