A Difficult History

When the Whitney Plantation slavery museum opened last year, it was the first museum in the state dedicated solely to an unflinching and accurate representation of the experience of enslaved African Americans. In this single, singular mission, it distinguishes itself from other interpretive plantation sites in the region, which range from offering a total focus on the history of the occupants of the big house and the accompanying hoop-skirted romanticism of the antebellum South to properties that, to varying degrees, acknowledge, discuss, and mourn the roles of enslaved individuals on a plantation. Does Whitney’s frank, emotionally gripping approach represent a vanguard moment in our history, a moment when we are finally ready to grapple with an uncomfortable past?

While acknowledging the efforts made thus far at places like Laura Plantation, Whitney’s unapologetic, hard-eyed presentation of slavery is so far beyond what has gone before that it seems at the front lines of a shift in how we grapple with a gruesome history. The property, like most of the River Road plantations, sits right on the river, a testament to the indispensability of that watery highway. Established by a family of German immigrants in 1752, the plantation grew indigo before switching to sugar in the early 1800s. After the Civil War, it changed hands a number of times before being purchased by New Orleans attorney John Cummings. Cummings was not available for an interview, but in a recent Washington Post editorial, he writes that he initially bought the land, crowned with an elegant Spanish Creole mansion, as an investment. As he looked into the history of the property and as he realized that no American museum was devoted solely to remembering slavery, he decided to commemorate those who had lived in bondage on this land. Fifteen years of planning, renovation, and research followed; and the museum, by now a labor of love and that even stronger goad, duty, opened in December of 2014.

From the road, the property is unremarkable—the terrain is bedsheet-flat, lined by a picket fence, and you park in a dusty gravel lot. Like that of a welterweight, the museum’s striking force is concealed at first glance. The lobby features a bookstore filled with works about the slave experience and by black authors, along with a mural of the famous “slave door” at Goree Island in today’s Senegal and an exhibit contextualizing American slavery within the broader histories of slavery in the Americas and in the world. Romans enslaved everyone, medieval Italians bought house servants captured in the Ukraine (“slave” is ultimately derived from “Slav”), and Ottoman elites snapped up shipwrecked Christians. The greatest source, though, was Africa, ravaged in the west by Europeans and in the east by Arab slavers. Of the Africans who crossed the Atlantic, under a fifth came to the United States or its predecessor colonies: most of them would be worked to death in the sugar-and-rum-producing islands of the Caribbean or sent to the plantations hacked out of the Brazilian forests.

Iversen came to the United States to work as a jazz vocalist, reversing her mother’s journey. When training as a tour guide, her other career, she passed Whitney and heard the woman training her say, “Oh, that’s where they’re going to tell the back-of-house story.” Iversen knew she had to get involved.

Early in the tour, Iversen made a point of explaining her preference, which I’d heard mentioned before, for referring to slaves as “the enslaved,” distinguishing slavery as something that happened to them, not what they were. While I saw her point, there was something about the phrase that grated on me. It had the rolling, sideways sound of a euphemism, and I didn’t like the idea of softening the blow. “Slave” is a hard-edged slap of a word, like “rape” and “hate,” and it sounds like what it means. Of course, a euphemism in the right hands can be as deadly as a stiletto. Iversen showed us an inventory of the enslaved people on the property and pointed out the descriptive terms used: “Like ‘mulatto,’ here. That’s what they would have called me. It means ‘mule.’” Of a nine-year-old girl: “She might have been purchased as company for a man.” Every adult winced—“company.” What a thing to call it.

We visited the Place des Anges, a small and simple memorial plaza dedicated to the children and infants who had died in slavery, then proceeded to the slave cabins, cramped and uninsulated buildings that warehoused four to five people per small room. The abuses of slavery are so blatant that they can overshadow these smaller indignities, but in the squalid shack it’s clear that being a slave meant losing, among everything else, the right to privacy. They were born, lived, made love, grieved, and died under the gazed of their peers and their oppressors.

Statues of children, made of dark clay—like terracotta, but darker to reflect the skin color of those depicted—dot the grounds and line the tour route. The work of a sculptor named Woodrow Nash, each of these statues represents an actual child who lived and worked on the plantation. They are a raw and unrepentant appeal to emotion: to protect children is among the few noble human instincts, and the slavemasters were as truly exploiters of children as the people we now call “predators.” It’s easy to be sad about the fate of the slaves, but having this physical and visceral reminder that some of them were children inspires a hot, startling anger.

In fact, it is Whitney’s ability to make the circumstances of slavery at all knowable, its ability to help the observer place him or herself in these physical spaces under these circumstances, that lends the experience such visceral power. Walking around the iron cages that held captured runaways, one can see that they were big enough that, with caution, someone enclosed could avoid burning himself on the sides; but they must have been ovens, and they sat near the slave cabins. Empty or occupied, they would have been seen every day by the enslaved, who would pass them on their way to and from their assigned tasks. Even from several feet away, the absorbed summer heat radiated from them. The sides were thick, and that much iron could, one imagines, stay hot through the night for months in summer. Iversen explained, “The South held the slaves, but the North built the ships. The North bought the cotton. The North forged the chains. The North made these cages.” When people are held in cages in the sun for the sin of wanting to breathe free, there’s enough blame for everyone.

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Culturally, Iversen is very much a product of her country, but she always heard about the South. “I was born in a place where black people were treated like kings and queens because so many of the ones who came there were the great jazz performers; but I also heard that at night, after shows, they would weep over the South and what they remembered and would return to.”

The memories, and the subsequent realities, are still painful. The slave history of the South is, in general, a topic that is decidedly taboo. It’s so big and such an integral part of the landscape; yet, like money or politics, it’s a topic one doesn’t discuss with strangers—even among people who wrestle with its legacy in the course of their careers. When I went looking for individuals—both black and white and representing various fields connected to history, historical preservation, or research—I found surprisingly few willing to speak to me on the topic. Ultimately, I came to see this reticence as testimony to the discomfort that this subject still stirs up for so many people … especially in the American South.

Senegalese historian Dr. Ibrahima Seck echoed Iversen’s statements and strongly emphasized the importance of education: “American historians are ahead of much of the world in the study of slavery, but this knowledge stays within academia. It needs to be brought out of dissertations and colloquia and into textbooks.” In the course of researching the historical and cultural links between Africa and Louisiana as embodied in the enslaved, Seck uncovered much of the slave history of Habitation Haydel (as Whitney was called before the Civil War). His book on the plantation’s slaves, Bouki Fait Gombo, argues in part that mourning the slaves and reviling the “peculiar institution” does not do the whole story justice: it is incomplete without acknowledging the enormous cultural influence these slaves and their descendants had on Louisiana and the country at large, creating both African American and American cultures that are consumed and imitated around the world. The local effect is also not to be minimized; Seck mentioned that there were plans to hold Haydel reunions on the property, for descendants of the white, black, and mixed-race families that trace their roots to the people of the plantation.

In the end, the ultimate value of the Whitney is that it affects you emotionally. On paper, most people know some of slavery’s facts, and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone in contemporary America who both defends slavery and could pass a competency hearing. So why tear open old wounds? Because, for many, they’re not old wounds. For many, they are still fresh, at least to the extent that the institution of slavery has a clear legacy in the present, a legacy of poverty and disenfranchisement and interrupted personal histories.   

For others, the wounds simply did not exist before, and the type of experience Whitney provides can bridge the gap between a textbook understanding and knowing. In her research, which involved uncovering documents related to the sale and evaluation of slaves as well as post-mortem inventories and baptismal and marriage records, Laura Plantation curator Sand Marmillion got to know a man. This man, who was born into slavery on Laura, fought with the Union and applied for a pension in 1880. The record of his pension application provided her a glimpse of an individual life, an individual’s voice; for Marmillion, this is the point at which “the detachment melts … you see that this is a bill of sale for a man named Tom, a real person and a human being.”

To know anything that is completely outside of one’s own experience can, of course, only be approached, never reached. But that approach still carries great value. Reconciling ourselves to the manifold, complicated, and still-disturbing legacy of slavery will be the work of generations, much as the institutionalization of slavery was the work of generations; but the work at Whitney and other historical sites has made sure that the process has begun.

Details. Details. Details.

Whitney Plantation

5099 Louisiana Highway 18

Wallace, La.

whitneyplantation.com

Laura Plantation

2247 Louisiana Highway 18

Vacherie, La.

lauraplantation.com

Evergreen Plantation

4677 Louisiana Highway 18

Edgard, La.

evergreenplantation.org

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