Laura Plantation Company in Vacherie, Louisiana, is rightly acclaimed for its decades-long pursuit of the fullest possible picture of eighteenth-century Creole Louisiana, with a particular unflinching focus on the generations of women who ran the sugar plantation and the people who labored there in chains. Individual lives, treated with integrity and rendered in ever-increasing detail by the staff (including Norman and Sand Marmillion, who have a long-term lease on the historic site; historian Katy Shannon; and publicist Joseph Dunn), populate for visitors a portrait of the River Road realm that gave birth to Creole culture. “We’re on our fourteenth or fifteenth iteration of the script,” said Dunn. “It’s constantly evolving—from guest questions, new information being uncovered, and new perspectives being considered.”
[Read this: From fragments, Laura Plantation builds archives for individual slaves]
But not all stories are meant for daytime. “Candlelight Confessions,” a new evening experience at Laura, will bring a more mature audience to the candlelit house and grounds to learn of occasions when greed, murder, and lust trampled over quainter ideas of yesteryear. “Each of the stories we’re going to tell could be a miniseries unto itself,” said Dunn. “These are contemporary stories, they just happened 150 or 200 years ago. Stories of identity, stories of segregation, stories of extreme vetting in immigration, identity politics, gender politics.” The news lacks the ambience of Laura, though, and the context for Creole life so prized by these interpreters only deepens under a vast night sky with just the candle’s rippling beam to light your way. “It’s a whole different sense of time and space,” said Dunn. “You’ll really have a sense of what it was like to be there.”
“Candlelight Confessions” begins on October 11 and continues each Friday in October and November. Cheese and Louisiana wines will be served before the tour begins. $75. Reservations only. Ages 15 and older. lauraplantation.com/candlelight_confessions.
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