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