We finally got to Natchez around 8:00 p.m., checked Yelp for some local restaurants but at that time of night, they were closing, so we opted for Applebee’s, a chain restaurant. Our motel was just up the bluff from lower Natchez, where traditionally the boats would land and unload and upload cargo. Natchez had been an important port on the Mississippi, rivaled only by New Orleans and maybe St. Louis. It had been the juncture where flatboats from the Ohio River Valley would unload their cargo, the crews would dismantle the flatboats and then go overland on the Natchez Trace back home. That habit may be one reason why there are no remaining flatboats. When Audubon stopped in Natchez, he noted the vultures swirling around the lower part of the city, the refuse of the rough port district, contrasted with the refinements of the upper part, famous now for its luxurious antebellum homes. We did not stop to tour the homes because we were anxious to get on the road to mother and daddy’s house in Baton Rouge. Anyway, back in the 1990s during a Christmas time trip from Alabama to Texas we had stopped and toured a mansion. My children were quite impressed with the house, the way it was decorated for Christmas with boughs of fir and red bows on the stair rails. My son, the budding designer was struck by the shoofly paddle and an early version of a cooler in the dining room. The shoofly paddle is a 3 foot by 4 foot wooden paddle suspended from the ceiling over the dining table with a pulley rope that a black child would pull during dinner to keep the flies off the food.
We were headed for St. Francisville, Louisiana, and Oakley Plantation where Audubon had stayed for three months tutoring the teenage daughter of the owners and collecting and drawing birds. On the way, we stopped at a convenience store/gas station in rural south Mississippi or north Louisiana. It seemed to be a gathering place for the local African Americans, several older men chatting with each other, greeting each other as they came to the store, got coffee, a bit of breakfast to start the day. One older fellow, apparently toothless, sat at a booth in the little dining section, looking out the window, perhaps to see who was coming in the store. Another man, with a walking cane carefully and slowly made his way along the building and in through the door, stopping occasionally to survey the scene and visit with people he knew. The ladies inside were having conversations about church, and one guy wanted to know what drink my husband was buying, a diet Dr. Pepper, which was in a new wrapping. He proclaimed to the attendant and my husband, “That Diet Dr. Pepper is not half bad.” Another man had some black lace-up shoes, the back heels either gone or mashed down, rags stuffed into the shoes in place of socks. I saw him filling up a red plastic gas can with gas; was he getting gas this way for a lawnmower or for some other purpose? This little convenience store/gas station may be a sign of the new rural America, a gathering place where people know each other and take pleasure in visiting with each other briefly before going about their business. The interactions I witnessed suggest that in this town members of the African American community know each other and take the time from their schedules to chat with each other. But it also a sign of the poverty that haunts the rural South, the rags stuffed in shoes, the toothless mouths, the role of the convenience store as gathering place, diner, and gas station.
Finally to Oakley Plantation. We arrived just in time for a tour of the house given by a woman who kept commenting on the plantation her daughter owns. We saw the room, at ground level, where Audubon and James Mason, the young man who accompanied him and helped by drawing backgrounds for the bird paintings, stayed. We learned about the construction of the home, the use of West Indian style shutters on the upper galley to move the air and shade the house, the history of settlement of the plantation from Spanish land grant days, the rebellion by St. Francisville residents from Spain. And of course we heard about the Pirrie family who owned the plantation when Audubon was there, the various marriages of Eliza, the teenager who grew up to replace her mother as matriarch of a number of plantations. Our guide acknowledged the use of slaves and even showed us the attic space where the indoor slaves slept, but the focus was not on them or the peculiar institution, but on the Pirrie family and the house itself, a way of both acknowledging and eliding the fact of slavery and the persistence of racial tensions in the South. St. Francisville is just a 45-minute drive from Baton Rouge, so I had been there a couple of times with my parents to eat lunch at the Magnolia Grill, walk about the old Episcopalian Church and graveyard, and drive past the historic homes, some dating back to the 1820s when Audubon visited. My husband had not been, so we did a quick tour of the historic district. I wanted to see the Mississippi River which comes in at Sara Bayou, but the river was too high to approach it, the rains and floods raising the water levels in Louisiana. With that, we hopped in the car and made a beeline to my parents.
