White America Gets a Look in the Mirror

Natchez’s palatial homes, built by some of the largest cotton planters during the 19th century, routinely host tours, weddings and luxury events. Visitors are peppered with legendary stories about the extravagance and indulgences of the slaver’s lifestyle, whose fortunes were made through enslaved labor, making Natchez one of the richest towns per capita in the 1800s. In recent years, a significant effort has sought to include the history of enslaved people who made this prosperity possible, while exposing the ugliness and horror behind it.

As Suzannah Herbert’s 2025 documentary Natchez shows, these opposing narratives—of the slavers and the enslaved—have only hardened Natchez’s resolve to tell its history. The film’s website writes, “NATCHEZ captures an unsettling clash between history and memory in a small Mississippi town; a layered mosaic of people contending with the weight of the past in a place where it is always present.”

Natchez, which won best documentary feature at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival, hit streaming services on March 31. (Screenings of the film can be found in select theaters.) You don’t want to miss it.

While audiences might prefer to contain the Natchez story to the boundaries of a small Southern town, Herbert holds up a mirror to all of America. She challenges audiences to decide if Natchez—a town whose wealth was built by enslaved people—is a place and time in the South’s past or if, in dramatizing that past, we reenact its history in our lives today.

Northern audiences will be tempted to lump Natchez into yet another example of Southern whites trotting out their “Lost Cause” mythology of the pre-Civil War South—as if white-supremacy is only a “Southern” thing. But doing so will miss the point of Herbert’s work. She’s documenting a commodified dramatization of America’s plantation system to expose the manifold expressions of white supremacy today. Natchez’s “heritage tourism” is one example of white Americans across the nation telling themselves a heroic and fabricated story.

I saw the movie this winter, cozied up with 10 strangers in a small auditorium at a/perture cinema in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, one of several independent theaters across the nation who screened the film.

Herbert’s lens centers on a core group of residents who, as tour guides, property owners, and community leaders, participate with Natchez’s tourism economy and the ways they cement or disrupt the history of “the lost cause” mythos. On one side, you have the inheritor of his family’s estate, David Garner, who needles audiences with his racist diatribe. On the other side is a Natchez community that includes Deborah Cosey and Rev. Tracy Collins working to integrate the truth of slavery’s history.

With a constellation of voices speaking from diverse perspectives about a single place, Natchez portrays Americans at a collective crossroads struggling with how to tell their story.

The film’s early segments linger on the interiors of Natchez’s mansions: piles of Spode ceramics, crepe myrtle and decaying hoop skirts. A magical soundtrack lures us through Southern mansions and, working with director of photography Noah Collier, Herbert’s camera glides through gauzy plantation scenery as if it were held by Tinker Bell. Herbert caters to a modern audience’s progressive sympathies but keeps us suspended in a Never Land space where we wonder just how deep into the Gone with the Wind story she’s going to take us. She craftily inverts today’s progressive imaginations by anchoring today’s Natchez tourism industry to a quasi-feminist history where the women from the town’s “old families” saved their community from ruin in the early 1900s by forming an epic garden club.

Leave it to “the women” of any town to roll up their sleeves and get crackin’ in the face of ruin. I’m sure young white ladies across the United States have etched the words of Scarlett O’Hara (played by Vivien Leigh) on their hearts when, in Gone with the Wind’s final scene, she says, “After all, tomorrow is another day!” She might as well say, “Let’s start a garden club.”

Herbert continues to massage the egos of today’s progressives when she introduces us to David Garner, a monumental narcissist and descendant of one of Natchez’s imperial plantations, Choctaw Hall.

We cautiously take in his outlandish display as he chats up tourists at his family’s mansion. Magnetic and funny, some in Herbert’s white audience will likely give David the benefit of the racist doubt: what he says isn’t that racist … besides, we find out that he’s gay and he’s a figurehead for the town’s LGBTQ community. David makes cameos throughout the film as he hob-nobs and blusters. Living with Parkinson’s disease and carrying the “burden” of polishing more silver than a Czar’s household, we find ourselves feeling some sympathy for the old man—but eventually the racist bombs fall with staggering aim.

Challenging the fantasy world of Natchez’s white descendants of plantation owners, Herbert documents the members of the town’s African American community who curate tours that convey slavery’s epic gravity.

Rev. Tracy Collins, a Baptist pastor, community leader and historian, has built a tour service that focuses on the realities of Natchez’s slavery history. The documentary follows Collins as he takes visitors to Natchez’s Forks of the Road slave market (now a national park), where 750,000 people were bought and sold from 1833 until the arrival of Union troops in 1863. He peppers his tours with staggering data about slavery and the Jim Crow era.

Another anchor in Herbert’s film is Deborah Cosey, who restored Concord Quarters, formerly the housing for enslaved people owned by Concord Plantation. Concord Quarters is one of the few freestanding slave dwellings listed on the National Register of Historic Places. We learn that Cosey is the first Black woman accepted into Natchez’s storied garden club. We get up close to understand her struggle both within parts of the Black community who want to leave slavery’s wound in the past and the white community who valorize the antebellum South.

Tourists—dubbed “pilgrims” in the distorted language of the “heritage tourism” world—are wallpaper for Natchez’s main characters. Herbert zooms in on their reactions and interactions. Watching their facial expressions, white audiences also find themselves shocked when David trots out a ceramic pitcher shaped like an ape dressed in a hoop skirt.

We are befuddled as a tour guide calls enslaved people “the servants.” We laugh at a tongue-tied guide trying to find politically correct words that won’t also offend his conservative friends. We feel confused by the erasure of America’s second-largest slave market—Forks of the Road—today a patch of grass beside a busy roadway across from a decaying muffler shop owned by a vocal white racist who harangues Rev. Collins during his tours. We feel ourselves wanting to support tours telling the truth of slavery’s system but are unsure how to do that.

After steering her audiences through a flurry of revealing scenes of white supremacy, Herbert also shows us how to imagine our lives without “heritage tourism.” In a nation where Hollywood depictions like Gone with the Wind have achieved canonical status, Natchez asks: Who are we if we’re not the heroes of our own myths?   

In a single galvanizing scene, Herbert takes us into a tour offered by the National Park Service at the Melrose Mansion, where a passionate guide describes the job given to an enslaved child. The role of a “punkhawallah” places a child at the edge of a dining room where they gently pull a rope that operates a “punkha”—a large baton suspended above a dining table. The baton would fan away the flies without putting out the candles.

But the Melrose tour guide challenges us to consider what happens to a youngster who is present near tables of power. Like a drumbeat, over and over, he says: “Information is power.” And then he tells this tour group about John Roy Lynch. Born into slavery in Louisiana and serving as a punkhawallah, Lynch became Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives and represented Mississippi as a Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives during Reconstruction in the 1870s and 1880s.

Here is where Herbert’s white audience learn their most important message: children near tables of power learn sophisticated workings of race and class in America.

At one point in the film, Herbert captures benign commentary exchanged on a gracious verandah where well-heeled whites enjoy mint juleps and coo about how the plantation tour gives them space “to step back in a lovely way to this lovely world.” Accessing a “lovely world” that serves white supremacy might explain the phenomenon propelling white tourists—“pilgrims”—to spend millions in Natchez every year. A good question to ask ourselves is: Why?

Sara June Jo-SæboMore by this author →

Sara June Jo-Sæbo grew up in Koochiching County, Minnesota, on the Canadian border and in rural Winneshiek County, Iowa. She now lives in Southwest Virginia where she is an author and freelance writer. Jo-Sæbo publishes her history work on her website: Midwest History Project.