Remembering Dixie by Susan T. Falck

Author:Susan T. Falck [Falck, Susan T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Social Science, Discrimination, Business & Economics, Industries, Hospitality; Travel & Tourism, Women
ISBN: 9781496824424
Google: ayysDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Published: 2019-08-23T22:35:55+00:00

A PASSION FOR LOCAL HISTORY

Natchez Garden Club members shared a keen reverence for local history that became apparent not only in their club work but also in other leisure and paid pursuits. The growing number of early twentieth-century white Natchez women who dabbled in historical pursuits—writing short sketches, magazine articles, memoirs, and fiction; selling antiques and historical photographs; or volunteering their time to restore and preserve historic homes, public buildings, and transportation routes—found a source of pleasure, purpose, and profit in these efforts.

One of the most common means to express a commitment and interest in local history was through writing. During the 1930s, more than a dozen white Natchez women, many of them garden club members, wrote and published historical sketches about Natchez’s territorial and antebellum past, many of which demonstrated an impressive ability to document local history.82 It is worth quoting a colorful passage from a press release written by garden club member Roane Fleming Byrnes, whose writing is typical in style and content to her cohorts, who were busily churning out their own sentimental prose. Byrnes urged travelers to hurry to Natchez where:

You can still find the Dixie of song and storybook—columns and live oaks and mammies and all … a place where the mocking birds sing as sweetly as ever in the camellia bushes and the magnolias. Barefooted little black boys play on the corners whistling dance tunes. Mulatto washerwomen in faded calicoes saunter along the sidewalks, sometimes swinging clothes baskets between them, sometimes balancing bundles carelessly on their heads. Old fashioned mule-drawn drays rattle by piled high with cotton bales; sweet olives and cape jasmine perfumes the air in the warm sunshine.83

The clubwoman’s sensuous description of whistling black boys and sauntering laundry women conjured up Lost Cause stereotypes reminiscent of the mythical images that Mary Britton Conner attempted to capture with her camera a few decades earlier (see chapter 4). Byrnes was as eager to preserve this world of mammies, mockingbirds, and moonlit mansions as she was to share it with admiring visitors—wallets in hand.

In the process of chronicling and preserving their region’s past, Natchez women forged new and satisfying self-identities. As Drew Gilpin Faust writes, telling stories is a powerful force in the formation of identity. “We all live in the stories we tell, for these tales fashion a coherent direction and identity out of the discontinuities of our past, present, and future.”84 Moreover, writing served as a way for these women to create a sense of order and meaning in a time of tremendous economic and social upheaval. Penning their thoughts about the southern past gave Natchez female writers not only a means to express themselves in the public arena but the potential to earn a much-need paycheck during the Great Depression.

Many of the sketches the women produced became part of the garden club’s promotional literature that attracted journalists, celebrities, and tourists to Natchez. Club leader Katherine Grafton Miller joined the ranks of published garden clubwomen with her promotional book Natchez of Long Ago and the Pilgrimage.

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