The Walls Remember

The mysteries of African House, and Clementine Hunter's murals within it

by

Along the winding Cane River, the home of Louis Metoyer, a gen de couleur libre (free person of color) of the early nineteenth century, accounts for one of the more complicated histories of Louisiana’s many plantations. But a modest two-story building positioned across from the main house has become a focal point of the property and holds perhaps even more intrigue than the plantation itself.

Termed “African House” in the mid-twentieth century by author and archivist François Mignon, the structure was originally constructed during the 1810s under Metoyer’s orders by his enslaved laborers. Architecturally, it is syncretic, adapting the economy and functionality of French barnhouses with climate-conscious modifications—such as its roof, with its generous twelve-foot overhang, and cool brick floors—from West African coastal architecture, relieving those inside the building from Louisiana’s sweltering heat.

There is no surviving record of the structure’s original purpose, and it bears no close resemblance to any other structure original to the surrounding property at Melrose. Theories have posited that it was constructed to function as a storeroom for the plantation’s production output, or to remind Metoyer’s mother, Marie Thérèse Coincoin—who was, according to folklore, once the wealthiest woman in the United States—of her ancestral homeland. It is believed by some to have served as a makeshift jail for enslaved persons, a theory reinforced by the presence of metal bars on the first-floor window. It does favor the blacksmith shop at the nearby Magnolia Plantation, the construction of which began within fifty years after the completion of African House. And Ghana House, a one-room wooden structure transported to Melrose in the 1930s from the Dominique Metoyer Plantation nearby, is a similar example of vernacular architecture featuring Creole adaptations on a French pièce-sur-pièce build.

In more recent history, the building has served various purposes—as storage for a selection of the estate’s abundant collection of antique furnishings and as studio space for the Melrose artists’ residency program in the twentieth-century.

For the past seventy years, though, African House has acted as the permanent gallery for an installation of works by the renowned folk artist Clementine Hunter, who lived the majority of her life on the plantation.

Hunter was born a free woman of color on an unaccounted-for date sometime between Christmas 1886 and January 1887 on Hidden Hills Plantation, which is said to have inspired Harriett Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Hunter relocated with her family to the nearby Melrose Plantation in her teens to work picking cotton, collecting pecans, cooking, and housekeeping. She eventually married a man named Emmanuel, with whom she had three children, who bore them seven grandchildren; her grandson, James Hunter, continues to paint today in her tradition.

Hunter never learned to read or write, but her talent in the realm of visual arts developed thanks to Alberta Kinsey, an artist from New Orleans who resided at the artists’ retreat hosted at Melrose. Kinsey befriended Hunter and gifted her excess paints, which she then used to produce the first works of what would come to be upwards of 10,000. These tableaux, which she called “markings,” depict baptisms, angels, brawls, field work, weddings, funerals, and the gossip and fables of Melrose. In her lifetime, she sold her paintings for a pittance and charged twenty-five cents, then fifty cents, for visitors to browse them.

[Read this: "As Seen by Clementine: At a 1970 auction near Natchitoches, a church won back the portrait of its founder"] 

The African House Murals are her most famous work, rendered over seven weeks in the summer of 1955 as an autobiographical account of her life. The murals’ scenes were endeavored at the encouragement of Mignon, who was a resident of the artists’ colony and authored, with Ora Garland Williams, Plantation Memo: Plantation Life in Louisiana: 1750-1970, and Other Matter.

By the 1970s, the building and murals within it began to fall into disrepair and neglect. The Association for the Preservation of Historic Natchitoches began a restoration of the buildings on the plantation, and in 1974, African House was designated a National Historic Landmark by the Secretary of the Interior. In 1983, a pair of conservators from the Kimbell Art Museum undertook the first cleaning, consolidation, and revarnishing of Hunter’s murals within, and Whitten &  Proctor Fine Art Conservation later orchestrated another restoration of the paintings in 2014. In 2015, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Hands-On Preservation Experience (HOPE) Crew began a project to preserve African House’s roof, framing, and exterior.

Today, newly rehabilitated and protected as a National Treasure by the National Trust, African House, with Hunter’s paintings as its centerpiece, will commemorate early Black history in the Cane River region in perpetuity.

Laid bricks made by enslaved workers constitute the flooring of the first story, which is empty save for a display on the 2015 restoration efforts. Located on the far right of the floorplan, a steep wooden staircase admits visitors into African House’s grenier.

Here viewers encounter the murals—nine panels spread across four walls, with some smaller connective panels wedged between them. In one, a self-portrait, the artist is seated in a large red chair beneath a pecan tree with a paintbrush in hand. Hunter depicts herself in the company of other artists who visited the colony during her lifetime, including Kinsey, Mignon, the photographer Carolyn Ramsey, and the Times-Picayune columnist Lyle Saxon.

Hunter’s style has been termed “primitive” and a popular example of “outsider” art in most published literature, but these reductions mistake the ingenuity and humor characteristic of her landscapes as an accidental consequence instead of an intentional means of demystifying regional narratives and aesthetics.

Christianity is a common theme in Hunter’s work, and in the African House murals, related motifs abound. There is a scene with a white church, where a duo of priests dressed in black frocks leads a flurry of nuns in white habits queuing closely behind them. Two baptisms are featured in the panel, including one of a panicked catechumen, likely frightened of water. Emmanuel Hunter, towering over a scattering of trees nearby, stands to the left of the chapel in the company of other lay people, ringing a church bell.

Hunter often scaled her subjects in proportion to her fondness for them, which might account for her husband’s prominence, featuring much larger than any of the other characters in the vignette. In another panel, there is a generous assessment of the sundial Hunter learned to tell time with. In an illustration of two murders spurred by wayward women and their jealous lovers at a local dancehall, the pigs grazing along the river outside exceed their human counterparts. Another scene, depicting nuptials, sees a groom diminish next to his bride.

In the artworks, women work the fields of Melrose in rows, picking cotton in colorful dresses and hats. The artist’s rendition of the labor undertaken by fieldhands appears at first to romanticize it, though observers will notice that the women are bowed over by weight of the burlap sacks they carry on their backs. It would be difficult to date this scene as post-Abolition if it weren’t for certain symbols of modern life depicted in nearby panels, including an airplane, which takes flight across the sky just beyond Hunter’s beloved sundial, or the two cars parked outside a church. Life in rural Louisiana appears semi-frozen in time: children climb on trees; clothes hang on a line; travelers advance by horse and buggy; people fish in reeded ponds; men drink, smoke cigars, and gamble with cards and dice.

The oil paints with which Hunter composed the mural are prismatic, thinned by kerosene and turpentine to spread across the murals in brushy, sometimes blotchy, strokes. Buildings are flattened and rendered with open-cut faces, admitting viewers into the private realms that lie inside. Featured as prominently as the plantation’s main house is African House in one panel, perhaps anticipating its centrality to the lure of the plantation in present time.

Hunter’s style has been termed “primitive” and a popular example of “outsider” art in most published literature, but these reductions mistake the ingenuity and humor characteristic of her landscapes as an accidental consequence instead of an intentional means of demystifying regional narratives and aesthetics.

Another panel features a spherical map, which situates Melrose Plantation among other landmarks along the Cane. The globe—replete with a compass, a coat of arms, and yet another version of the artist at work—features a sign staked into its southernmost borders identifying Hunter’s elaborate worldbuilding as that of “Melrose on the Cane River.”

As such, it’s tempting to take this mural as a literal depiction of the physical world Hunter occupied—except that her heartfelt improvisations and generous imagination exceed historical bounds.

For instance, a free man known as Uncle Israel, formerly enslaved on the plantation, appears just west of Hunter’s central sundial. He is painted in the upper plane of the painting—as if ascended into heaven. 

melroseonthecane.com.