plantation tour slave perspective

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Plantation tours bypass the ‘big house’ to focus on the enslaved

Deep Read ( 10 Min. )
By Noah Robertson Staff writer
Lindsey McGinnis Correspondent

Updated Jan. 28, 2021, 9:09 a.m. ET

For over a century, the history of American slavery has been insufficiently and inaccurately told, typically privileging the enslavers over the enslaved. But efforts to correct the record are underway on former plantations from Wallace, Louisiana, to Medford, Massachusetts. Some sites no longer include the manor house in their tours, sharing details instead about the lives of the enslaved people.

“We are the stewards of spaces that can offer answers,” says Michelle Lanier, director of the North Carolina Division of State Historic Sites and Properties. “There’s a grand healing that I think is attempting to emerge through our nation’s greatest wound.”

Why We Wrote This

By portraying slavery accurately and inclusively, some former plantations are doing their part to combat racial injustice. They hope letting the past inform the present will help heal “our nation’s greatest wound.”

At the former plantation of President James Monroe in Virginia, descendants of the enslaved are helping to right the record. “The true, deep-down hope is that this could be a roadmap to something bigger that our whole country can get behind,” says Jennifer Stacy, a member of the site’s Council of Descendant Advisors.

Meanwhile, at the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Massachusetts, Executive Director Kyera Singleton is working to expand the site’s role in social justice work by helping people learn from the past. “This history of injustice ... will keep happening if we don’t actually confront systemic inequalities and racism in this country,” she says.

Beside the long path to the Wappoo Creek stand symmetrical rows of Southern live oaks, arranged like the pillars of a temple. Down the dirt road below, shaded by the leaves and long beards of Spanish moss, Toby Smith leads her first tour of the morning to the Wappoo’s marshy banks. Then she asks them to look right.

Miles away, past mud flats, fishing boats, and the Ashley River, sits Charleston, South Carolina. If they drifted on the water for about an hour, they’d hit the city harbor. If they floated past for another three months, she says, they’d arrive on the West Coast of Africa.

That’s how Ms. Smith says she starts her tours of McLeod Plantation Historic Site, where she’s worked as a guide for the past two years. Her trip to the milky green waters of the Wappoo Creek is a regular pilgrimage, designed to help visitors imagine the journey of enslaved Africans who once stood on the same land. Starting near the water, she says, lets the tour walk in their footsteps.

For the next hour, Ms. Smith explains in a phone interview, she guides her group through the plantation grounds and lets them ask questions about its 37 acres. They pass the cramped slave quarters and palatial manor house. They pause at the slave cemetery and walk into the fields of sea island cotton, still growing. Inside the cotton gin house, they gaze at small dimples in the walls. Some days, Ms. Smith lets the group know that those are fingerprints left by enslaved children who hand-molded the bricks.

“We are walking on the blood, sweat, and tears of real human beings,” she often tells visitors. “That has a very profound impact on people. ... Sometimes you don’t have to say anything. It’s just the presence.”

McLeod is among a growing number of sites that recognize the power of that presence. Its vision is to interpret the legacy of slavery, where slavery took place. Behind that, the focus is a recognition that the history of American slavery has been insufficiently and inaccurately told, often privileging the enslavers over the enslaved. Gradually, that’s changing as historians acknowledge that every life on plantations like McLeod mattered.

Reconstructing the lives of enslaved people is difficult, but from Wallace, Louisiana, to Medford, Massachusetts, many sites on the ground zero of slavery are accepting their role in that effort. Recent calls for racial justice have demanded a reckoning with wrongs that date back centuries. Places like McLeod harbor that history – and with it hope for catharsis.

“Basically we’ve been miseducated”

For many Americans, that wound has grown more painful with the way it has historically been taught, says Derrick Alridge, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and Human Development.

Dr. Alridge recently chaired Virginia’s Commission on African American History Education, charged with auditing the state’s efforts to teach Black history. Released last August, its 80-page report identifies faults endemic to curricula across the country.

Long dominant have been so-called master narratives, which teach American history through the lives of U.S. presidents or other “great men.” People of color – and especially African Americans – are often segregated into sections that cover only “messianic figures,” like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Regular Black Americans, including enslaved people, are rarely given space.

“You can’t erase history. You can ignore it, which is something we’ve done for centuries,” says Jody Allen, an assistant professor of history at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. “There’s a real understanding that basically we’ve been miseducated in this country.”

Understanding the legacy of slavery, says Professor Alridge, is crucial to addressing its impacts today. Connecting historical dots – from the Black Lives Matter movement to the civil rights movement to abolition – puts the present in context and makes history real, he says.

At a place like McLeod, where that history is as real as it can get, the stakes for getting it right are high.

Bypassing the “big house”

Just as the historical narrative has traditionally focused on the owning class, plantation museums have orbited the “big house,” says Shawn Halifax, cultural history interpretation coordinator for the Charleston County Park & Recreation Commission, which runs McLeod.

Typically, visitors marvel at the opulent homes of slave owners, he says, while enslaved people are treated as footnotes. “The furnishing of these former dwellings oftentimes tends to create a type of nostalgia, which is the very thing that through our interpretation we’re trying to move beyond,” says Mr. Halifax.

At McLeod, the big house is empty, and the tour does not take visitors inside. Interpreters teach about William Wallace McLeod – the plantation’s owner and a Confederate soldier – but they focus on the 100 or so people enslaved on the site, telling their stories and saying their names.

More than 800 miles southwest, Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana, takes the same approach. Before the pandemic, the former sugar cane plantation attracted around 100,000 visitors each year, says Executive Director Ashley Rogers.

It, like McLeod, teaches slavery from the perspective of enslaved people and will soon empty its big house. “We’re trying to use this plantation as a vehicle to get people to understand the system of slavery more broadly,” says Ms. Rogers.

One way they do that is by making sure Whitney’s history speaks to today. Only two of the original 22 slave quarters are still standing, but they aren’t relics. After the Civil War, many of Whitney’s enslaved people had little choice but to keep farming sugar cane and living in their same quarters. Some of their descendants stayed until 1975.

“Our entire point of what we’re trying to do is to teach people about the past so that they understand the present,” says Ms. Rogers. “If history doesn’t have an impact that you can still feel, then it’s just an interesting story.”

Seeing today through the lens of yesterday

Sometimes the past and the present collide.

Jennifer Stacy grew up near Charlottesville, Virginia, about 10 miles from Highland, the plantation of President James Monroe. Her family used to drive past the site on their way into town, and she would read the sign: Home of James Monroe. She knew about slavery, and she knew her grandfather was also a Monroe. Even as a girl, she sensed the two were somehow connected.

Decades later, Ms. Stacy learned that she’s a descendant of Ned Monroe, an enslaved man at Highland who helped build the University of Virginia. Three years ago, she joined the estate’s newly formed Council of Descendant Advisors , a group of 10 descendants who advise the site on its efforts to tell a fuller story.

“It’s now shared authority, where the goal is to reinterpret the history there and to get it right,” Ms. Stacy says. “The true, deep-down hope is that this could be a roadmap to something bigger that our whole country can get behind and start doing, because it is who we are.”

Highland, like other plantation sites across the country, is researching the lives of those enslaved on its land – constructing genealogies, reviewing oral histories, and panning streams of centuries-old documents. The task, though, requires swimming against the currents of history. Researchers engaged in this work often face a dearth of primary sources, low funds, and small staffs.

This is especially true in the North.

Records show slavery is central to Northern states’ histories. Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and other influential figures in the North who supported abolition owned slaves, and New England colonies played a critical role in the transatlantic slave trade. There were enslaved people in every Rhode Island township, historians say, and local merchants bankrolled more than 500 voyages to West Africa during the Colonial period. All the other colonies combined sent 189.

But Americans’ postbellum memory associates slavery almost exclusively with former Confederate states. Research on slavery outside the South is thin, and long-held notions of Northern heroism can chill attempts to learn more.

Correcting the record

“There is this great desire for people to want us to have made greater strides, but we are working against 50-plus years of America’s educational system,” says Lavada Nahon, interpreter of African American history for the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

While many sites in the North are adopting an approach similar to Whitney’s or McLeod’s, rediscovering an entire state’s role in slavery is a massive effort in historical forensics.

Artifacts have been mislabeled and misinterpreted, and important history has been lost in translation. In New York, this could mean translating early documents from Dutch to English or interpreting confusing terminology – a recent paper published by the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in Albany argues that the “servants” listed in Alexander Hamilton’s cash book were actually enslaved people. Even cursive handwriting can challenge the newer generation of historians.

“It is not as if we are choosing not to honor our ancestors,” Ms. Nahon says. “It is time-consuming work.”

It’s also work that evolves. Heidi Hill, historic site manager at Schuyler Mansion, says the site has been compiling research on free and enslaved Africans since the 1980s. They’ve long incorporated names, numbers, and the type of work enslaved people did into their tours and other events.

“But now we’re asking different questions,” says Ms. Hill. “Who were these people? Where did they come from? Who were their family members? How did they connect?”

Piecing together the lives of enslaved people

When communicating with a largely miseducated public, making the historical narrative more inclusive requires a powerful commitment.

Kyera Singleton heard about the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts, at a conference in 2019. She’d grown up in the Northeast, studied slavery, and still had no idea there were freestanding slave quarters in the North. But while the scholar in her wanted to visit, Ms. Singleton had a familiar fear: that the history would be whitewashed and the trip would be more painful than illuminating.

Still, she decided to go and soon learned that the site had undergone a dramatic rebranding in 2005, bringing enslaved people into focus.

“Every room that we went in, we talked about the enslaved people,” she says. “It shows that their names matter, their lives matter, their history matters.”

Ms. Singleton was so impressed that she applied to work at the museum, and since April of last year, she has served as executive director. In her new role, Ms. Singleton is eager to uncover how the enslaved people who lived at the site experienced slavery, resisted it, and advocated for their freedom – a challenging mission that includes archaeological and archival research, partnering with universities, and a lot of guesswork.

“You might not find all of the information that you want,” she admits. “And that’s a part of the cruelty of history in many ways – whose lives were deemed important enough to document versus those whose lives were deemed unimportant.”

The paucity of first-person accounts of slavery has long been an excuse to avoid difficult conversations, says Cordell Reaves, historic preservation programs analyst for New York’s Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

“That is … a terrible disservice to the general public,” he says. “[Visitors] can be engaged in having a conversation around ongoing research, even if we are not absolutely certain about the outcome.”

Lately, Ms. Singleton has been working to increase the visibility of the Royall House and Slave Quarters, hoping to expand the site’s role in present-day social justice movements by helping communities understand that last year’s assaults against Black people, including by the police, were not unique.

“This history of injustice has been happening long before 2020,” says Ms. Singleton. “It will keep happening if we don’t actually confront systemic inequalities and racism in this country.”

Interrupting the cycle of history

The country has chosen not to confront the history before, and the history repeats. Generations come; generations go. The next sometimes forgets the last.

But places like McLeod remember, says Ms. Smith, the interpreter near Charleston.

Her tour ends, she says, at the Wisdom Oak, thought to be at least 200 years old. Ms. Smith asks her group to imagine what memories are caught in its branches.

Ms. Smith tells her group that she is a direct descendant of slaves, some of whom may have lived just 20 miles from McLeod. Her great-great-grandmother Idella was taken from modern-day Ghana in the 1840s, after the slave trade was illegal in America. Ms. Smith is alive today because Idella survived that voyage at the age of 8, mourned her losses alone, and started a family, living until 1941.

This work is “a way for me to keep them alive, share their memories, and also to give them a measure of honor and dignity that they never had in life,” says Ms. Smith.

Then, at the roots of the Wisdom Oak, she tells her group about a visitor to McLeod six years ago. A month before Dylann Roof killed nine members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, he visited McLeod and took pictures of himself there.

“People physically recoil at the fact that he was on the property,” says Ms. Smith. “But it gives us an opportunity to talk about hatred and why we cannot let hate end the conversation.”

There’s no agenda, no judgment, no attempt to sanitize what went on then or now, she says. It’s just a moment to pause, to acknowledge the pain, and to ask what they’ll do about it.

Maybe listen – to each other, or the ancient oak above them.

“Ultimately, we hope that it could be a place always of conversation and healing,” says Ms. Smith, “and people will leave better than when they came.”

Walter Houston Robinson contributed to this report.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the title of Whitney Plantation Executive Director Ashley Rogers and the spelling of Derrick Alridge.

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An Ethical Guide to Plantation Tours

Middleton Place National Historic Landmark And America's Oldest Landscaped Gardens In Charleston SC.

Wormsloe is often cited as one of Savannah’s top attractions. A quick internet search describes it as a state park, famous for its avenue of oak trees dripping with Spanish moss, under which visitors line up to take pictures and even get married. Tripadvisor reviews call it “breathtaking,” “magical,” and “like a fairy tale.” You'd never know Wormsloe was actually a plantation that ran on the labor of enslaved people.

Many travelers approach plantations, a cornerstone of tourism in the South, as they would parks, museums, or historical sites: a beautiful place to learn something about local history before having a cocktail or going out to dinner. But plantations need to be experienced differently. Black people were enslaved, raped, tortured, and killed for hundreds of years on these lands. They are America’s concentration camps.

Rather than shy away from the painful truth, plantations must expose it. They are a vital educational resource with which to combat modern-day racism.

The institution of slavery “translates into virtually every kind of social and economic racial disparity that you might think of today in terms of education, net worth, health, and mortality,” says Bernard Powers, director of the Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston and consultant with Middleton Place plantation. “It’s one thing to hear that. It’s another thing to go to a plantation site where you can see where the deed was done, see the implements of oppression, see the chains.”

Plantations are uniquely equipped to offer such an impactful, immersive experience. If such tours no longer existed, Powers says, “we would be far closer to developing an amnesia about what happened in the past, and the way in which the past continues to dog us in the present.”

Visitors are surprised to hear from Toby Smith, the lead interpretive aide at Charleston ’s McLeod Plantation , that the descendants of people enslaved at McLeod continued to live there, occupying huts without running water, until 1990. “It begins to sink in how very recent this is,” she says. McLeod’s Black visitorship rose after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, though Black and white visitors alike are “looking for answers.”

Some people don't want to hear about slavery when they're “on vacation,” says Brigette Janea Jones, former director of African American studies at Nashville’s Belle Meade plantation. But the experience can be life-changing.

“For many people, they leave feeling much better than they came, that they faced their fears,” Smith says. However, plantation tours vary tremendously, which poses a problem for travelers as they try to choose which one to visit. Some plantations celebrate the white slave-owning family and the upper-class furnishings of the big house with no mention of the atrocities that occurred there. Others are dedicated to honoring the lives of enslaved people, or are imperfectly working toward that goal.

This quandary also applies to historic houses, colonial attractions, and other slavery-era sites that functioned like plantations, but perhaps don’t look like them at first glance. Savannah’s Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters is one of the oldest examples of urban enslaved people’s housing in the South—but it was only in 2018 that “slave quarters” was added to its official name. Because of that, and its city setting, most visitors don’t view it as a plantation, says Bri Salley, marketing and communications manager for Telfair Museums, whose properties include Owens-Thomas. Visitors come primarily to learn about architecture and decorative arts, but receive an education on slavery too, hearing letters from enslaved people about their experience as cooks and groundskeepers.

With so many different types of plantations out there, with ranging emphasis on the history of enslaved people, we’ve created this guide to help travelers navigate their decision-making process. Here are some considerations for your next trip.

Take plantation tours that center Black voices

An exhibit inside the church at Whitney Plantation, in Louisiana

Look for plantations that focus heavily on the lives of enslaved people and tell their first-person stories, but more than that, look for plantations that employ Black historians, tours guides, and administrators. Avoid whitewashed storytelling that aims to make the experience more palatable, like tours that revolve around the slave-owning family and the luxurious furnishings of the big house.

Brigette Janea Jones is a fifth-generation Tennessean whose family was enslaved in Tennessee, and she led a Journey to Jubilee tour during her time at Belle Meade plantation, a tour that focused on the lives of enslaved people. She recited narratives recorded from enslaved people, whom she viewed as her own family, and the experience was very emotional for her. Journey to Jubilee began as an exhibit in 2007, but “grew like wildfire” once the tour launched in 2018, and there was a subsequent push not to have such segregated tours as they had been operating before she launched this program.

Jones says part of the solution was to put more Black artifacts, like portraits of enslaved people, inside the big house to acknowledge their role there, instead of regarding it as a purely white space. “White people can do this work,” says Jones about curating an experience that amplifies Black voices. “But Black people should be doing it.”

Avoid plantations that host weddings

When Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds had their 2012 wedding at Boone Hall Plantation, in South Carolina, activists sounded the alarm on the decision. Since weddings are a reliable source of revenue, many plantations are reluctant to give it up, but the practice is both inappropriate and disrespectful, drawing parallels to throwing a birthday party at Auschwitz. Similarly, avoid plantations that promote honeymoon packages, girls getaways, or other recreational products that detract from a serious discussion of slavery.

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For Pia Spinner, a descendant of people enslaved in Virginia and the education research assistant at Virginia’s Menokin plantation, this practice must stop industrywide. “No more plantation weddings,” she says, adding that while weddings did happen on plantations, those of enslaved people were often done in secret and went unrecognized. Menokin does not host weddings.

While the revenue may be tempting, a different business model is possible, says Joy Banner, director of communications at Whitney Plantation outside New Orleans . Whitney is famous for focusing exclusively on Black lives, and it does not host weddings or other events that detract from this mission. “There is opportunity to be honest and still have a sustainable business,” she says.

Look for the living descendants of enslaved people

Plantations should collaborate with the living descendants of people who were enslaved on the property. Descendants should have a say in how their family stories are told, how the property is managed, and how the organization interacts with the surrounding community.

Joy Banner is not just an employee at Whitney Plantation—she’s also a descendant of people enslaved on that very property, and she says that descendants are a crucial part of fulfilling Whitney’s mission. Besides herself, descendants occupy various other positions within the organization, including as interpreters and front desk staff.

“You’re gonna need to contact the descendant community,” says Janea Jones, advising other curators to collect the oral histories of descendants when developing their historic interpretations. In addition to working with Belle Meade in Nashville , Jones also worked with nearby Rippavilla plantation.

At Middleton Place, living descendants have joined the board of trustees and contributed valuably to the plantation’s storytelling, says Jeff Neale, director of preservation and interpretation. For years Middleton hosted separate reunions for Black and white descendants, until the first integrated one in 2006, a turning point says Neale, who joined Middleton in 2009. “From what I was told, people were a little worried, but it turned out to be an incredible experience.”

Large iron bowls used by enslaved people for boiling and refining sugar cane at Whitney Plantation

Ask about reparations

It’s ideal, though rare, for a plantation to give reparations to its living descendants, or allow descendants to have a say in how reparations are administered. Some plantations are working toward this, either in the form of direct monetary compensation or bolstering economic activity in the descendant community.

There’s an ongoing discussion at Menokin about compensating descendants, Spinner says. “I truly believe that all sites that want to work with the descendants of the people that they owned and benefitted from should compensate them.” McLeod is also considering compensating descendants, some of whom have visited and given feedback on the experience, says Smith.

“The descendants that contribute to the narrative of a plantation should be compensated,” says Banner of Whitney. “What that compensation looks like should be directed by the descendants.” She says plantations should make some kind of direct payout to descendants, though this has not been instituted at Whitney, and the pandemic put big collaborative projects like this on the back burner.

Direct payouts aside, Whitney has fostered some economic activity for the descendant community. Years ago Banner's sister opened a bakery near Whitney, and after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, the business closed. When Whitney opened to the public in 2014 and attracted visitors to the area, the business reopened as Fee-Fo-Lay Café , and it became a place where Whitney visitors could continue their conversations about slavery’s legacy. Descendants starting their own businesses is “the most powerful access that a plantation can give to a descendant community,” Banner says.

Broaden your view of when slavery happened

A view of the big house at McLeod Plantation, in Charleston

The story of slavery is not confined to a 250-year period. Plantation tours should discuss the lives of African people before the transatlantic slave trade, the fact that plantations were built on land taken from Indigenous peoples , and the links between slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, police brutality, and other current events.

For Spinner at Menokin, it’s important to acknowledge the murder and displacement of Native peoples to make way for plantations in the first place. “We do bring up the fact that this is Rappahannock land,” she says, adding that there are ongoing discussions about how to better include the tribe, honor its legacy, and have members use the land—to hold ceremonies, for example.

“Our Native American brothers and sisters were here first,” says Smith of McLeod. On her tours, she also traces enslaved people back to their lives on the African continent. She takes visitors down to Wappoo Creek and goes backward in time, by river to the Port of Charleston, by ocean back to Africa, and that opens up a discussion about the diversity of languages and cultures there. This topic is particularly personal for Smith. When her great-great grandmother was a young girl, she was taken away from her family in what is now Ghana, and brought to the United States. Smith says she mourned this familial loss. “Tell the story of who they were before they were captured,” she says. “America only knows Black people as captured.”

Last but not least, it’s crucial to connect the past to the present. Plantations should explain how slavery gave way to rampant lynchings during the Jim Crow era, alongside which police brutality flourished, long before the Black Lives Matter movement of today. During this time, countless George Floyds were killed, many of whose deaths did not spark nationwide protests.

Honest storytelling is fundamental to this entire effort, says Banner of Whitney. “If we are true to what the plantation was about, the difficulty of the labor that was involved, the system of slavery that kept people in prison on this land, rather than treating it like it’s this beautiful southern resort that was just magical for everybody, then we will be able to contribute a huge amount of progress toward racial healing.”

For more information

Whitney Plantation: 5099 Louisiana Highway 18, Edgard, LA 70049; whitneyplantation.org McLeod Plantation: 325 Country Club Drive, Charleston, SC 29412; https://ccprc.com/1447/McLeod-Plantation-Historic-Site Menokin Plantation: 4037 Menokin Road, Warsaw, Virginia 22572; menokin.org

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I used to lead tours at a plantation. You won’t believe the questions I got about slavery.

by Margaret Biser

The Old Plantation (Slaves Dancing on a South Carolina Plantation), ca. 1785-1795.

Up until about a year ago, I worked at a historic site in the South that included an old house and a nearby plantation. My job was to lead tours and tell guests about the people who made plantations possible: the slaves.

The site I worked at most frequently had more than 100 enslaved workers associated with it— 27 people serving the household alone, outnumbering the home's three white residents by a factor of nine. Yet many guests who visited the house and took the tour reacted with hostility to hearing a presentation that focused more on the slaves than on the owners.

The first time it happened, I had just finished a tour of the home. People were filing out of their seats, and one man stayed behind to talk to me. He said, "Listen, I just wanted to say that dragging all this slavery stuff up again is bringing down America."

I started to protest, but he interrupted me. "You didn't know. You're young. But America is the greatest country in the world, and these people out there, they'd do anything to make America less great." He was loud and confusing, and I was 22 years old and he seemed like a million feet tall.

Lots of folks who visit historic sites and plantations don't expect to hear too much about slavery while they're there. Their surprise isn't unjustified: Relatively speaking, the move toward inclusive history in museums is fairly recent, and still underway. And as recent debates over Confederate iconography have shown, as a country we're still working through our response to the horrors of slavery, even a century and a half after the end of the Civil War.

Read Margaret Biser’s answers to your questions from her reddit AMA .

The majority of interactions I had with museum guests were positive, and most visitors I encountered weren't as outwardly angry as that man who confronted me early on. (Though some were. One favorite: a 60-ish guy in a black tank top who, annoyed both at having to wait for a tour and at the fact that the next tour focused on slaves, came back at me with, "Yeah, well, Egyptians enslaved the Israelites, so I guess what goes around comes around!")

Still, I'd often meet visitors who had earnest but deep misunderstandings about the nature of American slavery. These folks were usually, but not always, a little older, and almost invariably white. I was often asked if the slaves there got paid, or (less often) whether they had signed up to work there. You could tell from the questions — and, not less importantly, from the body language — that the people asking were genuinely ignorant of this part of the country's history.

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The more overtly negative reactions to hearing about slave history were varied in their levels of subtlety. Sometimes it was as simple as watching a guest's body language go from warm to cold at the mention of slavery in the midst of the historic home tour. I also met guests from all over the country who, by means of suggestive questioning of the "Wouldn't you agree that..." variety, would try to lead me to admit that slavery and slaveholders weren't as bad as they've been made out to be.

On my tours, such moments occurred less frequently if visitors of color were present. Perhaps guests felt more comfortable asking me these questions because I am white, though my African-American coworkers were by no means exempt from such experiences. At any rate, these moments happened often enough that I eventually began writing them down (and, later, tweeting about them ).

Taken together, these are the most common misconceptions about American slavery I encountered during my time interpreting history to the public:

1) People think slaveholders "took care" of their slaves out of the goodness of their hearts, rather than out of economic interest

There is a surprisingly prevalent belief out there that slaves' rations and housing were bestowed upon them out of the master's goodwill, rather than handed down as a necessity for their continued labor — and their master's continued profit.

This view was expressed to me often, usually by people asking if the family was "kind" or "benevolent" to their slaves, but at no point was it better encapsulated than by a youngish mom taking the house tour with her 6-year-old daughter a couple of years ago. I had been showing them the inventory to the building, which sets a value on all the high-ticket items in the home, including silver, books, horses, and, of course, actual human people. (Remember that the technical definition of a slave is not just an unpaid worker, but a person considered property.)

For most guests, this is the most emotionally meaningful moment of the tour. I showed the young mother some of the slaves' names and pointed out which people were related to each other. The mom stiffened up, raised her chin, and asked pinchedly, "Did the slaves here appreciate the care they got from their mistress?"

2) People know that field slavery was bad but think household slavery was pretty all right, if not an outright sweet deal

"These were house slaves, so they must have had a pretty all right life, right?" is a phrase I heard again and again. Folks would ask me if members of the enslaved household staff felt "fortunate" that they "got to" sleep in the house or "got to" serve a politically powerful owner.

Relatedly, many guests seemed to think that the only reason to seek liberation from household slavery was if you were being beaten or abused. A large part of the house tours I gave was narratives of men and women who dared to attempt escape from it, and so many museum visitors asked me, in all earnestness and surprise, why those men and women tried to escape: "They lived in a nice house here, and they weren't being beaten. Do we know why they wanted to leave?" These folks were seeing the evil of slavery primarily as a function of the physical environment and the behavior of individual slaveowners, not as inherent to the system itself.

It is worth mentioning that I never, on any tour, said the slaves weren't being beaten -- these visitors simply assumed it. It is also worth mentioning here that the bulk of wanted ads placed in newspapers for fugitive slaves are for house servants, not field workers. Apparently whatever slavery was like in the big house, people were willing to risk their lives to get away from it.

3) People think slavery and poverty are interchangeable

Sometimes in the course of a conversation, guests I spoke with would remark that while being a field slave was indeed difficult, on the whole it was hardly worse than being a humble farmer living off the land. Folks have not always been taught that slavery was much more than just difficult labor: It was violence, assault, family separation, fear.

One important branch of this phenomenon was guests huffily bringing up every disadvantaged group of white people under the sun — the Irish, the Polish, the Jews, indentured servants, regular servants, poor people, white women, Baptists, Catholics, modern-day wage workers, whomever — and say something like, "Well, you know they had it almost as bad as/just as bad as/much worse than slaves did." Within the context of a tour or other interpretation, this behavior had the effect of temporarily pulling sympathy and focus away from African Americans and putting it on whites.

The most extreme example of this occurred in my very last week of work. A gentleman came in to view our replica slave quarter and, upon learning how crowded it was, said, "Well, I've seen taverns where five or six guys had to share a bed!" — thus adding "tavern-goers" to the list of white people who supposedly had it just as bad as slaves.

4) People don't understand how prejudice influenced slaveholders' actions beyond mere economic interest

I was occasionally asked what motivation slaveholders would have had for beating, starving, or otherwise maltreating enslaved workers. This was often phrased as, "If you think about it economically, they don't work as hard if you don't feed 'em!" (The frequent use of the general "you" in this formulation is significant, because it assumes that the archetypal listener is a potential slaveholder —i.e., that the archetypal listener is white.)

Sometimes this question was asked sincerely; at other times the asker was using it to suggest that stories of abuse, suffering, and exploitation under slavery were just outliers or exaggerations.

What this perspective fails to take into account is the racist beliefs that made cruelty to slaves seem ethically permissible. Slaveowners told each other that black workers were stronger than white ones and thus didn't require as much food or rest. They also told each other that black Americans had a higher pain tolerance — literal thick skin — and that therefore physical punishments could be employed with less restraint.

Such beliefs also helped slaveowners feel confident dismissing complaints from enslaved workers as ungrateful whining.

5) People think "loyalty" is a fair term to apply to people held in bondage

One of the few times I actually felt scared of a guest was during a crowded tour a couple of years ago. I was describing a typical dining room service: the table packed with wealthy and influential couples from the surrounding town, and, in the corners of the room, enslaved waiting men watching and serving but unable to speak. The tour was so crowded that not everyone could fit into the room, and a few tourists were listening from the hallway.

As soon as I finished my sentence about the slaves, an expressionless voice behind me intoned, "Were they loyal?" I turned around, and saw a man resting his arms on either side of the door frame behind me, blocking the exit. He looked like he was about to slap me.

I asked him why he would ask that. "They gave 'em food. Gave 'em a place to live," he said. He was just staring into the room, blank in the eyes.

"I think most people would act ‘loyal' to a person who could shoot them for leaving," I said. He and his adult sons keep their arms crossed as they stared at me for the rest of the tour, and I tried to stay toward the middle of the group.

All the misconceptions discussed here serve to prop up one overarching and incorrect belief: that slavery wasn't really all that bad. And if even slavery was supposedly benign, then how bad can the struggles faced by modern day people of color really be?

Why these misconceptions are so prevalent is a fair question. Sometimes guests were just repeating ideas they'd heard in school or from family. They were only somewhat invested in those ideas personally, and they were open to hearing new perspectives (especially when backed up by historical data).

In many other cases, however, justifications of slavery seemed primarily like an attempt by white Americans to avoid feelings of guilt for the past. After all, for many people, beliefs about one's origins reflect one's beliefs about oneself. We don't want our ancestors to have done bad things because we don't want to think of ourselves as being bad people. These slavery apologists were less invested in defending slavery per se than in defending slave owners , and they weren't defending slaveowners so much as themselves.

Other visitors seemed to find part of their identity in a sense of class victimhood, and they were unwilling to share the sympathy and attention of victimhood with black Americans. As Frank Guan pointed out in the New Republic, explicitness of racism tends to be inversely proportional to social class. Guests who expressed racism most openly to me often appeared to have had recent ancestors who were poor, who were prevented by convention and economics from rising in social status, and who were exploited by the powerful — but who were protected by their whiteness from the extreme oppression visited on African Americans. Regardless of their current wealth level or social status, they still felt that the deck had been stacked against them for generations. Their sense of ancestral victimhood was so personal that the suggestion that any group of people had it worse than their ancestors did was a threat to their sense of self.

And maybe some of these guests were just looking for somewhere to place their anger at their problems, their sense of powerlessness, and their discomfort at social change. They found a scapegoat in black America. I imagine that's what motivated Charleston shooter Dylann Roof , the Unite the Right movement , and others — that feeling of being aggrieved, and wanting someone to blame for it.

Regardless of why they were espoused, all the misconceptions discussed here lead to the same result: the assertion that slavery wasn't really all that bad ("as long as you had a godly master," as one guest put it). And if slavery itself was benign — slavery , a word which in most parlances is a shorthand for unjust hardship and suffering — if even slavery itself was all right, then how bad can the struggles faced by modern-day African Americans really be? Why feel bad for those who complain about racist systems today? The minimization of the unjustness and horror of slavery does more than simply keep the bad feelings of guilt, jealousy, or anger away: It liberates the denier from social responsibility to slaves' descendants.

The question of how to improve this state of affairs is gigantic, and better heads than mine have already said much about it . The tough thing is that racism comes more from the gut than from the mind: You can prove slavery was bad six ways from Sunday, but people can still choose to believe otherwise if they want. Addressing racism isn't just about correcting erroneous beliefs — it's about making people see the humanity in others. We need better education that demonstrates the complexity and dignity of all people; continued efforts from community organizations and faith communities to give justice its due; and better media portraying people of color as people, not caricatures or symbols. Art, public school, faith, entertainment — these are voices that address the subconscious, voices we absorb silently without even noticing. None of these is a complete solution, of course — they are all oblique routes to building compassion.

It's certainly not a bad idea for white Americans to take time to consider the ways in which we may personally have been complicit in oppression, but blame and guilt aren't really the point of telling the histories of enslaved people. The point is to honor those whose tales have not been told.

On the very small scale of leading historic house tours, what helped me combat ahistorical statements was to establish trust and rapport with guests from the get-go. For me, gentleness was key: It created an environment in which people were willing to hear new views and felt less nervous asking questions. For example, guests — especially older folks — used to ask me all the time whether the people who owned the house were "good slaveowners." I would say, "Well, that's an interesting question," and suggest a couple of reasons why even the phrase good slaveowner itself is troubling. They'd nod and look reflective. We were already friends, so they didn't feel attacked by the correction. Then again, maybe they only believed me because they trusted a fellow white person as an unbiased source. And making a personal connection isn't a foolproof way to diffuse racism, as the shooting in Charleston shows: Roof felt so welcomed by the members of Emanuel AME Church that he considered not killing any of them , yet ultimately he went through with his plan.

An older colleague once reminded me to "talk to people, not at them." It's a small piece of advice. But day by day as I was face to face with strangers, challenging their deeply held beliefs on race, it helped.

Margaret Biser gave educational tours and presentations at a historic site for more than six years. Read more stories of her experiences on Twitter @AfAmHistFail .

First Person is Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines , and pitch us at [email protected] .

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‘These are our ancestors’: Descendants of enslaved people are shifting plantation tourism

At three plantations in charleston, s.c., black descendants are connecting with their family’s history and helping reshape the narrative.

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Robert Bellinger was driving down Ashley River Road in Charleston, S.C., enjoying the landscape of live oak trees and Spanish moss, when it dawned on him exactly where he was headed and why.

“It just hit me,” Bellinger recalled of his drive in November 2016. “I thought, ‘I’m headed to a family reunion on a plantation where my ancestors were enslaved.’”

Bellinger, a historian and researcher from Boston, was on his way to Middleton Place , a former rice plantation in the Ashley River Historic Corridor. Today, Middleton Place is a national historic landmark and museum, and it is home to the oldest landscaped gardens in the United States.

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Bellinger learned about his family’s connection to Middleton Place decades before deciding to make the trip. In 1983, his cousin Mamie Garvin Fields, then 90 years old, published “ Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir ,” which recounts the family’s generational connections to the low country, including stories about Fields’ enslaved grandfather. His own family research helped Bellinger find ancestors at Middleton dating back to 1790.

He also learned that Middleton Place hosted descendant reunions every few years, gathering both Black and White descendants for a weekend of on-site research presentations, history lectures and informal dialogues. With some trepidation, he decided to attend.

“Just three days before, we had a presidential election, the results of which I was not too crazy about,” Bellinger said. “I was saying to myself, now why am I heading to a plantation in this climate?”

The past two decades have seen a shift among plantation museums across the south. Previously, the majority of tours focused on the architecture of the main house, the landscapes and the economics of slavery. But today, a growing number of these sites are making efforts to confront slavery head-on, emphasizing the narratives of the enslaved and often requesting the help of their descendants.

At Middleton Place, it began with Earl Middleton, a noted civil rights leader and Tuskegee Airman from Orangeburg, S.C., who in 1997 became the first Black descendant asked to join Middleton Place’s board of trustees. Earl Middleton’s grandfather, Abram, was enslaved there until the end of the Civil War . After emancipation, newly freed Black families needed a surname to be counted as citizens by the government; some families adopted the surname of their former masters, making today’s search for descendants easier for historians.

For Black tour guides in Savannah, the historical is personal

Middleton Place had previously hosted two reunions for White descendants, and in 2001, Earl Middleton was integral in the board’s decision to find and invite Black descendants as well.

“When a plantation comes to a Black family, there’s often suspicion, rightfully so,” said Tracey Todd, president and CEO of the Middleton Place Foundation. “But with the help of Dr. Earl Middleton acting as a liaison, as well as our continued genealogy research, we had a turnout of about 350 people at that first combined reunion in 2006.”

According to Todd, who is the first person outside the family to lead Middleton, about 30 percent of the descendants at the reunion were Black, and the event was “a little tense at times.” Ty Collins, one of the Black Middleton descendants who attended the first combined reunion, agreed.

“At first, it was a warm and fuzzy kumbaya, I’ll-be-glad-when-this-is-all-over kind of moment,” Collins joked. “I don’t know what our expectations were going into it, but it has resulted in a lot of communication between family members over the years."

Collins is a former English and theater professor who, after attending the reunion, began to volunteer at Middleton Place, giving tours and even performing dramatic interpretations of the daily lives of his ancestors. He is preparing to launch the African Heritage Seed Project, which includes researching and cultivating seeds of African origins on site.

Earl Middleton died the following year in 2007, though the combined reunions continued in 2011 and 2016, the year his cousin Bellinger arrived on his first visit to Middleton.

“We see Middleton very differently than many other people of color do, because these are our ancestors. We have a right and a specific need to acknowledge their presence.” — Ty Collins, one of the Black Middleton descendants

Since that first visit in 2016, Bellinger has remained involved at Middleton Place, acting as the site’s scholar-in-residence in 2019.

Collins and Bellinger said they agreed that being able to identify the soil their ancestors worked on is heavy but necessary knowledge to have. “I guess the word that would come up is ‘bittersweet,’” Bellinger said. “You know where they were and you know the conditions they were in, but now you also have the opportunity to know their names and celebrate their successes.”

“We see Middleton very differently than many other people of color do, because these are our ancestors. We have a right and a specific need to acknowledge their presence,” Collins said.

As plantations talk more honestly about slavery, some visitors are pushing back

Recently while giving a tour of Eliza’s House, a renovated slave cabin at Middleton Place, Collins greeted a Black couple in the home — and made a surprise family connection.

Vincent and Dorothy White, visiting from Athens, Ga., had never been to Middleton Place before; they decided to pull over because they have Middletons in their family from South Carolina.

“One of [Vincent’s] cousins married a Kenneth Middleton family, so we got curious … And then we found Earl Middleton in this book," said Dorothy White, referencing a book about slavery at Middleton.

“That’s his cousin!,” she said, pointing at her husband.

Vincent White nodded, “I have pictures of me, Earl and Kenny from back in the day!”

Collins was delighted. “That makes us cousins, too,” he said. “Dr. Middleton is still bringing us together.”

Magnolia Plantation , another former rice plantation near the Ashley River, has been owned by the Drayton family since 1676. Black people have lived and worked at Magnolia throughout its 350-year history, first as enslaved workers and then, after emancipation, as paid garden staff.

In 2008, Taylor Drayton Nelson, then CEO of Magnolia, partnered with genealogist and anthropologist Toni Carrier to launch Lowcountry Africana , an online database that has since helped thousands of people learn about their enslaved ancestors at Drayton Hall, Magnolia Plantation and in the lowcountry area, including comedian Chris Rock and former first lady Michelle Obama.

“For White Americans, genealogy is primarily a hobby. It’s a leisure pursuit,” said Carrier, now director of the Center for Family History at the International African American Museum. “But for African Americans, it’s much deeper than that. It’s a yearning to know who came before you.”

Using 10,000 pages of historical documents and oral histories, researchers uncovered an initial 1,568 names of the enslaved and their family members. An ad Nelson placed in Charleston’s Post and Courier newspaper helped locate Susan Weston Bennett, the granddaughter of Adam Bennett, the later-freed enslaved overseer at Magnolia Plantation.

Bennett descendants continue to visit Magnolia, even getting married on the crest of the plantation’s White Bridge . Susan Weston Bennett, who died in 2016, celebrated her 90th birthday at Magnolia in 2006.

“For White Americans, genealogy is primarily a hobby. It’s a leisure pursuit. But for African Americans, it’s much deeper than that. It’s a yearning to know who came before you.“ — Toni Carrier, genealogist and anthropologist

When the remaining Bennett family left Magnolia in the 1930s, another Black family, the Leaches, came to live and work in the gardens.

“Rev. Willie Leach worked as gardens superintendent alongside my grandfather,” Moore said. “His son Johnnie Leach worked as the gardens superintendent alongside my brother for several years after my grandfather’s death.”

Until 1969, Johnnie Leach lived with his family in one of the five slave cabins at Magnolia, situated in a row commonly referred to as “The Street.” At the time, the cabins had been updated with electricity, but the Leach family still used an outhouse and a gas stove. Years later, running water was added, but in 2008, each cabin was restored to demonstrate the historic building materials and living conditions as part of the “Slavery to Freedom” tour.

Two of Johnnie Leach’s sons, Isaac and Ted, who work at Magnolia, say they remember their childhood there fondly.

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“Growing up here, sometimes my friends [would ask] ‘Damn, you actually live there?’,” said Ted Leach, who at 54 is the youngest of Johnnie’s 16 children. “We can’t forget what happened with slavery, of course, but for us, this place was just home. My dad worked here for about 70 years.”

“Our grandfather [Willie Leach] was a botanist and he grafted camellias here for years,” said Isaac Leach. “This place will continue to change hands in the family and each person will have their ideas about how to run it, but what I see is African Americans doing this propagation and tending to the landscape. I’m looking at what our folks have done to this land and what they put into it.”

Both Isaac and his grandfather Willie have camellias named after them and registered with the American Camellias Society.

Growing up on James Island from the 1970s to ’80s, Kerri Forrest passed McLeod Plantation every day.

“We’d drive by and someone would say ‘Your grandfather used to live there,’ ” said Forrest of the slave cabins on Folly Road. “According to my dad and my aunts, my grandfather Coleman was the gravedigger there and was supposedly the last person buried in the graveyard.”

She also learned that not only was her great-grandfather Stephen Forrest enslaved at McLeod, but also he was left in charge of the plantation when owner William W. McLeod served in the Civil War.

“It was always just part of the family story,” Forrest said. “Unfortunately, my grandfather was already dead by the time I was born, and my grandmother passed away before I was 10 years old. I’ve had these stories all my life, even though I didn’t have people to necessarily connect them to.”

Established in 1851, McLeod was known for producing sea island cotton, a rare and expensive strain unique to the Lowcountry and tended to by enslaved workers from West and Central Africa. The home was occupied by the McLeod family until 1990, and the site changed ownership several times before ultimately being sold to the Charleston County Park and Recreation Commission in 2011 . As the park system prepared to restore the site and open it to the public, Forrest’s family stories became especially relevant.

“At the time, they were getting [McLeod] ready to turn it into an open park site,” Forrest said. “I mentioned my great-grandfather was the slave who held it down when McLeod went to war. That’s when we started talking about my family tree and how many of the older family members were still alive.”

From there, more puzzle pieces started to fall into place, including a photo of Forrest’s great-grandmother Harriet found by the South Carolina Historical Society; the picture shows her sitting on a stoop and smoking a cigar. Forrest said she appreciates how the research has reframed her perspective.

“Growing up, you didn’t want to talk about your enslaved ancestors because the assumed narrative was that they were just labor, they weren’t actually smart and they had no skills,” Forrest said. “But truly, these enslaved Africans brought skills that they used to build the city and to create an economic engine.”

Forrest spoke about her family connections to McLeod at the site’s opening in 2015 and has since stayed in touch. As director of Lowcountry programs at the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation , she hopes to partner with McLeod in the future and support their efforts to tell complete narratives.

According to Shawn Halifax, the cultural history interpretation coordinator at McLeod Plantation, the work to engage descendants of McLeod is an ongoing process meant to recover history that was once intentionally hidden.

"But truly, these enslaved Africans brought skills that they used to build the city and to create an economic engine.” — Kerri Forrest

“Traditionally speaking, sites of slavery have engaged in efforts to misrepresent, ignore, even at times, annihilate the history of the majority of the people that occupied these spaces,” said Halifax. “Subsequently the stories and the narratives that have been crafted traditionally at places like this have been crafted by folks that have been actively engaged in that work. Engaging descended communities is a way for people to take back their history. ”

McLeod continues to research using not only the oral histories from local families, but also the cemetery on-site.

Southern neighborhoods have been named ‘plantations’ for decades. That could be changing.

“Archaeologists that have studied [the cemetery] said that it was used as early as the American Revolution all the way until 1965,” Halifax said. “Not everyone that's buried has a direct connection to the site, but the names of people that are descended from here are ones that we continue to try to uncover and research.”

As a direct descendant, Forrest looks forward to engaging in conversations about the future of the cemetery.

“There’s been a lot of conversation in Charleston lately about those burial grounds,” she said. “With all of the development pressure going on in Charleston right now, you’re seeing so many burial sites being desecrated for development. I hope we’re able to actually honor the lives of those who have been laid to rest there.”

A photo caption in a previous version of this story misidentified a slave cabin as a cabin at McLeod Plantation. It is located at Magnolia Plantation. The caption has been corrected.

By Sarah Payne

Published november 20, 2019, 1 introduction.

At a time in the United States when white supremacy, racial violence, and Confederate iconography have become national talking points, more authentic representations of race relations and the country’s legacy of slavery assume a greater sense of urgency. In the last seveal years, the US has seen a spate of artistic representations and public history projects that attempt to combat whitewashed narratives of slavery. Recent films such as 12 Years a Slave (2013) and the 2016 remake of Roots , as well as Colson Whitehead’s novel, The Underground Railroad (2016), eschew romanticized visions of slavery in favor of narratives focusing on the enslaved. The opening of the National Museum of African American History in 2016 also participates in recuperating a more authentic understanding of slavery that recovers the humanity slavery sought to destroy.

Recent representations of slavery, however well intentioned, have provoked discussions about who should represent black pain and oppression and what purpose such representations serve. 1 Also evoking such questions are contemporary plantation tours, most of which are white-centered, “moonlight and magnolia” recreations. 2 There have been efforts to represent slavery more accurately at plantations such as Oak Alley, 3 and most notably, the Whitney Plantation, which opened in 2014. Located in Wallace, Louisiana, the Whitney stands out as the only plantation tour in the US dedicated to depicting the antebellum plantation entirely from the perspective of former slaves. The existing scholarly work on the Whitney largely approaches the site through the lens of heritage tourism or dark tourism. 4 These perspectives are useful in considering both how the Whitney works against whitewashed plantation tours and the potential for voyeuristic viewing practices among visitors.

The Whitney also has much in common with the textual genres of slave narratives and neoslave narratives, yet the Whitney’s connection to literary narratives of slavery remains largely unexamined. This essay asks how our understanding of the Whitney Plantation, as a representation of slavery, a public history project, and an example of dark tourism, might be affected by reading the plantation in connection to both historical and fictional accounts of slavery. Using examples from well-known novels such as Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), I demonstrate how the Whitney, like textual narratives of slavery, employs bodily epistemology, sentimentalism, a white authenticating presence, and a focus on authenticity, making neoslave narratives useful lenses through which to read the immersive experience of the Whitney. In what follows, I historicize the Whitney’s narrative of slavery within the broader genre of slave narratives in order to highlight the tradition of narrating slavery in which the Whitney participates.

2 Neoslave Narratives in the Twenty-First Century

In the introduction to the Oxford Handbook to the African American Slave Narrative , John Ernest describes the vastness of the slave narrative genre. Marion Wilson Starling, for example, counted the number of recovered slave narratives at 6,006, noting that the narratives appeared in “judicial records, broadsides, private printings, abolitionist newspapers and volumes, scholarly journals, church records, unpublished collections, and a few regular publications.” 5 Despite the wide array of materials in which slave narratives have appeared, critical consensus has often formulaically defined the genre to include certain tropes: the presence of a white amanuensis, the slave’s acquisition of literacy, depictions of cruel, often Christian slaveholders, and details of the amount of food and clothing allotted the slaves. Well-known slave narratives such as Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853) and Mary Prince’s The History of Mary Prince (1831), among others, exemplify the generic conventions of the slave narrative. 6 I agree with Ernest, however, when he urges us to broaden our understanding of slave narratives: “If we extend our perspective to take in the whole of slave testimony, the story gets even more complicated, and the call for a coherent portrait is both compelling and elusive.” 7 The elusive and complicated nature of slave narratives also appears in the Whitney’s own attempts to narrate slavery and recapture the past using limited archival evidence.

I want to pause over the white authenticating voice in the slave narrative, as this feature becomes particularly relevant in discussions of the Whitney. The presence of the white amanuensis, often motivated by abolitionist political aims, has sparked debate regarding the authenticity of slave narratives and the ability to locate the slave’s voice within the abolitionist’s writing. In Understanding Nineteenth-Century Slave Narratives , Sterling Bland examines the generic structure of many slave narratives, concluding the structure leaves little room for the voice of the narrator, the slave. Instead, he argues, the slave’s voice remains subordinated to the political aims of abolitionism. 8 Scholars such as K. Merinda Simmons, however, are critical of a focus on voice and authenticity, particularly from a feminist and postcolonial standpoint. Writing of Mary Prince’s slave narrative, Simmons notes that criticism has often positioned Prince as having a “true voice” that is accessible. Simmons points to the coercive elements through which Prince’s narrative is filtered, urging readers not to put too much emphasis on the idea of an authentic voice. Instead, Simmons suggests, readers should “investigate the other voices and dynamics at work in Prince’s text rather than classify the History simply as ‘autobiographical slave narrative.’” 9 I want to balance Bland’s focus on authenticity with Simmons’s attention to the “other voices and dynamics at work.” 10 Authenticity is important for the Whitney, particularly given its stark contrast to more romanticized plantation tours. Yet an overemphasis on authenticity can also detract from the multiplicity of voices the Whitney seeks to amplify.

While the slave narrative genre ended with texts written by former slaves after emancipation, fictionalized narratives of slavery persisted into the twentieth, and as I would argue, the twenty-first century. Bernard Bell first described neoslave narratives as “residually oral, modern narratives of escape from bondage to freedom.” 11 Ashraf Rushdy expands on Bell’s work, defining neoslave narratives as “contemporary novels that assume the form, adopt the conventions, and take on the first-person voice of antebellum slave narratives.” 12 By contemporary, Rushdy means texts from the 1960s onwards, whose authors were spurred by the controversy of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. 13 While the second half of the twentieth century did see a wave of neoslave narratives, such as Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966) and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), earlier texts such as Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder (1936) also function as neoslave narratives, making 1960 a tenuous demarcation. 14

More recent work on neoslave narratives broadens the genre to include a variety of literary styles and even non-literary representations of slavery. Valerie Smith, for example, refers to this “retrospective literature about slavery” as incorporating a diverse array of perspectives and genres such as speculative fiction, satire, and postmodern experiment (168). Scholars such as Stephanie Li argue for the inclusion of films such as 12 Years a Slave in the neoslave narrative genre as well. Drawing comparisons to Toni Morrison’s work, Li notes that Morrison’s artistic task is to “speak the unspeakable: to describe both the violence that is sublimated or ignored in slave narratives as well as to articulate the silenced interior life of enslaved men and women.” 15 Morrison’s goal, Li suggests, applies to Steve McQueen, the director of 12 Years a Slave. Given the understanding of neoslave narratives not only as diversified literary genres, but as encompassing non-textual representations as well, it would be a natural progression to extend some of the questions surrounding neoslave narratives to more embodied representations of slavery, as the Whitney also participates in the effort to “speak the unspeakable” and recover the voices of the enslaved.

While I reference several slave narratives in my analysis of the Whitney, more in-depth comparisons rely on passages from Kindred and Beloved . Both novels incorporate elements of postmodern experimentation, science fiction, and fantasy in order to recover a black feminist perspective on slavery. Kindred follows a woman, Dana, who lives in 1970s California but finds herself repeatedly transported to antebellum Maryland in order to save her white, slave-owning ancestor. Throughout these experiences, Dana comes to know the realities of slavery in much harsher terms than her white husband, Kevin, who also travels through time and space. Beloved reworks the historical account of an escaped slave woman who was arrested and tried for murdering her child. When confronted with white men who intend to return her to slavery, Sethe, Beloved ’s protagonist, would rather kill her child herself than let the institution of slavery do it. I use these novels for two reasons: they both attempt to represent slavery from a greater temporal distance than original slave narratives, much like the Whitney Plantation. More importantly, the texts narrate slavery through a black feminist perspective, combatting the male dominated genre of the slave narrative. Though the Whitney is not explicitly feminist, the tour’s attention to the violence slave women in particular endured, as well as my own observations regarding slave women’s presence in the Whitney’s archival materials, make these two black feminist texts particularly fruitful lenses through which to examine the Whitney’s representation of slavery.

3 “Go there tuh know there”: Touring the Whitney Plantation 16

A substantial body of criticism exists on contemporary plantation tours in the US, much of which centers on the ways these sites whitewash history, romanticize slavery, and focus primarily on the planter class rather than the slaves. Scholars such as David Butler and Stephen Litvin, and Joshua Brewer analyze the under-representation and significant omission of slavery on many plantation tours, both in urban environments and more rural plantations. Butler, for example, observes a stark contrast between the number of times tour guides mention slavery and the frequency of language pertaining to slave-owners, architecture, and crops. Echoing the attention to slavery’s absence, Litvin and Brewer raise the important question of authenticity in regard to representing slavery and consider how much information can be left out of plantation tours before the absence of slavery becomes problematic. 17

More recent scholarship in public history and heritage tourism also contributes to our understanding of plantation tours. Derek Alderman, David Butler, and Stephen Hanna, for example, argue that heritage tourism plays an increasingly important role in understanding the racialization process in the US, and Marie Tyler-McGraw suggests that monuments and historical sites are a form of civic education. 18 Control of these sites, their forms, and their inscriptions is a control of local history. Attending to the relational process of heritage tourism, scholars have highlighted the significance of tourists’ prior knowledge of the sites and their own participation in meaning-making at plantation tours. 19 Regarding the spatial and narrative elements of plantation tours, Azaryahu and Foote are instrumental in understanding the centrality of the physical landscape in the production of meaning at plantations. 20 I want to extend the critical attention on plantations and spatial narrative to include literary narratives, particularly as they relate to the Whitney’s depiction of slavery.

Situated about an hour outside New Orleans, the Whitney Plantation was founded by Ambroise Heidel, a German immigrant who came to Louisiana in 1721. Heidel bought the plantation, originally named Habitation Haydel, in 1752 where he focused on indigo production. His grandson, Jean Jacques Haydel, took over the plantation in the early nineteenth century where he emphasized sugar over indigo. In 1819, Haydel owned sixty-one slaves. Most were Creoles born in Louisiana, nineteen were born in Africa, one in Jamaica, one in Haiti, and three came from the east coast of the US. Additionally, there were twenty-one women on the plantation and nine children. Records indicate early pregnancies in the women and high child mortality rates as well. The Whitney gained its current name in 1867 after Bradish Johnson bought the land and named it after his grandson, Harry Whitney. 21

Located on the historic River Road in Southern Louisiana, the Whitney is in close proximity to other plantations such as Oak Alley, Laura, and Destrehan, yet its mission differs starkly from the other plantations. Oak Alley, for example, markets itself as a plantation, restaurant, and inn that has several cottages available for overnight stay, complete with free Wi-Fi. Additionally, Oak Alley is available to rent out for weddings and the event photos feature smiling white women dancing and clinking champagne glasses. 22 The Whitney, however, is the self-described only Louisiana plantation with a focus on slavery and has received significant attention from the popular press. 23 A New York Times article by David Amsden refers to the Whitney as the “first slavery museum in America.” 24 John Cummings, a New Orleans trial lawyer and the white owner of the Whitney, opened the museum in December 2014 after learning the history of the land he had purchased. The Whitney makes every attempt to represent plantation life from the slaves’ perspectives, from the tour itself to the plantation’s website, which includes information regarding the slaves who lived there, the Atlantic slave trade more broadly, slave resistance, and the slave quarters.

There is also a burgeoning field of scholarship on the Whitney, which often approaches the site through the lens of heritage tourism or public history. 25 Thomas Raymen takes one of the more critical stances on the Whitney. Using a criminological approach, Raymen analyzes the Whitney in terms of dark tourism, arguing that touring the Whitney functions as a form of “deviant leisure” with the potential to be both exploitative and voyeuristic. 26 Additionally, Raymen argues that the Whitney relegates slavery to the past, and visitors thus lose sight of the ways in which slavery still operates today, albeit in mutated forms. 27 While I agree that making an excursion to a site of extreme violence and oppression is unsettling, particularly as a white person, placing the Whitney in conversation with neoslave narratives can provide another dimension to the ethics of touring the site. Michelle Commander suggests that “Cummings and his staff promulgate a quasi-neo slave narrative in which they advance the idea that slavery left its imprint on American society in subtle and devastating ways,” though she doesn’t expand on the connection between the Whitney and literature. 28 Extending Commander’s linkage between the Whitney and neoslave narratives, I argue that the Whitney makes use of the contemporary body in order to bridge the gap between slavery’s history and its current manifestations.

The body has long been considered significant in knowing and understanding, particularly in terms of slavery and racial oppression. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God , Janie relates her experiences to her friend Phoeby, ultimately concluding “you got tuh go there tuh know there . . . nobody else can’t tell yuh and show yuh.” 29 Janie’s way of knowing relies on bodily experience and physically being there. Likewise, Kindred ’s protagonist, Dana, finds herself literally transported through time and space to understand the realities of antebellum slavery. In Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture , Lisa Woolfork uses the term “bodily epistemology” to consider how the body of a patron, viewer, or reader can locate them in the past. There is a certain premise, Woolfork argues, that “forcing visitors to imagine themselves in the perspective of slaves may offer a more proximate and complex interpretation of the slave past.” 30 The bodily epistemology Woolfork references, which appears in Hurston’s and Butler’s novels, plays a significant role in the tour at the Whitney as well. By inverting the typical structure of a plantation tour, the Whitney encourages visitors to know a more accurate depiction of slavery through the physical experience of the tour.

Before commencing the ninety-minute tour, visitors first enter a church, watch an informational video about the plantation, and hear an introductory overview from the tour guide. Throughout the church, life-size statues of slave children surround the visitors. The statues, created by Woodrow Nash, an Ohio-based artist, are meant to symbolize the former slaves that were interviewed as part of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). The interviewees would have been children at the time of emancipation. Mary Ann Sternberg, in River Road Rambler Returns , recalls her tour of the Whitney: “[T]o me, nothing was more poignant or affecting than the powerfully wrought sculptures of slave children. . . .” 31 Others echo the evocative power of the statues, calling them “reembodiments”: “Bodies are highly affecting objects. We relate to bodies because we are embodied.” 32 The physical representation of slave children elicits sympathy in visitors, forcing them to acknowledge the influence of slavery on young children before even beginning the tour.

Others, however, are more critical of the Whitney’s emotional appeals. In her review of the Whitney, Randi Lynn Tanglen refers to the “heavy-handed pathos” of the tour, particularly when the tour guide described the grounds as a “crime scene.” 33 By using such language, the tour risks undermining the potential for resistance on the part of slaves, portraying them solely as victims. Michelle Commander also describes what she calls the “sensory excess” of the tour, echoing Tanglen’s critique. 34 Yet we might also consider how earlier textual slave narratives used sentimentalism and what one might call “heavy-handed pathos” to appeal to white audiences. Slave narratives of the nineteenth century often employed sentimentalism in order to gain reader sympathy and advance their political aims. Common sentimental tropes include attention to vulnerable womanhood, a focus on the family and domesticity, and the potential for Christian salvation. As Jennifer Williamson notes in Twentieth Century Sentimentalism: Narrative Appropriation in American Literature , many abolitionists used “moral suasion,” to focus “rhetorical appeals on the basic goodness of human nature” in order to portray the immorality of slavery. 35 Williamson goes on to argue that sentimental tactics have persisted into twentieth century neoslave narratives, such as Kindred and Beloved . Both novels employ sentimental themes related to domesticity and familial connections, specifically using children to persuade their readers of slavery’s destructiveness, much like the Whitney’s use of childlike statues.

A formative moment for Dana is when she has been transported back to antebellum Maryland and witnesses several slave children pretending to hold a slave auction. While the children think they are playing a game, Dana recognizes the unsettling implications of the children’s actions. Tired and disgusted, she tells her husband, Kevin, that the “games [the children] are playing are preparing them for their future.” 36 While Kevin thinks Dana is reading too much into the children’s game, Dana thinks he is reading too little into it. The moment incites an argument between the two, and we understand just how differently Kevin and Dana perceive their antebellum environment. Kevin’s status as a white man affords him the privilege of viewing a mock slave auction as only a game. Dana, however, has witnessed slave whippings and is acutely aware of her role as a slave on the plantation. She cannot separate the children’s actions from the world of violence and oppression they inhabit. Butler uses children specifically to demonstrate the psychic and physical destruction of slavery, as Dana informs Kevin that even if the children live to see emancipation, they will have “slaved away their best years.” 37

Similarly, the climactic moment of Beloved is when Sethe kills her own child rather than see her enslaved. Williamson refers to this moment as “an extreme expression of sentimental motherhood.” 38 Morrison carries sentimentalism to its furthest end, demonstrating how slavery perverts the concepts of motherhood and familial connections. The Whitney accomplishes a similar goal through its use of child-sized statues and affective language. There is a didactic element to the tour, much like sentimental literature. The tour is not meant to incite a variety of interpretations; rather, its goal is to demonstrate the immorality of slavery. By materially representing enslaved children and deploying “heavy-handed” language, the Whitney implicitly tells visitors how to view slavery. Before commencing the official tour, visitors must confront the brutal realities of slavery, particularly as experienced by vulnerable children.

Rather than begin the tour at the “big house,” as most tours do, the Whitney leads visitors out behind the house, to the fields and slave quarters. Visitors first encounter two separate memorials dedicated to former slaves: The Wall of Honor and the Field of Angels. The Wall of Honor is reminiscent of the Memorial Wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, with the names of former slaves at the Whitney engraved on granite slabs. Additional details gleaned from archival materials such as age, relevant skills, and country of origin appear as well. The descriptions on the Wall of Honor demonstrate the complexity of recovering and honoring people whose lives and archival traces appear mediated through their oppressors. Listing the relevant skills and country of origin for each slave echoes the language used by slave-owners and traders on ledgers. In a sense, the rhetorical representation of the former slaves reinscribes the violence of slavery by calling on the slave ledger. Yet the Whitney reappropriates these details, using the scant information about the slaves to honor what little we do know about their lives rather than reduce them to human chattel.

The Field of Angels represents a more general homage to former slaves, as it is dedicated to the 2,200 slave children who died in St. John the Baptist Parish between the 1820s and 1860s. Both memorials textually inform visitors of the identities of the Whitney’s former slaves while physically requiring visitors to traverse the grounds. Visitors read the slave narratives both literally and in a more embodied sense.

Visitors then proceed to the slave quarters where the tour guide details the material conditions of those who lived in these cramped spaces. The original slave cabins were torn down in the 1970s; those currently at the Whitney have been moved from other nearby plantations. 39 Visitors then enter the cabins, crowding into the sparsely furnished homes. A tour group has little room to simply stand inside and observe the cabins; the implicit understanding is that it must have been even more difficult to actually live in these spaces. While neither a spatial nor a temporal progression, the movement to the slave quarters reiterates the thematic focus on the slave experience; visitors traverse the plantation as a slave might have and are encouraged to view each location through a slave’s perspective rather than the slave owner’s.

Before heading indoors, the tour guide makes one last stop: a fully enclosed metal box that likely served as a slave jail. The slave jail is not an original structure, but was brought to the Whitney and placed in the middle of the grounds with no respite from the Louisiana heat. 40 The tour guide points out the visual perspective of a slave trapped in the jail: the jail is in full view of the slave-owner’s house, further cementing the difference in physical and material comfort between the planter class and the slaves. The representation of racial oppression aligns with the tour’s emphasis on the lives of slaves and the realities of antebellum life. Viewing the big house from the vantage point of the jail induces a perspectival identification between the visitors and the former slaves. Additionally, the jail is notably behind the big house, which prevents the image of torture from marring the grandeur of the plantation façade, replete with columns and tree-lined walkways. The suffering of the slaves remains out of sight from a public perspective, much as the realities of slavery remain unacknowledged in the national public consciousness.

Descriptions of slave abuse in recent representations of slavery have prompted much debate regarding the purpose of witnessing these violent depictions. Multiple critics objected to the violence shown in 12 Years a Slave , arguing that scenes of rape and whipping operated as torture porn, devalued the black body, and reinscribed the violence of slavery. 41 Similarly, though not in existence during my own tour, the Whitney has since installed a memorial to the failed 1811 German Coast slave revolt in southern Louisiana. After the rebellion, scores of slaves were decapitated and their heads placed on spikes along River Road. Woodrow Nash has recreated this scene by designing over sixty ceramic skulls on rods, which are installed on site. There is also a plaque with each slave’s name on it. 42 Given that plantation tours often fall under the rubric of dark tourism, we might find the Whitney’s focus on the jail and descriptions of slave torture particularly voyeuristic. Commander, for example, warns that the memorial to the slave revolt in particular enacts a “kind of hypervisibility of violence.” 43 Quoting Saidiya Hartman, Commander suggests the Whitney’s narrative minimizes “the very terror it sets out to represent through these mundane’ representations.” 44

So, do the Whitney’s tactics reopen wounds for black tourists? Serve as opportunities for fetishistic voyeurism on the part of white tourists? Again, it is useful to consider how the same questions have been applied to textual neoslave narratives in order to understand the implications of representing racialized violence. Robin Winks, for example, characterizes slave narratives as the “pious pornography of their day” 45 while Karen Halttunen describes abolitionist representations of slavery as “voyeuristic pornography of pain” that is “obscenely titillating.” 46 Well-known slave narratives, such as Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), feature vivid depictions of whippings and sexual violence enacted on slaves. These moments certainly hold the potential for voyeuristic reading practices that fetishize destruction of the black body, yet these textual moments are also widely recognized in literary studies as seminal moments in the depiction of slavery’s violence. I do not mean to clear the way for any and all depictions of racialized violence, but rather by historicizing the Whitney’s narrative of slavery within the broader genre of slave narratives, I aim to highlight the tradition of narrating slavery in which the Whitney participates.

Given the participatory nature of the plantation tour, it is difficult to control entirely how such depictions of black pain and suffering will be received, making such depictions even more prone to negative interpretations. Much like neoslave narratives, the Whitney draws on bodily epistemology in order to try and control how the depiction of slave torture is interpreted. On our tour, for example, the tour guide paused to ask if anyone needed water or a break, as she didn’t want anyone to faint during the blistering, unshaded tour of the fields and slave quarters. She was quick to remind all of us, however, that such a reprieve would have been unavailable to slaves on the plantation. The tour guide used our physical discomfort, albeit slight in comparison to former slaves’, to emphasize the physical duress under which slaves labored. During the tour, the Whitney incorporates the body, the landscape, and physical objects, connecting contemporary materiality to the materiality of slavery, in the hopes that visitors will know more about slavery than they did when they first arrived.

4 “I heard you weren’t telling it”: The “True” Story of Slavery

The Whitney’s narrative of slavery is not limited to the tour; in interviews and museum materials, we also witness various attempts to educate the public about the realities of slavery. In David Amsden’s New York Times article, John Cummings asks Amsden, “Don’t you think the story of slavery is important? . . . Well, I checked into it, and I heard you weren’t telling it . . . so I figured I might as well get started.” 47 Cummings’s statement echoes a theme in textual slave narratives to tell the “true” story of slavery as opposed to the narrative put forth by white slave owners. Cummings’s language also reveals a belief in a singular story of slavery, as he refers to “the story” and “it.” Rather than acknowledging the multiplicity of slave stories, Cummings simply inverts the more common whitewashing of plantation tours, referring to his particular version as the correct one. In a 2015 article for the Washington Post , Cummings echoes the focus on factuality, stating that the Whitney “presents the facts of slavery through the words of those who experienced it” and that the museum provides a “meaningful and factually accurate education about slavery.” 48

Cummings’s emphasis on the accuracy of the Whitney could be due to the plantation’s self-proclaimed status as the only museum dedicated to telling the story of slavery. Given that the Whitney does not represent the common experience of plantation tours, Cummings might feel pressure to assure skeptics and critics of the validity of this oft-untold story. If so, it is curious that Cummings does not mention Ibrahima Seck in the Washington Post article. Seck, a Senegalese scholar, works as the Director of Research for the Whitney and was responsible for much of the historical research that informed the Whitney’s representation of slavery. His book, Bouki Fait Gombo: A History of the Slave Community of Habitation Haydel (Whitney Plantation) Louisiana, 1750–1860 , details the lives of the slaves who lived at the Whitney. Amsden’s NYT article features multiple images of Seck and Cummings, noting the “alliance between the two men has been an auspicious one, with Seck’s patience and expertise serving as a counterbalance to the instinctual eccentricity of Cummings.” Seck also describes Cummings as making “real reparations. He feels there is something to be done in this country to make changes.” 49 Seck’s expertise and involvement with the Whitney authenticates Cummings’s motivations when we might otherwise question a wealthy white man who purchased a former plantation in order to represent slavery.

Yet Cummings also serves as an authenticating presence himself, particularly for white audiences. His reiteration of the facts in the Washington Post article echoes the various forms of front matter that accompanied written slave narratives in which the (often white) amanuensis verified the narrative and assured the (mostly white) readership that the following account was neither tall tale nor racial propaganda, but a true accounting of the slave’s experience. Such authentication was required, as white audiences would otherwise doubt the veracity of a black narrator. In his article, Cummings operates as the amanuensis for the Whitney and serves as an authenticating presence for whites because of his race and financial means. Cummings’s omission of Seck’s involvement, whether intentional or not, reifies the ways in which narratives regarding slavery often still require white authentication for white audiences.

Cummings’s whiteness does not preclude him from attempting to retell the history of slavery from the slaves’ perspectives, though the role of his whiteness should not be dismissed either. In Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity , Vincent Cheng examines the tension surrounding who is “allowed” to speak for subaltern groups and who we consider an authentic author. Cheng himself is an Irish Studies scholar, though he is not Irish, and questions whether or not he is authorized to speak for the Irish as postcolonial subjects: “If, however, anyone can potentially speak about Irishness, do we not risk robbing the colonial subaltern (once again) of his/her own voice?” We might ask the same question about slavery—if anyone is allowed to speak with authority on slavery, do we not risk subordinating slave voices, particularly when we consider the role of whites in contemporary plantation tours? Yet Cheng goes on to question the very notion of authenticity, noting that contemporary cultural and poststructuralist theories “endorse the deconstruction of supposedly authentic or originary identities.” 50 I agree that determining an “authentic” voice, particularly in the case of slavery where we remain limited by archival evidence, is a tenuous concept. Yet I do not mean to equate various representations of slavery or suggest Cummings’s motivations go unquestioned.

Though tenuous, authenticity is still a pertinent issue for the Whitney because of its notably distinct mission. While we could likely find links between textual neoslave narratives and more whitewashed plantation tours, I want to stress that taking slavery as the subject of representation does not necessarily lead to an ethical or accurate depiction. I find Cheng’s assertion that “we must ask where the ‘speaking for’ goes and what it does and whether it enables or disables the empowerment of those spoken for” 51 useful in distinguishing the Whitney from the more common plantation tour experience as well as for interrogating the Whitney itself. As noted, Seck conducted much of the historical research that informs the plantation. Though Cummings may provide the financial foundation for the Whitney, knowledge production regarding slavery does not begin and end with Cummings; rather, scholars invested in the history of slavery also participate in the Whitney’s representations of antebellum life.

Questions of authenticity not only apply to Cummings’s role at the Whitney, but in the historical materials from which the Whitney builds its narrative. For example, the slave narratives recorded through the Federal Writers’ Project are the basis for the “history shared at the Whitney Plantation through memorials, statues, slave cabins and artwork on the grounds.” 52 While no doubt useful in understanding slavery through the eyes of those who labored under it, the FWP narratives are not specific to the former slaves at the Whitney, revealing the ways in which the Whitney’s narrative does not exist in a discrete form, but is cobbled together from various sources. Tanglen highlights what she calls the “imprecise use” of historical documents such as the FWP narratives in recreating the realities of slavery, implying that the Whitney’s desire to tell the true story of slavery is undermined by its reliance on historical documents not specific to the Whitney. Commander makes a similar critique about the use of the FWP narratives, citing the “well-documented and cogently argued critiques about the dubious nature of many of the accounts.” 53 Instead, Commander suggests, Cummings and his employees could better acknowledge the controversial nature of the FWP narratives “to underscore the magnitude of the Whitney Plantation’s production of historical counter-narratives.” 54 While I agree with Commander’s suggestion, it’s also worth noting the FWP narratives are not the sole source of information regarding slavery; in addition to Seck’s Bouki Fait Gombo , the Whitney also utilizes Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s work on slavery in Louisiana, particularly her online Louisiana Slave Database. 55 An overemphasis on the FWP narratives risks minimizing the influence of historically grounded research by scholars invested in slavery’s legacy.

We should also consider the vast array of historical documents that do apply to the former slaves at the Whitney. Included on the museum’s website are photocopies of previous owners’ slave inventories. For example, the inventory of Mathias Roussel Pere, taken in October 1818, lists the names, origins, qualifications, and any observations regarding the slaves Pere owned. A slave named Justin is listed as being from Bambara, born in 1778, and epileptic. A female from Acadienne, Marie, is listed as a domestic and a spinner with a three-year-old daughter, Marie Eve. The vast majority of the slaves listed, however, lack any qualifications or observations. They are instead known by their name, origin, and year of birth, which serve as the only record of their existence, at least for the Whitney. One can’t help but wonder how to read the blank spaces in the inventory. This slim evidence of human existence and lack of subjectivity casts a critical eye on the notion of authenticity, particularly as Tanglen uses it. While the inventories might be more historically precise than the FWP narratives, they lack the first-person accounts of the FWP. Instead, the inventories represent the slaves as commodities; their identities are made manifest through the violence of the slave ledger. Though less specific to the Whitney, the FWP narratives are valuable to the Whitney’s effort to restore subjectivity to former slaves, even if those slaves did not actually live at the Whitney.

Emphasizing historically precise documents should also be viewed skeptically because historical documents surrounding slavery, no matter how accurate, inevitably leave space for readers to impose their own interpretations. In the inventory of Jacques and Nicholas Haydel Jr., for example, there appears a young “Negresse,” age fourteen. Of the nine slaves listed on the inventory, she is the only unnamed person. Under “observations” she is also listed as mutilated. Given the sexual abuse slave women endured at the hands of their white masters and overseers, and the tour’s own emphasis on sexual violence, one cannot help but wonder if the unnamed girl was sexually abused and if this is related to her mutilation. Yet the exact fate of the girl is unknown and to impose sexual abuse on her would only reenact the oppressive conditions of slavery. Though a historically precise document, the gaps and silences in the slave ledger enable imprecise interpretations.

Our inability to know the identities and fates of the Whitney’s former slaves also elicits epistemological questions, which have been raised by scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Gayatri Spivak. 56 In Hartman’s seminal essay, “Venus in Two Acts,” she describes the presence, or lack thereof, of slave women in the archive: “Hers is the same fate as every other Black Venus: no one remembered her name or recorded the things she said, or observed that she refused to say anything at all. Her is an untimely story told by a failed witness.” 57 Hartman goes on to reflect on her own recuperative work as a scholar and the ways she is limited by the available archival evidence, noting that she wishes to avoid simply re-enacting the violence of slavery, but also wishes to respect what she cannot know. Viewing the Whitney through Hartman’s lens, the emphasis on facticity, both by Tanglen and Cummings, seems to lack an acknowledgement of our own epistemological limits, particularly when our knowledge depends on an incomplete archive that denies some their subjectivity. While I understand Cummings’s motivations for emphasizing the Whitney’s factuality, I would also caution against this insistence because it opens the Whitney up to critiques such as Tanglen’s. Instead, Cummings might temper his focus on the facts with some attention to the value of having a multiplicity of sources and voices in representing slavery.

Stephen P. Hanna, Derek H. Alderman, and Candace Forbes Bright also emphasize the value in the Whitney’s varied source materials, despite the sources not being historically specific to the Whitney. Observing that several of the current structures on the plantation, such as the slave quarters and Antioch Baptist Church, are not original to the Whitney, the authors note that relocating these buildings is “antithetical to more conservative historic preservation practices.” 58 However, the authors go on to praise the relocation of these structures: “this approach provided the material elements necessary to anchor the stories of the enslaved in the landscape, even if these disparate elements did not fit squarely with each other in terms of era or geographic origin.” 59 Indeed, in the absence of the original slave quarters, for example, we might ask if it is better to maintain the slave quarters’ absence or restore these dwellings with some type of surrogate. Hanna, Alderman, and Bright take a similar approach to the Whitney’s more textual resources, such as the FWP interviews. Rather than view the use of these documents as imprecise, the authors describe the amount of material as transcendent. Acknowledging the FWP narratives are not specific to the Whitney, the authors cite the FWP narratives’ value “because they allow for the voices of the formerly enslaved—regardless of where they were enslaved—to make present their own lived experiences.” 60 Much as Simmons urges an attention to the multiplicity of voices in Mary Prince’s slave narrative, Hanna, Alderman, and Bright also encourage us to attend to the diversity of slave experiences represented at the Whitney rather than overemphasize historical accuracy.

Toni Morrison’s postmodern experimentation in Beloved is also useful in analyzing the multiplicity of voices at the Whitney and the collectivity of slaves represented at the plantation. In the second section of Beloved , we witness fragments of communication between Beloved and Sethe:

Tell me the truth. Didn’t you come from the other side? Yes. I was on the other side. You came back because of me? Yes. You rememory me? Yes. I remember you. 61

Critics interpret “rememory” in an active sense to mean “inhabitation of past experiences” 62 and the act of using “one’s imaginative power to realize a latent, abiding connection to the past.” 63 As nouns, rememories “exist not only outside the agent’s mind but are available to anyone who enters the sphere of action.” 64 Drawing from an array of source material, the Whitney imaginatively recreates antebellum slave life, encouraging visitors to inhabit the space of the plantation in order to gain some understanding of former slaves’ experiences. Importantly, rememories are not limited to the one who actually experienced an event and who holds the memory. Rememories exist in the world to be “bumped into.” 65 It’s worth noting that in Rushdy’s definition, rememories are available to anyone in the “sphere of action,” but not necessarily noticed or interacted with. Likewise, the opportunity for engagement with the past is available to anyone who visits the Whitney, but may not necessarily be acted upon whether because of preconceived biases, the potential trauma of engaging with slavery, or simply being distracted on the tour. As opposed to a rigid focus on factuality, the concept of rememory, as a type of collective memory that has the potential to transcend time and space, serves as a possible method of understanding the Whitney’s more encompassing, imaginative use of source materials that might otherwise be deemed historically imprecise.

5 “Feel a little of what it was like:” Connecting Past and Present

In 2010, Joseph McGill Jr., a Civil War re-enactor from South Carolina, founded a nonprofit organization called The Slave Dwelling Project. McGill, a descendant of slaves, began by traveling to various former slave dwellings and sleeping in them to gain people’s attention. His goal was not only to encourage preservation of the dwellings themselves, but also to remind the public of slavery’s significance in the nation’s history. McGill observed that we “tell the story of our country through the buildings we decide to preserve, and we tend to focus on the happy parts. . . . There was a void in this part of history, a lack of buildings that recognized the enslaved.” 66 McGill soon began bringing others to sleep with him in the dwellings; one man slept with his wrists shackled to “honor the ancestors who came over in the middle passage . . . and to feel a little of what it was like to be bound.” 67 According to the Slave Dwelling Project website, McGill has now stayed in over ninety different slave dwellings in over eighteen states. The project now holds an annual conference, and the organization allows people to sign up for overnight stays, which include educational lectures.

I admit the prospect of sleeping over in a slave dwelling evokes discomfort; as a white person, what purpose would such an experience serve? Would sleeping over in a slave dwelling be a voyeuristic glimpse at an oppression neither my ancestors nor I experienced? The Slave Dwelling Project, like the Whitney Plantation, produces complicated questions regarding how slavery should be represented and how, or even if, one can ethically participate in these representations. I do not claim to have the perfect litmus test for determining whether current engagements with slavery are “good” or “bad.” However, I do think it is critical to remember that current representations of slavery, whether films, plantation tours, or other immersive experiences such as the Slave Dwelling Project, do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, these depictions draw on long histories of narrating slavery and encouraging others to know the true violence of slavery. Much as the Whitney seeks to connect the past with the present, our understanding of the Whitney would be well served by connecting past representations of slavery with current ones. Examining how neoslave narratives like Butler’s Kindred and Morrison’s Beloved have elicited, and attempted to answer, the same questions the Whitney now faces can help us navigate questions of authenticity, voyeurism, and public history regarding more immersive representations of slavery.

Sarah Payne is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Liberal Arts at Middlebury College. She earned her PhD in English literature from Northeastern University. Her dissertation analyzes the refusal of racial identity in twentieth-century women’s writing, focusing on Harlem, the US South, and the Caribbean. Her research interests include southern literature, gender and sexuality, and digital humanities.

See Roxane Gay, “I Don’t Want to Watch Slavery Fan Fiction,” New York Times, July 25, 2017, accessed October 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/opinion/hbo-confederate-slavery-civil-war.html; Alex Greenberger, “‘The Painting Must Go’: Hannah Black Pens Open Letter to the Whitney About Controversial Biennial Work,” ARTNews, March 21, 2017, accessed October 3, 2019, http://www.artnews.com/2017/03/21/the-painting-must-go-hannah-black-pens-open-letter-to-the-whitney-about-controversial-biennial-work/.
Earl F. Bargainnier describes “moonlight and magnolias” as “the myth of an antebellum Golden Age, a myth created in the postbellum world of the 1880s and 1890s, and a part of the larger myths of the plantation and the Lost Cause.” See Earl F. Bargainnier, “‘Moonlight and Magnolias’ Myth” in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture , vol. 4, Myth, Manners, and Memory , ed. Charles Reagan Wilson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 246.
See Stephen P. Hanna, “Placing the Enslaved at Oak Alley Plantation: Narratives, Spatial Contexts, and the Limits of Surrogation,” Journal of Heritage Tourism 11, no. 3 (2015), 219–34.
In “Encountering Engineered and Orchestrated Remembrance: A Situational Model of Dark Tourism and Its History” (P. R. Stone, R. Hartmann, T. Seaton, R. Sharpley, and L. White, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018]), Tony Seaton describes dark tourism, also known as thanatourism, as tourism “motivated by the desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death” (13).
John Ernest, The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 4.
Other well-known slave narratives include Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and the Life of “Olaudah Equiano” or Gustavas Vassa, the African (1789); William Wells Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1847); Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901).
Ernest, The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative , 7.
Sterling Lecater Bland, Understanding Nineteenth-Century Slave Narratives (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood. 2016), 11.
K. Merinda Simmons, “Beyond ‘Authenticity’: Migration and the Epistemology of ‘Voice’ in Mary Prince’s History of Mary Prince and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, ” College Literature 36, no. 4 (2009): 77.
Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition . (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 289.
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, Neo-slave Narratives Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3.
For an understanding of the critique Styron’s novel received, see John Henrik Clarke’s edited collection, William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).
In “Ideologies of Black Folk: The Historical Novel of Slavery,” Hazel Carby also discusses Black Thunder in relation to late-twentieth century neoslave narratives.
Stephanie Li, “ 12 Years a Slave as a Neoslave Narrative,” American Literary History 26, no. 2 (2014): 327.
I toured the Whitney Plantation in 2015, and my experience of the tour aligns with others who have published on the topic, such as Randi Lynn Tanglen, “Review: The Whitney Plantation.” Public Historian 37, no. 4 (2015), 146; and Stephen P. Hanna, Derek H. Alderman, Candace Forbes Bright, “From Celebratory Landscapes to Dark Tourism Sites? Exploring the Design of Southern Plantation Museums,” The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies , ed. P. R. Stone, R. Hartmann, T. Seaton, R. Sharpley, and L. White (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 399–421.
See Stephen Litvin and Joshua Brewer, “Charleston, South Carolina, Tourism and the Presentation of Urban Slavery in an Historic Southern City,” International Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Administration 9, no. 1 (2008): 71–84.
Derek H. Alderman, David L. Butler, and Stephen P. Hanna, “Memory, Slavery, and Plantation Museums: The River Road Project,” Journal of Heritage Tourism 11, no. 3: 209–18; Marie Tyler-McGraw, “Southern Comfort Levels: Race, Heritage Tourism, and the Civil War in Richmond,” in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory , ed. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 157.
See Derek H. Alderman and E. Arnold Modlin, “On the Political Utterances of Plantation Tourists: Vocalizing the Memory of Slavery on River Road,” Journal of Heritage Tourism 11, no. 3 (2016): 275–89, and Christine N. Buzinde and Carla Almeida Santos, “Interpreting Slavery Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 36, no. 3 (2009): 439–58.
Maoz Azaryahu and Kenneth Foote, “Historical Space as Narrative Medium: On the Configuration of Spatial Narratives of Time at Historical Sites,” GeoJournal 73, no. 3 (2008): 179–94.
“Bradish Johnson to John J. Cummings III,” Whitney Plantation, accessed October 2, 2019, https://www.whitneyplantation.com/education/louisiana-history/ownership-of-the-whitney/bradish-johnson-to-john-j-cummings-iii/.
“Wedding Receptions,” Oak Alley Plantation Restaurant and Inn, accessed October 2, 2019, https://www.oakalleyplantation.com/host-event/wedding-receptions.
For example, see Jared Keller, “Inside America’s Auschwitz,” Smithsonian , April 4, 2016, accessed October 2, 2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/inside-americas-auschwitz-180958647/; Kalim Armstrong, “Telling the Story of Slavery,” New Yorker , February 17, 2016, accessed October 2, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/telling-the-story-of-slavery.
David Amsden, “Building the First Slavery Museum in America,” New York Times , February 26, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/magazine/building-the-first-slave-museum-in-america.html.
See Candace Forbes Bright and Perry Carter, “Social Representational Communities and the Imagined Antebellum South,” (2018); Matthew R. Cook, “Counter-narratives of slavery in the Deep South: the politics of empathy along and beyond River Road” (2015); and Randi Lynn Tanglen, “Review: The Whitney Plantation” (2015).
Thomas Raymen, “Slavery, Dark Tourism, and Deviant Leisure at the American Society of Criminology in New Orleans,” Plymouth Law and Criminal Justice Review 9 (2017): 17–18.
Michelle D. Commander, “Plantation Counternarratives: Disrupting Master Accounts in Contemporary Cultural Production,” Journal of American Culture 41, no. 1 (2018): 34.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1937), 285.
Lisa Woolfork, Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture (Champaign: University of Illinois Press. 2009), 9.
Mary Ann Sternberg, River Road Rambler Returns: More Curiosities along Louisiana’s Historic Byway (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2018).
E. Arnold Modlin, Stephen P. Hanna, Perry L. Carter, Amy E. Potter, Candace Forbes Bright, and Derek H. Alderman. “Can Plantation Museums Do Full Justice to the Story of the Enslaved? A Discussion of Problems, Possibilities, and the Place of Memory,” GeoHumanities 4, no. 2 (2018), 9.
Randi Lynn Tanglen, “Review: The Whitney Plantation,” 146.
Commander, “Plantation Counternarratives,” 37.
Jennifer Williamson, Twentieth-Century Sentimentalism: Narrative Appropriation in American Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2014), 14.
Octavia Butler, Kindred (Boston: Beacon Press. 1979), 100.
Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Random House, 1987), 22.
“The Slave Quarters,” Whitney Plantation, accessed October 2, 2019, https://www.whitneyplantation.com/education/louisiana-history/the-big-house-and-the-outbuildings/the-slave-quarters/.
Speaking to Michael Patrick Welch in a 2015 article for Vice , Seck says the slave jail was found in Gonzales, Louisiana, and was likely used to imprison slaves before they were sold at the New Orleans slave market.
See Armond White, “Can’t Trust It,” City Arts, October 16, 2013, accessed October 3, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20140326115927/http://cityarts.info/2013/10/16/cant-trust-it/; Dana Stevens, “My problem with 12 Years a Slave ,” Slate , January 17, 2014, accessed October 3, 2019, https://slate.com/culture/2014/01/12-years-a-slave-my-problem-with-steve-mcqueens-harrowing-film.html; Richard Brody, “Should A Film Try to Depict Slavery?” New Yorker , 2013, accessed October 3, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/should-a-film-try-to-depict-slavery.
Commander, “Plantation Counternarratives,” 40–41.
Robin Winks, et al., Four Fugitive Slave Narratives . (Boston: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1969), vi.
Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995): 318–19.
Amsden, “Building the First Slavery Museum in America.”
John J. Cummings, III, “The US Has 35,000 Museums. Why Is Only One about Slavery?” Washington Post , August 13, 2015, accessed October 2, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/08/13/the-u-s-has-35000-museums-why-is-only-one-about-slavery/.
Vincent J. Cheng, Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 14.
Cummings, “The US Has 35,000 Museums.”
Commander, “Plantation Counternarratives,” 36; in terms of the FWP narratives, Commander points to “controversies over their transcription, the racialized power dynamics that existed between the untrained interviewers and their interviewees, and the fact that many African Americans were skeptical of the mostly white interviewers and likely covertly resisted by fabricating their recollections for safety reasons and/or to maintain control over their own stories” (36). Commander states in an endnote that the Whitney has recently installed a banner near the gift shop, which acknowledges the FWP narratives might only reflect what interviewees thought their interviewers wanted to hear (43).
Commander, “Plantation Counternarratives,” 36.
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1719–1820 , accessed October 3, 2019, https://www.ibiblio.org/laslave/
See Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader , ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 2.
Stephen P. Hanna, Derek H. Alderman, Candace Forbes Bright, “From Celebratory Landscapes to Dark Tourism Sites?” 416.
Morrison, Beloved , 254.
James McCorkle, “Narrating Memory: Rayda Jacobs, Yvette Christianse and Andre Brink and the New Slave Narrative.” Journal of the African Literature Association , 10 no. 1 (2016): 20.
Caroline Rody, “Toni Morrison’s Beloved : History, ‘Rememory,’ and a ‘Clamor for a Kiss.’” American Literary History , 7, no. 1 (1995): 101.
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, “‘Rememory’: Primal Scenes and Constructions in Toni Morrison’s Novels.” Contemporary Literature , 31, no. 3 (1990): 303.
Early in the novel, Sethe tells Denver: “Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. . . . It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else” (43). Rememories physically exist in the world, open to encounters with various people.
Patrick Sisson, “The Slave Dwelling Project: Preserving the Structures and Stories of Slavery,” Curbed , November 13, 2015, accessed October 2, 2019, https://www.curbed.com/2015/11/13/9900156/slave-dwelling-project-joseph-mcgill.
Tony Horwitz, “One Man’s Epic Quest to Visit Every Former Slave Dwelling in the United States,” Smithsonian , October 2013, accessed October 2, 2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/one-mans-epic-quest-to-visit-every-former-slave-dwelling-in-the-united-states-12080/.

Plantation tours evolve to put more focus on the experiences of enslaved people

As Confederate statues fall , NASCAR and the U.S. Marine Corps ban the display of the rebel flag and even the country group Lady Antebellum changes its name , another reminder of one of the darkest chapters of American history, former plantations, still beckon tourists.

But those who think their plantation visit will be focused on china collections and lush gardens may be in for a surprise. More of the estates have recast themselves to starkly portray the evils of slavery.

Some, such as the McLeod Plantation in Charleston, South Carolina, or the Whitney Plantation near Wallace, Louisiana, put their focus on the lives of enslaved people. They show the interiors of quarters of enslaved people in sharp contrast to the luxury of the plantation owners' houses. They have, in effect, become museums to Black suffering.

At a time when the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer has unleashed a wave of reassessment when it comes to symbols, relics or monuments that stand in the way of equality for Black Americans, some former plantations stained with the history of slavery stand apart as tourism destinations that work toward education.

"I am convinced they have a very valuable role to play in society. I have seen them evolve over several decades," said Bernard Powers, director of the Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston at the College of Charleston .

When he first visited plantations in the area in the 1970s, Powers said the focus was mansion tours and the lush lives of the estates' owners. Docents may not have referred to Black workers as slaves or enslaved people but rather as servants.

Now, he said, some tours may start in the quarters of enslaved people before working their way to the main house. They may display the cruel implements of slavery, like a knife used for branding, rather than glossing over the issue to celebrate the pre-Civil War life of plantation owners.

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At Whitney Plantation , the self-guided tour starts at a memorial that gives an overview of slavery and then goes on to shed light on the lives of enslaved people and their work on the plantation.

"I think that plantations, because of the times, are moving to be more inclusive of the narrative of enslaved people," said plantation spokeswoman Joy Banner, herself descended from the enslaved people of the estate. "We try very, very hard to tell the full story of slavery."

At the Magnolia Plantation and Gardens in Charleston, history and culture coordinator Joseph McGill leads the "From Slavery to Freedom" tours that portray life in the quarters of enslaved people.

"We are being more frank in telling the real story with the lives of the slaves on the plantation," said McGill, who has been at Magnolia since 2011. In addition, he said he has assisted in making sure their stories are infused into guides' descriptions on other tours. After all, he said, their efforts made the rest of the plantation possible, such as planting and harvesting rice that would later foster the plantation's heralded gardens.

McGill has also gone a step further, hosting campfire sessions that can often lead to frank discussions about slavery. One woman, he said, confessed her father was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan with whom she was trying to mend a relationship.

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The newfound emphasis on Black history and the life of enslaved people is possible, he said, because visitors have more background on the subject than in the past.

"Our guests have been very supportive of this mission," McGill said. "People come here, they know the truth. They know what they learned through American education did not adequately address the story of slavery."

The story of slavery applies to the estates of U.S. presidents, as well.

Because George Washington was such a devout record-keeper, the staff at Mount Vernon in Virginia say they were able to assemble an exhibit now on display that delves into the stories of 19 enslaved people , including their daily activities, families, hardships they endured and how they bounded together as a community, said spokesman Matt Briney.

But telling the tragedy of slavery can also be an invitation to push back.

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At Montpelier , the Virginia estate of President James Madison and his wife, Dolley , the staff has woven in the story of the enslaved people who worked there over the years – about 100 at any given time – including a permanent exhibit by reaching out to descendants, said Elizabeth Chew, executive vice president and chief curator.

The plantation, where the home is closed amid the coronavirus pandemic but the 2,700 acres of forest and grounds remain open, has sponsored a Juneteenth celebration for five years.

The holiday celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation is observed annually on June 19 and took on added significance this year as racial injustice protests continue.

More: Should Juneteenth be an official holiday? Two-thirds of Americans surveyed by Harris Poll think so

Most visitors love the plantation's celebration, but some complain, saying, "We came to hear about the Madisons," Chew said. But she indicates that to not delve deeply into the issue of slavery would be to give short shrift to the truth.

"What we tell you is the whole story," she said. "African American history is American history."

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Whitney Plantation Tour

Visiting the Whitney Plantation is a profound experience, shedding light on the history of slavery since its founding in 1752. The five-hour tour includes original slave cabins, exhibits of artifacts like clothing and tools, and old sugar cane fields. A chapel offers spiritual guidance for descendants of slaves. The Whitney Plantation provides an unparalleled glimpse into America’s past, educating visitors and honoring those impacted by the dark history of slavery.

Our Plantation tours

Front facade of whitney plantation near new orleans, la

Delve into the deep and powerful history of Whitney Plantation with our immersive tour. Engage with thought-provoking exhibits and well-preserved structures that vividly portray the lives and stories of the enslaved.

A front view of oak alley plantation near new orleans, louisiana

Oak Alley Plantation Tour

Uncover the rich history of Oak Alley Plantation on our exclusive tour. Stroll through the majestic oak-lined pathways and explore the grand mansion, surrounded by stunning landscapes that highlight the beauty of this iconic estate.

Laura alley plantation tour: historic house

Laura & Oak Alley Tour

Join us on a unique journey through the contrasting histories of Laura and Oak Alley Plantations. At Laura Plantation, experience the vibrant Creole culture and personal stories of its residents. Then, be awed by Oak Alley’s beauty.

What you'll See

Tour the “Big House,” the main residence on the plantation, where you can see the stark contrast between the lives of the enslaved and the opulence of the plantation owners. This grand house, with its lavish furnishings and architecture, starkly contrasts the simple and harsh living conditions of the enslaved. It provides a vivid context for understanding the social and economic dynamics of the plantation system, highlighting the disparities in wealth and power.

Antioch Baptist Church

Step inside the Antioch Baptist Church, a spiritual and historical landmark on the plantation. Originally built by former slaves, this church serves as a powerful symbol of faith and resilience. Visitors can reflect on the deep sense of community and hope that this sacred space provided to the enslaved and their descendants. The church also stands as a testament to the enduring strength and unity of the African American community in the face of adversity, preserving their cultural and spiritual heritage.

Historic Slave Cabins

Explore the meticulously preserved slave cabins that stand as poignant reminders of the harsh conditions endured by the enslaved people. These cabins, constructed with basic materials, provide a stark contrast to the grandeur of the plantation house, offering an immersive experience into the daily lives and struggles of those who lived and labored here.

Slave Revolt Memorial

The Slave Revolt Memorial at Whitney Plantation stands as a poignant tribute to the brave individuals who participated in the 1811 German Coast Uprising, the largest slave revolt in U.S. history. This powerful monument, crafted by artist Woodrow Nash, features hauntingly lifelike sculptures that evoke the courage and resilience of the enslaved men and women who fought for their freedom. The memorial offers visitors a deeply moving and educational experience, shedding light on a crucial yet often overlooked chapter of American history.

The Field of Angels

The Field of Angels at Whitney Plantation is a deeply moving memorial dedicated to the memory of the 2,200 enslaved children who died in St. John the Baptist Parish before the age of three. This installation, created by artist Rod Moorhead, features delicate angel sculptures symbolizing the lost lives of these innocent children. Each name inscribed on the granite slabs surrounding the field serves as a somber reminder of the harsh realities of slavery.

Exhibits & Artifacts

Whitney plantation tour: statues inside baptist church

HEAR FROM OUR CUSTOMERS

Hands down the best tour I’ve taken. Derek was a tremendous host/driver/tour guide. Gave great tips on food, restaurants, and day/night life. Would definitely recommend this tour company/driver. Very enriched history in Louisiana! Thank you Derek for your hospitality!

Super great tour at the Whitney plantation. Very informative. Incredibly moving as it actually goes into the history of the enslaved people that worked there. Our bus driver Larry was also really friendly and gave great commentary on the attractions and areas we drove through.

Very interesting tour of Whitney Plantation that gives you a complete enactment of life in those times. Tour bus driver/guide, Dwayne was an exceptional asset to the tour. Had an extremely courteous, informative, funny personality that enhanced the experience. He is a very knowledgeable person. Highly recommend it.

The best tour ever! Pick up was on time! Very convenient! They offer multiple pick up locations! We did Laura plantation + Oak Alley plantation! We had the absolute best driver Michelle! She was extremely knowledgeable & friendly! She made the drive feel short & sweet! The best driver ever!

Michelle picked us up promptly and treated us to NOLA history and places of interest during the ride. The Laura Plantation and Oak Alley Plantation are beautiful and full of history. The guides at both were wonderful story tellers. Highly recommend.

Derek picked us up on time and had so many helpful tips to give during our stay in NOLA. He was very knowledgeable about things to do and places to eat around the area. He kept us entertained during our travels to the tour and was a blast. The plantation was gorgeous with so much history. Highly recommend.

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Your safety is our top priority at Cajun Encounters. We adhere to the highest safety standards and regulations, ensuring that every tour is conducted with your well-being in mind.

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For your convenience, we offer multiple pickup locations around New Orleans, including the most popular spots and hotels. This ensures that starting your journey is as easy and hassle-free as possible.

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Oak Alley & Laura Plantation Tour

History of whitney plantation.

Whitney Plantation, located on the west bank of the Mississippi River in Wallace, Louisiana, stands as one of the most poignant historical sites in the United States. Founded in 1752 by Ambroise Haydel, a German immigrant, the plantation was initially established as a sugar plantation, a common venture in the region due to the favorable growing conditions for sugar cane. Over the centuries, Whitney Plantation evolved, witnessing significant changes and becoming a symbol of the deeply entrenched institution of slavery in the American South.

The plantation’s history is intricately linked to the labor of enslaved Africans and African Americans who worked its fields and maintained its operations. In its early years, the Haydel family owned and managed the plantation, relying heavily on enslaved labor to cultivate and process sugar cane. By the mid-19th century, the plantation had become one of the most prosperous in Louisiana, with extensive sugar cane fields and a large enslaved population.

The original layout of Whitney Plantation included the “Big House,” slave cabins, a church, and various outbuildings. The Big House, constructed in the late 18th century, stands as a testament to the wealth and opulence of the plantation owners, contrasting sharply with the stark conditions endured by the enslaved workers. The slave cabins, built of simple materials, provide a glimpse into the harsh living conditions that characterized the lives of the enslaved population.

A defining aspect of Whitney Plantation’s history is its role in the 1811 German Coast Uprising, the largest slave revolt in American history. Led by enslaved men and women seeking freedom and justice, the revolt began near New Orleans and involved hundreds of participants. Although ultimately suppressed, the revolt highlighted the intense resistance and desire for freedom among the enslaved population. Today, a memorial at Whitney Plantation honors the bravery and sacrifices of those who participated in the uprising.

In the years following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, Whitney Plantation underwent significant changes. The plantation continued to operate, but the labor dynamics shifted dramatically. Sharecropping and tenant farming replaced the institution of slavery, bringing new challenges and hardships for African American workers. Despite these changes, the plantation remained an important agricultural site, contributing to the region’s economy.

In the late 20th century, Whitney Plantation began to transform from a working plantation to a historical site dedicated to preserving and interpreting the history of slavery. In 1999, John Cummings, a New Orleans attorney, purchased the plantation with the vision of creating a museum that would educate visitors about the realities of slavery in America. Under Cummings’ leadership, extensive restoration and preservation efforts were undertaken to maintain the plantation’s historic structures and landscapes.

Whitney Plantation officially opened to the public in 2014 as a museum and memorial dedicated to the enslaved. It is unique in its focus on the lives and experiences of the enslaved people who lived and worked there. The museum features exhibits that include oral histories, artifacts, and art installations that tell the stories of the enslaved individuals and their descendants. Memorials and sculptures throughout the plantation grounds honor the memory of those who suffered under slavery.

Today, Whitney Plantation serves as a powerful educational resource, drawing visitors from around the world. It provides an unflinching look at the history of slavery and its lasting impact on American society. By preserving this history and sharing the stories of those who lived it, Whitney Plantation plays a crucial role in fostering understanding, reflection, and dialogue about one of the darkest chapters in American history.

Whitney plantation image gallery

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Exposing the Real Story of Slavery: Whitney Plantation

Jun 12, 2019 â€¢ Ennis Davis, AICP

Located 46 miles west of New Orleans, Whitney Plantation is a museum and historic district that is devoted to sharing the un-sugarcoated story of slavery.

Known as Americaâ€™s first slavery museum, the Whitney Plantation dates back to 1752, when German immigrant Ambroise Heidel acquired the land, earning great wealth in the cultivation of indigo. Heidelâ€™s youngest son, Jean Jacques Haydel, Sr., transitioned the plantation into a sugar production operation in the early 19th century. At its height, its enslaved workforce produced up to 407,000 pounds of sugar during a single grinding season. Following the Civil War, the Haydel family sold the plantation in 1867 to Brandish Johnson of New York, who then renamed the property after his grandson, Harry Whitney.

Between 1880 and 1946, the plantation was owned Pierre Edouard St. Martin, ThÃ©ophile Perret and later generations of their families. In 1946 it was acquired by Alfred Mason Barnes of New Orleans who sold it to the Formosa Chemicals and Fiber Corporation in 1990. In 1999, troubled by the way plantations have been romanticized by modern generations, New Orleans-based attorney John Cummings purchased the 1,700-acre property with the intentions of restoring it as a museum dedicated to telling the story of slavery. Cummingsâ€™ goal was to show slavery from the perspective of the enslaved on a site where 350 enslaved blacks worked and lived. After an $8 million restoration and with the help of Senegalese scholar Ibrahima Seck, Cummings opened the museumâ€™s doors for the first time in December 2014. Since then it has quickly become a popular destination for Southern Louisiana visitors.

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Whitney Plantation: Tour of an American Slavery Museum

By: Author Dave Lee

Posted on Last updated: October 7, 2021

In planning my third trip to New Orleans , going on a Whitney Plantation tour was high on my to-do list.

I wanted my first southern plantation experience to be more than a photo-op.

The Whitney Plantation is the first museum dedicated to American slavery.

The 2,000-acre sugar plantation dates back to 1752 when it was developed by German immigrants Ambroise Haydel and his wife.

According to the plantation's website , it stayed in their family for 115 years, before being “sold to Bradish Johnson, a major businessman and plantation owner with roots in Louisiana and New York.”

Fast forward to the early 2000s, and John Cummings, a successful lawyer from New Orleans, purchases the property as a real estate investment.

Over time, he realizes how little he knows about the history of the slaves who once worked on such properties.

And as he learns more, he decides to invest millions of dollars of his own money into turning the plantation into a museum honoring their experience.

Table of Contents

The Antioch Baptist Church

The children of whitney, the wall of honor, allées gwendolyn midlo hall, the field of angels, the slave quarters, robin's blacksmith shop, the kitchen, the big house, getting to whitney plantation, whitney plantation tour.

The Whitney Plantation opened in December 2014.

Unlike most plantation tours that focus on the large houses of the owners, the Whitney Plantation tour is given from the slaves' perspective.

Visitors meet their guide in the Welcome Center, which also serves as a tasteful gift shop, primarily offering books on slavery.

The 90-minute walking tour begins with a visit to the Antioch Baptist Church, which was built in 1870 on the eastern side of the Mississippi River.

Slaves would come from nearby plantations to worship there.

The church was donated and relocated to the Whitney after its community opened a new, larger one in 1999.

Walking inside the historic wooden structure, one's attention is drawn to the lifesize sculptures of child slaves.

Their innocence and vacant eyes evoke empathy.

“ The Children of Whitney , a series of sculptures by Ohio-based artist Woodrow Nash , represent these former slaves as they were at the time of emancipation: children.”

The children bring the space to life in a way I've never experienced in a museum before. We would see more of them as the tour continued.

Next, we visited The Wall of Honor, which memorializes stories from the 350 slaves who worked on the Whitney Plantation.

Etched into the granite slabs, in their own words, are horrific, heartbreaking accounts of their treatment.

My words certainly won't do these stories justice, so I took a few photos to share here.

“The most crue master in St. John the Baptist Parish during slavery time was a Mr. Valsin Mermillion. One of his cruelties was to place a disobedient slave, standing, in a box, in which there were nails placed in such a manner that the poor creature was unable to move. He was powerless even to chase the flies or sometimes, ants crawling on some parts of his body.” — Mrs. Webb, Louisiana Slave

“We jus' have co'n braid and syrup and some times fat bacon, but when I et dat biscuit, she comes in and say, ‘What dat biscuit?' I say, ‘Miss, I et I's so hungry.' Den she grab dat broom and start to beatin' me over de head wid it and callin' me low down nigger and I guess I jes' clean lost my head 'cause I know'd better fan to fight her if I knowed anything ‘tall, but I started to fight her and de driver, he comes in and he grabs me and starts beatin' me wid dat cat-o'-nine tails, and he beats me 'till I fall to de floor nearly dead. He cut my back all to pieces, den dey rub salt in de cuts for mo' punishment, I's only 10 years old.” — Jenny Proctor

Following The Wall of Honor, we had a few minutes to walk through a memorial to the 107,000 Africans enslaved in Louisiana during the 18th and 19th centuries.

The memorial is named after Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, a historian, teacher, and author who compiled a database known as “Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1719-1820.”

The black granite walls are filled with more names, stories, and images of the enslaved.

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The Field of Angels recognizes the 2,200 slave children born in St. John the Baptist parish between 1823-1863, many of whom died before their second birthday.

Most were buried on the grounds of the plantation; some were buried in the cemetery of a nearby Catholic church.

“Death rates on Louisiana’s cane plantations were relatively high compared to cotton or tobacco plantations. Many of the children honored at this memorial died of diseases, but some of them died under tragic circumstances such as being hit by lightning, drowning, or burning.” — Whitney Plantation website

The striking statue at the center of the memorial is “Coming Home” by Rod Moorehead. It depicts a black angel carrying a baby up to heaven.

The Whitney originally had 22 cypress slave cabins.

However, in the 1970s, all but two were destroyed to make more room for larger trucks and more modern harvesting equipment.

Some of the family owners, who were focused on selling the property rather than preserving it, believed the value would increase as a result.

The rest of the cabins visible on the Whitney Plantation were purchased from the Myrtle Grove Plantation.

The Children of the Whitney make another appearance on the porch of a slave cabin.

This particular cabin had a wall in the middle, splitting the single building up for use by two or more people.

Each side had a fireplace, a bedroom, and what appeared to be a sitting room.

Constructed in Pennsylvania in 1868, this rusty metal jail was donated to the Whitney by a Louisiana couple.

The metal box, about the size of a shipping container, would have been used to hold slaves who were caught trying to escape.

It is similar in design and appearance to what was used during slave auctions, as well.

As the Whitney Plantation tour continued, we passed by Robin's Blacksmith Shop.

According to a plaque, Robin was an enslaved man born in 1791 on the east coast of the U.S.

His job was to provide all the metalwork for the plantation, including “horseshoes, nails, hinges, and curtain rods.”

Built in the early 1800s, Whitney's kitchen is the oldest detached kitchen in Louisiana.

Here, a slave was responsible for cooking all the meals for the plantation owner's family.

Pigeon holes were cut in the roof so that the loft could be used as an additional pigeonnier (a space created for pigeons to nest).

Last but not least, we walked from the kitchen to The Big House, where the plantation owners lived.

The house was rebuilt in its current form sometime before 1815, making it a little over 200 years old.

It's an excellent example of Spanish Creole architecture.

Front view of The Big House, which is the last stop on the Whitney Plantation tour

Each floor has seven rooms. However, the guided tour only passes through the dining room in the middle of the ground floor.

There's not much to see. I found it the least interesting part of the experience.

Overall, I found the effort to present plantation life from the slaves' perspective to be a success.

Walking the grounds where so many indentured men, women, and children toiled without choice, were mercilessly tortured, and sexually abused is a heavy experience.

The investment in bringing a church, slave cabins, and original artwork to the grounds has paid off.

The Children of the Whitney, especially, give faces to the names and stories.

Seeing them throughout the tour reminds you what happened there was real, not some abstract history lesson.

There's no public transportation from New Orleans to the Whitney Plantation, so the easiest thing to do is sign up for a tour, which includes roundtrip bus transportation (from the French Quarter) and admission for a guided tour.

I went in partnership with Gray Line , which sells adult tickets for $69. Children age 6-12 cost $35 each.

The whole trip takes five hours. To make a full day of it, you can add a second plantation for an additional cost.

I also visited Oak Alley Plantation, where the focus is on the owners' home and oak trees. It's a beautiful property, and there are some slave cabins to see; however, the impact wasn't the same.

If you have a car and prefer to visit Whitney Plantation independently, it's recommended you buy your tickets in advance. Adult admission is $25; children age 6-18 are $11 each.

Where to Stay in New Orleans: The Quisby is centrally located in the Garden District, a 15-minute walk from the French Quarter. Free breakfast, an on-site bar open 24/7, and dorms starting at just $18 are a few of the reasons to stay here. Click here to check availability

My trip to New Orleans was in partnership with New Orleans & Company and The Quisby; this tour was provided compliments of Gray Line.

Dave is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Go Backpacking and Feastio . He's been to 66 countries and lived in Colombia and Peru. Read the full story of how he became a travel blogger.

Planning a trip? Go Backpacking recommends:

G Adventures for small group tours.
Hostelworld for booking hostels.

Travel: The Whitney Plantation outside New…

Things To Do Travel

Travel: the whitney plantation outside new orleans shows the reality of slavery, unique museum flips the narrative on antebellum south.

Most of them spin the same fantasy — allowing visitors to imagine themselves as the master and mistress of the manor, strolling beneath the magnolias in hoop skirts and top hats, and then pulling a cord to summon a slave to bring a mint julep when it’s hot.

Such places are popular wedding venues, where would-be Scarlett O’Hara’s can marry under old oaks, in front of white mansions built with the money from sugar cane, rice and indigo fields worked by enslaved people.

Only one plantation goes out of its way to flip the story entirely.

The Whitney Plantation, also along the River Road, tells the same tale — but from the enslaved people’s point of view. And it’s a fascinating one.

Originally founded in 1752, the plantation went through several owners before being purchased in 1998 by John Cummings, a white former trial lawyer and civil rights activist from New Orleans.

He spent $8 million of his own money and 16 years turning it into America’s most important (and maybe only) museum of slavery. It opened in 2014.

Cummings said that he didn’t know what he was going to do with the property when he first bought it from a petrochemical company that had unsuccessfully sought to build a factory there, but after reading accounts of slaves that lived and worked on such plantations, he was inspired to create a museum.

Historian and author Ibrahima Seck came from Senegal to be the plantation’s director of research and help plan the exhibits.

Property records kept track of the purchase and sale of slaves, as well as their disposition after the owners’ deaths.

The Haydel family, German immigrants who founded the plantation and operated it and adjoining ones until 1867, owned 354 slaves over the years, according to the records.

A memorial on the property pays tribute and lists the names of 107,000 people known to have been enslaved in Louisiana, according to the Louisiana Slave Database. The 1860 U.S. Census, taken right before the Civil War, found nearly 4 million enslaved people living in the United States.

Since the African slave trade and its harsh aftermath are such shameful episodes in American history, people might assume that the plantation tour is grim and painful.

It is emotional — tour guides don’t mince words or hide the hard parts — but this important tour of American history is ultimately satisfying and helps fill in the blanks of many people’s curiosity about slavery and how it was practiced on such plantations.

The movies “Django Unchained” and “12 Years A Slave” were filmed at Whitney.

Like all such restored sites, people coming to Whitney Plantation see the elegant manor known as the “Big House,” but in this case they don’t learn about the master and mistress. No hoop skirts are in evidence.

Instead, visitors learn that the house was built of cypress wood, from trees chopped down and planed by slaves.

They hear about the domestic servants who worked there in the house and adjacent tiny kitchen building, perspiring over the hot pots and fires to feed its inhabitants.

As the museum’s excellent audio guide explains, most people would assume that the life of a domestic in a house like this was much easier than a field hand, but it also had its hardships.

Domestic slaves typically lived together in a small building behind the main house. However, they were on call 24 hours a day, and sometimes required to sleep on a pallet outside the owners’ bedrooms. Obviously, this also made it easier for masters to abuse their servants, who were unable to fight back.

On the other hand, field hands worked brutally hard from sunup until sundown, but they typically had their own small cabins to live in with their families, and the few hours remaining after sundown were theirs to enjoy.

Sugar cane plantations like this one were considered the most deadly places to work, with the types of diseases that haunt swamps, venomous snakes and sometimes fatal heat exhaustion in the high temperatures and humidity.

Legally, enslaved people were property — not human beings — so they could be whipped, tortured, mutilated, imprisoned or even killed with impunity, on the whims of masters.

These are the kinds of insights that Whitney visitors learn as they tour around the remaining 40 acres of the plantation.

At the Whitney Plantation slavery museum near New Orleans, LA. Bronze sugar kettle where slaves made molasses from sugar cane. (Photo by Marla Jo Fisher/SCNG)

In addition to the Big House, it includes a gift shop, a church built by ex-slaves, an iron jail, a blacksmith shop, a mule barn, the kitchen, the overseer’s house,the garden, commemorative sculptures and actual slave cabins decorated with statues of the children who would have lived there.

The variety of artwork around the property lend a poignant air to the stories of the people who worked there.

At the Whitney Plantation slavery museum near New Orleans, LA. This Baptist church built by former slaves shortly after the war was moved to the plantation. Sculptures from the

Huge bronze sugar kettles demonstrate the legacy of sugar production, from sugar cane.

Some of the buildings are original, others were moved here or recreated.

Today, the museum is owned by a nonprofit devoted to educating the public about slavery and its legacy.

At this writing, adult visitors pay $25 to enter, depending on time of day and type of tour. Kids and seniors are cheaper. Both guided tours and self-guided audio tours are available. We did the audio tour, since no guided tours were offered the day we visited. The site is mostly wheelchair accessible on gravel pathways.

In the combined visitor center and gift shop, permanent exhibits describe the history of the international slave trade, worldwide and in Louisiana.

The museum is open daily except Tuesdays. The best way to visit is by rental car or by tour bus from New Orleans. Expect to spend about two hours at the museum.

Learn more: The Whitney Plantation, 5099 Louisiana Highway 18, Edgard, LA 70049. 225-265-3300. WhitneyPlantation.org

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PLAN YOUR VISIT TO WHITNEY PLANTATION

Quick details.

For a full experience, we recommend that visitors plan to spend a minimum of two hours at Whitney Plantation.

HOURS & ADMISSION

Hours: 9:30am- 4:30pm. Last entry 3:00 PM. Closed Tuesdays.

Closed Tuesdays and the Following Holidays:

New Year’s Day
National Freedom Day (February 1st)
Mardi Gras Day
Easter Sunday
International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade (August 23)
Thanksgiving Day
Holiday Break, December 20th- 26th
SELF GUIDED AUDIO TOURS

CHILDREN 6-18:

Children under 6:, students, senior , military:, residents of st. john & st. james parishes, guided tours.

Guided Tours are offered at 10:45am, 12:45pm and 2:15pm. They are available on a first-come, first served-basis.

SELF GUIDED TOURS

Self-guided audio tours are offered between 9:30am – 3:00pm. Arrive at any time in this window to begin your tour.

EDUCATION TOURS

Education tours are tailored for middle and high schoolers. We serve schools, homeschools pods, scout groups, clubs, and youth groups.

LARGE GROUP TOURS

Large group tours are for groups of 20-50 people of all ages. This type of tour is well-suited for church groups, family reunions and universities.

TOUR OPERATORS

Gray Line New Orleans

Legendary Tours

Crescent City Tours

N’awlins Luxury Tours

Second Line Tours

Cajun Encounters

Old River Road

Tours By Isabelle

LOCATION & DIRECTIONS

Our address is: 5099 Louisiana Hwy 18, Edgard, LA 70049

Uber, Lyft and other ride-sharing services do not operate near the plantation. If you take an Uber or Lyft to the museum you will not be able to return.

There are many tour operators who provide daily transit from New Orleans. If you would like to come with one of these services, you may book your tickets with them directly.

From New Orleans, Downtown: Take I-10 West towards Baton Rouge for 39.3 miles. Take the LA-641 S exit, EXIT 194 towards Gramercy. Turn left onto LA-641 S. Take the LA-18 ramp toward Edgard/Vacherie. Turn right onto LA-18/Great River Rd.

From Baton Rouge: Take I-10 East towards New Orleans. Merge onto US-61 S via EXIT 187 towards Gramercy. Turn right onto LA-641 S. Take the LA-18 ramp toward Edgard/Vacherie. Turn right onto LA-18/Great River Rd.

THE EXHIBITS:

Exhibits in the visitor center are free to the public and are open from 9:30am to 4:15pm, every day except Tuesday .

PERMANENT EXHIBITS:

The History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

This exhibit is a brief overview about the history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It includes information about how the trade began, which European countries were involved, and where Africans were captured and forcibly migrated along routes of trade that extended both to the west and east of the African continent.

Slavery in Louisiana

Focused on the history of slavery in Louisiana from 1719-1865, visitors learn about all aspects of slavery in this state, including the history of the Code Noir, topics of gender, and resistance & rebellion.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:

Photo & video policy, image use statement.

Whitney Plantation encourages media outlets and visitors to use these approved images of the buildings, grounds, memorials and collection objects as part of their coverage of the Museum. When using images please be sure to credit photographer’s name, listed in caption, anywhere the image is reproduced.

GENERAL PHOTOGRAPHY

Personal photography is permitted in the permanent collection galleries, the grounds, and the historic structures. Flash photography is prohibited without special permission. Videotaping is not permitted on the tour.

PHOTO SHOOTS

Members of the media may photograph or film within approved areas of the museum for the purpose of news coverage. All organized photo shoots inside the museum—for news coverage, school projects, tourism programs—require an escort by a member of the communications staff. Submit a request to schedule your visit to ensure a staff member is available. Unscheduled photo shoots that cannot be staffed will be declined. Commercial photographers not commissioned by The Whitney Plantation may not conduct photo or video shoots in the museum without prior permission from staff. A fee will be charged for use of facilities and staff time. Tripods are not permitted on the tour. Wedding and engagement photography is not permitted on the grounds.

RIGHTS AND REPRODUCTIONS

Photography is permitted for private use only. Photographs may not be published, sold, or otherwise distributed for commercial purposes. Visitors may post images from their visits on personal social media sites, so long as they are not used for profit. The museum may photograph or videotape visitors for educational and promotional purposes. Attendance on museum property is implied consent for the use of visitors’ likenesses for marketing purposes. The Whitney Plantation reserves the right to withhold or withdraw permission to photograph on the premises. Staff has the authority to approach and verify the intent of photography, and to enforce this Photography Policy.

EVENTS & SEMINARS

Whitney plantation events, temporary exhibit on view march through august 2025, extractivism.

Free film preview and artist talk

Extractivism: artist talk and film preview.

KEEP UP TO DATE WITH WHITNEY PLANTATION

PLAN YOUR VISIT

CALL US TODAY

(225) 265-3300

5099 LOUISIANA HWY 18 EDGARD, LA 70049

[email protected]

we are closed due to Hurricane Francine on september 11-14

Protect Your Trip »

The 3 best new orleans plantation tours.

Learn about the Big Easy's role in slavery on one of these daytrips.

Best New Orleans Plantation Tours

Slave quarters with large bowls in front of the house

Courtesy of New Orleans Kayak Swamp Tours

Whitney Plantation's exhibits are largely devoted to the lives of the enslaved people who worked on the property hundreds of years ago.

Known for its Creole cuisine, Mardi Gras festivities and iconic architecture, New Orleans has something to offer every traveler, especially history buffs. The area's antebellum plantations offer a look at the lives of enslaved workers, how local landowners ran their farms using – and profiting off – the labor of the enslaved and how agriculture impacted New Orleans.

Picking the right tour means more than picking a plantation close to your hotel. (Many plantations are located within an hour's drive of the French Quarter .) You'll want to find a tour where first-person accounts depicting the brutal conditions enslaved workers had to endure are the focus. These stories help to provide a more complete picture of plantation life and provide context for why plantation owners were able to afford the luxurious mansions preserved on the property. Additionally, look for plantations that emphasize researching about the lives of enslaved workers, plantations that do not host weddings and those that employ descendants of former slaves.

Not sure where to start? Begin at Evergreen Plantation. This research-focused property is not open to the public, but you can explore its comprehensive website to learn more about the lives of the enslaved men, women and children who were forced to work on the plantation. Visitors can also peruse a slavery database, read biographies of slaves who labored at Evergreen and take a virtual tour.

Taking into account the above criteria – as well as traveler opinion and expert sentiment – U.S. News identified some of the top New Orleans plantation tours.

Gray Line – Whitney Plantation Tour

Price: Adults from $79; kids from $39 Duration: 5.5 hours

Opened to the public in 2014, Whitney Plantation offers a distinct look at the enslaved people who lived and worked at the site more than 200 years ago. This Gray Line tour, which lasts about 5.5 hours, allows access to museum exhibits, artwork and recorded first-person slave narratives. Reviewers say this tour is particularly powerful and important and describe it as a must-do activity. They also appreciate the bus drivers who share more tidbits of information on the drive to Whitney.

Tours depart Wednesday through Monday at noon and 1 p.m. Ticket prices start at $79 for adults and $39 for children 12 and younger. Gray Line offers other plantation tours, ghost tours, swamp tours and more.

View & Book Tickets: Viator | GetYourGuide

Two statues of enslaved children on front porch

New Orleans Kayak Swamp Tours – Whitney Plantation & Swamp Kayak Tour Combo

Price: From $195

Duration: 8 hours

Travelers say this daylong tour is a wonderful way to experience two must-do New Orleans attractions. Half the tour is a kayak trip through Manchac Swamp to see cypress trees and local wildlife while learning about the history of the area. The other half is a moving visit to Whitney Plantation, where the experiences of enslaved workers are the main focus. In between the activities, you'll stop for lunch (at your own expense).

Fees start at $195 per person, regardless of age, and tours begin at 9 a.m. Wednesday through Monday. Transportation to and from New Orleans (pickup is near Frenchmen Street) is included. The company says the paddle is suitable for beginner kayakers. It also offers kayak excursions through Honey Island Swamp, among other options.

View & Book Tickets: New Orleans Kayak Swamp Tours

Legendary Tours – Laura Plantation Tour

Price: Adults from $79; kids from $45 Duration: 5.5 hours

Named for Laura Lucoul, a Creole member of the family who owned the plantation, Laura Plantation allows visitors not only to explore the lives of enslaved workers on the property, but to also learn more about Louisiana's Creole heritage. During this half-day outing with Legendary Tours, travelers will explore the plantation in depth, view slave quarters, see the great house and much more. Tourgoers commend their drivers and say the guides at Laura Plantation are excellent.

Tours last about 5.5 hours and operate Wednesday to Monday beginning at 10 a.m. (though keep in mind, transportation pickup starts at 8 a.m.) Tickets start at $79 for adults and $45 for children 5 to 12; kids 4 and younger explore for free. Fees include round-trip transportation from select areas of New Orleans. Legendary Tours also offers tours exploring other area plantations.

View & Book Tickets: Legendary Tours

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New Orleans: Whitney Plantation & Museum Tour

The Whitney Plantation and Museum in Louisiana offers visitors a profound exploration of slavery’s complex history . This self-guided experience takes guests on a journey through the lives of enslaved Africans, providing a deeply impactful and thought-provoking experience. With a guided bus tour along the historic River Road and an insightful audio headset, participants gain a deeper understanding of the daily struggles, resilience, and legacies of those who were forced into bondage. As the only museum in the state dedicated exclusively to the legacy of slavery , the Whitney Plantation serves as a powerful reminder of the past and its continued influence on the present.

Explore the Whitney Plantation, the only museum in Louisiana solely dedicated to slavery, to learn about the harsh realities faced by enslaved Africans.
Discover the significance of the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history along the historic River Road during a guided bus tour.
Enjoy a self-guided tour of the Whitney Plantation with provided headsets for an immersive and informative experience.
Benefit from hotel pickup and drop-off for a convenient and hassle-free tour experience.
Appreciate the excellent value for money with the option for free cancellation up to 24 hours prior.

More tours and experiences nearby.

Adults-Only New Orleans Ghost, Crime, Voodoo, and Vampire Tour
Cemetery and Ghost BYOB Bus Tour in New Orleans
French Quarter Historical Sights and Stories Walking Tour
New Orleans Adults-Only Ghost, Voodoo and Vampire Tour

Tour Overview

The tour offers visitors the opportunity to experience the history of slavery in Louisiana on a self-guided tour from New Orleans.

Visitors can explore the Whitney Plantation memorial museum and travel the historic River Road. The tour lasts around 5 hours and is led by a live guide in English.

Travelers can take advantage of the free cancellation policy , which allows them to receive a full refund up to 24 hours before the tour.

The tour provides an immersive experience , allowing visitors to connect the past with the present and learn about the lives of enslaved Africans on a sugar plantation.

Pricing and Reservation

At a price starting from £59.89 per person, the Whitney Plantation & Museum Tour offers visitors an opportunity to explore the history of slavery in Louisiana.

Visitors can take advantage of the reserve now & pay later option, which provides flexibility in planning their trip. To check availability for starting times, customers can easily access the booking platform.

The tour includes:

Guided River Road bus tour
Self-guided tour of the Whitney Plantation
Hotel pickup and drop-off

With these inclusions and the option to cancel up to 24 hours in advance for a full refund, the Whitney Plantation & Museum Tour provides excellent value for money .

Transportation Details

For the Whitney Plantation & Museum Tour, hotel pick-up is included for those visiting the plantation. The pickup service covers most hotels within 1-2 miles of 414 Canal St, New Orleans.

Visitors staying at hotels outside the designated pickup area can meet the group at the 414 Canal St location. The tour includes transportation via a comfortable bus , allowing participants to sit back and enjoy the scenic River Road journey.

Headsets are provided during the self-guided portion of the tour, ensuring clear audio and an immersive experience.

Whether you’re staying close to the city center or further out, the tour’s transportation arrangements make it easy to explore the historic Whitney Plantation and learn about Louisiana’s slavery past .

Experience Highlights

Visitors to the Whitney Plantation & Museum Tour can expect to connect the past with the present, witnessing firsthand how slavery shaped the landscape and culture of Louisiana.

The tour offers a powerful and immersive experience, allowing guests to:

Learn about the daily lives and harsh realities faced by enslaved Africans on a sugar plantation.
Visit the only museum in Louisiana solely devoted to the history of slavery , providing a comprehensive and thought-provoking perspective.
Discover the significance of the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history, which took place along the historic River Road.

The tour’s informative and well-maintained facilities, combined with the exceptional transportation services, ensure an enriching and memorable exploration of Louisiana’s complex and often overlooked past.

Tour Inclusions

The Whitney Plantation & Museum Tour includes a guided bus tour along the historic River Road, allowing visitors to gain a deeper understanding of the region’s complex history. This self-guided tour also provides access to the Whitney Plantation, the only museum in Louisiana solely dedicated to slavery. Included in the tour are hotel pickup and drop-off, as well as headsets for clear audio during the self-guided experience.

Visitors are advised to wear comfortable clothing, as the tour proceeds rain or shine. Food and drinks are not included in the tour package.

Customer Feedback

Glowing customer reviews highlight the Whitney Plantation & Museum Tour’s exceptional value and thoughtful execution .

With an overall rating of 4.6/5 based on 11 reviews, the tour consistently impresses visitors.

Highlights include:

Excellent transportation, with hotel pick-up and drop-off making the experience seamless.

Outstanding value for money, providing an immersive look at Louisiana’s slavery history at a reasonable price.

Informative guides and well-maintained plantation facilities, enhancing the educational and emotional impact of the tour.

Customers praise the tour’s ability to skillfully connect the past with the present, offering a profound and enlightening exploration of slavery’s lasting legacy .

Exploring the Past

On this tour, visitors embark on a poignant journey through the complex history of slavery in Louisiana. At the Whitney Plantation, the only museum in the state dedicated to slavery, guests witness firsthand the harsh realities faced by the enslaved Africans. The tour highlights the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history along the River Road, shedding light on the harrowing experiences of those who fought for freedom.

Meaningful Connections

This immersive tour invites visitors to forge meaningful connections with the complex history of slavery in Louisiana.

Through a self-guided experience, travelers can:

Learn about the daily life and struggles of enslaved Africans on a sugar plantation, gaining a deeper understanding of their plight.

Visit the only museum in Louisiana dedicated solely to slavery, offering a poignant and thought-provoking exploration of this painful past.

Discover the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history along the historic River Road, a powerful reminder of the resilience and resistance of the enslaved.

Here's a few more nearby tours and experiences we think you'll like.

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New Orleans Swamp and Bayou Boat Tour With Transportation

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is the Dress Code for the Tour?

The tour recommends wearing comfortable clothes. There is no formal dress code, as the activity proceeds rain or shine and visitors will be walking around the plantation grounds.

Can I Take Photos During the Tour?

Yes, visitors are generally allowed to take photos during the self-guided tour of the Whitney Plantation museum. However, flash photography may be prohibited in certain areas to preserve the historical artifacts and exhibits.

Are There Any Accessibility Accommodations Available?

The tour offers accessibility accommodations for visitors with disabilities. This includes wheelchair-accessible buses, designated parking, and assisted listening devices for the self-guided tour. Visitors should contact the tour operator in advance to request any necessary accommodations.

Can I Bring My Own Food and Beverages?

The tour does not include food or drinks, but visitors are welcome to bring their own. However, participants are advised to wear comfortable clothing as the tour proceeds rain or shine.

Is the Tour Suitable for Children?

The tour is generally suitable for children, but parental discretion is advised. While the historical content may be heavy, the museum offers age-appropriate exhibits and activities to engage younger visitors. Children should be supervised throughout the tour.

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The Whitney Plantation & Museum Tour offers a profound exploration of slavery’s history in Louisiana. Participants gain a deeper understanding of the daily lives, struggles, and resilience of enslaved Africans through the self-guided experience and guided bus tour. This impactful journey through history leaves a lasting impression, fostering meaningful connections with the past and a greater appreciation for the ongoing legacy of slavery .

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Whitney Plantation Tour

Additional Info
Plantation Tours
Walking Tour

Within the boundaries of the “Habitation Haydel,” as the Whitney Plantation was originally known, the story of the Haydel family of German immigrants and the slaves that they held were intertwined. In 2014, the Whitney Plantation opened its doors to the public for the first time in its 262 year history as the only plantation museum in Louisiana with a focus on slavery.

Through museum exhibits, memorial artwork, restored buildings and hundreds of first-person slave narratives, visitors to Whitney will gain a unique perspective on the lives of Louisiana’s enslaved people. To reserve click on the link below or call 504-471-1499.

This adventure is operated by Legendary Tours New Orleans

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Black History: The Best New Orleans Plantation Tours For Adults & Kids

Published on July 13, 2020
by The Mom Trotter
in North America , Travel , Travel Destinations , USA States

This post may contain affiliate links. By clicking on any of the links below, I may get a commission if you make a purchase at absolutely no additional charge to you. This helps offset the costs of running this blog & I appreciate your support. Please see my privacy & disclosure policy for more.

Although these New Orleans plantations are well manicured and beautiful estates to look, years ago, they housed slaves who worked endlessly and tirelessly day in and day out. So, it was very important for us to go on a New Orleans Plantation tour while in New Orleans.

This wasn’t Aiden’s first time learning about his history. When we visited Ghana , learning about slavery first hand was very important. Aiden was about four years old when I started talking to him about the slavery and the real truth about it.

We visited the Whitney Plantation and it was upsetting, painful and eye opening to see the conditions that slaves lived in, and everything that they had to endure without much of a choice.

If you are planning to take your kids on a plantation tour, I highly suggest that you start of by reading a book from this collection with your kids reaching them about slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, Rosa Parks, Ruby Bridges and more.

Regardless of race, background, ethnicity, it is important to talk to your children about slavery. Talking to your kids about these topics and being open with them will give them a solid foundation and a better understanding of what they will see and learn about at the plantations.

List Of New Orleans Plantations

There are eleven plantations in New Orleans:

Whitney Plantation
Laura Plantation
Oak Alley Plantation
Houmas House Plantation
San Francisco Plantation
Nottoway Plantation
Destrehan Plantation
Ormond Plantation
Malus Beauregard House
St. Joseph Plantation
Madewood Plantation

Want to know which plantation to visit – then click here to read more about each New Orleans plantation individually.

If you haven’t talked to your kids about slavery yet, then you absolutely should, and while in New Orleans make sure that you also show them as well.

Visiting The Whitney Plantation With Kids

The doors of this museum were opened for public in 2014 for the very first time in the entire history of the museum and this is the only New Orleans plantation which is based on the views of slaves and everything that they endured.

The museum at the Whitney Plantation exhibits memorial artwork, plenty of first-person slaves’ narratives, restored buildings, and can give a unique perspective of the enslaved people who lived there.

From New Orleans you can drive to the plantations or go with a tour group. We went with a tour group because we didn’t rent a car and it went well.

Reading this below made my heart ache thinking about all the slaves had to endure and how strong and resilient they were.

Booking A New Orleans Plantation Tour

There are plenty of New Orleans plantation tours so it is important to make sure that you are booking a tour to the specific plantation that you want to see.

All the tours below include pick up from New Orleans, so make sure to inquire where exactly the pick up location is for your tour when you book it.

Do note that you can visit some of these plantations on your own, however an advance purchase ticket is a must. I do however highly recommend a tour especially because you get a more in depth explanation of everything.

Whitney Plantation tour – this half day 5 hour tour includes a full visit to one of the most popular plantations. It includes museum exhibits, restored building and offers a first hand experience from a slaves point of view. This is the tour we booked.
Swamp boat adventure and plantations full day tour – this nine-hour tour is a full day tour which includes visiting secluded areas of the bayous to witness Cajun living. This tour also includes Oak Alley Plantation and Laura Plantation.
Swamp boat ride and southern plantation tour – this is a five and a half hour plantation tour which includes viewing wildlife and a visit to Destrehan Plantation.
Double plantation tour – this five-hour tour includes a combined visit to Oak Alley, Laura Plantation or Whitney Plantation. When you book this tour you have the option to choose any two plantations that you’ll like to visit.
Plantation brunch and swamp experience tour – this eight and a half hour tour not only includes a visit to Oak Alley and Laura Plantations, but it also includes a delicious Cajun brunch as well.

Here is a compiled list of New Orleans Plantation Tours you can choose from.

Have you ever gone on a plantation tour? Or taken your kids on one?

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Whitney Plantation – The First Museum Dedicated to Slavery

Whitney Plantation is a former plantation site in Louisiana that has a distinguished history of slavery. In the past, a generation of Africans and their descendants were enslaved here to grow indigo, rice, and sugar. On December 7, 2014, Whitney Plantation opened to the public as a museum. Today, visitors come here to learn about the South’s turbulent past. It exposes the dark history of enslaved people and addresses the crimes against humanity head-on without sugar-coating any of the facts.

Visitors worldwide come to Whitney Plantation for the accurate history of slavery, to pay homage to those who lost their lives, and to see firsthand what plantation life was like. If you are visiting the South, this is the one plantation you should tour.

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About Whitney Plantation

A short drive from New Orleans takes you to Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana. Founded before the Civil War, it is the first slavery museum in the United States. In the 1750s, German immigrant Ambroise Haydel bought this land in Louisiana and named it Habitation Haydel. The place has a long history of slavery culture.

This plantation is exclusively dedicated to educating people about slavery. The Whitney Plantation Historic District is on the National Register of Historic Places.

If you take the tour here, you will see the world through the eyes of the enslaved people who lived and worked on an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century indigo and sugar plantation. This plantation does not glamorize, endorse or celebrate plantation life. It condemns it yet provides a historically accurate account of life on a plantation.

Whitney Plantation Through the Ages

Ambroise Heidel, a German immigrant who earned great wealth cultivating indigo, acquired the Whitney Plantation in 1752. The plantation was transformed into a sugar production operation by Heidel’s youngest son, Jean Jacques Haydel, Sr. A single grinding season produced 407,000 pounds of sugar. Like on any plantation at the time, enslaved black people were the primary source of labor here. More than 350 enslaved Africans worked on the plantation. The enslaved people at Whitney Plantation were continuously beaten, malnourished, and overworked. This harsh environment caused enslaved people to die.

In 1867, Brandish Johnson of New York purchased the plantation from the Haydel family, renaming it after his grandson, Harry Whitney. Between 1880 and 1946, Pierre Edouard St. Martin, Théophile Perret, and subsequent generations of their families owned the plantation. In 1990, Formosa Chemicals and Fiber Corporation acquired it from Alfred Mason Barnes of New Orleans.

Formosa Chemicals and Fiber Corporation intended to operate a chemical-based manufacturing facility. However, the community turned down yet another chemical plant in an area already known as “cancer alley.”

Whitney Plantation Museum

Throughout history, ownership of the plantation has shifted many times. Many buyers wanted to use the plantation for business purposes. The plantation’s use would not change dramatically until the late 1990s.

New Orleans-based attorney John Cummings purchased the 1,700-acre site in 1999 to restore it as a museum to tell the story of slavery. He spent $8 million of his fortune on research, restoration, and artifacts. Cummings was interested in telling the tale of slavery because no one else was, so he decided to do it himself.

The idea was developed 13 years ago by Senegalese scholar Ibrahima Seck. Seck inspired Cummings to turn the Whitney into a slavery museum. Cummings’ goal was to cut ties with all that is evil and begin righting some of history’s crimes with the museum. Many visitors feel the museum is a first step towards accepting the region’s troubled past.

Whitney Plantation opened to the public as a museum on December 7, 2014

Mr. Cummings owned and operated the property for 20 years, from 1999 – 2019. In 2019, John Cummings donated the museum, which is now a 501(c)(3) governed by a board of directors.

Note: The United States is home to more than 35,000 museums that ensure our nation’s culture and history are memorialized – Whitney Plantation is the first dedicated to slavery. However, many have challenged this claim citing museums such as The Lest We Forget Museum of Slavery in Philadelphia and Cincinnati’s National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. I’ve never been to either so I can’t offer an opinion here. What I will say is Lest We Forget Museum of Slavery opened in 2002 and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center opened in 2004. A little but late to the cause to make such a claim! Or, perhaps the challengers misinterpreted first vs. only?

The Whitney Plantation Mansion

It should be no surprise that the mansion is not the focus here. While you can walk through the lower section, there’s nothing much to see: no staging, no portraits, and no recreation of the lives of the plantation owners’ privilege. Just the bare bones of the mansion, intact and maintained. The Whitney Plantation Mansion is a fine example of Spanish Creole architecture. The house is also one of the few historic American houses with Canova-painted decorative ceilings and wall paintings.

Whitney’s historic outbuildings provide a unique look at the evolution of Louisiana working plantations over time. The Creole mansion and related buildings are a part of the tour and are historically interesting. What I appreciated is that the mansion is not the main attraction. And, I would not consider any of the artifacts on display here attractions. This is a museum, not a tourist attraction.

Slavery at Whitney Plantation

There is a long history of slavery on the Whitney plantation. In 1722, nearly 170 indigenous people were slaves on Louisiana’s plantations. But with time, the number of enslaved increased. Enslaved women worked in the indigo fields growing and maintaining the crop. In most cases, enslaved men worked to produce dye from plants. To create the dye, enslaved workers had to ferment and oxidize the indigo plants. The enslaved people were beaten, killed, undernourished, and overworked. The lives of enslaved people were filled with hard labor. They worked from sunrise to sunset. Rather than caring for their children, enslaved women worked as wet nurses. If you’re unfamiliar with that term, it means they cared for the children of their owners. In layman’s terms, they breastfed their owner’s children.

Whitney Plantation Tour

Whitney Plantation opened its doors to the public for the first time in its 262-year history in 2014. Visitors will gain a unique insight into the lives of enslaved people on a Louisiana sugar plantation through oral histories recorded by the Federal Writers’ Project. Whitney offers people a unique perspective through museum exhibits, memorial artwork, restored buildings, and first-person narratives.

All tours include a memorial to a formerly enslaved person. The memorial card shares each enslaved person’s story, humanizing and honoring their legacy.

Guided Tour

The Whitney Plantation offers guided tours on a first-come, first-served basis. Advanced purchase is highly recommended, as they do sell out. The guided tours are also on a schedule, so even if not sold out, you will probably not be able to join one without a reservation. The guided tour takes 90 minutes.

Self Guided Tour

We took the self-guided tour , and I’m glad we did because we got to take our time. You listen to the history through a headset. Different people narrate each area you visit. It’s incredibly detailed and takes at least an hour to do a tour. If, like us, you listen to all of the additional snippets, prepare to be there for a couple of hours.

The self-guided tour is the only option you can take if you get there, and the guided tours are sold out.

About The Tour

Touring this museum is not for the faint of heart or for anyone that cannot or will not accept a historically accurate account of the plantation era. Nor is this tour for those who want to shrug off this part of American history under the umbrella of “that’s how it was back then.”

I’ve toured a few plantations. They range from completely glamorizing and celebrating southern lifestyles to somewhere in between. Whitney is the opposite. It is 100% focused on slavery and the horrific injustice.

I encourage you to visit if you are genuinely interested in real history. You’ll get a lifetime’s education in a couple of hours. I took this tour with my friend and her daughter, who is in her early 30s. She knew nothing about the slave trade or what life on a plantation was like until this tour. I did not photograph her as she walked sobering through the grounds. I did not need to. I’ll never forget the look on her face; I will never forget the darkness in her eyes or the tears she shed.

The tour is graphic and traumatic, and there are parts where you’d have to be soulless not to shed a tear.

The Slave Quarters

There were 22 slave cabins on the Whitney Plantation before the Civil War and 20 cypress slave cabins that housed field hands. During the late 1970s, they were still in perfect shape when they were torn down and removed from the plantation so that the large tractor-trailers could easily swing into the plantation. According to Steve Barnes, grandson of A.M. Barnes, members of his family advocated bulldozing the buildings on the site to increase the estates’ value. So, the original slave quarters are not on display.

On the site are slave cabins that were acquired from nearby plantations. Notice the large cast iron bowls? These are sugar kettles. During the short harvest season, enslaved people worked around the clock to maintain the massive sugar kettles. Ladling the hot cane juice from one kettle to another. They worked in the dark and often sustained third-degree burns. Infections often result in death. A common occurrence in the crushing mill involved chaining enslaved people together; if they got caught in the wheels, their limbs were amputated on the spot. Add to this; that whipping was a common punishment.

You’ll see sugar kettles all over New Orleans. People use them as fire pits, water features, and planters. There is a high demand for authentic plantation sugar kettles. What in the world is wrong with us? It’s deplorable and ignorant.

One manufacturer I researched makes replicas which is a little more stomachable. I also hope this will encourage some people to avoid glamorizing a genuine historical artifact symbolic of such pain.

Wall of Honor

The Wall of Honor lists more than 350 documented slaves who were enslaved at the Whitney Plantation. There’s a place for each one and their names and quotes narratives of the former slaves.

All enslaved people who lived on the plantation are remembered on a Wall of Honor. On the granite plates, etchings are made, and names are listed non-alphabetically. Using this approach to display the names emphasizes the chaos that accompanied slave life. Its primary purpose is to recognize and honor those individuals whose contributions and work had gone unnoticed and unveiled.

Allées Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

A slave memorial with 107,000 names engraved on it honors those enslaved in Louisiana and is documented in the “ The Louisiana Slave Database ” built by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall.

Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

White historian Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall built The Louisiana Slave Database . It contains 107,000 entries documenting the people enslaved in Louisiana from 1719, with the arrival of the first slave ship directly from Africa to 1820. Her work enabled the Wall Of Honor and the Allées Gwendolyn Midlo Hall.

She speaks on the audio tour once you get to the Allées Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. I can’t recall her exact quote on her motivation to document slaves, but it was something like, “I was sick and tired of the lies, and someone needed to share the truth.” Now, I don’t want to evoke debate here. But, for those on the other side of the racial divide in America – some white people care and get it. Dr. Hall is a prime example of an ally, an ambassador, and a proponent of truth, as is John Cummings. Admittedly, each of us can learn from their approach to the world.

Here is a quote from an interview with Afropop Worldwide :

When you were getting started as a historian, what was the state of Louisiana’s historiography? How accurately was the history of Louisiana being told? And what did you feel needed to be done, and how has it changed in the intervening years? Well, that’s an interesting question. It goes way back. I went to public school here. Historiography then was quite overtly racist. It has improved a bit over time. When I was in public school, the teachers spent about half their time pronouncing racist diatribes, and that was called education. The main theme was that blacks were all stupid, and uneducated, and violent, and dangerous, and that the only way to keep order and preserve the white race was to maintain very severe repression of blacks. So if I could put the history in a nutshell, that was about it. It had to improve from there.

Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall passed on August 29, 2022. As a tribute to his mentor, Dr. Seck designed Allées Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, a granite-block memorial featuring the names of all 107,000 people in her database. According to her request, her ashes will be scattered there later this year.

The Field of Angels

The Field of Angels commemorates the 2,200 Louisiana slave children who died before their 3rd birthday. Some names are listed as “a little slave child.” The museum has a bronze sculpture depicting a black angel holding a baby. There are granite slabs around the statue that list the names of the slave children. It is unknown how many children died on the Witney Plantation, but according to external historical documents, 39 children died here between 1823 and 1863, and only six survived to adulthood.

You will struggle to find a dry eye when you reach this part of the tour. You could cut the air with a knife as it’s complete silence as people read the granite memorials of the little ones. It’s overwhelming and takes some time to take it all in.

Sixty Ceramic Heads

Woodrow Nash produced sixty ceramic heads to commemorate an incident in 1811 when around 125 enslaved people fled the plantation. A total of 95 of these individuals were killed by workers dispatched to round them up. New Orleans’ French Quarter was adorned with spikes bearing the severed heads of some of these escapees.

Stop and think about this for a moment. Seriously?

Some visitors leave negative feedback regarding this display because of perceived horror. But let’s be honest; the truth hurts.

This is another part of the tour where you will not hear a single word. Even though there’s a sign requesting silence, it’s assumed. I observed people reading, and their draws dropped. I could feel their horror as they processed what they read and saw.

The Antioch Baptist Church

Former slaves 1868 founded the Antioch Baptist Church. There were ways in which racism existed during this time in history that most of us have only read about. A burial society was formed at this time by some brave men from the Paulina area. Similarly to our current burial insurance , the society operated as an organization. Members paid nickels and dimes for membership dues, and the society paid their funeral expenses. This society was named Anti-Yoke. Freedom was the meaning of this name – untied and unbound.

Controversy of Plantations

Some displays have sparked controversy because of their association with this shameful part of American history.

People of all races opposed the idea of a slave museum. Some were skeptics, and some were cynics. White people viewed it as a threat to their faith in Southern heritage, American culture, and glory. Some have condemned the museum for inspiring unwholesome pity for black people. Many argued that a slavery museum built by a white man who owned a plantation was another example of continued profiteering off the suffering of black people. According to some black people, their ancestors built their wealth with blood, sweat, and tears; now, the descendants seek to make money by selling their version of the story.

Fortunately, Whitney Plantation does not profit on the back of slavery. The Whitney Institute (DBA Whitney Plantation) is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization dedicated to educating the public about the history of slavery and its legacies.

Who owns Whitney Plantation today?

Where is the whitney plantation house.

The exact location of the Whitney plantation house is 5099 Highway 18 in Wallace, Louisiana, on the west bank of the Mississippi River.

Is Whitney Plantation a real plantation?

Whitney Plantation was a real working plantation. Today it’s a museum.

Why is Whitney Plantation famous?

Whitney Plantation is the first museum in America dedicated to the history of slavery. Slavery sufferers’ names and experiences are commemorated through memorials and displays.

How many people died at the Whitney Plantation?

Historical records do not accurately count how many people died on the plantation. Whitney Plantation enslaved more than 350 people over the years. Thirty-nine children died on this plantation from 1823 to 1863, only six reaching the age of five.

How many were enslaved people on the Whitney Plantation?

The Whitney Plantation was formerly home to over 350 enslaved Africans.

What You Need To Know

It’s scorching hot! Even though there are misting stations to cool off under, it’s blazing hot. Wear a hat or bring an umbrella shade. Lastly, don’t forget water!
There are gators on the property! We saw them with our own eyes. I am sure the museum relocates them as they mature, but they are there. So keep an eye out.
While I encourage you to take your children, there are some graphic elements you should prepare children for.

Bonus: Scenes from “Django Unchained,” starring Jamie Foxx, were filmed at the site.

Closing Thoughts

Whitney Plantation is one of the country’s first slavery museums. It has been mentioned by numerous publishers and socialists worldwide due to its historical and societal significance, and it welcomes hundreds of thousands of guests annually.

The museum pays tribute to more than just the enslaved people who worked on its sugarcane farm. Cummings collected relics and brought buildings that weren’t originally on the property. For example, the slave cabins and the shocking slave cage used to transport and sell enslaved people.

I was so impressed with the museum. It’s one of the most educational tours I’ve taken in a long time and worthy of anyone’s time. Whitney’s approach is a model that all plantations should follow. Nottoway , in particular, stands to learn a lot.

I hope this is the first of many pieces of history set right. Most importantly, I hope everyone reading this will consider visiting to broaden their understanding of America’s past.

Looking for more historical posts? Start here:

Dachau Concentration Camp – Why You Should Visit
Nottoway Plantation – The Most Controversial Plantation in Louisiana
Inside Magnolia Plantation – South Carolina
Solomon’s Castle Ona, Florida
The Howey Mansion – Howey-in-the-Hills, Florida
The Marquee New Orleans – Bluegreen’s Augmented Reality and Interactive Art Resort
The Wonder House – Bartow Florida

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St. Petersburg, Russia

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St. Petersburg was never intended to be Russian at all. Rather, it was founded to exemplify Peter the Great's vision for Russia, which was "Western." Built on marshland with slave labor, Peter the Great, one of Russia's emperors, established St. Petersburg city as the new capital of Russia. You may see the city referred to as St. Petersburg, Saint Petersburg, Sankt-Peterburg, or Petersburg.

St. Petersburg, Leningrad, Petrograd

From 1914-1924, Petersburg was known as "Petrograd." Then the name became "Leningrad" and stayed that way until 1991 in honor of the Soviet leader Lenin. Some individuals who haven't kept up with their current events (for the past two decades) may still call St. Petersburg by one of its former names. But St. Petersburg is St. Petersburg now, just as it was in Peter the Great's time.

St. Petersburg is often called "Petersburg" or simply "Peter" for short.

St. Petersburg was built on the Neva River in Russia on the Baltic Sea. It has about 4 and a half million inhabitants. Due to the age and beauty of St. Peterburg's city center, it has been named a World Heritage Site by the UNESCO World Heritage site committee.

You can expect St. Petersburg to be warm and pleasant during high summer, which occurs in June and July. Temperatures begin cooling in late August. Winters, starting in November, can last until April. While cold, St. Petersburg is beautiful in the winter - the Neva freezes and snow falls predictably throughout most of the winter months. St. Petersburg weather, however, can be unpredictable, so check weather forecasts in advance of your trip.

Getting To and Getting Around

St. Petersburg, Russia can be gotten to by train or plane from Moscow or other parts of Russia, and a ferry is available from Tallinn. While in St. Petersburg, it's possible to use the tram/trolley system or the St. Petersburg metro. Of course, really seeing St. Petersburg involves hoofing it.

Attractions

What's not attractive about St. Petersburg, Russia? Whether you're catching a glimpse of the Church of the Spilt Blood over the St. Petersburg rooftops, visiting the Hermitage Museum, or strolling through the streets, you'll also get your fill of gorgeous, decorated bridges, monuments that are the stuff of legend, and the buildings that once housed Russia's nobility.

Day Trips from St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg is situated in such a way that visitors find day trips easy to take. Go to Vyborg, Catherine's Palace, Kizhi Island , or Peterhof .

St. Petersburg Hotels

St. Petersburg hotels range from the budget friendly to the luxurious. Shop around for the best hotel deals, which will be harder to come by during the tourist season. Also take into consideration the location of your hotel to make seeing the sights more convenient.

COMMENTS

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Dec 2021 • Solo. A wonderful museum located in the Mikhailovsky Palace. A rich collection of Russian art in beautiful interiors. Health and safety - temperature at the entrance, you need to scan the QR code, present your passport, the requirement to maintain social distance, wear a mask, employees wear masks.
St. Petersburg, Russia's Window to the West
St. Petersburg, Russia. St. Petersburg was never intended to be Russian at all. Rather, it was founded to exemplify Peter the Great's vision for Russia, which was "Western." Built on marshland with slave labor, Peter the Great, one of Russia's emperors, established St. Petersburg city as the new capital of Russia.

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Plantation tours bypass the ‘big house’ to focus on the enslaved

Why We Wrote This

“Basically we’ve been miseducated”

Bypassing the “big house”

Seeing today through the lens of yesterday

Correcting the record

Piecing together the lives of enslaved people

Interrupting the cycle of history

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An Ethical Guide to Plantation Tours

Take plantation tours that center Black voices

Avoid plantations that host weddings

Look for the living descendants of enslaved people

Ask about reparations

Broaden your view of when slavery happened

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I used to lead tours at a plantation. You won’t believe the questions I got about slavery.

Read Margaret Biser’s answers to your questions from her reddit AMA .

More on race in America

1) People think slaveholders "took care" of their slaves out of the goodness of their hearts, rather than out of economic interest

2) People know that field slavery was bad but think household slavery was pretty all right, if not an outright sweet deal

3) People think slavery and poverty are interchangeable

4) People don't understand how prejudice influenced slaveholders' actions beyond mere economic interest

5) People think "loyalty" is a fair term to apply to people held in bondage

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‘These are our ancestors’: Descendants of enslaved people are shifting plantation tourism

By Sarah Payne

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4 “I heard you weren’t telling it”: The “True” Story of Slavery

5 “Feel a little of what it was like:” Connecting Past and Present

Plantation tours evolve to put more focus on the experiences of enslaved people

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