The previous day, we’d had to check out of our hotel in the
French quarter and look for new digs. The room rates skyrocket during the
weekend, and although we were interested in trying to stay another day, the
rate had doubled literally overnight, so discretion was the better part of
valour, so after returning from our tour of the lower 9th ward, we
picked up our car and headed out of town.
Finding a place to stay though was a little more
problematic; there seemed to be a festival on in N.O as well as the weekend,
and the first place we found, about 10 minutes out of town on the I-10, charged
$300 for a room per night! Onwards we went until we found a good room about 30
minutes out of town at a small settlement called La Place. Rooms were getting
hard to find as many of the industries and plants around the area and we were
lucky to get one for three nights. Based on the huge long line of traffic we
saw heading into N.O, getting out of town seemed to be a good idea.
So Saturday, and today our planned activity was to go out to
a plantation, the Whitney Plantation, for a tour. This tour is one with a
difference though, because it focuses on the slaves themselves and the
depredations they suffered under slavery, rather than the plantation owner’s
life. After a rather nice hotel breakfast (and lifting up the Hotel sofa chairs
as we liked them & wanted to try to see who they were made by) we jumped in
the car and headed off into another stunning and hot day. The plantation is
about 30 minutes away from our hotel here, and we crossed the mighty
Mississippi over a huge & high bridge just before we get to our
destination. There’s a lot of river traffic of large ships even this far up as
there’s a large refinery (probably sugar based on the number of sugar cane
fields around) so a high bridge is necessary to allow them to pass safely
under.
We arrived at the plantation site well ahead of time, so
looked around the gift shop before our tour started and picked up a couple of
things before we began.
The Whitney plantation dates from around 1752, and the
original owner, who’d emigrated from Germany with his mother and siblings,
planted indigo (for blue dye), but after it was passed onto the next
generation, the son changed the crop to sugar, and today there are still many
sugar cane fields around the house (interestingly our guide kept referring to
the area as the German coast).
The tour started at a large church on the grounds. This
church wasn’t original to the site, but was actually built in Paulina just down
the river on the opposite bank of the Mississippi. It was built just after the
Civil war, in 1870, and had its origins when freed blacks joined together to
form a society that could help out others, especially to bury their dead as
until then , slaves had just been thrown into the swamp when they died. Members
paid what they could and when they or a loved one died, the society took care
of the funeral expenses. The name of the society was the “Anti-Yoke”, and in
1870 the society bought land in Paulina, and built the church which was the
only church that African-Americans in the area could attend. The church
was soon named ‘Antioch’ church, which is a biblical reference, but close also
to “Anti-Yoke” to get past any resentment the local whites might take!
Inside the church, there are many statues of
African-American children, and these represent the children who were slaves at
the plantation when the Civil War ended and they were freed. Their oral
histories had actually been recorded just before America entered WW2, when as
part of Roosevelts public works program, an agency called the Federal Writers
Project was charged with recording the oral stories of everyday Americans. As
that work unfolded, it became apparent that there were many former slaves,
children or teenagers when the civil war ended, who were living testimony to
those times, and so their stories were fortunately recorded for posterity,
including those from Louisiana. Seeing these children dotted around the church
is a somewhat surreal and eerie experience as although they’re statues, they
have a lifelike quality to them.
After a quick introductory video we were then taken to the
Wall of Honour. This wall is a dedicated memorial to all those enslaved at
Whitney, and the information has been gleaned from original archives. Around
350 slaves have been identified from original records and the names cover both
sides of the wall. The names of the original slaves are first name only, mostly
a given European name, and if their original region in Africa was known, that
too is recorded.
What is interesting is that two slave names have
surnames. Victor Haydel & Marie Becnel, were the children of slave
women made pregnant by the owner and a visiting relative (the rape and sexual
abuse of both men and women was endemic, and any attempts at resistance harshly
punished).
However, their story has a positive outcome, as their
descendants would one day achieve public prominence with one becoming the mayor
of N.O for two terms.
Also on this wall is a recording of a bill of sale for 65
slaves which makes sobering reading. Those with skills commanded a higher price
and their individual description is one of property, not personage.
After this, we were taken to a large garden area where
several large memorials were placed. The garden is named after the woman who
has built the “Louisiana Slave Database”, Allées Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, where
this information originates from.
These memorials have the names of 107,000 slaves kept in the
Louisiana area and in addition to their names, there are also excerpts from the
various oral histories which make for sobering reading. They speak of a time
when these people were nothing more than chattels and property, having terrible
punishments inflicted on them, having families torn apart, and leading a life
of desperate hope. There were even places where women were kept to do nothing
more than have children whose only destiny was to be sold into slavery.
After spending several minutes reading these testimonies,
and feeling rather grim, we then went to a small memorial called the field of
angels. This pays tribute to the 2,200 children born into slavery who never
made it to their third birthday. The birth date of these children is not known,
but tellingly their date of death is, and this is because their owner could
claim insurance for the ‘loss of property’ after the child’s death.
Unbelievable.
We then started to visit some of the buildings, stating with
the slave cabins. These basic shacks housed several dozen people and were the
most basic of dwellings. There are no original cabins on the site, and the ones
we looked at were original but from other plantations.
Walking away from the cabins, we then were taken to a slave
jail. This is an iron box, much like a small shipping container, with three
narrow cells and doors which, incredibly, was built just after the civil war
ended as slaves were still being seen as property and being kept in cells like
this when being put up for auction.
Walking away from that, we then went towards the main house.
The original overseer’s house still stands on the grounds, though in the
process of restoration and not accessible to us as yet. The overseer was
responsible for management & discipline of the slaves, and the tales of
cruelty and violence we’d read about, and imparted by our guide, was hard to
hear. It had shades of the German treatment of the Jews before and during ww2,
the casual violence and dehumanisation towards these people only differing
slightly in that there was no planned genocide by the state.
There was a separate building used as a kitchen, and this
was apparently a mark of wealth and standing in the community. Good cooks were
prized but also trusted by their owners, so had somewhat of a slightly better
position (as much as an indentured person can be).
Finally we got to the main house itself, in very good
preserve. The difference in living standards is too great to even contemplate
and we could only look and wonder what life must have been like for both sides,
the Civil War ending a style of life taken for granted and, indeed, expected as
holy writ. How good much emancipation have felt to the slaves when it happened,
with the Jim Crow laws and segregation still to loom ahead.
So ended our tour, and with it came a fresh appreciation of
the horrors of slavery. The tour, despite its grim and dark nature, was
actually very good and one we would highly recommend. I think the discussion
around slavery is one many in the U.S still find hard to have, however I think
tours like this help to better understand their life and in doing so we can
appreciate why those racial divides are still hard to get past. Our guide also
reminded us that much of the U.S wealth was built on slave labour, where
millions worked without any wages or cost to their “employer”.
After this, it was late in the afternoon, so we decided not
to head into N.O as it would be getting late, so retreated to the hotel for a
quiet end to the afternoon.
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