Grey Gardens, the house first made famous by the 1975 documentary on the lives of Jackie Kennedy’s aunt and cousin—better known as “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Beale—is, in many ways, familiar in southern culture. The story of the Beales and their derelict home in East Hampton, New York, later dramatized in the 2009 HBO film of the same name, might have been drafted for a novel set in the South. Although born into wealth and privilege, the social and economic decline that befell mother and daughter was not unlike that which many southern families faced following Confederate defeat and the end of slavery. Add to this that the Beales became reclusive and seemed resigned to living in the filth and decay that surrounded them and you have the makings of a gothic novel.The story of the Beales and the condition of Grey Gardens was, in many ways, reminiscent of the kind of story once only associated with a crumbling Old South. Decades before the story of Big and Little Edie made headlines, William Faulkner’s fictionalized accounts of the region provided a stark contrast to the romantic South many Americans loved in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. His novel The Sound and the Fury and his short story “A Rose for Emily” were peopled with grotesque characters whose personal decline was a reflection on the region itself. It was through this binary lens of both the romantic and benighted South that Americans in the 1930s saw the region. Popular culture—particularly literature, film, and theater—informed what was, for all intents and purposes, these mythic perceptions. And yet, even as Faulkner rose to prominence, there was a very real story of southern degradation and decay that made national headlines in the fall of 1932—long before Americans learned of Big and Little Edie and the life they lived in the shadows of Grey Gardens.
That earlier story involved a feud fought between aging southern belles. There was murder, too, and a dilapidated antebellum mansion named Glenwood. The New York Times headline captured what made the case so compelling to readers: “Neighbor Pair Held in Natchez Murder, R. H. Dana and His Housekeeper Charged with Slaying Miss Merrill Over Goats. Three Members of Aristocratic Families, All 60 or More, Lived Lives as Recluses.” Here were Faulknerian characters come to life.
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Natchez, Mississippi, was by any definition a small town. Its population was little more than thirteen thousand the year the crime took place. Yet, it had once been one of the wealthiest towns in the nation, per capita, prior to the Civil War. The reason? Cotton and slavery. Both local southerners and northern investors from New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania sought out this small town that sits atop the bluffs of the Mississippi River, purchased large tracts of land in Louisiana and Mississippi, and built magnificent homes known as “suburban villas” in and around Natchez. They were directly involved in America’s domestic slave trade, which forcibly removed between 750,000 and one million enslaved people from the Upper South to work the plantations they bought in the Deep South. Solomon Northup, who documented his experience in 12 Years a Slave, was one of the many men, women, and children who were victimized by the greed of slave traders and planters.