Invitation Only : A Delta Debutante Meets the Second Reconstruction

In 1963, the Mississippi Delta was exploding with racial violence. And yet, the Delta Debutante Club (DDC) continued with its celebratory season of festivities including dances, teas, and luncheons while civil rights activists were harassed, beaten, jailed, and lynched. As a reluctant and naïve debutante during that turbulent year, Rosedale’s Beauvais S. McCaddon examines a very specific white and gendered heritage as a prerequisite to join this ultraexclusive strata.

Drawing on her own family’s history and extensive archive, McCaddon reconnects more than sixty years later with her debutante classmates and examines the women behind the formation of the DDC and its sister Bachelors Club. The seemingly harmless festivals and cloistered organizations function to maintain not only the separation of the races, but also a corseted white social hierarchy decaying from within.

McCaddon was born in 1944, two years after the DDC’s founding, in a line of grandnieces descending from Jefferson Davis. A nostalgia for lost plantations, venerated objects, and coveted portraits dominated her family’s everyday life. Using letters, diaries, photographs, and family documents, she also explores the white supremacy being enacted within the debutante rituals. As a transitional generation coming of age during Mississippi’s Second Reconstruction, the 1963 DDC class tries to find its way through raging alcoholism, Lost Cause hero worship, desiccated nostalgia, an organized Black resistance, and an incipient second-wave feminism to discover its own hard-fought awakenings. Beauvais McCaddon’s journey is laced with tragedy, second guessing, and the centrifugal pull of a land still celebrated as "the most Southern place on earth."