new century clattered to life like a great steam engine, Bienville joined a cotton boom that brought spectacular wealth to the Lower Mississippi Valley, all on the backs of African slaves, who had proved easier to control than enslaved Indians, who knew the land better than their putative masters and had homes to run to when they managed to escape. The moonlight-and-magnolia dream of the Anglophile whites—and the nightmare of the black Africans—lasted only sixty years. By 1863, Ulysses Grant and an army of seventy thousand Yankees were camped four miles outside Bienville, aiming to conquer Vicksburg, forty miles to the north. Bienville waited in schizophrenic expectation, its anxious planters hoping to surrender, its workingmen and planters’ sons ready to fight to the last man.
Bienville’s Civil War history usually fills a bloody chapter in books on the Vicksburg campaign. All that matters now is that on June 7, 1863, General Grant decided that, despite fierce Confederate resistance that had originated there, Bienville—like Port Gibson to the east—would not burn. Grant’s decision ensured the survival of more than fifty antebellum homes, many mansions that would draw enough tourists during the Great Depression to bring the city back from the dead. The history of the years that followed was as troubled as that in the rest of the South, and it ensured that by the 1960s a crisis would come. Bienville weathered those racial troubles better than most of its neighbors, but the deepest issues were never fully addressed, setting the stage for a reckoning that by 2018 still has not come.
The reason it has not bears a name: the Bienville Poker Club.
When I was a boy, I sometimes heard references to a “poker club,” most often when I was visiting Paul Matheson’s house. Back then, I thought the term referred to a weekly card game Paul’s dad played in sometimes. At that age, I couldn’t have imagined its true nature or function, and my father certainly never talked about it. Dad had to have known about it, of course, for the Bienville Poker Club was founded seventy years before he was born and had exerted profound influence over this area ever since. But though my father published many scathing editorials about Bienville politics, he never once wrote about the Poker Club as a political force. To this day, I’m not sure why.
Thanks to the Poker Club, while the other Mississippi River towns withered during the final quarter of the twentieth century, Bienville continued to grow. Up in the Delta, there are drug dealers living in the mansions of former cotton planters. In Natchez, forty miles downstream, commercial real estate values have been eroding for two decades. But in Bienville business is on the march. Quite a few observers have speculated about the reasons for this. Some tout the foresight of Bienville’s leaders. Others point to economic diversification. One particularly naïve journalist wrote a piece about Bienville’s “uniquely congenial” race relations and cribbed from Atlanta’s old pitch as being “the city too busy to hate.”
All that is bullshit.
The Bienville Poker Club was founded shortly after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. The original members—most of whom were ancestors of the twelve present members—created the shadow organization to defend themselves against the depredations of the “carpetbaggers” who swarmed south like boll weevils to plunder what remained of the Confederacy. Since the Yankees saw Southern gentlemen as habitual gamblers who loved wasting time indulging in whiskey and cigars away from their family homes, nightly poker games provided credible cover for more subversive activities. While men in other towns formed parties of night riders that would soon become the Ku Klux Klan, the pragmatic businessmen of Bienville employed more Machiavellian methods of resistance. Rather than fight under an ideological banner of violence, they worked relentlessly to keep their hands on every lever of power still within reach. They collaborated with the Yankees when necessary, but betrayed them when they could. They employed cardsharps, whores, and criminals to control the carpetbaggers and Negro politicians of the new inverted world, and by the Compromise of 1877—which mandated the removal of the federal troops that enforced Reconstruction laws—the Poker Club had most of the town’s institutions firmly in its hands.
It is testament to the vision of those men that 153 years later, I stand in the shadow of a bluff that still supports their mansions, witnessing their descendants consummating what the Wall Street Journal dubbed the “Mississippi Miracle.” Down in front of the Azure Dragon tent, the governor of Mississippi has introduced a Chinese man in a tailored suit. He takes the microphone with Bienville’s mayor at his side, a local sidekick grinning like an organ-grinder’s monkey. The company man has a Chinese accent, but his vocabulary is better than the mayor’s. When the mayor leans out and calls the aldermen and supervisors forward to the line of shovels to play out their charade for the cameras, I shift my gaze to the Prime Shot tent, where most current members of the Bienville Poker Club stand watching, expressions of mild amusement on their faces.
The 2018 iteration of the Poker Club isn’t nearly so rich as the original group prior to the Civil War, when they ranked only behind New York, Philadelphia, and Natchez in banked millions. But the war gutted those fortunes, and that kind of damage takes a long time to make up. Today’s club controls something north of a billion dollars among the twelve members. That’s a long way from New York rich, but in this corner of Mississippi, it’s enough to mold the shape of life for all.
Blake Donnelly, the oilman, is worth more than $200 million. Claude Buckman, the banker, is in the same league. Donnelly’s in his mid-seventies, though, and Buckman’s over eighty. Max Matheson made his fortune in timber, and together he and Paul run a huge lumber mill north of town, plus the Matheson Wood Treatment plant near the sandbar to the south. They also manage hundreds of thousands of acres of timber all over the state. I’m not sure how much Wyatt Cash is worth. I do know he owns one river island outright, which he operates as an exclusive hunting camp—one frequented by NFL players and college coaches, most from the SEC.
Beau Holland, the asshole I met down on the road with Tommy Russo, is the hungry jackal among the lions of the club. From what Jet tells me, Holland has used inside information to exploit every aspect of the new paper mill, bridge, and interstate. Until last year, Beau had a junior partner named Dave Cowart working for him as a contractor. Cowart built most of Belle Rose and Beau Chene, the two residential developments at the eastern edge of the county. But last year, Jet went after Cowart with a lawsuit alleging rigged bidding on a project partly funded by federal dollars. As a result, Cowart and one alderman ended up doing time in federal prison. This did not endear Jet to the remaining club members, but since she’s Max Matheson’s daughter-in-law, there was little they could do except bitch on the golf course.
The other members span the professions. Tommy Russo has his casino. Arthur Pine handles the legal paper. Warren Lacey is a plastic surgeon and nursing home king whom Jet nearly sent to jail over bribery of state officials. (Dr. Lacey ended up with a suspended sentence and a one-year suspension of his medical license. He’d happily inject Jet with a lethal drug cocktail if he could.) Then there’s U.S. senator Avery Sumner, the former circuit judge whom the Poker Club somehow got appointed to the seat recently vacated by the senior senator from Mississippi for health reasons. Sumner flew in for today’s event on a CitationJet owned by Wyatt Cash’s company. The jet’s livery features a large circular view through a riflescope, with buck antlers centered in the reticle. The other three members of the club I know little about, but they surely fulfill their function of greasing the wheels of commerce while pocketing whatever they can skim from every transaction or building project.
What must those men feel as they watch the local elected officials—nine whites and four blacks—lift the gold shovels from the stand and spade them into the pre-softened earth? The aldermen and supervisors are mugging for the cameras now, trying to look like Leland Stanford at the golden spike ceremony in 1869. A paper mill is no transcontinental railroad, but any project that brings a new interstate to a county containing only thirty-six thousand people comes pretty close to salvation.
When the photographers stop snapping pictures, the ceremony is over. The crowd disperses quickly, and crews miraculously appear to break down the tents. As the governor’s motorcade roars up Port
