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Natchez

by Lauren James on June 10, 2026

Meet the New South, sometimes the same as the Old South.

Part of my family tree grows from Southern soil. This is an elevated way of saying that I’ve heard someone I’m related to refer to the Civil War, in all earnestness, as the “War of Northern Aggression.”

I’m sure that term is alive and well in Natchez, Mississippi, the city Suzannah Herbert’s documentary explores with so much insight and humanity. The film’s perspective is best embodied by Tracy “Rev” Collins, a Black reverend who offers van tours of a place that’s a fascination but not a home. While white Natchez likes to court the tourist dollars that come for restored antebellum homes and Lost Cause stories of vanished gracious living, Rev—a natural storyteller with plenty of garrulous Southern charm—offers a more complete picture.

While Rev’s sales pitch acknowledges he’s going to talk about slavery, very few of his white customers seem to choose him because they specifically want this unvarnished narrative. They drift in, or they’re won over by his easygoing demeanor, or—likeliest of all—they underestimate how fundamental slavery was to Natchez, how inseparable the city is from the blood and misery of its history. Once some of them start to understand Rev’s vision of the world, they argue with him, in the most batshit and sadly familiar of ways. You can’t talk about the legacy of enslavement in America without some white guy in shorts suggesting that really any current day problems stem from Black women having children out of wedlock.  

Rev, often almost superhumanly patient, has no patience with this, nor should he. He’s just spent a whole tour explaining that Natchez’s one-time prosperity—the wealth that led to all those beautiful houses—came largely from the city being one of the slave-trading capitals of the country. The markets stood at the Forks of the Road intersection: a site of untold horror and human suffering that’s now marked with some informative plaques, a haunting piece of discarded shackles embedded in concrete … and some local businesses with owners who heckle Rev’s tours, shouting out that “that Black boy will lie.” You can, TripAdvisor tells me, “do” the Forks of the Road in ten minutes, much less time than it takes, surely, to “do” one of the houses on the Garden Club’s tour. (Even his minor of an exhibit, we learn, is the product of years of hard battling against white reluctance.) But you can’t get a guarantee that you won’t encounter present-day racism in the process.

Nevertheless, Rev likes people, including a lot of his customers. He’s the best kind of ambassador anyone could hope for, cheerfully offering up the good kind of bullshit, like playful flirtation and instant friendliness, while refusing the bad. He hopes, he tells Herbert’s crew, to make genuine connections with the people he meets, to have real conversations with them; it hurts when a tour’s ended and he feels like nothing has changed, when he knows someone he’s talked to has closed themselves off. But it happens. For now, he continues to put himself out there—and put up with other people’s bad kinds of bullshit, albeit with a necessary timer for how long it can go on—in the hope that it’s making a difference.

His willingness to extend a kind of charitable empathy to the people he meets filters out into the film, too: though, like Rev, the film knows when to cut its losses. One of the local plantation homes is owned by David Garner, an eccentric, elderly white gay man. David has Parkinson’s, and he explains how carefully he walks to avoid falls that could permanently change his ability to get around; the charity drag events he and his husband help sponsor are protested by ranting assholes with sandwich boards. It’s not as though David’s whiteness or wealth have protected him from everything in life, and Rev notes that—“He’s still a gay man in America”—and gives David credit for occasionally sending customers his way. But he’s also heard that the way David talks when he’s around isn’t the same way he talks when he’s not. He finds a possible motivation for that—that David is to some extent protecting his fragile in-group status by over-performing a kind of Southern gentleman role—and it makes sense. It’s kind. But there’s nothing kind about the blistering, almost compulsive racism that spills out of David later, when there’s no one to show off for but the camera crew. It’s a moment so souring that it feels like straight out of a horror movie, like David’s ripped off some kindly, goofy mask to reveal there were always maggots squirming around underneath. He’s only been in his own corner this whole time. Understanding and social progress for me, but not for thee.

The film does not, however, suggest there’s no hope for white Natchez at all. There’s already a park ranger who speaks about the city’s history calmly and unsentimentally, and who sees Ser Boxley, who’s spent years advocating for the Forks of the Road memorial, as a kind of prophet; she sees and supports the holy work of telling truth to power. There’s the hopeful connection Rev makes at the end of the film with Tracy McCartney, a white woman from a poor background who found some sense of prettiness and worth in offering hoop-skirted tours of the plantation home she married into but who, post-divorce, is having to reinvent herself from the ground up, and is doing that partly by finally taking Rev’s tour. They’re both named Tracy, they note, and they were born in the same year. She’s his sister now, Rev proclaims, and the end sees them both at an event together, sharing a hug. It’s not necessarily the cosplay that gets in the way of community. It’s not the houses. It’s the willful, malicious ignorance.

What Natchez documents most movingly of all are all the attempts to alleviate that ignorance and preserve the city’s Black history. I already talked about Rev and Ser Boxley, but another key figure is Deborah Cosey, the only Black member of Natchez’s prestigious Garden Club with its tour of antebellum homes: Cosey owns restored slave quarters. It was a dormitory-style building, built over a kitchen—I can’t imagine the heat during the summer—and now it simply looks like the beautiful two-story bed and breakfast and wedding venue that it is. But Cosey keeps its history alive, offering tours and insisting, both implicitly and explicitly, that this too is Natchez, that this is also part of the story, and that the lives lived in her house remain worth remembering and discussing. She (with less patience than Rev, but who could blame her) also offers the plantation home owners tips on how to talk about slavery on their tours. (Notably, though, the liveliest and most striking incorporation of it that we see comes from a Black park ranger, not a white private home owner. Most of them, despite Cosey’s efforts, are still talking about “servants.” And how much were those servants paid? Don’t worry about it.)

Natchez came out in 2025, into an America speeding up its retreat into whatever lies and delusions would make its white residents the most comfortable. We need these kinds of films, and people like Deborah Cosey, Ser Boxley, and Tracy Collins, more than ever, even as the world around them gets more thankless. The saddest, bitterest part of this movie is where the antebellum home owners note that tourism is falling off because Millennials and Gen Z have less nostalgia for the Old South—and I don’t know how long that will last, as education about the past is stripped away. The white man who yelled at Rev wonders why Natchez’s Black community wants to “[promote] the memory of something that was bad.” These days, he might not even say that it was bad. Now, he might feel, he has permission to skip that part.

Natchez is streaming on YouTube, thanks to PBS Documentaries. Thanks to Bridgett Taylor for recommending this one.

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