The Whitney Plantation and Remembering Slavery

Last Tuesday, I attended a lecture by Dr. Ibrahima Seck, Director of Research at the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, LA. The plantation is the first of its kind in the United States because instead of focusing on the masters of the property and the architecture and grandeur of the "big house" it focuses on the lives of those who made the masters prosperous and the big house even possible, the chattel slaves who worked the land and sustained the economy of the plantation. I've written about this subject on this blog before, briefly, when talking about Attica Locke's The Cutting Season, a novel which takes place on a plantation that now hosts weddings, tours, and events causing it to become a place where the South gets remembered not for those who built it with their hands but for those who benefited off of that work.

Whitney Plantation's focus provides a unique opportunity for its visitors because it shows them the horrors of the peculiar institution. Visitors listen to the voices of former slaves, gathered in the 1930s by workers for the Federal Writers Project. All of these individuals, of course, were only children during slavery, so they recall bondage through the eyes of a child. Because of this, the plantation contains numerous sculptures by Woodrow Nash, some of which you can see in the video above and the picture below. They are all children, not adults, because the voices you hear as you walk through the grounds are those of people who were children before 1865. Along with the sculptures, the plantation contains memorials to the thousands of slaves who lived in Louisiana. One memorial, The Field of Angels, is dedicated to the 2,200 slave children in Louisiana who died before their third birthday. Unlike the monuments like the Wall of Honor (dedicated to slaves on Whitney Plantation) and the Allées Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (dedicated to the 107,000 enslaved people in Louisiana appear in the "Louisiana Slave Database"), the memorials in the Field of Angels are low for children to read the names. When hearing about this section, and the fact that some of the children did not have names or that their mother's name did not appear in the records, I could not help but recall Toni Morrison's Beloved , which was inspired by the case of Margaret Garner, a slave who escaped and upon being surrounded by slave catchers killed her two year old daughter by slitting the girl's throat with a butcher knife. I wondered, as Dr. Seck spoke, how many of the children on that wall experienced something similar or if they all died of diseases, neglect, and other maladies of the day.

Another thing that I started to ponder during Dr. Seck's talk was the actual land and the "rules" that allowed the plantation owner's brother, Antoine Haydel, to rape a slave named Anna who conceived a baby named Victor. Information about Victor and his lineage can be found on the Wall of Honor page. Upon hearing the story of Antoine and Anna, I immediately started to think of Tee Bob and Mary Agnes in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and about Bonbon and Pauline in Of Love and Dust. I also began to ponder the land. Last spring, I took a class to New Orleans for a literary tour. I've been to New Orleans numerous times, and whenever I am there, or in another city, I think about who may have walked the streets before me. In New Orleans, that list would be very large. In fact, during the tour, the guide pointed out two buildings, both of which I had visited earlier that same day, where literary salons with Sherwood Anderson, Tennessee Williams, and others took place. I never would have guessed it. When I walk the land on River Lake Plantation, the thoughts about who walked here before me become stronger. The numbers decrease because of the rural setting, and I know that those who populated the land were either the perpetrators or recipients of oppression. I know that the people that Ernest Gaines writes about lived there, and are buried there. The connection is stronger. John Callahan has mentioned that on that land you can feel the spirit of the people. They are there. Even though I haven't been to Whitney Plantation yet, I imagine it is the same feeling. I know what occurred there, Super Bowls didn't, conferences didn't, huge Mardi Gras parades didn't, music festivals didn't. What occurred there is something we still live with, and something we must remember. I think Dr. Seck summed it best when he said the purpose of the plantation is "not to have anyone feel guilty but to teach people about the legacy of slavery." It is something that needs to be taught because its effects can be seen, as Gaines mentions, throughout the twentieth century and into our own. That is a discussion for another day.

To me, the Whitney appears akin to the Holocaust Museum. After you go, you cannot think about things the same way again. It also contains similarities to art and literature. These things bring us close to reality even though they are fabrications of it. They make us empathize and ponder the quandaries that surround us daily. I have written about this topic before, and I urge you to go back and read what I have to say about art's power over an audience.

I want to leave you with a couple of links about Whitney Plantation:

• Interview with Dr. Seck (KRVS)
• "Building the First Slavery Museum in America" (New York Times)
• "New Museum Depicts the Life of a Slave" (NPR)
• "The Whitney Plantation: Looking Back to Look ahead" (NBC12)

If you went to Dr. Seck's lecture or have been to the Whitney Plantation, what are your thoughts? Please share them below.