"You Have to Understand..."

At the final Supper Club of our Spring Series, we'll explore the connections between Senegalese and Creole cultures with a menu by Senegalese chef Serigne Mbaye, performances from the renowned Adella Adella the Storyteller (Adelle Gautier), and tours of Laura Plantation. Tickets on sale now.

Norman Marmillion has a refrain as he leads tours of Laura Plantation: “You have to understand ...” At his insistence, visitors are asked not to just admire the big house—a raised Creole cottage—or flinch at the slave cabins but to follow the story of Creole culture’s development in Louisiana, a commingling of language, food, and music among the West African, West European, and Native American peoples who lived and labored (some far more than others) along the River Road.

The full impact of Laura, billed as a “Creole heritage site,” is felt in the sobering, immense amount of detail compiled about the plantation’s residents over two hundred years, particularly in the new permanent exhibit, “From the Big House to the Quarters: Slavery on Laura Plantation.” But all the site-specific research that Norman Marmillion, wife Sand (a cultural anthropologist), and historian Katy Shannon have completed would not have come to pass had they not been chasing down a trickster rabbit, one whose relevance to popular culture had almost faded when the Marmillions acquired Laura in 1993. “We caught the tail end,” said Norman.

You likely know the character as Br’er Rabbit, from Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus tales. But Harris did not create Br’er Rabbit, just the disputed framework of the good-natured freedman sharing stories on the plantation. Br’er Rabbit traveled from West Africa to the Carolinas and Georgia, where Harris listened to the tales of former slaves at Turnwold Plantation in Eatonton, Georgia, and wrote them down, later publishing the collection as Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. But the rabbit set foot in French Louisiana even earlier—folklorist Alcée Fortier later heard and transcribed the stories from the Wolof- and French-speaking peoples of Laura Plantation and other properties in the area. “Fortier and Chandler Harris were both members of the American Folklore Society,” said Norman, a trained puppeteer, who acquired the plantation with Sand primarily due to its connection to the folktales. “They crossed paths and realized, ‘We have the same story.’” A scholar more than a storyteller, Fortier concerned himself with preserving the stories purely as he heard them. “You have to understand, these were two different traditions,” said Norman. He now joins that legacy of folklorists with a new adaptation of Compair Lapin, complete with illustrations by Françoise Marmillion (their daughter) along with Martin Whitmore and Rebecca Wood. The art is intended to invoke West African styles, while the prose reflects Norman’s effort to stay true to the original tales. Researching the book’s final story, “The Elephant and the Whale” (Néléphant avec Baleine), revealed how well oral tradition had already preserved these stories across an ocean and a century before Alcée Fortier set his pen to the page. “That’s the one we found that was almost word-for-word between West Africa and the one recorded here.

“You have to understand,” said Norman, “that Louisiana was owned by a company in France, the Company of the Indies, and their headquarters were in Dakar—St. Louis, Senegal.” Over the course of ten years, three thousand West Africans were shipped to enslavement in French Louisiana; then a revolt in Senegal halted the slave trade for sixty years. In Louisiana, the enslaved continued their traditions. “The food—gumbo, shrimp creole; their music traditions, which is how we got jazz; and the folk traditions. They became the core of the black experience in Louisiana.”

[Read this: Who They Were: From fragments, Laura Plantation builds archives for individual slaves.]

The sly Br’er Rabbit endured as a hero for the displaced and demeaned Senegalese, and tales like his have meaning beyond sheer entertainment. Tours at Laura are organized into fourteen stories, each highlighting an aspect of this Creole world that didn’t jibe with the rest of the United States. “You have to understand that if you know what was going on back then on a deep level, then you understand why we are the way we are today and the problems we have today. When you understand the culture a hundred, two hundred years ago, you can see why we’re in the state we are and why there’s still so much racism out here, why we don’t believe in public education—you can see it.”

Norman does not like to explain much to his tours. “I just tell the stories, and if you get it, you get it. And if you don’t, you don’t.”  

Be at Laura Plantation (2247 Highway 18, Vacherie, La.) for 6 pm to enjoy cocktail hour while dinner begins at 7 pm. Tickets available on bontempstix.com for $140. 

This article originally appeared in our May 2018 issue. Subscribe to our print magazine today.