While most tourists beeline for the Antebellum homes during Natchez’s Spring Pilgrimage, Tracy “Rev” Collins, a tour guide there, offers a different look at the city’s history.
Throughout the course of a nearly 90-minute van ride, Collins makes several stops throughout the city, including at the Forks of the Road monument.
There, he explains the pain and agony enslaved people went through in the 19th century before being sold at the site, which was once the second-largest slave trade market in the Deep South.
To Collins, that history needs to be shared because Spring Pilgrimage doesn’t otherwise capture the city’s full story.
“That’s not the African American story,” Collins said during a panel discussion Tuesday in Fant Memorial Library at Mississippi University for Women. “… That’s white folks telling the African American story. So who better to tell the story of how an oppressed person felt than a person who has experienced oppression?”
That contrast between the romanticized portrayal of Antebellum history, used for profit at Southern tourism sites like plantation homes and historic buildings, and the reality of slavery inspired Suzannah Herbert and Darcy McKinnon to create the documentary “Natchez.” The film was shown Tuesday at MUW for about 30 attendees, followed by a panel discussion with the filmmakers, Collins and Laverne Greene-Leech, founder and director of the R.E. Hunt Museum and Cultural Center in Columbus.
The panel also explored parallels between the Natchez tradition and Columbus’ Spring Pilgrimage, which started April 7 and runs through Sunday.
The Mississippi Humanities Council sponsored the event as part of six planned screenings of the documentary throughout the state in April and May.
The 86-minute film showcases Natchez’s 2022 Spring Pilgrimage through interviews with Antebellum homeowners, city business owners, tour guides and advocates.
Throughout the film, the challenges that exist between those Antebellum homeowners sharing an incomplete or sanitized history of the homes and their origins are juxtaposed by preservation efforts from others, including the National Park Service, to bring the city’s history of slavery forward.
The documentary has won several awards, including Best Documentary Feature at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival, and is slated for broadcast on PBS in May.
“I think that the film makes it very clear that it is so incredibly important that we confront and we understand our full history,” Herbert said. “Because these legacies of our past continue to show up in our present day.”
Telling the whole story
Herbert said over the course of filming, she focused on speaking primarily with those involved in the pilgrimage tours and in conservation efforts, rather than experts or historians, to make the film as authentic to the area’s experience as possible.
“I wanted to make a film that took people on tour,” Herbert said. “(And give them) the experience of going through Natchez and taking the different tours and seeing the different perspectives. … To feel like they were experiencing the history.”
McKinnon said during filming, it became clear that younger generations are not as interested in the same incomplete history that homeowners have told at Spring Pilgrimage for years.
“We have the internet now, and so the expansion of scholarship … continues to complicate and broaden our understanding of the historical past,” McKinnon said. “… Younger generations do not take the whitewashing of history as fact. And that is my hope that stories like ours … is going to be the antidote to that.”
Collins said he has seen a sharp decline in Natchez’s pilgrimage attendance since he started hosting tours in 2015.
Even in the face of that lost revenue, Collins said homeowners still have been unwilling to tell Natchez’s complicated history, which has been frustrating for Black residents.
“They’re so stuck on that story (and) they’re resisting to expand the narrative,” Collins said. “And that’s crazy, because … most of those houses are not owned by the people who built them.”
While Greene-Leech said efforts to remember Black history in Columbus have improved over the last few years with the reopening of the Hunt Museum and the addition of more historic markers in the city, there’s still room for improvement going forward.
“There’s a lot of work to do, but together we can make it happen,” Greene-Leech said.
Greene-Leech believes one possible improvement to Columbus’ Spring Pilgrimage could be paying homage to the home’s history by having organizers partner with local Black historians, re-enactors and vendors during the event.
“It’s not telling the full story, because we have very few (Black people) that will even go (to Spring Pilgrimage),” Greene-Leech said. “… And I think if you told the whole story, more people would be encouraged to come and go.”
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 46 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
