I’ve visited quite a number of plantations over the past 50 years—enough of them to seldom want to see another because they usually tell the tale of a gracious life in another era, and seldom touch on the lives of those who made that wealth possible.
But Whitney Plantation, some 50 miles upriver from New Orleans, is a different story altogether: it tells the story from the point-of-view of the hundreds of men, women an children who were forced to work there over those years. It’s blunt about it: All of its advertising says plainly “Whitney Plantation: The Story of Slavery.”
The umbrellas were for shade from the sun, not rain…
We drove out from New Orleans to visit it on a day when the official temperatures were over 100 in the shade, and worse under the sun. It gave us a little extra sense of how hard it would be to be working all day, not walking for a couple of hours, and without the pleasant mist lines that we passed through at points along the walk.
The Whitney is not a self-guiding tour; there are signs and labels, but there’s much too much to understand that way, so we signed up for a two-hour tour. Our guide, above, was Ali, a perhaps not-as-young-as-he-looks man whose family has lived in the area for many generations. That’s true for numbers of the museum staff; the young woman at the cashier’s desk can trace her family in the area to the 1730s.
As the grandchild of free immigrants just past 100 years ago, I have a hard time imagining knowing nearly 300 years of family history, and knowing that half of that was in slavery. But part of the Whitney’s mission is to remind us of that, and that hundreds of thousands, now unremembered, were not units, but people with names and stories of their own.
We’re reminded of that in a number of ways, starting with the history wall at the entrance of the museum, describing the development and spread of slavery, not only here but elsewhere. Some of it is familiar, and some is not. There’s a lot of truth to what Ali tells our group as we start off: “As we walk, you’ll learn more about slavery in two hours than you ever learned in all your years in school.”
Our first stop was at the Antioch Baptist Church, moved to the plantation from nearby Paulina, LA when its congregation built a new church in 1999. Founded in 1868 by ex-slaves, its name refers not only to the Biblical Antioch, but to its foundation by the Anti-Yoke society; the ex-slaves liked the double meaning.
The Children of the Whitney (Whitney Plantation photo)
Inside the church, as in a number of other places, there are statues of slave children, meant to remind us not so much of the inhumanity of slavery but of the humanity and hopes of the children at emancipation. They’re by sculptor Woodrow Nash, and throughout, they are paired with quotations from the 1930s project in which folklorist Alan Lomax recorded the words of elderly ex-slaves. Quotations and images are also on the tags visitors wear on the tour.
Moving on from the church, we came to a long wall, faced with plaques, bearing the names of all the known slaves of what was originally the Haydel Plantation, started in the 1730s by immigrants from Germany, who quickly blended into their new ‘French’ surroundings. The names and descriptions reflect that these slaves were captured in Africa and brought here; on the other side are the names of slaves born here, often by intentional for-profit breeding.
The plantatation is in lowlands on the banks of the Mississippi River; in the beginning, the land was marshier than it is now, and the first crop was indigo, used to produce blue dye, a luxury item at the time. The experience and skills to grow it did not exist in Europe, so people from areas in Africa where it was grown were captured and enslaved for their knowledge and labor.
Once the plantation was well-established, the owners transitioned to the crop that is still grown on the land today: sugarcane. Sugar is a demanding crop, requiring a lot of labor to grow, harvest and process. The plants grow 6 to 15 feet high, and have sharp-edged leaves that are usually burned off before harvest. Haydel Plantation was a big and profitable producer, with three mills that also produced for neighbors—and needed many slaves. The rows of cauldrons lying in rows were part of the complex process in which the sugar moved from larger to smaller.
After the Civil War, the plantation was sold to a New York investor named Johnson, who named it Whitney after his grandson, Harry Whitney. It continued, through several changes of ownership, as a profitable sugar plantation with sharecroppers and contract laborers instead of slaves. By 1998, the land was owned by one of the petrochemical plants that line miles of the Mississippi in the area, and they had little use for this part.
The Field of Angels commemorates at least 2,2200 slave children who died in infancy in Louisiana…those whose names were recorded.
In 1998, John Cummings, a wealthy New Orleans lawyer with a history of social justice cases as well, took 250 of the original 1700 acres off their hands, and began pouring his money, as much as $7 million, into rehabilitating and moving buildings, creating the memorials, including the Field of Angels, above, and planning and shaping the narration. By late 2014, the site was ready to open as the only museum in the U.S. dedicated to the story of slavery. For an interesting sense of John Cummings, click HERE.
Another of the memorial projects has turned a cane field into a register of names of over 100,000 people held in slavery in Louisiana up to 1820. It’s based on research by Prof. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall of Rutgers University; in the future, more years and more names will be added.
The slave quarters on the Whitney Plantation are only a small sample, and have been moved from their original location: When the estate was at its fullest size, the quarters were kept far away and out of sight of the owner’s mansion.
Barracks might be a better word to describe them than cabins. They are not large, but were crowded with people. They were definitely NOT family dwellings; to the slave-owner, families did not make sense. Children lived with their mothers to age 12; then they were adults and either lived with others doing the same work or might be sold away. At the time of the Civil War, there were 22 of these double-sided cabins.
The separate kitchen, built nearer the mansion, provided fine meals for the owners and basic subsistence for the slaves. No cooking in the slave cabins: they were built of cedar, with all parts carefully fitted (no nails or other metal that could become weapons) and too valuable to risk burning in kitchen accidents.
Photo above by Z28Scrambler/Wikimedia
Only near the end of the tour do we approach the home of the owners, a building that’s considered to be one of the gems of French Creole architecture. And while we do look at the fine furnishings, and the clever ventilation arrangements, the focus is still on the enslaved people who served the masters in it, and in some cases the story of the descendants of those slaves, including the first black mayor of New Orleans.
But perhaps the most poignant, and disturbing, story of the house, and perhaps of the day, was that of the young girl who was purchased for the daughter of the owner as a companion and playmate—almost, you might say in a macabre way, a living doll. And when the daughter grew older and had white playmates and responsibilities, the slave girl was sent away. Discarded.
Back at the Visitor Center, which is fully stocked with books and other material on slavery as well as gifts and souvenirs, a final question for visitors: What did the tour mean to you? Desks and Post-Its are provided for the answers. A few minutes reading the sometimes lengthy and heartfelt notes answers the question: it means a lot.
VISITING WHITNEY PLANTATATION
Tickets are available in advance from the Whitney website. They’re also sold on-site, but may sell out, so advance is better. Prices are $22, $17 for students, senior or military, and $10 for 12 and under. It’s about an hour drive from N.O. The Whitney website, by the way, is packed with other interesting information.
It’s also possible to visit as part of a tour; tours are available from New Orleans with several companies, including GrayLine Tours New Orleans, Legendary Tours and Tours by Isabelle
There’s no food available at the Whitney except for a few snack vending machines, but if you turn west out of the plantation, and continue about 10 miles on to Vacherie, LA, you’ll find B&C Seafood Market and Cajun Restaurant, which is exactly what its name implies. It’s inexpensive, friendly and delicious (and to look at the stars on Yelp, etc. we weren’t the only ones to think so!)
