Gone with the Windbags: 'Natchez' Skewers Plantation Pageantry and the Lost Cause Myth

It took Margaret Mitchell more years to write her novel Gone With the Wind than the actual Confederacy lasted, which in retrospect is as good a proof as any that the most potent weapon in any arsenal is propaganda. Here it is almost a century on from that book’s publication (and its subsequent beloved movie adaptation), and we’re still being forced to battle against her romanticized vision of America’s Antebellum nightmare. Those slaves were actually “happy servants” who were treated well by their generous and dignified owners, don’t you know?

That’s the toxic house of cards that a town like Natchez, Mississippi, found its modern religion through, once the actual dirty business of Slavery stopped being profitable. Today a town like Natchez makes its blood money off of what’s called “Heritage Tourism” which sees thousands of visitors per year descend upon its gloriously restored and maintained Plantations to hear prettified tales of genteel ladies in hoop-skirts and the upright gentlemen who wooed them, all while waltzing right past all that under-the-carpet carnage. (Many films have been shot in town, perfectly ranging from Raintree County to Ma.)

These houses are the focus of filmmaker Suzannah Herbert’s bracing and brilliant new documentary named Natchez after said same place. (The film not only won Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it premiered, but also took home well-earned special jury awards for its Cinematography and Editing.) Focusing on several of the home-owners and tour-guides who help propagate—or, in two extremely satisfying instances, disassemble—this region’s reigning mythologies, the colorful and funny group of characters that Herbert assembles here make Natchez a surprisingly entertaining watch. Until those moments when it pointedly isn’t.

The Natchez Garden Club was founded in 1927 (notably just a year after Mitchell began writing Gone With the Wind—why it’s almost as if a rewriting of history was in the air) and they helped to carry the town economically through the storms of the Great Depression, turning the place into a living museum and hot-spot for the reminiscences of a past that never existed. (An infestation of boll weevils that ate up the town’s cotton supply was the real lynchpin.) The club still functions today, although as the film makes clear, it’s mainly running on fumes since the people maintaining the homes and the people going on their tours are all getting up there in age. (They get better crowds when the houses burn down in 2025.)

So, the documentary finds the people of Natchez in a contemplative mood about the place’s future and in a tumultuous one regarding its past. Herbert hands the reins over to her several subjects to relay the town’s history, slamming the dreamy recollections coming from the white people against the more realistic and fact-based lens that the Black people see the place and its dark part through. The juxtaposition is something!

And no, it’s not as simple, as cut and dried clean as all that—there are several well-meaning white folks of various levels of effectiveness. There’s the current mayor of the town named Dan Gibson, who, while giving a speech, joins a white woman and a Black woman’s hands together and basically right then and there declares racism solved. Good job, Dan. And there’s the funny, smart, and kick-ass-seeming superintendent of the Natchez National Parks Service sites named Kathleen Bond, who’s been working for years trying to get the location of the so-called “Forks in the Road” (which was the second largest domestic slave market in the entire country) turned into a proper historical site. She, more than any of the other white people interviewed, really seems to have this town’s number.

For now, the Forks in the Road is only marked by a small patch of concrete with some chains embedded in it that sits on the side of a road. Several locals, including the seething monstrosity that owns the muffler shop across the street, refuse to sell their businesses off to allow for a more proper monument to the tens of thousands of human beings who were sold on this plot of land. Instead, they’re happy to chew their tuna sandwiches in the bones of a building that housed an American holocaust, and sometimes scream at the tourists who gather across the street.

Those tourists are usually on the last stop of a tour given by a guy who calls himself “Rev.” A pastor from the other, blacker side of town, Rev is a jovial and passionate man who spends his weekdays giving some of those more fact-based tours of Natchez from his van. And it should be noted that all his passengers we see are white and Southern and more than happy to take this less-than-rose-colored journey through Natchez’s real past. Their presence gives us some morsels of hope. Still, Rev speaks pointedly of how he needs to be profoundly observant of these people’s body language as he speaks—he can always tell how far to push before stepping back and cracking everybody up with a joke.

And then there’s Debbie, the first Black homeowner to become a part of the Garden Club in its 100-year history. She owns a former slave dwelling and uses it to teach the truth of the people who lived there; her tours, when contrasted with those of her white counterparts, do plenty to unravel Natchez’s pretty facade. And one cringeworthy scene where Debbie gathers together with several white ladies of the Garden Club is, as with Rev, a study in how Black people are constantly forced to navigate the comforts of their fairer and thinner-skinned neighbors. God, it’s exhausting.

The piece de resistance in Natchez, the movie and Natchez the town, though, would have to be David Garner. The lawn-gnome-ish owner of Choctaw Hall, considered to be the crown jewel of the town’s many beautiful old blood palaces, David is a gay man (he proudly admits Natchez would be nothing without the efforts of gay men like himself) whose days of enthusiastic tour-giving seem to be coming to an end as he battles an illness taking his voice away. He also happens to be a vicious racist, caught on tape hurling monstrous slurs one minute, happily watching a Black drag queen perform at a ball given in his honor the next. A portrait of American hypocrisy at its most insidious and vile, Natchez stares as Garner polishes the china and mammy-figurines on the sinking slave-ship of his family’s making, and asks what the hell we can even make of this. Damned if I know, but blessed be the people asking these questions out loud.