- In this episode of "Fly Brother", we're rolling on the river down to the Little Easy, Natchez, Mississippi.

We start off with a visitation to the foundational people of the region with storyteller, Jennifer Ogden Combs.

We cook and eat with chef and educator, Jarita Frazier-King We expand our understanding of Southern traditions with innkeeper, Deborah Cosey.

We cook and eat again with Little Easy chef, Ashley Allen.

Plus hangout with a few more Natchezians.

You all don't want to miss this.

Let's get fly.

(upbeat music) I'm Ernest White II, storyteller, explorer.

I feel like Indiana Jones.

I believe in connecting across backgrounds and boundaries.

(upbeat music) Join me and my friends, and discover that no matter the background, no matter the history, the whole world is our tribe.

Come with me.

(Ernest barks) - Yeah!

(upbeat music) Fly Brother.

- [Announcer] Major funding for this program is provided by.

- This is Mayor Ras J. Baraka.

Welcome to Newark.

(jazzy music) We're Newark.

One family, Brick City.

- [Announcer] Courageous Conversation Global Foundation, promoting racial justice, inter-racial understanding, and human healing.

Additional funding provided by the following.

(jazzy music) - Natchez, Mississippi.

This small, proud city sits 285 miles up-river from her younger, but bigger sister, New Orleans.

And just like the Big Easy, the Little Easy knows how to party with her own buffet table full of culture, food, and plenty of stories.

Filmmaker and Mississippi native, Tate Taylor tells us just why Natchez is fertile ground for storytellers.

- There's a lot of history there and you can feel it in the air.

And when the creative people come here, they say the same thing.

They can feel the depth of the history, which helps the creative process.

And for creative people, it's good to feel energized and inspired by a place.

- So what does the Little Easy mean to you?

- A lot of people and its proximity to New Orleans, consider it the Little Easy.

It's the Big Easy, but a little smaller and a little easier.

- No newcomer to Natchez can escape its culinary pull, and the Little Easy's chef Ashley Allen, born in the Virgin Islands is no exception.

You know, the Little Easy is a place that I feel like makes you feel at home, right?

I'm not sure how much of that is just the welcoming nature of the community in general or your welcoming nature being from the Caribbean.

But you know, I do feel like there's some synergies there.

- There is, there is.

I would say the Caribbean and the south is so similar with the foods and the flavors that we use.

Ready to rock and roll?

- Yes sir.

- Chef Ashley- - Well- - What are we looking at here?

- We have a arugula-based salad with a house-made white.

This is a jerk waffle.

- A jerk waffle, which you did say before, and I didn't know.

- Well, here you go.

It's ready to go.

So you got a jerk waffle with some braised greens and cranberries, and then a pecan crusted chicken breast.

- [Ernest] Oh my goodness.

- And the chicken breast is actually sous vide and then fried, so it's nice and moist and tender.

- That sounds incredible.

- This is a biscuit and chicken with almost like a chicken pot pie kind of combination.

So we did a white cheddar biscuit below, on top is a pecan crusted chicken breast again, and then a bechamel sauce on the top.

- Now chef Ashley, you know I'm on a diet, right?

- Well, that's the way the portions are so small.

- Okay, but these are not the portion sizes that you generally- - No, no.

Usually you would have four waffle pieces, you know, a big belgium with a heaping stack of chicken and a nice drip of syrup, you know?

- Why can't I have that?

Oh, because I'm on a diet.

- Yes, that's right, and I want you to try everything.

- Got it.

I didn't even know what to say you all, but it was magic.

- [Chef Ashley] I like that reaction.

Excellent.

- My brother.

(inhales deeply) I'm in heaven, Chef Ashley.

- [Chef Ashley] Excellent.

I love that.

- I am sleepin' so good tonight.

(jazzy music) Tucked between the world famous blues highway and the mighty Mississippi River, Natchez has a special appeal all its own.

Architecture, art galleries, parks, cafes, and shops draw visitors from far and wide.

And this close knit community of nearly 15,000 residents provides plenty of opportunities for discovery, not only as a way of engaging visitors, but also as a way to reconcile its less than shiny history.

Natchez sits high above the Mississippi River at the start of the Natchez Trace, a forest trail to Nashville first created by native Americans.

French colonizers arrived in 1716, but the city fell under British and Spanish control before the US claimed it in 1798.

Soon, the slavery-powered cotton trade made Natchez and economic powerhouse.

In fact, before the civil war, half of America's millionaires lived here.

Today, you can tour the town and discover the food, the music, the history, and the people who make this the capital of Southern hospitality.

(rock music) One of my favorite Natchezians is Jennifer Ogden Combs, whom I met on my very first trip to Natchez, and who brings us to where it all began, the grand village of the Natchez Indians.

Jennifer, you are a native of Natchez and yet you have lived in many different places.

What brings you back to this particular place?

- Well, okay, first of all, see where you are, hear where you are.

Birds, beautiful land, but more importantly than that, this is the origin of Natchez.

This was the original people of this 300 and what?

305 year old city.

It's a very sacred place.

It holds, and I don't know if you can feel it, if you're standing and you have your eyes closed, you can feel the people, the history, but also the importance of it to the peoples of the world, really.

- Sure.

Okay.

- This was a ceremonial mound.

It was the home of the Great Sun.

The chiefs of the Nachez tribe were descendants of the female, it's a matrilineal society here.

- Okay, like the best societies tend to be.

- Absolutely, absolutely.

It's just a beautiful place.

It's a place to reconnect.

It's a place to feel the importance of the history of the Natchez.

And you know, some of the history was not particularly lovely.

- No.

- I mean the Nachez tribe was ultimately destroyed by the French who, they were friendly at first.

- Sure.

- And as the French began, this is like in the 1700s, early 1700s, as the French began to move more in to encroach on the Nachez tribes lands, the Nachez attacked and were decimated.

So at the end of that, which is about in the late 1720s, early 1730s, the remaining people that survived either were taken into other tribes, so the nachez tribe in essence, didn't really continue as an individual tribe, as a recognized named tribe, they were taken into the Creeks and the Cherokee and sold into slavery in the West Indies by the French.

- That is a heavy history.

- It's a heavy history.

- That we're still working ourselves through even today - Indeed, indeed, absolutely.

One of the exciting things to me about where Natchez is going now is exactly what you hit on, which is all of the cultures that are being celebrated here, increasingly so.

We started really a focus in the tricentennial, but the community has just grabbed it.

There's fabulous new ways that the multi-cultures are being shared here in a way that I think is going to make, it's going to be a radical change, a positive radical change.

(funky music) - Natchez is indeed a multicultural place, and always has been.

Founded two years before new Orleans, Native American, African and European cultures melded often by force, as the fort grew into a bustling riverport for cotton, sugarcane, manufactured goods, and yes, enslaved people.

In fact, nearby Forks of the Road was the second largest domestic slave market in the deep south.

One of the enduring testaments to the fortitude and ingenuity of those enslaved people and their descendants is soul food, and chef and educator Jarita Frazier-King gives us a taste at Soul Fusion Natchez.

Now Ms. Jarita, I'm very familiar.

I have an intimate, deep, longterm relationship with soul food.

And what we see in front of us, this bountious spread that you have laid out.

(laughs) But if you could describe what we're about to eat to some of our wonderful audience members who may not be familiar.

- All right, today, we are going to have some collard greens.

We use a lot of bell peppers and onions, things like that that you could grow really wild, fresh garlic, wild garlic, and these are turkey necks.

Turkey necks are parts of the turkey that were, most of the time, thrown out.

- Absolutely.

- As you know, a lot of dishes we had to make out of necessity because there was- - Sure, well, they weren't thrown out in my house.

- It wasn't thrown out of nobody's house.

(both laughing) But as enslaved people, we had to use the things that we had.

I always liked to say black women, any enslaved women they had to be food engineers 'cause they had to design some dishes- - Food engineers, yes.

- Out of necessity - Some hidden figures, for real, in every kitchen.

- (laughs) Yes sir.

- In the culinary world.

(Ernest laughs) Of course, fried chicken.

This is smoked macaroni and cheese, and we use smoked paprika in it to give you the smoke flavor.

You can use a lot of different things to give you a smoke flavor, and smoked paprika is going to be one of those things.

And of course on the table, we have some homemade corn bread.

- Now, Ms. Jarita are there any feet in that macaroni and cheese, particularly your feet?

- There might be some hands in there.

(laughs) (Ernest laughing) - We're joined by a few friends.

Who've come over responsibly to taste a little or a lot of what chef Rita's been cooking.

How you doin'?

What's up?

Good to see ya man.

- Good to see you.

- Well yes ma'am.

- Okay.

(Ernest laughing) (Ernest exhales) Discipline over mood.

(funky music) Man, look here.

(funky music) Chef Rita, bringing people together.

- Well, we enlighten people about how African-American enslaved people and native Americans influenced most of the food that we eat here in the south.

And so when people come to the cooking school, we ask them, we give them a wooden spoon.

Wooden spoons have been used throughout generations.

You can go all the way back to Egyptian tombs and find wooden spoons and things that were- - For spanking.

- No, not for spanking, (both laughing) but for uses of doing different mixing or things like that and just different measurement, sizes and stuff.

And so for us, we have that wooden spoon, wooden spoons hold flavor.

I like to say, I tell stories on the plate.

But when people- - I experienced that story.

(Jarita laughing) (Ernest laughing) - When people come, we want them to take those stories home with them and we give them a wooden spoon to take back with them.

- Nice.

- That wooden spoon for us represents the putting together of family, the perfect mixin' and blendin' of family, of good times, laughs.

When you come to a dinner table, it's a place of rest, it's a place of your guards are down.

So we asked them to take that wooden spoon back home with them, do something with their family, and send us back a picture.

And we send them a certificate of love from the Fitzgerald family.

- Aw!

That is love.

I mean, food is love.

- It's love.

(laughs) - And in this case you're also holding people accountable to establish love in their own family.

(jazzy music) After a very needed coffee, we head over to The Towers, a restored antebellum mansion originally built by members of the elite slave holding planter class in 1790.

More recently, The Towers has become home to one of the largest collections of antiques furnishings and historical items, this or any side of the Mississippi.

Curated personally and brilliantly by Ms. Ginger Hyland, who gives us a special tour of the treasures within.

- The furnishings are going to be pretty classically 1840 to 1865, almost everything.

The collections are going to go back to early 1700s all the way up to the end of the 1800s with an occasional overlap here and there, but that's the focus on most of them.

And I love it if I can concentrate it down right on about 1858, which is when this portion of the house was built because The Towers was built partly in 1798, partly in 1826 and then finally in 1858.

So I like to find things that are really right there in that period when it was made and would've gone along with it.

- When you bring things from so many different influences, so many different cultures, so many different places into the space, how do you feel that they co-exist so easily with one another?

- Because they're all beautiful, and that's what counts.

It's the beauty, the craftsmanship, that went into them and caring about it.

That's what is so wonderful.

Let me give you an over the top example.

So if we were writing in 1870 with our dip pen and we're done with our letters and we're ready to put our pen away and we see there's still ink on the tip of that nib, by 1870 they began making Vienna bronze animals with bristle brush backs on them called pen wipes, and this is how you got rid of the little bit of ink on the tip of the nib.

You wiped it off on the back of the pen wipe and then let the pen dry in the antlers.

Isn't that charming?

It's just charming.

- I love it.

(jazzy music) You know what's so impressive Ms. Ginger is the fact that you know all the stories of these things.

- That's what brings them alive when you know the stories, and that's why collecting can be so wonderful because you're always finding out something new, something different.

You start with a trunk of the tree and collecting one thing, and pretty soon you're on a branch over here.

And then pretty soon before you know it, you're all the way over here because you've discovered something else and you can learn about it and learn all its variations, and it's wonderful.

- It's choose your own adventure.

- That's correct.

You do the adventures in the sky.

I do some of the adventures on the ground.

(both laughing) (jazzy music) - The Towers truly is a place of wonders.

- You have an open invitation.

Anytime any of you may come back, even you.

(chuckles) (gentle music) - Natchez boasts some 500 restored and preserved mansions built by plantation owners whose actual fields were often located across the river in Louisiana, unlike in other parts of the south where the big house was situated on the plantation itself, in Natchez folks lived up close, the better to show off to, compete with, and party with each other.

But against all odds, there was some room for opportunity within Natchez's burgeoning community of free people of color before the civil war and for emancipated African Americans after the war.

John Roy Lynch was born into slavery.

At 16, he was freed by the emancipation proclamation.

He lived right here at Dunleith.

10 years later, the state of Mississippi sent him to Congress.

He along with Hiram Revels in the Senate would be the only African-American the state would elect for the next hundred years.

On the floor of the house, he spoke about civil rights passionately, telling his colleagues that black citizens quote, "Ask no favors, they desire and must have an equal chance in the race of life," unquote.

After reconstruction, the period from 1865 to 1877, when union soldiers from the Northern states enforced political rights for African-Americans in the south, black codes and Jim Crow laws firmly cemented racial segregation in place and black Natchezians were terrorized by both the Ku Klux Klan as well as representatives of state and local institutions in suits and ties.

The black churches in Natchez stand as reminders of the ongoing fight for racial equality that climaxed in the mid 1960s, a time when church leaders and their congregations, mothers and grandmothers, children and teenagers, protested and were often arrested and sometimes killed in their desire for equal rights.

And a legacy of that fight and reclamation is Concord Quarters, a bed and breakfast located in a meticulously restored slave dwelling owned and operated by Mrs. Deborah Cosey.

- Hello!

- Hello, Mrs. Cosey, it's so good to see you.

- Ernest it's so good to see you, oh my.

(Ernest laughing) Come in.

- I'm excited.

- Watch your step here.

Yes, wonderful.

Concord was comprised of 1000 acres, okay?

- That's not small.

- That's not small.

It was all during the- - Much more than 40 acres.

- That's for sure.

So what happened here, this building and the other was and they are concealed by design.

Now of course I have my mother's China cabinet and that sort of thing in here, but no nothing's changed really in here, except we decided to brighten things, you know?

Because the master of the big house, I mean it had to look good on the plantation.

This was their courtyard out here.

So these dependencies had to look very nice.

Now, we did an overlay of an old map and that, so about 10 miles down the road, then you find- - Shacks.

- Shacks, there you are, the little cabins.

- Sure, sure.

- Little cabins, yeah.

But in this case, Concord, because it was built so early for the Spanish governor, built what 1789?

- Okay, so kind of before a lot of the large-scale plantations - Yeah, but he had his thing here.

He had some cotton, tobacco, that's 1000 acres here.

Now, you know that later, you're exactly right, those planters start to take their things over to Louisiana and they would live here in the city.

- All of these houses then kind of appear on tours that they have a couple of times a year called pilgrimages, correct?

- You have a Spring and a Fall.

- Okay, and you are the only black woman to have a house on the pilgrimage.

- That's correct, and I'm on the Fall only.

- Fall only?

- Yes.

- Okay, and what is the significance of even having a house on the pilgrimage?

- When I was invited to have my house on a pilgrimage tour and people do come, then I say to them, and I'll say to you, again, you come to see the big houses, but when you come to Concord Quarters, you come to see the kitchen, you come to see the quarters, you see?

We give honor to the enslaved men, women and children who worked and who were enslaved at Concord.

And again, I have to say too, don't get it twisted, because these are the quarters.

Old Concord burned in 1901, you see?

- But the quarters survived.

- But the quarters survived, and I found, and we found an inventory, 124 men, women and children- - Passed through here.

- That's right.

That's right, and they were enslaved people here at Concord.

So I, you know I call those names.

Flora Upshaw, and on the inventory it tells me that Flora, she's number 34, I believe, on the inventory, 27 years old, and it tells us that her worth was $550, you know?

So I name those names, Charity Martin and George.

- You say their names.

- I say their names, and we give honor to those people.

In my mind, those beautiful people and Gregory and I chose to live here.

We live in history here.

It is also to remind us how far we've come.

It was falling when we bought it.

We decided, I did, that slave dwellings are worthy of preservation also, you know?

- Something that is not often thought about or talked about.

- No, not at all.

And as you've been about the city, usually a slave dwelling is part of a complex, you know what I mean?

But we're free standing here, and so that's one of the reasons this was so forgotten, who cares about an old slave house, you know?

Who cares?

But we did and we do, you know?

And we're going to just keep working at it.

And there it was, it was falling and we save it and it's so worthy, it's so worthy of preservation, you know?

- We are worthy.

- We are worthy.

That's right.

We are so worthy.

Why can't we keep this?

Why can't we have this house and many more because since this, and I'll tell you, I feel I'm a trailblazer, I think, since this and this city there's been- (Ernest chuckling) Yeah.

- Hey, tell it.

- I can have it.

It is sacred.

It is to remind me of how far we've come.

You know what I mean?

It's all of that.

It heals.

It helps me.

In a way, oh my goodness, it's like I said, when I come over here in the mornings and I'm having my bad day or whatever, I get in here, the storm's comin', oh my goodness, and I get in here and I'm praying with the ancestors and I feel like there's no way this house is going down.

It ain't fallin'.

Storms come through and blow that old fence down, but this house is just a big old man standing.

It's so strong here, you know?

But anyway, I could go, let me stop.

But that is, this we should have, and thank you.

- All places have their histories, but it's the world we're building today for tomorrow that counts.

Before visiting Mississippi for the very first time a few years ago, based on that history, I never thought there would be anything there that resonated with me.

Was I ever wrong.

The warmth and sincerity of the people I met, the beauty of the sunsets and the Magnolias, a flower that grew in my own backyard, the legacy of a people's strength and creativity, the determination to get along and get it right going forward.

New stories are being told, new realities created.

To be honest, I feel at home in Natchez.

Come on by and sit a spell.

Maybe you'll feel at home too.

(big band music) - [Announcer] Major funding for this program is provided by.

- This is Mayor Ras J. Baraka.

Welcome to Newark.

(jazzy music) We're Newark.

One family, Brick City.

- [Announcer] Courageous Conversation Global Foundation, promoting racial justice, inter-racial understanding, and human healing.

Additional funding provided by the following.

To join the Fly Brother travel community or to order your own copy of this episode, visit flybrother.com.

(violin music)