A Reckoning at the Big House
Regional historians, tour guides, and descendants of the enslaved weigh in on the future of plantation tourism in Louisiana
If you were to visit the Shadows-on-the-Teche when the National Trust for Historic Preservation first opened it as a museum in the 1960s, you likely would never hear the name Louisa Bryant.
You’d learn about Mary Weeks, the circa-1834 estate’s original owner and overseer, the widowed matriarch of the four generations who would come to define the property now frequently deemed the “Jewel of New Iberia.” The presence of the enslaved Black woman standing beside her, assisting in virtually every aspect of the family and sugar plantation’s operations, would have been obscured by stories of the house’s Tuscan columns, the Spanish moss draped above the lush Southern gardens, the experiences of Mary herself, and of all her descendants. The only significant acknowledgement of the twenty-four enslaved individuals who also lived on this property, and over 160 more at the family’s nearby sugar plantation at Grand Cote, would be found in the exterior public restrooms, built as replicas of the former slave quarters that once stood in the same spot. From 1961 until the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, those restrooms were segregated.
In the 1980s and ‘90s, you might have heard Louisa’s name, or even observed her portrait—pulled from the Weeks’ extensive family archive. “Mary’s housekeeper,” the tour guide would explain briefly, before turning to the Sheraton-style cherry bed.
By the time Bethany Jay, a philosophy doctoral candidate at Boston College, visited the site in 2006, the Trust had expressed a commitment to incorporate more nuanced presentations of slavery into the Shadows' tour. But Jay reported in her dissertation that her tour guide seemed obviously uncomfortable with the subject, frequently falling back on terms like “field hands,” “house servants,” or “workers” in the few instances that enslaved labor was mentioned at all. Of the two hundred people enslaved by the Weeks family, Louisa was the only one named, described as the “number one house servant,” who worked alongside Mary as her “peer”.
For over fifty years, Louisa’s place in history was reduced to that of a shadow, a footnote to the bright, grand stories of the Southern elite and all their gentility. But of course Louisa had her own story, too. In addition to having to care for Mary’s six children, she also cared for eight of her own—many of whom were taken away from her to live and work at the Weeks’ sugar plantation at Grand Cote. The strain of this labor brought illness and injury into her family, and she lost her son, Perry, because of it.
In the Shadows canon, much has been made of Mary’s experience at the end of the Civil War—having been left mostly alone on the property and forced to move upstairs as Union Troops occupied her mansion. But Louisa was there too, one of three enslaved women who stayed with the old matriarch. One can only wonder what went through her mind as she cared for her enslaver while the old world fell away just downstairs.
All it took was a closer look at the archives to see Louisa in the history of the Shadows. She’s always been there, waiting in between the lines, along with the stories of her daughter, Ann, who took a job as a sick nurse after the War—eventually earning enough to purchase land of her own on Center Street. And Ann’s son, Emperor, who worked for Mary’s great grandson William Weeks Hall throughout the twentieth century. Two families, generations later, still leaving their marks at the Shadows.
If you take a tour at the Shadows-on-the-Teche today, you’ll hear the stories of Louisa Bryant and her descendants, as well as those of many other enslaved individuals who existed beside them on the Weeks’ estate. The tour—rewritten by the Shadows’ recently-hired Senior Manager of Interpretation and Education Adam Foreman to fully incorporate stories of the enslaved and their descendants into every room of the house—is the culmination of ongoing reinterpretation initiatives facilitated by the National Trust in recent years.
“People are looking at museums, and they’re asking ‘Why are you still telling me the same old moonlight and magnolias story? There’s so much happening that you’re not engaging with.’ So, in order for museums, especially plantation museums like the Shadows, to remain relevant to the community, we have to change. We have to continue to consider our collection and how it is relevant.”
—Adam Foreman, Senior Manager of Interpretation and Education at the Shadows-on-the-Teche
This new approach to storytelling at the Shadows (and other National Trust properties) is reflective of a cultural shift at historic sites across the globe, as long-simmering demands for historical honesty—particularly regarding enslavement in America—reach a boiling point, spilling beyond the realm of historians and academics and firmly into the public discourse.
“People have been criticizing plantation tourism as an industry for a very long time,” said John Bardes, a professor of history at Louisiana State University (LSU) specializing in topics of enslavement and emancipation in the Antebellum South. “But now is a real period of reflection. It just seems that 2020 [and the Black Lives Matter protests spurred nationally by the murder of George Floyd were] a pivotal point where it really no longer became tenable.”
Isabelle Cossart, who has been leading personalized van tours to River Road plantations since 1979, has observed this change in real time. People have different expectations of plantation sites than they once did, she said. “It used to be, you know, they were a little offish when we talked about slavery. They were on vacation. It was like, ‘[Slavery’s] not a nice thing to talk about. It’s sad.’ And now, no. We must [talk about slavery]. They want the truth.”
“It all kind of came to a head in recent years,” said Foreman—whose first job, at age sixteen, was as a tour guide at Shadows-on-the-Teche. He went on to pursue a career in public history, working for a time as the Director of Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches. For his Masters at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette (ULL), he conducted research on instances of enslaved resistance—drawing extensively from the Shadows archives. This spring, when he learned of the opportunity to join the staff and “fundamentally change the way that we have these conversations,” he couldn’t pass it up.
“People are looking at museums,” he said, “and they’re asking ‘Why are you still telling me the same old moonlight and magnolias story? There’s so much happening that you’re not engaging with.’ So, in order for museums, especially plantation museums like the Shadows, to remain relevant to the community, we have to change. We have to continue to consider our collection and how it is relevant.”
The “Gone with the Wind” Effect
Over the last two hundred years, the word “plantation” has become imbued with intricate and contradictory sets of meaning. Once a functional, geographical term for large-scale agricultural sites typically fueled by enslaved labor, the word gained its more recent romantic associations as an aesthetic pinnacle of Southern heritage in the wake of the 1939 cultural phenomenon that was Gone with the Wind. The film’s influence on how such properties are presented and perceived as attractions is still readily evident at tourist sites to this day.
Almost a century removed from the context of that release, the nostalgia and romanticism of genteel Southern accents, piles of green curtains, hoop skirts, and mint juleps can appear on the surface as nothing more than innocent escapism. But it is no accident that the garden tours and 200-year-old furniture, Greek Revival architecture and smoking rooms have for so long been divorced from the economic system that made any of it possible.
“When people critique plantation weddings or criticize the way plantation tourism operates today, it’s not just because it is a version of history that omits most of the people who lived and worked there—though it is that, too,” said Bardes. “But it also is the fact that the people who, after the Civil War, thought long and hard about ‘What do we do next, now that the Confederacy has collapsed?’—they looked to novels, and later to film, and they looked to plantation tourism, and they thought very strategically about how these kinds of cultural motifs could be used to legitimize white supremacy.”
“It’s the cruel genius of the Lost Cause. You can celebrate one and ignore the other.”
— Aaron Sheehan-Dean, the chair of LSU’s History Department, scholar of the Civil War and Reconstruction
The release of Gone with the Wind, which remains to this day the highest-grossing film in history (when adjusted for inflation), coincided with the end of the last generation of Confederate soldiers’ lives—fostering a culture shaped by commemoration and a “resurgence of the myth that the agricultural world of the Confederacy was this pure, bygone thing outside of the modern era,” as described by Ian Beamish, a professor of history at ULL specializing in slavery and public history.
The phenomenon of opening Southern plantation sites to the public, and the philanthropic efforts associated with preserving them, emerged most fully-fledged around the 1930s in response to the national captivation inspired by Gone with the Wind, and as a way to fund upkeep of the mansions during the most difficult parts of the Great Depression. “And it all obviously gains popularity during the massive resistance and pushback to the Civil Rights Movement,” added Beamish.
Presented with a focus on the accoutrements of wealth and beauty, and the history of the white elites who enjoyed them, the fantasy of Southern aristocracy functioned simultaneously as an economic engine for struggling rural towns in the South and as a way to validate Lost Cause sympathies in a manner that was just subtle enough to be regarded as tasteful. None of it would have been so effective if honest representations of the violence and oppression experienced by thousands of individuals enslaved on these sites were included in the storytelling.
“It’s the cruel genius of the Lost Cause,” said Aaron Sheehan-Dean, the chair of LSU’s History Department, who specializes in Southern history, particularly regarding the Civil War and Reconstruction. “You can celebrate one and ignore the other.”
Searching For a Path Forward for Plantation Tourism
When it comes to plantation tourism in the American South today, there is ample evidence to suggest these influences achieved exactly what the Lost Cause architects hoped. The misrepresentation of what the Antebellum South actually looked like and how it functioned at plantation sites has contributed to a cultural amnesia that affects not only our collective understanding of the past, but also of the present.
“These stories aren’t being told, and because these stories aren’t being told, people don’t think they exist,” said Jordan Richardson, who until recently served as the Program Coordinator for Digital Collections for the Iberia African American Historical Society (IAAHS), which operates its Center for Research and Learning at the Shadows-on-the-Teche Visitor Center through a formal partnership with the National Trust. “People don’t think [the cruelties associated with slavery] happened. It creates dangerous gaps, where I guess people don’t think Black people did anything during this time period. Then, all of a sudden, that is the excuse as to why they’re so economically disadvantaged today. It’s important because a lot of the inequities and inequality that still exist today start there.”
Sheehan-Dean expands this even beyond plantations, articulating the reality of where our infrastructure comes from. “We need to understand it. Because so much of the landscape of Louisiana was built by enslaved people, we’re all the beneficiaries of that. The roads, the buildings, the shape of the river, all of that was done with enslaved labor,” he said. “It doesn’t matter when you arrived in Louisiana, you could have showed up yesterday, but you’re still living in a world that slavery created.”
Today, a combination of cultural influences such as Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project and the Black Lives Matter movement, politically-charged conversations around affirmative action and critical race theory, and the general ease of access to discourse and information allowed by our digital age, have made the word “plantation” and what it represents a hot button, culturally divisive topic of conversation, with increasingly negative connotations. As the public becomes more educated on patterns of historic erasure at these sites, they are not only demanding more comprehensive and inclusive histories be incorporated, they are also becoming more selective about the sites they patronize. For some, this involves researching which sites are doing the work to present enslaved histories before spending their dollars there. For others, this can equate to an effective cultural “cancellation” of any institution associated with the word “plantation”. “Post-2020, it’s certainly harder to conceive of people having plantation weddings,” said Bardes. “Seeing that as problematic is much more mainstream than it was fifteen years ago.”
And for Black Americans, what a “plantation” represents—as a place of unacknowledged generational trauma—is even more fraught, and has been for far longer than the contemporary discourse around the subject. “Family members left plantation spaces, and highly discouraged people from going back there,” said Richardson. “’There’s nothing back there for you,’ they’d say.”
“We've done so much damage. And when I say ‘we,’ I mean white Southerners, I mean public historians. There's a necessary corrective that has to happen. At the very least, if plantation museums are going to exist, they should exist to educate people about our nation's history, and not to entertain people and make them feel good about an imagined past.”
—Ashley Rogers, Executive Director at Whitney Plantation
The question of how to ethically make use of these sites going forward is not novel, but in these recent cultural shifts, it arises anew. Is a more honest, inclusive future for plantation tourism attainable?
Local historians seem to hope so, acknowledging that the already-in-place structure of the sites-as-tourist attractions might be put to use towards the presentation of more honest, complete histories, and as educational tools for filling in the gaps left gaping for so long.
“We've done so much damage,” said Ashley Rogers, Executive Director of Whitney Plantation. “And when I say ‘we,’ I mean white Southerners, I mean public historians. There's a necessary corrective that has to happen. At the very least, if plantation museums are going to exist, they should exist to educate people about our nation's history, and not to entertain people and make them feel good about an imagined past.”
Sheehan-Dean expressed that he believes Louisiana is well-positioned to be a leader in this revolution of public history. We’ve got the tourist magnet of New Orleans, he pointed out, and so many of these properties across the landscape. “We’ve got great people at the universities studying Louisiana slavery and Southern history right now,” he said. “And so, the resources are here for the historic sites to really draw on that. Not to mention that we have really good storytellers here. We’ve got the opportunity to turn the narrative around, to show other places how to do this.”
Even so, if you ask members of Louisiana’s African American descendant community—individuals whose ancestors were enslaved here—the prospects tend to be less optimistic. “I don’t think that the tourism industry, local or state level, are even close to getting where we need them to be in order to truly tell our story,” said Jo Banner, whose ancestors were enslaved at both Whitney and Laura Plantations on River Road. Jo and her twin sister Joy co-founded The Descendants Project with a mission to “eliminate the narrative violence of plantation tourism,” and to address the effects of slavery still impacting descendant communities today, like petrochemical plants moving onto former plantation land and disproportionately impacting residents of color with exposure to toxic chemicals. They conceived of the organization after working in local tourism, when they encountered their ancestors’ histories continually being misrepresented.
“The plantations, and the way that you treat them or don’t treat them are examples, or symbols, of how you think about Black people. So when we see these plantations, it is not that we're getting angry at the house, we're getting angry at white supremacy. And we're getting angry that nobody else sees the fact that we were brutalized, how nobody else can see the contributions.”
—Joy Banner, Co-Founder of the Descendants Project
“We weren't satisfied with the almost juvenile way that our history is being treated, being simplified, being gimmick-ified, being labeled as one thing, ‘plantation country,’ for example, said Jo. “An understanding of where the holes were inspired us to want to have more input into our own history and the way that it's being told.”
Joy expanded, explaining that what they and other descendants are seeking through these changes is acknowledgment and understanding of their ancestors’ place in history, and their contributions to this country. “The plantations, and the way that you treat them or don’t treat them are examples, or symbols, of how you think about Black people,” she said. “So when we see these plantations, it is not that we're getting angry at the house, we're getting angry at white supremacy. And we're getting angry that nobody else sees the fact that we were brutalized, how nobody else can see the contributions.”
Darryl Hambrick, who co-founded the River Road African American Museum at Tezcuco Plantation with his sister Kathe in 1994 and recently worked as a tour guide on Mississippi River cruises, said that he holds out hope that things will improve. “But when I see river boats loaded with people who don't look like me, traveling across oceans, traveling across skies, traveling from every part of the Earth to come and learn this history, and then the information that they're given [is] somewhat one-sided,” he said. “Then you look around the community and look at what's going on today, and it saddens me to understand that they make all that money again, on these plantation tours, and the people who made it possible are not included.”
Louisiana’s Plantation Sites Today
Changing the South’s, or even just Louisiana’s, perspectives on plantation tourism is no small undertaking. When the dominant narratives presented at plantation sites since Reconstruction have been romanticized biographies of slave owners, experts agree that it is not enough to simply add facts about slavery to preexisting tours. “It's not as simple as just saying, ‘Oh, well, now we’re going to talk about slavery,” said Ashley Rogers. “It's like, okay, you’ve got an entire staff of people who themselves are probably undereducated about it, are not emotionally prepared to do it well, don't know how to engage.”
As the Executive Director at Whitney Plantation—famous for its claim as “the only former plantation site in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on slavery” since its opening in 2014—Rogers places particular emphasis on ensuring her tour guides are well-trained and well-suited to the challenging work of interpreting the site’s history, inverting the traditional focus on enslavers and the material beauty of the big house to focus on the enslaved. After two to three days of learning about Whitney and slavery as a whole, guides are given a few weeks to complete required reading and prepare their script, which must be approved by Rogers and other staff.
By using slavery as a narrative starting point at Whitney Plantation, the River Road site has served as a radical model for what historically honest plantation tourism can look like—especially from the perspective of memorialization and grieving. One of the most famous stops on Whitney’s tour is its “Wall of Honor,” which memorializes those who were enslaved on these grounds and elsewhere by listing their names.
Another model for centering Black history at former plantation sites, conceived two decades before Whitney’s opening, is the River Road African American Museum. Though the institution has resided in Donaldsonville since 2003, it was founded at Tezcuco Plantation in 1994, directly challenging the question of who, and what, these sites should be for.
In 1999, co-founder Kathe Hambrick told New York newspaper Newsday that many questioned why an African American history museum would be located at a former plantation—to which she responded: “Well, where else?”
“The conversation hadn’t been had,” said Darryl Hambrick. “Once our museum opened at Tezcuco, I think the conversation began to happen in plantation country here along the River Road.”
“You have to have the research, the historian there to do the work. You’ve got to have community support. But then you also have got to have institutional support. If you don’t have a director, if you don’t have a board, if you don’t have the entire institution ready to make these changes—without all three of these things, your process doesn’t work.”
—Adam Foreman, Shadows-on-the-Teche
To that point—the same year, Laura Plantation opened its doors just down the road, offering a progressive-for-the-time tour that shared individualized stories of its enslaved population, drawn directly from Laura Duparc’s illuminating memoirs and other primary documents. “I had visited many different places along the river and in Mississippi, and [the tours at Laura] were actually telling the story of enslaved people here in a way you were not encountering elsewhere,” said Laura’s staff historian Katy Morlas Shannon. “Twenty years later, we’re seeing how the information we have has grown exponentially and how the story has evolved over time. And when I first came here, it was revolutionary. And now there's an expectation that those stories need to be told.”
Across Louisiana’s landscape of heritage tourism today, such comprehensive approaches to incorporating African American history into the “plantation tour” experience as Whitney’s or the more recent efforts at the Shadows-on-the-Teche stand on one end of a spectrum that still extends to sites holding tightly to their hoop skirts. But there are also the places in between—sites that have, for decades, been making more gradual efforts to incorporate representations of slavery into their programming.
As early as 1999, Magnolia Mound introduced its “Beyond the Big House” tour, focusing on the history of the eighty people enslaved onsite, and continues to offer programming that elevates Black stories, including its annual Black History Month celebration. In Natchitoches, Melrose Plantation’s unconventional history as a site of enslavement built and operated by Louis Metoyer, the son of a freedwoman—and its reputation as the home of Black folk artist Clementine Hunter—have always made it a uniquely resonant site at which to explore Black history. In 2013, Oak Alley opened its Slavery at Oak Alley exhibit—which centers on six re-constructed slave quarters with a corresponding tour. In 2020, historians at Evergreen Plantation—the most intact plantation property in the South, with twenty-two original slave cabins onsite (and which has been closed to tours since Hurricane Ida)—announced a database of primary source documents telling stories of the four hundred enslaved people who lived there. And earlier this year, Oakley House at Audubon Historic Site launched a series of thoughtful tours presented from the perspective of the house’s women, including the enslaved cook Silvia Freeman (read Alexandra Kennon's review of the "Women of Oakley" Tour, here).
[Read more about the artist Clementine Hunter in this story from 2018: "As Seen by Clementine"]
While important, and often worthy of public support, these efforts tend to fall short by their piecemeal nature and by relying on spatially segregated models that place stories of the enslaved as functional add-ons to the existing narratives at the heart of these sites’ programs—often presented as entirely optional to the experience of the site as a whole.
The work of dismantling the gilded nostalgia of the last century’s plantation tourism industry requires immense coordination and investment of time and funds—all at a high level of risk to, or total undoing of, the plantation’s existing economic model, which might rely on offering furniture-focused tours, resort-like accommodations, or a wedding venue.
Rogers said that part of the difficulty in standardizing any approach to this work is the great variety of organizational structures behind our region’s historical sites, which also makes collaboration between the various institutions a challenge. “Some are nonprofit, some are for-profit, some are for-profit-nonprofit partnerships, some are owned by cities, some are owned by the [state or federal] government,” she said. “That all impacts what they’re going to do, and how quickly they can change, and how much motivation they have to change. If there is a really strong profit directive to not changing, then a lot of them—they’re not going to.” Laura, Whitney, and the River Road African American Museum—all privately owned entities or 501c3 nonprofits—were founded with these ideals in place from the start. The sites that started out within the Gone with the Wind idyll face something much more challenging, the task of total restructuring.
“You have to have the research, the historian there to do the work,” said Foreman, noting the Shadows’ great benefit of the Trust’s support and experience in this field. “You’ve got to have community support. But then you also have got to have institutional support. If you don’t have a director, if you don’t have a board, if you don’t have the entire institution ready to make these changes—without all three of these things, your process doesn’t work.”
Confronting the Archive
One of the biggest obstacles cited by plantation sites attempting to more thoroughly incorporate the history of their enslaved populations is that of the limited archive. Because most enslaved individuals were unable to read or write, the written history has overwhelmingly been presented from the perspectives of an educated white elite.
However, sites that have invested time and resources into this particular field of research have proven that the stories are there, for those willing to look for them. “I’ve said it before: whenever people tell you ‘they can’t find information,’ they are lazy, because it is there,” said Sand Marmillion, cultural anthropologist and owner of Laura Plantation. “[The research conducted at Laura] has taken us decades. This is not for instant gratification.”
The lack of reportage cannot be blamed entirely on laziness, according to Dr. Mary Niall Mitchell, director of the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies and the Gordon Nick Mueller Professor in Public History at the University of New Orleans (UNO). “The notion that there was so little information available about enslaved people in itself was a sort of silencing of those histories. Because that information was there, people just had not looked for it,” she explained, citing the late Gwendolyn Midlo Hall as an example of what happens when researchers just bother to look. Hall’s database of over 100,000 enslaved Africans in Louisiana, published in 2000, was the result of her travels to rural courthouses around New Orleans, where she realized “that there was just this mass of information about people who had been presumed to be sort of lost to history,” said Mitchell.
Historians like Richardson, Bardes, Foreman, Shannon, Mitchell, and Rogers have reached into the thick of this growing field of research, which is becoming progressively more creative in its accumulation of sources and interpretations—piecing together these presumed-lost stories. “There are really sophisticated, rich studies, and super creative ways that scholars have been able to capture the experience of enslaved people—rereading through sources, using archaeology and reading Black folklore, and a whole range of other tools to fill out that world, and help us see, help us understand,” said Sheehan-Dean.
"There are so many stories that we can tell that people understand in a visceral human way, with just a few little documents that are left behind.”
—Ashley Rogers, Whitney Plantation
“We have to shift the way we think of what is historical, what are historical records,” asserted Kathryn Dungy, the Chair of the UNO History Department, who specializes in studying people of color in slave societies. “Everything that we do has a history, everything that we see has a history. It’s about asking the right questions of the materials.”
Dungy frequently turns to oral histories in her work, as well as census records, property records, judicial and church records, resources also utilized heavily by historians at Whitney, Laura, and Shadows-on-the-Teche plantations, as well as the River Road African American Museum. “The buildings themselves tell stories, how they’re made, what materials are being put into their construction, what kind of ephemera is found around those structures,” she said
For plantation sites in possession of an extensive onsite archive, like the Shadows-on-the-Teche or Laura, the possibilities for powerful storytelling can be inspiring: “I can tell you conversations that Louisa and Mary had,” said Foreman. “We can get so deep into their personal lives, that it makes our experience relatively unique.” The challenge with these sorts of archives is maintaining a consciousness of who is telling you the story. “We’re reading documents written by white folks from a white perspective, so when we read something about a person running away, that gives you a clue—you’re reading in between the lines, asking ‘why did he say it like that?’ ‘What is the language here that is being used?’” explained Foreman.
Even when the records themselves are limited, a basic understanding of the human experience can help us fill in the blanks about what was experienced at these sites. Rogers pointed out that Whitney Plantation, regarded as the most slavery-focused plantation site in Louisiana (and arguably, the South), works from an archive far more limited than most other plantation sites in the area. “There’s no, like, plantation journal, no diaries,” she said. “And we have managed to string together an entire narrative about the history of that place, using very few actual documents about people who were enslaved there…There are so many stories that we can tell that people understand in a visceral human way, with just a few little documents that are left behind.” She offered the example of Francoise, an enslaved woman who they learned—via census and succession records—gave birth to her first child when she was just thirteen years old. By the time she was twenty-three, she had five. And by age twenty-four, all five of Francoise's children were dead—three in the same year.
Rogers tells this story while standing in the slave cabins at Whitney. “What does it feel like for a place that small to suddenly be empty? You’re not hearing the sounds of your children . . . So, you have to not be afraid of those gaps, and willing to use some historical imagination. I have no idea what Francoise felt, but I can imagine what she felt to lose another child right after she had just lost one. I think a lot of people can understand that.”
Stories like these are, according to historians, the key to sincerely and impactfully confronting this history—granting students and visitors to historic sites the opportunity to activate their own empathic centers, and to connect history to the people who experienced it, opening them up to a more nuanced understanding of what happened here.
“That's where you get people to really understand,” said Mitchell. “There's a sort of necessity of telling individual stories that serves the larger understanding of the history of slavery.”
Today, more scholars and curators are finding it worthwhile to invest efforts and funding into this research—Mitchell’s Freedom on the Move database, which documents fugitives who escaped slavery, is one example, as is the Iberia African American Historical Society’s Center for Research and Learning, and the River Road African American Museum’s forthcoming genealogy research center, which will be housed at their restored Rosenwald school, and is anticipated to open in October 2023.
Listening to the Voices of Descendants
“Do we tear down these plantations? Destroy them? Do we burn them down? If that would change the history, yes, let's do it,” said Darryl Hambrick. “I think we need to leave them there and learn a lot more about that history.”
As for how to utilize these sites ethically, answers are evolving. Currently, the general consensus among historians working in this space, as well as descendants of formerly-enslaved people, is that a bare minimum of respect, memorialization, and acknowledgment should be built into any experience taking place on these historical sites. And that descendants of the enslaved need to be involved in the decision making.
“I do think it really starts with engaging descendant communities, I think it can't move forward until descendants have a voice in how these sites are presented. That's just critical, that has to be the path forward, is to give descendants a seat at the table for any kind of revision or reimagining of these sights,” said Mitchell. But the situation is “all hands on deck,” and the work cannot be left entirely to Black Americans. “Educators have to be at the table, historians have to be at the table. And all of those groups have to work together to make it successful.”
“I think what we want is to finally be able to jump, to cry, talk about it, scream, without anybody judging us for that. We want that freedom without people calling us angry. And we are angry, we deserve to be angry. So just letting us emote and feel instead of everyone trying to sanitize …When it comes down to this history and these sites, it is about us. It really is about us.” —Jo Banner, Co-Founder of The Descendants Project
This concept of diverse groups coming together to determine best practices and collaborate on solutions is not uncharted territory. In February 2018, the National Trust hosted the inaugural National Summit on Teaching Slavery at Montpelier, former President James Madison’s plantation in Vermont. Forty-nine descendants of the enslaved, scholars, educators, museum curators, and others attended with the goal “to develop a model for descendant engagement at historic sites that is rooted in best practices for historical research, community dialogue, exhibition design, and historic preservation.”
In attendance from Louisiana were Ashley Rogers and Joy Banner, who were involved in pinpointing problematic aspects of current plantation tours as well as developing a rubric for how to best engage descendant communities about the interpretations of slavery presented at historic sites and museums. The rubric is multifaceted—but based around three pillars: transparent, collaborative, and accessible research; building relationships between communities of descendants and the sites that interpret the history of enslavement; and criteria and tools for historical interpretation. This rubric is currently the guiding principle of the Shadow-on-the-Teche’s reinterpretation initiatives, which include establishing an advisory board made up of twelve members of the community, half of whom are descendants of people enslaved in the region. The Shadows’ partnership with the Iberia African American Historical Society will also be an invaluable resource as they further develop their tour and programming, with stories of Iberia Parish’s enslaved at the center.
“They are our descendant-led partner,” said Shadows-on-the-Teche’s new Executive Director John Warner Smith. “Not many sites have what we have. We’ve got this organization, whose mission is to actually celebrate the achievements of African Americans and to teach the history of African Americans of Iberia Parish. And they’re right upstairs.”
Jo Banner said, as a descendant, what she really wants is the ability to confront the complexities of trauma and history and inequality conjured by these spaces, and what they’ve stood for, directly. “I think what we want is to finally be able to jump, to cry, talk about it, scream, without anybody judging us for that,” she said. “We want that freedom without people calling us angry. And we are angry, we deserve to be angry. So just letting us emote and feel instead of everyone trying to sanitize …When it comes down to this history and these sites, it is about us. It really is about us.”
Richardson, whose work as a historian has been crucial to the IAAHS, says there is a particular expression of culture waiting for Black people in these spaces, if and when they choose to partake in it. “This is something that I think is a triumph of the character of Black people, that they made a way out of no way, as Black Americans have been doing since they’ve set foot in this country, because they had to,” he said. As a Black man working in this space, he said that the work can be heavy. “There are rough days, days that I see ancestors’ names listed like animals. But if no one does the work, none of these stories get told.”
Warner Smith, who is the first Black person to serve as Executive Director of a National Trust property where enslavement occured, described his new tenure at the Shadows as his “swan song”. Leading the way to a future in which the ancestors of Iberia Parish’s Black community are honored and studied with care and dignity, he thinks he could help change the world.
“I’ve got this somewhat ambitious plan, vision, goal,” he said. “We can literally build a better society by doing what we do.” By telling the stories of Louisa, and Ann, and Emperor, and Francoise, and the millions of others who were enslaved in America—“you build more empathy, bridge those gaps in differences in perception that people have. Ignorance gets torn down. It’s not just about preserving a historic site anymore. It’s about building a more just society.
“There’s a lot of work to be done,” he said. “But I believe we’ll get there.”