Bay St. Louis, Miss. – The crown molding is hardly standard-issue for the Cavalier trailer the government provided after Hurricane Katrina. And certainly, neither is the Rolls-Royce parked on the slab out front.
Then again, there’s nothing standard about Charles Harry Gray, who lives here and is rebuilding even as a new hurricane season begins Thursday.
Nose pointing dramatically ceilingward, the ruddy-faced septuagenarian says in lilting patrician tones, “I’m not going to live in a house without crown molding, even if it does only have 7-foot ceilings. So that makes me uppity trailer trash.”
Katrina may have wiped away most of the antebellum homes – including Gray’s former mansion – that gave Mississippi’s Gulf Coast much of its charm. But as long as people like Gray remain, the place will always have character.
Gray traces his lineage back to the region’s beginnings. An ancestor was Tennessee’s first attorney general and signed Andrew Jackson’s law license. That man’s son, Clinch Marquis Gray, was surveyor general for the Mississippi Territory and signed the state’s first constitution in 1817.
“(He) was a 40-year-old bachelor down here in south Mississippi surveying, and his father in Tennessee sent him word, ‘Come home, son. I have a rich wife for you,”‘ Gray says. The wife, described in the family Bible as “a spinster lady of means,” arrived in Mississippi with 13 wagons of French furniture, 38 slaves “and a quantity of gold.”
“I don’t know how much ‘a quantity of gold’ is, but it’s whatever we’ve lived on for the last 200 years,” Gray, 72, says with a twinkle in his Gulf-blue eyes.
Gray was born 100 miles inland in Waynesboro but spent much of his life traveling the world. Along the way, he says he added to that inherited French furniture some notable artworks – old masters, a Picasso and other valuables.
“It was kind of the best unkept non-secret in south Mississippi that he had this stuff,” says coast historian Charles Sullivan.
For 33 years, Gray ran a restaurant in New Orleans – Corinne Dunbar’s – with his business and life partner, Jimmy Plauche. After Plauche became ill with mouth cancer, the pair moved to Bay St. Louis and into an 1840 Greek Revival mansion facing the Gulf, which Gray called Beachwood – a play on Beechwood, the ancestral manse in east Tennessee.
Gray hosted many gala events at Beachwood. The late historian Stephen Ambrose and his wife, Moira, would arrive on a bicycle built for two, dressed in full evening regalia.
After Plauche’s death, Gray sold Beachwood and bought a former Model T Ford plant around the corner, overlooking the bay. Its 16-foot ceilings, he reasoned, could accommodate the 7½-foot Baccarat crystal chandelier he had inherited. The 1911 building would have a library, a grand ballroom and more.
The renovation was about 80 percent done when Katrina hit.
Gray evacuated to Waynesboro at the request of his sister, Martha Love. When he returned, he was aghast at the destruction: The brick steps that led to the veranda at Beachwood drop off into a crater of red clay. The Model T plant, with its 20-inch- thick terra-cotta block walls, was flattened.
The center bowl and a finial were all he could find of the chandelier. Beneath the trailer lies the gold-leafed apron of a 1735 table.
Gray found a bronze bust of Plauche and the chest containing his ashes. Most of the paintings are lost. A nephew picked up and tossed away an etching that Gray swears is a Rembrandt self-portrait – before Gray saved it. It is with a restorer.
Digging behind his home, Gray managed to salvage eight of the 12 place settings of fine china. Plates with chips he smashed.
“Tennessee Williams, whom I knew, wrote in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’: ‘Ruined finery is all I’ve got left,”‘ he says, affecting a Blanche DuBois hauteur. “I was determined my finery was not going to be ruined.”
The Rolls was in storage elsewhere and was undamaged.
Love is storing some of her brother’s things.
“He has to come up here every once in a while to look at and feel all of his treasures,” she says. “It gives him the strength to go on.”
Because Gray’s house was still under construction, the contents were not insured. But he is rebuilding on the factory site.
Sullivan is glad to hear it.
“For him to stay,” he says, “that’s a connection between the past and our future that I hope is better than the present.”
“Things have always worked for me. I have great faith that they will again,” Gray says.
