Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Natchez, Mississippi, has weeping willows that line the streets, which are dotted with stately, towering mansions. Lush lawns and colorful flowers are overseen by a local and discerning group called the Garden Club. Tourists come to tour the homes and gardens. It's part of something called the Pilgrimage, an annual event which is set to begin in March of this year, but like many places, this is just one of the many views of this picturesque place.

One of the reasons why Natchez was such a wealthy town was because of cotton fields and the enslaved people who picked the cotton, and the enslaved people who built the mansions and worked inside them and outside of them, the enslaved people who tended to the gardens. On the outskirts of Natchez is an area that was once one of the biggest slave markets in the country. Filmmaker Suzannah Herbert took her camera to examine how residents, both Black and white, wrestle with this history for her film Natchez. Here's an example of how Rev, a Black tour guide, does his tours, and the predominantly white Garden Club does theirs.

Rev: When you're looking at these houses, you're going through Natchez, understand that they were built by slaves. That's the piece of the history that you don't get in the antebellum houses. They used the word servant or help, but these were slaves.

Tour Guide: Okay. This was Dr. Duncan's servant. That was their favorite servant. He became the overseer of this house. They taught him to read and write. Those are his actual writings right here.

Tourist 1: Oh, yes.

Tourist 2: Oh, [unintelligible 00:01:45].

Tour Guide: Back then, it was against the law.

Tourist 3: That's what I wanted to mention.

Tour Guide: Dr. Duncan, he was good to his people.

Alison Stewart: The film has won numerous awards on the festival circuit, including Best Documentary Feature at the Tribeca Festival, and it will premiere here in New York at the Film Forum on January 30th. Suzannah Herbert is with us in studio. Hi, Suzannah.

Suzannah Herbert: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: You grew up in the South, yes?

Suzannah Herbert: Yes, in Memphis.

Alison Stewart: In Memphis. How were you taught about the Civil War?

Suzannah Herbert: I went to public schools, and I actually was taught a pretty robust history of the Civil War. We had facing history in ourselves, in our schools, but yes, the mythology of the Lost Cause in the Civil War is just kind of everywhere. You can't help but absorb it growing up. As a white person, as I got older, I was really struck by that romanticization of the Civil War and of the antebellum times.

Alison Stewart: Why did you decide to focus on Natchez, of all places?

Suzannah Herbert: I first got interested in exploring these topics when I was invited to a wedding on a plantation. It was very unsettling.

Alison Stewart: A family farm, you mean, as they used to call them?

Suzannah Herbert: Right, and they still call them, unfortunately. I wanted to explore how white people use plantations and historic sites today for their own enjoyment and profit and entertainment, and how that affects us as a society, and how it affects people on the individual level as well. I started talking to friends and family in Mississippi, and everyone told me to go to Natchez. I first went with my mom on a road trip. I had been reading a lot about the antebellum times and slavery. I was just so struck by the beauty of Natchez, like you described at the beginning, but also, this pain and horror that was so right under the surface.

It was very unsettling. I realized I needed to explore that in a film. Natchez has been, for the past 100 years, telling the myths of the Old South through tourism. They're grappling with these issues on an everyday, every day.

Alison Stewart: One of the ways, as you said, is through tourism and through the Pilgrimage. Explain to me what the Pilgrimage is.

Suzannah Herbert: Pilgrimage is this time in the spring and in the fall, where the homeowners of antebellum homes open up their private homes to tourists, as they call pilgrims. They receive the pilgrims and tell a version of history of their homes that is usually pretty one-sided.

Alison Stewart: What's an example of one-sided?

Suzannah Herbert: Houses don't talk about the enslaved and how the wealth was built. If they do talk about slavery, they use the word servant or help, or they say, "Our slaves were happy." They use a lot of language that dehumanizes people and the experiences of the enslaved.

Alison Stewart: Usually, who are the people on the tours?

Suzannah Herbert: It's a lot of white people, older retirees, who have been taught the grander story of the Old South. History is absorbed, I think, a lot through popular culture, and Gone with the Wind, to this day, is still the highest-grossing film of all time. The ideas of the Old South are very much entrenched in popular culture, so people seek that out. They seek to experience the beauty of that time, and Natchez has been selling that myth for decades.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with Suzannah Herbert, director of the documentary Natchez, about a small town in Mississippi, reckoning with its big vision of the past. It premieres at Film Forum on January 30th. Tickets are on sale now. There are so many characters in this. I want to just talk about a couple. The member of the Garden Club who helps take care of these beautiful places is a gay man named David Garner. He and his partner, they own one of the mansions, and he takes a lot of pride in the mansions, but he's also really problematic. What did you want to explore about racism with him in particular? Because by the end of the film, he's straight-up racist.

Suzannah Herbert: Yes. I think part of the danger of telling these corrosive histories is that it often hides the racism. It's so easy to be charmed by it and to excuse it. I think that a lot of people in society and in this country, they're able to do that because it can be so welcoming, and there, it's very insidious, actually.

Alison Stewart: I wondered how, just as a filmmaker, how long did it take him to let loose with his racism?

Suzannah Herbert: Actually, not that long. I used my Southernness and my whiteness as a way to expose the reality. I think that people saw themselves in me and felt very comfortable pretty immediately.

Alison Stewart: Yes. It's so funny because if you speak Southern, my sister lives in Richmond for 30 years, so I speak a little bit of Southern.

Suzannah Herbert: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Natchez is described as a peculiar place, and peculiar often meant slavery. It could also mean gay as well. It was interesting. I wondered if you felt that the people there, they were okay with David's gayness as long as he took care of the beautiful home and he kept the tourists coming, considering so many people hold the same feeling about gay people as they do about Black people. Do you know what I'm saying?

Suzannah Herbert: Yes. There's an intersectionality of it, but I don't think that those two things are mutually exclusive. Just because you kind of be oppressed doesn't mean you're not an oppressor. I think that David represents that in totality.

Alison Stewart: Another subject in the film is Rev. He's self-described the best tour guide in America. He's not a member of the Garden Club. He has a very different approach to Natchez. He's a Black tour guide who talks about it, both the good side and the bad side. How did you find him?

Suzannah Herbert: I found him just by going to the visitor center. I was going to get some brochures and to find out information on tours, and he recruited me onto his van, just like he recruits everyone onto his van, like you'll see in the film. I was blown away by his tour and the history that he was telling because it was so different than other tours that I was taking in Natchez. We immediately connected.

Alison Stewart: He takes visitors to a place called the Four Points Project. Would you explain that?

Suzannah Herbert: Yes, it's called the Forks of the Road.

Alison Stewart: Forks of the Road.

Suzannah Herbert: Yes. It's the second-largest slave market in the history of this country, and it's in Natchez. It is a very-- It's a forgotten part and site of American history. The National Park Service is actually working really hard to buy up land around the site and to make it a memorial and a place of healing and history.

Alison Stewart: How do residents feel about him bringing his tourees to the spot and telling them what happened there?

Suzannah Herbert: I mean, I think it's mixed. I think a lot of people not just support it, but then there are people, like business owners across the street, that you'll see in the film, who are not so happy with the work that's being done at the Forks of the Road.

Alison Stewart: Why are they unhappy with it? That's what I was having trouble with.

Suzannah Herbert: I think because a lot of people feel threatened and fearful in telling a full version of American history. I think that it's a lot of resentment, and racism, and fear.

Alison Stewart: One guy just says, like, "Let's get over it."

Suzannah Herbert: Yes.

Alison Stewart: That's his answer.

Suzannah Herbert: Yes. "Why do we need to remember that?" Because people don't want to acknowledge that it affects us today. The legacies of slavery directly affect how we live today. People don't want to think about that and acknowledge that.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with Suzannah Herbert, director of the documentary Natchez, about a small town in Mississippi, reckoning with a vision of its past. It premieres at Film Forum on January 30th. It's so interesting. As a filmmaker. It kind of has a gauzy, filtered look when you make the film. How intentional was that? What did you want the film to look like?

Suzannah Herbert: Yes. Thank you. My cinematographer, Noah Collier, we talked a lot about the look of the film before starting to shoot. We wanted it to feel like a fiction film. We took a lot of cues from Gone with the Wind, this really vast, beautiful, rich colors. We shot the film on a tripod and with vintage prime lenses from the '60s.

Alison Stewart: Oh, cool. Oh, that must have been really cool.

Suzannah Herbert: Yes. It had this really beautiful look, because Natchez, it does pull you in with the beauty, but then in the film, and like on Rev's tour, we want to slowly peel away the layers and to show you the unvarnished version of it and the truth.

Alison Stewart: There's also a subtle issue of class in the film as well. There's a woman who just loves getting dressed up in this antebellum clothing. She's a beautiful woman, and she's putting on the skirts, and she says she feels unbelievably beautiful when she's dressed like this. Then she gets, I think, did she get divorced? Separated from her husband?

Suzannah Herbert: Yes.

Alison Stewart: She has to put everything in her car and drive off. What did she go through in the making of this film?

Suzannah Herbert: I think Tracy is a really beautiful character in that she shows the transformation that is possible, I think, when you understand a more complicated history of our country. I think that she really aspired to be a part of this kind of aristocracy or this Southern belle version of history. Then, over the course of the film, she ultimately takes Rev's tour and realizes that what she had been taught is not the full picture.

Alison Stewart: One of the other groups in the film you follow is the Garden Club. Why is the Garden Club such a big deal in Natchez?

Suzannah Herbert: I think because in the 1930s, Natchez was really struggling. It was the Depression. The boll weevil had hit. Sharecropping was happening. A lot of the wealth from slavery was gone, and the matriarchs of these white homeowners, they came up with this idea of Pilgrimage. They opened up their homes, and people across the country, not just in the South, but all over the country, Gone with the Wind had come out, and they were flocking to Natchez to tour these homes and to escape, basically. Escape to simpler agrarian times. Because they saved Natchez, essentially, and saved these homes, they were given a lot of power in the town because they created this industry of tourism.

Alison Stewart: How does one become a member of the Garden Club?

Suzannah Herbert: Oh, that's a good question. I think you have to pay dues. You have to be invested in preservation and show up.

Alison Stewart: There is one woman who is in the club who is Black, and she's the first Black member. Is that right?

Suzannah Herbert: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Why did she want to become a member?

Suzannah Herbert: I think because she bought Concord Quarters, which was a slave quarter, and she restored it, and she was telling a very different version of history at her home. The Garden Club asked her to be a part of their club because they wanted, I think, to also support her in that retelling. I think that she wanted that exposure, and she wanted to reach people who might otherwise not go to a slave dwelling.

Alison Stewart: How does she feel about living in a former slave dwelling?

Suzannah Herbert: I think it takes a huge emotional toll on her, but when she is feeling, like she says in the film, when she's feeling like she can't do it anymore and it's just too much, she goes out on the porch, and she remembers and says the names of the enslaved who lived in her house, and she remembers everything that they worked against and fought for. That gives her strength to keep going on.

Alison Stewart: There's a little bit of struggle within the Garden Club when they're both trying to explain the slave quarters to people. As you were watching that go down, and you knew who the characters were, what were you thinking?

Suzannah Herbert: Oh, my gosh, that scene, that moment, what I was thinking was, "Oh, this is the crystallization of the film and what I'm trying to say, and not just in Natchez, but how in America, we are constantly fighting over how the story of this country is told. They were talking about it as it relates to their everyday lives. That's what I was thinking.

Alison Stewart: This film was done closer to 2020, especially after the reckoning of George Floyd, but now we have an administration that wants to focus on "American pride" and the 250th anniversary.

Suzannah Herbert: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: How is that affecting Natchez and the quest to expand this national park, this place where slaves were sold?

Suzannah Herbert: I think that the National Park Service in Natchez is doing incredible work, and they are telling the history of the enslaved, not just at Forks of the Road, but also at Melrose, which is an antebellum estate. So far, they are-- I was with them last week in Mississippi, the park rangers and the superintendent, and they're still going strong and doing all that they can to uplift those stories.

Alison Stewart: The name of the film is Natchez. It's about a small town in Mississippi, reckoning with its vision of the past. It premieres at Film Forum on January 30th. I have been speaking with its director, Suzannah Herbert. Thank you for sharing your film with us. I really appreciate it.

Suzannah Herbert: Yes, thank you.

Alison Stewart: There's more All Of It on the way. A new exhibition at Poster House explores the connection between Italian fascism and futurism, how art aided authoritarianism, and vice versa. Coming up, we'll speak with one of its curators. That's happening right after the news.