The Deepest South of All Quotes

“In Natchez, you only use the word home if it’s antebellum,” said Doug. “If your house was built after the Civil War, it’s trashy to call it a home.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“White people were similarly invented. Europeans coming to America boarded ships as Germans, Poles, English, French, and so on. They soon learned that in America they had a new privileged identity based on something they had scarcely considered before: the pale color of their skins.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“It’s just the South. There’s no point trying to explain it.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“It’s not just Mississippi. The North is segregated too. This is work the whole country needs to do. White people need to understand the bitterness we feel about slavery. There’s pride that we survived the whole experience and came through it with dignity, and then successfully fought for our civil rights, but a lot of white people act like it’s no big deal, or we should be grateful for what we have now. They haven’t even begun to understand.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“White and black citizens are bound together in the most fundamental way possible—at the level of the genome,” he writes, and yet divided by the racial pseudoscience originally devised to justify slavery and perpetuated in slightly shifting forms ever since.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“By tracing paternal ancestry through Y-DNA, geneticists have found that a third of African American men today are directly descended from a white male ancestor who fathered a mulatto child in the slavery era, “most probably from rape or coerced sexuality,” in the words of Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor of African American studies at Harvard, and presenter of popular television shows on black genealogy.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“They eat every part of them, including the testicles. I don’t eat the testicles. I don’t want anybody eating on mine, so I won’t eat on anybody’s. I eat the hams, ribs, and shoulders. I enjoy them. Once you start eating testicles, it’s like you’ve gone cannibalistic.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“Whatever race might be, it is certainly not logical or scientific.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“Think about three hundred Donald Trumps walking around here shopping for niggers. ‘Look at that one, didn’t they shine him up nice? What if I buy that other one, will you make me a deal?’ ” That”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“There was white racism aplenty in Natchez, but most of it wasn’t hateful, and it didn’t preclude voting for a black man. It was subtler and more complex than that, and arguably more insidious because it was less easy to call out.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“When I was growing up here, slavery was hardly ever mentioned,” said Regina. “Or people would say that the slaves were happy and well looked after, and the Civil War was about states’ rights and honor. You still hear that, of course, but we are finally making some progress. The best thing we can do about our awful history is to acknowledge it openly and honestly.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“This is a common form of exchange when Mississippians meet for the first time. They want to know about each other’s ancestors, and which families they married into. If kinship ties can be established, so much the better. If there was a feud in the past, it could get awkward.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“People are stuck looking at this as a black and white issue, when they should be asking, ‘How can our kids succeed in school?’ ” he said. “And it’s really very simple. It’s not part of the human condition to want to fail. If children know for an absolute fact that you have faith in them, that you genuinely care about them, and you’re not going to quit on them, they will succeed in school. And if they doubt any of that, they will look for a way to succeed on the streets instead.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“Any white person who doesn’t care about the public schools is a fool. The whole future of this town depends on fixing the public schools, so we can stop our population decline and attract new families and businesses. If we can’t fix the schools, I’m afraid we’re going to lose the town.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“F-rated Natchez High, with 700 students, had four principals and four assistant principals, all making between $50,000 and $82,000 a year plus benefits. By contrast, the A-rated public high school in Tupelo, Mississippi, with 2,100 students, had just one principal, working with one assistant principal.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“Judging from payroll documents obtained through a Freedom of Information request, the Natchez–Adams County school district was functioning more like a patronage system than a normal American educational system. The district had over 700 staff, including teachers, for approximately 3,400 students—or one employee for every 4.9 students. There were 70 administrators, not including principals and assistant principals, for those 3,400 students. A typical American school district has about 50 administrators for 20,000 students.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“The people in charge blame the whites, blame the parents, blame the teachers, blame the students, and now they’re blaming the buildings. The facilities are run-down because they haven’t maintained them properly. They say there’s no money for maintenance, but they spend a fortune on hiring consultant after consultant. Oh my God, so many consultants when we didn’t have any textbooks or paper.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“The problem with divisiveness is that it doesn’t lead to prosperity. It holds us back. We use up all our energy fighting over a pie that is getting smaller and smaller as our population and tax base declines”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“Now the city, led by the new mayor, Darryl Grennell, was erecting a monument to honor the survivors of the Parchman Ordeal, and others who were arrested for attempting to march. The “Proud to Take a Stand” monument, a black granite wall with the names of all the 439 people who were wrongfully arrested, will stand in the grounds of the city auditorium. “It’s the first monument in Natchez that addresses a very traumatic, difficult, but ultimately victorious era in our history,” said Mayor Grennell. “No tour of civil rights history in the Deep South will be complete without a visit to this site.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“For inspiration, he read Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and listened to the Drive-By Truckers singing about the duality of pride and shame they felt as white Southerners.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“James Jackson, the barber, led the meeting, which was filmed by a documentary filmmaker named Ed Pincus, who was in Natchez documenting the civil rights struggle. The resulting film, Black Natchez, is still widely available.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“We resurrected our history in order to sell tickets and make money from it, but it’s more powerful than we are. It’s like we resurrected a monster and now we can’t control it. Sometimes it feels like progress is impossible, because the dead are running the show.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“They have to square their well-earned reputation for kindness and hospitality with their equally well-earned reputation for violence and bigotry.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“Layne took him to Monteigne, a stunning Italianate mansion on twenty-three acres. The owner, Mary Louise Shields, a steel magnolia who lived to be 109, showed Kevin Kline a quilt and said, “Now this belonged to Scarlett O’Hara.” Layne is no stickler for factual accuracy, but this was too much for him. He said, “Honey, she’s a fictional character.” Miss Mary Louise said, “We do believe that to be true.” Layne lost his temper. “She’s from a fucking movie!” She said, “Honey, if you’re not enjoying the tour, why don’t you step off the back porch?”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“Family separations were probably the most brutal, heartless aspect of American slavery, although many slaveholders claimed that blacks, being less than fully human, weren’t particularly bothered by it.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“Theophilus Freeman was right over here. He’s the one that sold Solomon Northup out of Twelve Years a Slave.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“There were no slaves in Natchez,” she insisted haughtily. “We had field hands on our plantations, of course, but they were out of town or across the river. Here in Natchez, we had servants and we loved them. They were part of our families.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“And there’s a whole spectrum of behavior that we refer to politely as ‘eccentricity.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“How could our own people sell us into slavery like that? But there was no concept of “our people” in Africa at that time. Africans didn’t think of themselves as black, Negro, or African. They were Fulani, Bambara, Mandinka, or whatever ethnic-linguistic group they belonged to. The idea that black people share a common identity was created by the experience of being enslaved together in the New World, on the basis of their skin pigmentation and the newly invented fiction of “race.” White people were similarly invented.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi