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
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