"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."
Natchez anchors an antebellum tourism economy built around river cruises, historic-home tours, and garden-club pilgrimages that celebrate plantation-era aesthetics while often omitting slavery. The town shifted toward tourism after the boll weevil devastated cotton in the 1930s, years after enslaved laborers were converted to sharecroppers during Reconstruction. Younger visitors express less appetite for romanticized antebellum narratives, prompting local Black guides to foreground enslaved people's experiences and confront entrenched Southern pride narratives. The tourism sector shows uneven reckoning: some tours and institutions revise programming, while others maintain nostalgic, revisionist presentations that sanitize or elide the realities of slavery.
Read at Conde Nast Traveler
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