Hi all,
This is my final blog post for the trip, I can’t believe how quickly it has gone!
Last night we went back to Napoleon House for dinner where we shared jambalaya and a muffaletta (sandwich). We shared an ice cream, and then we headed to Fritzel's European Jazz Pub where we enjoyed some live jazz music on Bourbon Street.
This morning we met our walking tour to the St Louis Cemetery No. 1.
Overall, it was OK. Our guide was very passionate and quirky, but she
talked really fast and kept going off on tangents mid sentence. It was
hard to follow, and gave me more questions than answers. However, due to
vandalism in the cemetery over the last few years, tourists can only
enter with a tour guide since 2015. So it was worthwhile joining the tour just to
go in.
First, we stopped at a small church called Our Lady of Guadalupe. This
was our guide’s local church, and centuries ago was the mortuary chapel
for those that died of yellow fever - which apparently killed more
people here than anywhere else in the US. She said she loves her
congregation for two reasons: the church lets homeless people come in
for shelter after mass, and they have jazz mass on Sundays.
The first cemetery in New Orleans was consecrated in 1724, and was just
down the street from this church. It filled quickly due to disease
epidemics, and people were buried in the ground in this one. However, if you dig 45cm in New Orleans, you hit water. So when
burying these people, holes were made in their caskets and bricks were
placed inside the caskets to weigh them down and stop them floating away.
Apparently the cypress that the caskets were made out of remains
preserved, so when old burial grounds are found today, they are still in tact.
These original cemeteries were built over because people at the time believed the smells from the cemeteries were causing other people to catch yellow fever. So the St Louis Cemetery No. 1 was consecrated in 1789 and is the oldest remaining
cemetery in New Orleans. After people had been buried here, the Spanish
reduced its size and began to build houses on some of its land.
Subsequently, this meant the families of those already buried had to
move them.
When we arrived at the cemetery, we paid $2 per person. Our guide told us that the Spanish bury their dead in tombs above the ground, which is why the tombs in this cemetery are above ground. This was interesting because I had assumed they were above ground to avoid flooding. Apparently in the Catholic religion here, the body is first placed inside the tomb. After one year and one day, it is pushed to the back and falls to a pit at the bottom. Sounds pretty creepy to me!
The first grave we stopped and looked at was that of Marie Laveau, a famous voodoo practitioner and herbalist from the 1800s. Apparently she also had a very big heart as she took in orphans and helped to raise them, and allowed for 80 unrelated people to her to be buried in her tomb that couldn't afford their own. When she died, hundreds if not thousands of people attended her funeral. We then saw the grave of Etienne de Bore, the first mayor of New Orleans.
The tour took a strange turn at this point, as we realised our guide was telling us that Nicholas Cage's tomb was in front of us. Rob and I looked at each other and said "isn't he still alive?", and then it all made sense when the guide said "so when he dies, this is where his name will go". It turns out that Nicholas Cage loves New Orleans, and owns a house and a church here. Contrary to the outrage of many locals, he was able to buy a plot in this graveyard for $275,000 US which meant some existing graves had to be moved to make room for his pyramid tomb. I joked to Rob that it reminded me of something to do with Cage's movies 'National Treasure', but apparently it's because he wants to be buried near Marie Laveau.
We saw a tomb that featured in the movie 'Easy Rider', some Battle of New Orleans graves and Homer Plessy's grave. Then we saw the Musicians Tomb, which belong to the Barbarin family who donated it for poor musicians that can't afford their own tomb to be buried in. This then led into a discussion about jazz funerals. I looked them up on YouTube - wow! The funeral starts off with slow, durge music. After the body is buried the tempo picks up and jazz music is played to celebrate the life of the person who died.
I noticed on many tombs three Xs written in a row, like "X X X". Apparently New Orleanians are very superstitious, and our guide said this had to do with voodoo superstitions. She then went on to tell us some funny stories of how superstitious her parents were when she was growing up.
After the tour, Rob and I walked to Armstrong Park. This park is named after the famous jazz musician from here Louis Armstrong. We enjoyed the great sculptures of musicians in the park, as well as the sculpture of Louis himself. It was a sunny and beautiful day today, so a nice day for a walk through. In the park was Congo Square. This was a square in which enslaved people would congregate on a Sunday and drum, dance, sing and trade, apparently with crowds of up to 500-600 people. These expressions of music and dance eventually developed into Mardi Gras and many genres of music that came out of New Orleans including jazz, rhythm and blues.
We then headed down to Jackson Square, which had a completely different vibe today. We think maybe a lot of people make a long weekend out of New Orleans, because there were lots more people, musicians and tarot card readers around today. The queue for beignets was huuuuuuge. We sat by the Mississippi River for a while before sharing a shrimp Po Boy for lunch.
Next we caught the St Charles Avenue streetcar to the Garden District. I had downloaded an audioguide before we left home for this, and it was really good. It explained that the streetcars here began in 1835 to join the various 'cities' cropping up that make up today's New Orleans. This is why the street names change either side of Canal Street, because there are the street names in the CBD and in the French Quarter. When the Americans came here after the Louisiana Purchase, they began to develop what is now the CBD area and many built mansions to the east of that in the Garden District. The streetcar allowed them to commute to work in the CBD or French Quarter. The cars operating today are from the 1920s, and the interior was beautiful.
For two hours, we caught the streetcar the entire length of its course, and then back again. We couldn't hang out the side like in San Fran, but we could open the window and enjoy the sun and fresh air. We saw the Mardi Gras stages being set up in preparation for the coming weeks, as well as many beads hanging from oak trees from Mardi Gras parades of the past. We learned that other than the French Quarter, the rest of the city used to be plantations were eventually sold to developers. Then we went past the WWII Museum which is meant to be fantastic. It started off as the D Day Museum because apparently the D Day boats were made by a company here, but has been added to so comprehensively that it's now the best collection of WWII resources in the USA.
We got to the Garden District and saw many beautiful mansions surrounded by oak trees. Some of them had awful unit complexes next to them, so it reminded me of Toorak or Hawthorn etc. back home. We then passed Tulane and Loyola Universities.
Once back in the French Quarter, we sat together by the Mississippi as the sun dropped below the buildings. I leave to head home tomorrow, but Rob continues to Washington DC and New York City. It's been so great spending such a long time together on this trip. Though we have had a little bit of bad luck getting so sick in the first couple of weeks, we have had a wonderful time and really enjoyed each other's company. At home, we rarely get to spend quality time together due to us both being so busy with work and our work hours differing to each other so much. I've really enjoyed and appreciated the time I have been able to spend with Rob over here, and I think we became even closer every day of the trip.
We didn't head back to the hotel for a rest today, but instead, Rob queued up outside Preservation Hall while I quickly dropped all the things we didn't need back at our hotel. We again went to the 6pm show, but today we were at the front of the walkup queue (which was huge by the time the show started!). Rob got a seat on a bench, and I went and sat on some cushions on the floor with some teenagers. The show was even more wonderful than Wednesday. The trombone player and clarinet player were the same, but the drummer, pianist, trumpet player and bass player were different. We enjoyed this makeup more as they seemed to have more fun together and really got into it. The crowd got more involved and they had us singing some lyrics, laughing at jokes etc. I'm glad we got to go twice!!
Then we went for one last dinner at the Napoleon House. If you come here, eat at Napoleon House. Their food is delicious, the restaurant has a great atmosphere, and they're 1/3 the price of all the tacky places off of Bourbon Street. We went three times and loved the food and service each time we went. Then, of course we stopped for one last helping of beignets on the way home. From my calculations, here is my tally for New Orleans: 3x servings of beignets, 2x jambalaya, 1x gumbo, 2x po boys, 1x muffaletta. We did well!
Tomorrow morning, we are heading to the airport together. Rob's flight leaves at 11.10am and mine is at 1.40pm. I fly home via Los Angeles, arriving home Monday before heading back to work on Tuesday. I have had such a wonderful time on this trip, and have seen, learned and experienced so much. Thank you so much for reading along, I hope you have enjoyed it too! See you in Japan in March!!
Love to all
Claire
Xoxox
Hello everyone,
Today we walked to the car rental company and picked up our little Ford. Rob drove in Orlando when I wasn't feeling well, so I drove today. It poured with rain most of the way, but I was fine. We are both pros driving on the "wrong" side of the road now.
After an hour, we arrived at the Whitney Plantation. At the height of slavery in the USA, Louisiana was home to hundreds of plantations and over 100,000 slaves. The reason we chose to first visit the Whitney is because it was purchased by John Cummings in 1999, and only opened to tourists in 2015, and is the first plantation/museum in the USA to tell the story of slavery from the perspective of the slaves. We were the first car in the carpark, and headed in at 9.30am to read information in the museum. At 10am we joined a tour. Our guide was extremely passionate, and despite the pouring rain, our tour went for two hours instead of 1.5. It poured with rain for the majority of the tour, but I think this actually added to the perspective we gained. Slaves worked in any weather, and were only given thin clothes to wear and no shoes. Working in these conditions would have been awful. I looked down at my goretex Salomon hiking shoes and thought to myself that the rain didn't matter, we were here to learn. Thankfully, Rob had asked reception at our hotel for umbrellas, so these kept us pretty dry in addition to our raincoats.
The Whitney Plantation opened on this site in 1752, and was owned by German immigrant Ambroise Haydel. Many of the plantations in this area were owned by German immigrants, and for that reason the region has been called the German Coast. Over the 100 years that slaves were used on this site, 354 of them were forced to work here. The plantation mainly produced sugar, but also rice and indigo at some stage. It was used as a working plantation until 1975.
The museum provided us with a timeline for the Atlantic slave trade. In 1444, Portuguese sailor Dinis Dias discovered Senegal and the Gambia Rivers. In 1502, Christopher Columbus brought the first African slaves to the new world. Slavery in the US lasted for 245 years, but the practice itself was much older. The word 'slave' developed in the middle ages when Slavic people were forced to work.
African people were chosen as the slaves to help develop the new world because it was decided that Native Americans were "too hard to control" in their own environments, and too susceptible to European diseases. The boat journeys from Africa were horrendous, with hundreds of people packed in against their will. Apparently 20% of those on the boats died during the journey, and were merely dumped into the ocean if so. Diseases, exhaustion and starvation were common causes of death.
Most slaves that arrived in Louisiana came from the Senegambia region that I mentioned earlier. Our guide told us that they "resisted their captivity through the preservation of their identities", but this became much harder through the generations as the people who were slaves later on were born into slavery, so hadn't experienced anything but being a slave.
Some women were traded explicitly for sexual services. Young girls were seen as "breeders". By the age of 18, these girls were expected to have had four children. Disgustingly, plantation owners and other higher ups would rape these women in order to create children that would then subsequently be born into slavery. They promised some women freedom in return for bearing children, but most of the time this was a lie.
Our tour started in a church that was donated to the plantation when a new one was constructed nearby. The church is from 1868 and was sent here and parts and put back together. Inside were some really well done clay sculptures of slave children. These were made to look like actual children that lived on the plantation, and we each had a name and photo on our ticket to look out for in the church. Rob's and mine were facing each other. Our guide, Cheryl, told us that there is no cemetery or burial site in the grounds. However, she suspects that many bodies were buried haphazardly wherever they fell. For this reason, she told us the whole site is sacred ground.
Next, we went to a memorial honouring the 104 slaves that were first brought to the Whitney Plantation. Here we read anecdotes and saw photos. Some of them were very harrowing Many of the slaves' names changed to more European names when they arrived, one on the wall was named Claire. It started to really bucket down at this point, but we headed to a memorial for the children born into slavery called the 'Field of Angels', dedicated to the 2200 slave children in Louisiana that didn't make it to their third birthday, 39 of them at Whitney.
Then we saw some sugarcane kettles where sugarcane was boiled, before we headed to a larger memorial created with the 107,000 names of slaves that Gwendolyn Hall listed in her Louisiana Slave Database. We continued through to the slave quarters, of which there were originally 22 on site. Many were torn down, but two original ones remain today. Others were brought in from other plantations to give visitors an idea of the layout of the place. The cabins housed unrelated people, with 5-7 slaves sharing a room and 7-10 slaves sharing a room during harvest season when more slaves were rented and brought in.
The slaves worked two overlapping 16 hour shifts, and as a result this meant that often times they were working in the dark. This resulted in many accidents, because sugarcane was planted very closed together and hacked away with machetes. Many slaves accidentally harmed other slaves, and if this got infected it meant almost certain death due to a lack of medicine.
After the slave quarters, we walked past slave pens/cells that were used in the slave markets of New Orleans, which in the 1820s and 1830s was the biggest slave market in the US. The plantation has chosen to place them here in front of the plantation home as a direct contrast. I went inside and it gave me goosebumps. We then saw a blacksmith workshop that featured in the film 'Django Unchained', the overseer's home which is currently being restored and the kitchen which was the oldest detached kitchen in Louisiana.
Our final stop on the tour was the plantation home. We visited the ground floor, which has not been made to look ornate and fully furnished as it would have to the owners. Rather, it has been left plain as it's a place that the slave children being forced to work inside of it would have loathed. In a weird contrast though, the oak trees out the front were very picturesque and made the building look beautiful.
Though British parliament banned the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, and the US followed suit in 1808, slavery continued in the US for many more years. The American Civil War later followed from 1861 to 1865 which saw a huge divide between the north (anti slavery) and the south (pro slavery).
Our tour ended and we both felt very emotionally drained. The tour had been very informative and interesting, but it really made us consider how on Earth you could treat another human being the way that all of the slaves were treated. How could a person with a conscience possibly forcibly remove someone, trap them, send them away and then force them to work for them for free? It just defies understanding and makes me feel so sad.
We then drove ten minutes down the road to our next plantation, the Laura Plantation. The two of them could not have been more different. Whitney felt like Auschwitz, and in comparison, Laura felt like Disneyland. As we walked in, the gift shop had happy southern music playing and the staff were chatting and laughing. We went into the small museum before our tour started and I was shocked to read about the perspective of slaves running away here. At Whitney, it had talked about slaves running away due to terrible conditions etc. Here, the board said "by running away, slaves deprived their owners of their labour and cost them valuable time and money". Wow - a very different perspective! It also went on to say that slaves behind union lines during the civil war were freed, and that many of these slaves and soldiers raided the plantations.
Our tour started and again in contrast to Whitney, Rob and I were the only two people on it. At Whitney there had been about 30 of us. Our guide was Rocky, and he was very knowledgeable. The tour here focused mostly on the family that had begun the plantation and their descendants. We took a photo in front of the house and then continued through it. The rooms here were decorated with much original furniture. The house has been largely restored though due to a fire that damaged 80% of the property in 2004. Apparently what saved the structure was the plastering technique that west African slaves had used to build it.
The plantation was started in 1720, but the house was built in 1805, and in 1984 it was sold. Apparently a chemical company wanted to tear it down and build a chemical plant, but couldn't get the permits to do so. In 1993 it lay abandoned, but then later was restored and set up as a museum as we know it today.
As we toured through the house, we learned about the Duparcs who owned the estate. The name 'Laura' comes from the great granddaughter of the original owners, who wrote a series of memoirs that gave a lot of information about what the house and life at the estate was like. Amazingly, Laura lived from 1861 to 1963, so lived from Abraham Lincoln all the way through to JFK in terms of presidents.
We toured through the French Garden that Laura had mentioned in her memoirs and was replanted according to her descriptions, and then saw the levee and road that were constructed in the 1920s at the front of the property. Originally, the property went all the way up to the Mississippi River. Underneath the house, we also saw original markings on the 30 beams that gave the house the name Laura mentioned - 'House of Thirty'.
Laura defied what was mostly expected of heirs of plantation homes. She left the plantation and went to school in New Orleans to learn English (her family spoke French). When she inherited the plantation, she sold it in 1891 and moved herself and her family to Missouri, where her husband was from. She didn't want to become 'dehumanised' like her grandmother Elisabeth had after treating slaves terribly for the majority of her life.
We ended up in the slave's quarters here where our guide talked about the fact that when slaves were freed, they often stayed to work for a wage as they had nowhere else to go. Afterwards, we passed another house the original owner had built. It's very run down, but the money to restore it had to be used to restore the main house after the 2004 fire.
So in summary - we learned a lot from both plantations, but we thought the Whitney was a fantastic portrayal of what life was like for those that the slave trade so horrifically affected - the slaves themselves.
Afterwards, we drove back to New Orleans and drove through some of the districts most impacted by Hurricane Katrina. We drove to a flood wall site that had breached during the hurricane. We couldn't believe how flooded the streets were already today even though it hadn't rained too much. The puddles were huge. Then we went to the Hurricane Katrina Memorial at the Charity Hospital Cemetery. This cemetery had previously been used to bury unclaimed persons during disease outbreaks etc. So after Katrina, a memorial was created here and the 80 unclaimed/unidentified people who died out of the 1100 total were buried here.
Afterwards, we dropped the car back and walked down Canal Street into the CBD. Here we inadvertently walked past the Hard Rock Hotel collapse site that has been in the news of late, and collapsed in October. The people here are getting understandably angry that it's taking so long to clear.
We then enjoyed some more beignets and a hot chocolate at Cafe du Monde, before walking through the French Market and coming back for a rest at the hotel. Tonight the plan is to go out for dinner and find some good live music.
Love to all
Claire
Xoxox
