Beauvoir

Looking to the left as Momma Cuandito and I drove east along the Gulf Coast on scenic Mississippi Highway 90, we saw mile after mile of vast lawns behind which beautiful mansions once stood.  Before Hurricane Katrina's landfall on August 28-29, 2005, the wealthy residents of those manors could peer from their front windows and porches across the road to the south, and look out beyond the strand to the gulf.  The devastation of Katrina changed all that.  In the ten years which have elapsed, only a very small minority of land owners have chosen to rebuild.  One reason might be their lack of insurance coverage before the storm.  More likely, many simply do not want to take the gamble that another storm of Katrina's magnitude will not occur in the future.  Even for those inclined to roll the dice, the exorbitant premiums which insurers would charge to provide coverage for new dwellings on those vulnerable real estate parcels could be prohibitive.  It is prudent not to dare Mother Nature.

Miraculously, Beauvoir withstood the wind and water surges of Katrina, even though it, too, is situated on 90.  Beauvoir is the name of the estate in Biloxi where Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War, lived with his wife and children in the last eleven years of his life.  Before the war began, Davis was a lieutenant in the United States Army, the Secretary Of War under President Franklin Pierce, and a congressman and senator from Mississippi.  Although he was a slave owner and politically championed what he considered to be individual states' rights, he argued against the secession of the thirteen confederate states from the Union.  His powers of persuasion were inadequate, however, and when the rebels fired shots at Fort Sumpter, South Carolina, the War Between The States was on.

Davis' legacy has not been granted nearly the same level of respect and admiration by historians as has the South's highest ranking military officer, General Robert E. Lee.  As a leader of men and a strategist, Lee's description is usually rendered with glowing terms by Civil War buffs.  Davis, on the other hand, is judged to have been an ineffective president, probably the wrong man for the job.  Some of the knocks against him include the failure to address the economic problems of the Confederacy, his off-putting personality, his tendency to promote friends over better qualified candidates for important positions, and his meddling in the minutia of military affairs.  He knew how to run a successful political campaign, but once elected, was not a good deal maker.

In any event, Davis is honored with what is labeled as a "presidential library," on the same grounds as Beauvoir.  It is not as grandiose as libraries honoring more modern day US presidents, such as Kennedy (Boston), Nixon (Yorba Linda, California) and LBJ (Austin).  Nevertheless, it is a must-see for anyone interested in learning more about the Civil War and the man who went from American statesman to renegade executive.  We spent less than a full hour browsing the modest library filled with admirable art and unique artifacts, then scampered on foot a hundred yards in the chilly Magnolia State air over to the Davis house, where a tour awaited us.

I have to admit that when I first walked into Beavoir, I figured the tour would take about twenty minutes, tops.  The living quarters is comprised of only four rooms in the interior of the one-story house, and four smaller rooms built on the large back porch.  A long commons area separates the two interior bedrooms on the east side from the parlor and smoking lounge on the west.  The four "porch rooms" functioned as "his" and "her" bedrooms, a tiny dining room for the children, and a larger dining room for the adults.  The kids were relegated to the smaller room until about age fourteen, when they may have been deemed to have acquired manners adequate to merit admission to dine with their parents in the main dining room.

 

My estimate of ten minutes was way off, thanks to the wonderful docent who hosted us, Jim Kalis.  Sporting a trimmed silver beard and wearing a black brimmed hat, a crisp white shirt and a string tie, Jim looked like he could have been a plantation owner straight out of an antebellum movie.  He told us he was a seventy-five year old grandfather, originally from Washington state.  Prior to his gig at Beauvoir he was a guide at other points of interest, mostly in the South.  Following Katrina he became deeply involved in the restoration and maintenance of Beauvoir.  Like many docents, he had a flair for spinning some interesting humorous yarns about the place.  What follows are a few things we learned from Jim.

 

Typical of almost all other mansions built in the mid-nineteenth century, Beauvoir's kitchen was housed in a separate building, located about fifty feet behind the main dwelling.  The two causes for such positioning were concern for fires and oppressive heat, both emanating from the kitchen.  A path dubbed the "whistle walk" connected the two structures.  At meal time, slaves and servants, depending on the period of history, transported the prepared food from the kitchen to the house.  According to Jim, said transporters were instructed to whistle as they were moving, so that the overseer could know that the subordinant wasn't eating any food on the way.  "It's pretty hard to whistle with a pork chop in your mouth," said Jim.

 

As the father of two daughters, just like Davis, I was amused by the curved mirror situated on the wall between the front parlor and the adjacent rear smoking lounge.  The southerners refer to it as a "chaperone's mirror."  When a gentleman came to call on one of the Davis daughters, propriety demanded that they not be left entirely alone.  Accordingly, the young couple would sit in the front parlor, while a chaperone could keep an eye on things from her vantage point in the back lounge by looking at the mirror.  The curvature enabled the chaperone to see what was going on in the parlor without actually being in the parlor.  How ingenious!  Jim did not mention if the  phrase "keep four on the floor" was used in that era.

 

Speaking of "curves," it is noteworthy that in the nineteenth century, homeowners expended an enormous amount of effort putting on the dog.  Impressing house visitors was important (maybe because the owners had no fancy cars to park in their driveways), so much so that a little chicanery was often utilized.  For example, the main commons area of Beauvoir has curved corners where the walls and the ceiling come together.  This was a sign of architectural craftsmanship found only in the manors of the wealthy.  The builders of Beauvoir took it a step further by painting the trim on the ceiling of some other rooms to make the corners appear to be curved -- an optical illusion, if you will -- even though the walls and ceiling of those rooms actually met at straight ninety degree angles.

 

Along the same lines, the Beauvoir doors were made of cypress, a relatively inexpensive wood.  But for the sake of appearances, the Davis family (and others before and after them) had the doors varnished, and painted grain lines into the wood to give the appearance of oak, a more valuable material than cypress.  The song "You're So Vain" comes to mind.

 

Fittingly, Jim shared this story with us near the end of our tour.  Jefferson Davis was the tenth of ten children.  Although his middle initial was "F," he rarely used it.  After some reporters failed to get an honest response from Davis to reveal his middle name, they went to his mother for the answer.  She told them that while she was pregnant with Jeff she realized he would be the last of her brood.  Therefore, she explained, the "F" stood for "Finis."