Friday: Whitney Plantation

As sometimes happens, the vacation blog posts didn’t quite get finished all at once. So let’s go back to Louisiana to finish up our trip…

On Friday, we rented a car and drove about an hour out of New Orleans to Wallace, Louisiana, where the Whitney Plantation is located. You can see more about it on the official website here: http://www.whitneyplantation.com/, and also the review that piqued our interest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/magazine/building-the-first-slave-museum-in-america.html?_r=0. All around this area, rich land with good access to shipping along the Mississippi River, are plantations that thrived pre-Civil War because of the labor of enslaved people. They are now historic places to visit, but seeing as learning more about the history of enslaved people hasn’t been a real crowd-pleaser, they tend to focus on the style, Gone with the Wind culture and all that of the big houses. (The big house is the grand house where the land owners / planters lived.) But the creator of the Whitney Plantation did something very different, he decided to create a museum / experience that would tell the story from the point of view of the enslaved people. It was extremely powerful and we were all really glad we visited. There are more (and better!) photos on the links above, but here are a few that we took.

The tour started with a short video in the restored church. The historian who led the tour talked about how little we know about enslaved people from Africa because the main source of stories that we have to go on are from WPA projects in the 1930s and 40s, when federally employed writers were dispatched across the US to interview adults who had been born into slavery and could talk about what they experienced. The stories are really incredible insights into what went on, but it only tells about one time period in one country, whereas the African slave trade was huge both in terms of duration and geography. So with that in mind, we went outside to see a memorial to all of the enslaved people in Louisiana in 1815, before a big movement to bring in enslaved peoples from Virginia.

The lists names, interspersed with stories from the WPA project mentioned above. Like the Vietnam Veterans memorial in Washington, DC, the reflective surface brings the viewer into the piece. As you may have noticed, I’m using the term that we learned at the Whitney Plantation, enslaved peoples, rather than slaves. The historians there used this term throughout the tour. It’s a very clear term.

Another memorial there listed names of children who lived on the Habitation Haydel, and birth and death dates, and mothers’ names when recorded.

Sugar cane was the main crop in that region, and it’s a really labor-intensive and brutal agricultural product to produce. These cauldrons weren’t original to the Habitation Haydel, the original name of this plantation, but they are typical of what would be used to heat and process the sugar cane.

Anyway, for more I suggest you visit the web sites listed above. And go visit the Whitney Plantation next time you’re in Louisiana, and spread the word to anyone who is planning a visit!