- 1 Several operators are dedicated only to offering tours of River Road plantations, such as https://w (...)
- 2 Six million visitors have toured the grounds of Oak Alley Plantation since 1974, according to a sel (...)
1Tourism in the United States, one of the leading tourist destinations in the world with close to 80 million visitors in 2019, represents an economic powerhouse (Statista, 2020). Visitors are often drawn to a form of tourism that revolves around a series of imaginaries—that is to say destinations commonly associated with certain images, such as the mythicized American West and its numerous stories about great outdoors and the wilderness. The South is also a region loaded with preconceived representations of its history, identified with the period of slavery, plantation homes and the Civil War, and embodied by the plantation tourism industry that operates as a driving force for the local economy1. In Louisiana, “River Road” represents the hub of plantation tourism, in a region delineated by the course of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge (“The River Road,” nps.gov), and which used to be the greatest symbol of slave-owning wealth in antebellum Louisiana—it was nicknamed “Millionaires’ Row” because of the abundance of wealthy planters in the area. There, some of the former sugarcane plantations that were not destroyed during the Civil War were turned into historical sites which have become major tourist attractions where tour operators send busloads of visitors mainly from New Orleans2. They offer various activities of hospitality and tourism (Bed & Breakfast, wedding venues, restaurants, gift shops) and sometimes operate as outdoor museum sites, designated as “plantation-museums” by Jennifer Eichstedt and Stephen Small in their 2002 groundbreaking study of plantation tourism, Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums.
2Eichstedt and Small defined ‘plantation-museums’ as “sites based on physical structures that were originally used a part of plantation complexes during the period of slavery and which now are organized to provide exhibits and tours of southern history” (Eichstedt and Small, 2002, p. 9). In such places so closely related to the history of enslavement, one could assume that these plantation sites would focus, at least in part, on the history of both slavery and the enslaved, especially when considering that they used to function thanks to slave labor. Instead, many of these plantations offer visitors a mythical representation of the Old South during the antebellum era, which is a glorified and whitewashed version of the period of slavery–to such an extent that the ‘Gone-with-the-Wind’ representation of a plantation has turned into the basic image coming to mind for visitors (Carter et al., 2014, p. 549). Such a representational strategy is but another addendum to the racist tradition of the Lost Cause ideology that dates back to the post-Civil-War era. This ideology was born from the ashes of the slave-based Southern society and from the white Southerners’ unbearable psychological trauma of Confederate defeat, which came to define the entire white Southern vision of the past: one through which Southerners worshiped an idyllic Old South where benevolent masters lived in harmony with their happy, loyal slaves on a peaceable plantation. Over the decades following the war, Lost Cause rhetoric would find its way into books, newspapers, political discourses, meetings, ceremonies, artifacts… to the point where its ideology turned into a feature of Southern identity, a sort of civil religion that bound together an entire region (Blight, 2002, p. 258).
- 3 The movement that was initially focused on mass incarceration and police brutality has recently tur (...)
- 4 The origin of the opening of Whitney Plantation as a slavery museum pre-dated the above-mentioned s (...)
3Traditional representational patterns, such as focusing on the slave-owning family’s life, were used for decades by the plantation tourism industry, but they are now being debunked by new curatorial practices. The reformist trend in the plantation tourism industry these past few years can be inscribed in a larger societal pressure toward a better recognition of African Americans’ past and present experiences in American society. The possible reasons for this “plantation turn” are manifold, including the greater interest of the public in the history of slavery, which has grown in part due to various factors, including the popular success of critically-acclaimed movies dealing with slavery—such as Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) and above all, 12 Years a Slave by Steve McQueen (2013), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. The growing pressure from social activists, such as the Black Lives Matter movement3, from scholars and also parts of the American population calling for a national reckoning on race and slavery in the public space (the debate surrounding the statues of Confederate officials being the most visible example) and in the national narrative may have also contributed to changes in plantation tours. The events and demonstrations that followed George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, after a brutal and deadly police arrest, serve as recent instances of those pressing calls to come to terms with the history of slavery and racism in the United States. This long-standing social pressure have thus led some tourist plantations, but not all, to reconsider their business strategies in order to tap into the soaring curiosity of visitors for the institution of slavery—as is the case at Oak Alley Plantation, for example. These reforming tourist plantations may also have had no choice but to adapt to the arrival in the industry of a new actor that revolutionized the sector. Whitney Plantation indeed serves as the trailblazer and the most conspicuous example for a renewed memorialization of slavery in plantation tourism. Opened in 2015 as the very first slavery museum in the United States, Whitney Plantation Museum offers a more realistic presentation of the history of slavery. It has since then opened a new path for the other plantations in the area to include the history of the enslaved in their tours4.
- 5 From March to May 2019, I visited sixteen plantation-museums from Louisiana’s River Road, each time (...)
4The focal point of this article is not to focus on the causes of the “plantation turn” or to analyze the economic implications behind such changes. Instead, it emphasizes some of the slave-centric representational strategies and how they allow for a better understanding of slavery in three selected plantations: Oak Alley Plantation, Evergreen Plantation and Whitney Plantation—as opposed to a more white-centric approach illustrated here by the study of Houmas House and Greenwood Plantation. My aim is to assess whether the new museum strategies at some plantation sites serve as clear-cut counter representations to the sanitized version of history offered by traditional plantation tours, or whether they simply illustrate a trend toward reform within an always adapting plantation tourism industry, in which some sites are more reluctant to changes than others. This article is not an exhaustive analysis of all River Road plantations, and it will not encapsulate the plantations described in the article into closed categories. Drawing on personal visits of several of them5, however, I do argue that the various, opposing representational patterns observed during the plantation tours are on both ends of the interpretative spectrum regarding the history of antebellum Louisiana. I will first focus on one of the most recurrent, traditional narrative patterns observed in Houmas House and Greenwood Plantation: the white-centric, and therefore whitewashed, vision of plantation history. Such a narrative tool produces a “Gone-with-the-Wind” interpretation of these historical sites, one that transforms plantation-museums into strongholds for Confederate heritage. I will then show that in a landscape of representations of slavery so much imbued with the tropes of the Lost Cause, some plantation sites have worked toward a more inclusive and more accurate interpretation of the antebellum era, by giving a voice to the enslaved in their respective tours, thus striving to debunk the myths portrayed in traditional plantation tours.
- 6 This idea of a “whitewashed” plantation tour was shrewdly introduced in Butler’s pioneering study o (...)
- 7 Visit of Greenwood Plantation by the author on March 21, 2019.
- 8 Emphasis added, leaflet collected on a visit of Houmas House in March 2019.
5The foundational element of a whitewashed plantation tour is its extensive—and sometimes, even exclusive—attention to the experiences of the master’s family, and especially of the slave-owning planter himself6. The planter is often presented through the filter of his economic success and/or of his high standing in the southern antebellum society–and later among the Confederate officials. At Greenwood Plantation near St. Francisville, LA, presented as the “best kept secret in the Feliciana Hill Country” and as “a truly magical and majestic place” on its website (greenwoodplantation.com, 2020), the tour guide seems to proudly recall the time when Greenwood Plantation was a massive complex of both sugarcane and cotton production spreading across 12,000 acres7. Likewise, at Houmas House in Darrow, LA, advertised as the “Crown Jewel of Louisiana’s River Road” on the plantation’s website and leaflet, the tour highlights the supposedly glorious past of one of the plantation owners, John Burnside, dubbed the ‘Sugar Prince’ by the docent. The process of glorifying the planter’s past extends to the plantation advertisement, in this case a visitor’s leaflet, where one can read sentences such as “the entertaining and educational tour includes stories of the Great Sugar Barons who built Houmas House and the sugar empire.”8 The message is clear from the onset: the plantation tour will be an entertaining experience for the visitor–never mind that the enslaved who actually built the Big House and made possible the sugar empire disappear from the plantation narrative. The result of such a focus on the wealth and lavish lifestyle of the plantation owners, including beautifully set tables as well as luxurious decorations and clothing, is powerful as it produces an impression of a glorified bygone era. It also diverts the visitors’ attention by lingering on objects and artifacts owned by the master’s family rather than evoking the fact these objects were handled most of the time by the enslaved (when setting the table for the slave-owning family for example). A manipulation of the narrative is at work, as confirmed by scholars Alderman and Campbell who state that “managers and docents frequently use artifacts and objects once owned by plantation owners and other whites to deflect attention away from a discussion of the contribution and struggles of slaves” (Alderman and Campbell, 2008, p. 340). Such a rhetoric reinforces the idea of a “South that wasn’t there,” to borrow the title of Michael Kreyling’s book, The South That Wasn’t There: Postsouthern Memory and History (2010). A lifestyle in the South which, incidentally, existed only for an elite, as stated by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in Within the Plantation Household: “only the very wealthiest slave-holding households remotely approximated the physical luxury and ease attributed to them in the romantic legend” (Fox-Genovese, 1988, p. 105).
- 9 According to the tour guide at Greenwood Plantation on March 21, 2019, the expression originated in (...)
- 10 Based on personal observations from two visits of Houmas House, the tour guide must follow a specif (...)
- 11 Pineapple being scarce at the time, it was a sign of exterior wealth to be able to procure the frui (...)
6To produce that ‘romantic legend,’ plantation tour narratives articulate around a series of anecdotes, with the intent to downplay the true nature of plantation life. Among those anecdotes are explanations of some popular expressions such as ‘sleep tight’ or ‘don’t throw away the baby out with the bathwater,’ an effective, deceiving tool that belittles the harsh realities of life on a plantation since it will most likely make the visitor smile9. It is actually only one of several narrative devices used by the guides at Houmas House to trivialize the slave past. Others include lingering on trifling details that receive much attention from the docent, who, for example, is asked10 to begin the tour by telling the visitors about the symbolical meaning of a pineapple fruit in the antebellum South.11 The anecdotes of plantation tours are often presented as fond reminiscences of the ‘good ol’ days,’ in an attempt to create what Ewa A. Adamkiewicz calls a “commodification of white nostalgia,” that is to say a presentation of history that purposefully displays the landscape of plantations as fairy-tale like spaces, barren of any kind of racial issue. For the white audience, such presentation represents “an escape into constructed memories of a more glamorous, heroic past where slavery plays only a minor role or no role at all” (Adamkiewicz, 2016, p. 16). In this respect, plantation-museums fall into the ‘edutainment’ category of the tourism industry, which corresponds to places where leisure activities and educational purposes merge into a business model that eventually aims to satisfy the visitor-patron, even though it implies sacrificing one aspect of plantation tourism [education] over the other [leisure] (Bright et al., 2018, p. 15).
- 12 Personal discussion with Ibrahima Seck on April 17, 2019.
7In the ‘edutaining’ plantation tours, perhaps the most influential tool of the narrative guidelines is the resort to “symbolic annihilation” of the enslaved presence, defined by Eichstedt and Small as “a powerful rhetorical and representational strategy for obscuring the institution of slavery” (Eichstedt and Small, 2002, p. 106). This narrative artifice materializes itself by either not mentioning at all the enslaved population or by making vague references such as ‘they,’ ‘servants,’ ‘someone’—misleading expressions employed several times by the tour guide at Houmas House on a visit of the plantation in May 2019. This speaks to the enduring unease to engage the history of slavery in plantation tours (Alderman and Modlin, 2008, p. 267). Such apprehension results in the trivialization of slavery when the tour guide does mention the enslaved, but in a way that ridicules the slaves’ experiences by using ahistorical references–for instance, when referring to the ‘whistle walk.’ The ‘whistle walk’ is one of the most recurring myths heard during plantation tours, similarly to the ‘funny’ anecdotes discussed earlier aiming at lightening the mood of the visitors and that will likely make them laugh, but one that is also ludicrous. According to the myth, the master demanded that his slaves whistle while bringing the food to the Big House from the outdoor kitchen, lest they stole from the plates. In a discussion with Ibrahima Seck, Director of Research at Whitney Plantation, Dr. Seck pointed out the nonsensical character of this alleged practice—“the most ridiculous” of all the myths conveyed during plantation tours as he puts it—wisely calling to mind that the slaves were the ones cooking meals and thus had every opportunity to discreetly sample the food it they wanted to12. One also cannot help but wonder how a whistle sound could travel all the way from a remote outdoor kitchen to the Big House and still be heard by the master’s family. Such a fabrication in interpreting the history of plantation life encloses the African American enslaved population in a transparent and meaningless role, one that is not even worth mentioning or at least not seriously. Tiya Miles, in her book Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era, sums up shrewdly the impact of such a choice of interpretation:
The people who had mattered in these tours were the slaveholding high-society families, not their chattel slaves. African American bondsmen and bondswomen had been transformed into virtual ghosts, absent and yet eerily present in historical tours as invisible laboring bodies that made their owners’ fortunes shine. (Miles, 2015, p. xxi)
8One of the consequences is that the visitor learns virtually nothing from the tour regarding the complexity of plantation life during the antebellum era. A series of anecdotes and/or myths does not constitute comprehensive history. Instead, resorting to such practices becomes an explicit effort to preserve a specific representation of slavery, one closely linked to the rhetoric of the Lost Cause and the enduring idea of white supremacy. The Lost Cause was a coherent narrative developed after the Civil War by former Confederate officials and apologists, writers and scholars with the intent to create a “classic image of the antebellum South as a mythical realm of handsome cavaliers, white mansions, benevolent masters, and happy slaves” (Cook, 2017, p. 6). And in many ways, some tourism plantations still constitute contemporary appendages to the Lost Cause tradition.
9Released in 1939, Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind—the screen adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel—and its romanticized image of the Old South have had such a profound impact on the American psyche that its vision became ingrained in the public imagination, to the extent that many visitors of plantation sites today come to visit these historical places with preconceived representations of antebellum plantation life. Consequently, tourism plantation owners have tended to adapt the tour narrative to fit the ‘Gone-with-the-Wind mythology’ (Carter, Butler and Alderman, 2014, p. 549). The result is a narrative that upholds the tropes of the Lost Cause tradition, symbolized by the representation of the slave-owning Old South in Gone with the Wind. Tara McPherson in Reconstructing Dixie points out that:
Tara [plantation] is more than just the house in which Scarlett was born. Like the southern colonial homes popular during Mitchell’s lifetime, Tara becomes a symbol of the old ways of the antebellum South, and Mitchell’s mythic imaging of those landscapes works to naturalize the relationship of land-owning southerners to their property. Of course, what such a process erases is both the initial seizure of the land from its original inhabitants and the system of slave labor that allowed Tara to ‘miraculously’ produce cotton in the first place. It also justifies the Civil War on the basis of saving the land, dismissing slavery as an issue in the conflict. (McPherson, 2003, p. 51)
10One corollary of this fantasized vision is to present the Confederate South as a victim of Northern aggression. In this regard, Confederate officials were the defenders of an allegedly virtuous cause. It is therefore not surprising to hear plantation tour guides proudly present masters as actively involved in the Confederacy’s decisions. At Greenwood Plantation, the tour guide highlights the fact that planter William Ruffin Barrow was one of the signatories of the Louisiana ordinance of Secession in 1861, something presented here as a real accomplishment, in a move to aggrandize once again the lives and actions of the planter elite —what tourism scholars Christine Buzinde and Carla Santos call the “prowess of white gentry” (Buzinde and Santos, 2008, p. 480). Such a narrative device goes hand in hand with the rhetorical tool of Southern victimhood, which is a major Lost Cause trope and operates as an additional artifice to shift the blame on someone else, namely the ‘Yankees,’ and to escape from the guilt of slavery. In Possessing the Past, Lisa Hinrinchsen explains that “the language of victimhood itself can paradoxically form a means of managing and disavowing trauma, shifting the focus from the reality of black racial trauma to claims of equivalent white emotional injury” (Hinrinchsen, 2015, p. 25). Hence, perhaps, such an emphasis on the fantasy of the Old South in plantation tours.
- 13 It was said for example that if a gentleman happened to see the ankle of a white lady, he had the m (...)
11To be able to bring the legend to life, the plantation tour guides, in addition to telling a series of romanticized interpretations of history, are indeed in some cases asked to wear period attire—and particularly hoopskirts for the female docents. The female guides thus become the incarnation of the ‘Southern Belle’ stereotype, another trope of the Lost Cause tradition, in which southern women were portrayed as champions of piety and purity, and as delicate creatures to be safeguarded at all costs. At Houmas House, the practice of fetichizing the female guides as the embodiment of the southern lady is reinforced by the use of additional anecdotes about social mores in the South and the sanctified character of the elite white woman.13 Such a representational choice also speaks to the gendered vision of plantation life, mostly centered on the master and not the mistress, with the incidental idea that she had somehow nothing to do with the horrors of slavery. Catherine Clinton details the stereotypical conception of the plantation mistress: “In antebellum society, […] a woman remained as securely bound to the land as her husband’s other property. […] Every woman was an island, isolated unto herself and locked into place by the stormy and unsettling seas of plantation slavery” (Clinton, 1982, p. 179). Depicting the antebellum southern women in such a way is but another deceptive device allowing the tour guide not to mention the violent role of the master or the mistress. It goes without saying that there is no reference during the tour at Houmas House to any kind of physical or psychological abuse committed against the enslaved by the master or the mistress.
- 14 After a long ideological battle over the historical significance of former Confederate General Robe (...)
12For all these reasons, it is not a stretch to state that some plantation sites today serve as strongholds of Confederate heritage—and perhaps even sanctums for Confederate pride. Houmas House is home to several Confederate artifacts, including a small shrine to William Porcher Milles, who designed one of the versions of the Confederate Flag. These artefacts cannot be viewed as simple items to decorate a historical site. Instead, they constitute memorial objects loaded with a specific history and, therefore, serve a specific purpose made clear by Houmas House’s owner, Kevin Kelly. When in April 2018, Kelly offered to bring the statues of Confederate leaders that were taken down in New Orleans14 to the grounds of Houmas House (The Advocate, May 26, 2018), he revealed, behind the representational choices at Houmas House, a political agenda aiming to perpetuate the tropes of the Lost Cause and to celebrate a mythical representation of the South that glorifies the rich white man’s experiences, to “save the splendor of Southern living at its finest,” as one of the plantation’s marketing catchphrases puts it. Incidentally, Kelly’s offer to relocate the Confederate statues was endorsed by Louisiana’s Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser, who declared that Houmas House was “an ideal place for the three important monuments to be displayed, and the history and significance of each told” (Nola.com, May 1, 2018). The same Nungesser who was photographed alongside President Donald Trump himself sporting ‘Trump socks’… (The Hill, May 14, 2019).
13The mythical representation of the Old South therefore occupies a significant place in the plantation tourism industry. However, in the last few years, some plantation sites have moved towards a path of reforms in their interpretation of slavery and the Old South, with new curatorial trends that try to offer a counter-perspective to the traditional plantation sites.
- 15 Personal interview with Laura Kilcer on May 23, 2019.
- 16 Ibid.
- 17 Beyond the romanticized representation of the house slave as an “elite” among the enslaved, which d (...)
14Oak Alley Plantation is one of the plantations that has taken a turn to move away from the nostalgic vision of history. The turn, symbolized by the project “ReDiscover Oak Alley,” launched in 2011, has brought several significant changes to the plantation experience. As one of the most visited sites in River Road, with more than 200,000 visitors per year (Alderman, Butler and Hanna, 2015, p. 5), the fact that it has changed its representational strategies in the past few years bears significance considering its impact on the plantation tourism industry. The most conspicuous transformation in the presentation of the plantation tour is perhaps the guides’ appearance. In a previous visit to Oak Alley Plantation in March 2016, it was very clear to me that the tour was still very much about selling the ‘Gone-with-the-Wind fantasy,’ as the staff were wearing costumes, and more noticeably hoopskirts for the female guides, while selling mint juleps to the visitors. A new visit in March 2019 showed a radical evolution: the guides were clothed in simple polo shirts and regular pants. No more period attire, no more fantasy: the staff was no longer another romanticized attraction of the tour. Such a change was pushed forward by Oak Alley’s former curator, Laura Kilcer, who had joined the plantation staff in 201115. According to her, getting rid of the costumes was clearly a way to “move away from that sort of nostalgic, imaginative past.” It would also encourage the visitors to focus on the narrative and not on the tour guide’s physical appearance. Laura Kilcer had particularly her female staff in mind: “it reduced the amount of objectivization and sexualization for my female guides.”16 These female guides were not fetish anymore, one that could be flirted with or even groped by some lewd male tourists. But changing the physical presentation of docents to focus on the narrative would mean nothing without changing the narrative itself as well. Whereas in 2016 the tour was all about the experiences of the slave-owning family, master Jacques Roman and his wife Celina, the 2019 tour narrative acknowledged the presence of the enslaved, and, more than that, it gave them a voice. Again, under the impulsion of Laura Kilcer and her staff, the interactions between the master, the mistress and their slaves were put at the center of the narrative. These interactions were embodied by Meanna, a house slave whose story contributed to telling the complexities of plantation life. By insisting on how Meanna’s particular position in the Big House was tantamount to being at the core of the master’s family’s experiences, the curatorial changes brought about at Oak Alley Plantation spotlighted the perspective of not only a house slave–an already particular position17–but that of an enslaved woman inside the Big House, in other words someone whose experiences were invisible and were in fact meant to be that way. According to Laura Kilcer, there exists a sort of fascination for the plantation mistress that needed to be counterbalanced by telling the story of another woman: her house slave, who literally lived in the mistress’ shadows, and consequently was highly representative of what it was like to live in the Big House.
- 18 Most slave cabins simply did not resist age and decay as they were very often poorly built–and were (...)
- 19 Personal visit of Evergreen Plantation on April 17, 2019, quote from Robin’s tour narrative.
- 20 Personal interview with Hillary Loeber, Marketing Director at Oak Alley Plantation, on May 13, 2019 (...)
15Shifting the narrative and the tour’s content towards an emphasis on the enslaved African Americans’ experiences often takes place in the slave cabins, or what is left of them. At Evergreen Plantation, in Edgard, LA, their twenty-two original slave cabins (cf. figure 1) have survived, largely unchanged since the period of slavery (evergreenplantation.org, 2020), which is a rarity across the South18. For that reason, the slave cabins at Evergreen Plantation are an essential part of the guided tour, the last stop of the visit. And since they are original to the place, so is their location on the plantation grounds, namely at a remote distance from the Big House, where they could actually not be seen by any visitor standing by the river levee: that is to say, at a location from which someone would not be able to see the slave village. The tour at Evergreen Plantation is, therefore, organized in such a way as to bring to the forefront the experiences of the enslaved Africans and African Americans through the visit of the very place where they built a community: the cabins. As a result, before heading to the cabins, Robin, one of the tour guides at Evergreen Plantation, asks the visitors to walk quietly toward the slave village in order to, somehow, contemplate the lives of the enslaved and as a way of “showing homage” to the people who lived there19. A similar attitude towards paying tribute to the enslaved population in Louisiana plantations can be found at Whitney Plantation. In a tour largely, if not exclusively, dedicated to the plantation’s slave community, one significant moment is the visit of the outdoor kitchen: a place of crucial importance where the black cooks prepared the meals for the master’s family but also for the entire slave community. At Whitney Plantation, the visit of the kitchen allows the tour guide to insist on the invaluable contribution of the African slaves brought in Louisiana to Southern cuisine. In shaping food culture throughout the slave South and more precisely Louisiana, the enslaved retained their African roots by drawing from the West African foodways to create staple dishes such as gumbo, jambalaya and red beans and rice. These recipes now form the foundations of Louisiana Creole cooking, one of the most respected food scenes in the entire United States (Seck, 2014, p. 120-129). The presence of former slave buildings on plantation-museums’ grounds appears to be an essential feature for any slave-centric plantation tour to be complete. In this regard, part of the “ReDiscover Oak Alley” project was the creation of a massive exhibit on the enslaved community, “Slavery at Oak Alley,” through the construction of replicas of slave quarters. The staff at Oak Alley went to great lengths to build slave cabins that would resemble those in which the enslaved used to live, collaborating with scholars and universities and above all visiting the original slave village at… Evergreen Plantation20. However, showcasing slave buildings on plantation grounds does not necessarily mean that the tour experience all of a sudden becomes slave-centric: slave buildings on plantation grounds are merely a front if they are not fully integrated in the tour. One can therefore wonder why the slave exhibit is not part of the guided tour and remains an optional visit at the tourists’ discretion–thus showing how delicate the task can be for any plantation staff willing to include slavery in their experience while having to deal with the great array of visitors’ sensibilities.
Figure 1. Slave cabins at Evergreen Plantation
Photo: Melaine Harnay
- 21 John Cummings stepped down as owner of the Whitney Plantation in late 2019. The plantation-museum i (...)
- 22 “The Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1719-1820” database is available at https://www.ibiblio. (...)
- 23 German Coast Revolt of January 11, 1811 is the largest slave revolt in U.S. history, involving abou (...)
- 24 Quote from a personal visit of Whitney Plantation on April 14, 2019, with Dr. Seck as a tour guide.
16The emphasis on giving back an identity to the enslaved, so as to offer more inclusive counter-narratives to the traditional romanticized plantation tours, is at the core of Whitney Plantation’s interpretative choices. As Director of Research Ibrahima Seck puts it plainly: “the goal is to tell the story of slaves” (Ibrahima Seck, April 16, 2016). Hence the entire focus on the memorialization of slaves’ experiences during the tour, an approach that was decided from the onset ever since the opening of Whitney Plantation Museum in 2014. The former owner, John Cummings21, sums up the work that is being done at Whitney Plantation, giving it an almost activist perspective: “we try, somehow, here, to define the ‘it’ [slavery] and unless you know what the ‘it’ is, don’t ask the question ‘why can’t they [African Americans] get over it’” (John Cummings, August 27, 2015). In other words, contrary to traditional plantation sites, Whitney is decidedly advocating a political statement that aims at placing the issue of slavery at the very core of the national discourse about the past, as exemplified by the fact that it was advertised as the very first museum in the United States dedicated to the history of slavery—and still is today. Whitney Plantation thus offers a unique perspective in comparison to other River Road plantation-museums. It features several memorials dedicated to the enslaved on its grounds, including one that pays a special tribute to the enslaved children of Whitney Plantation. In order to commemorate their existence, each visitor receives a lanyard with a small descriptive card about the life of one of these children. Afterwards, the visitor is encouraged to actually find the enslaved child presented on the card directly on the plantation grounds: small statues of enslaved children were indeed commissioned from African American artist Woodrow Nash to produce a memorial to the enslaved children, called ‘The Children of Whitney’ (cf. figure 2). As explained on the plantation website, the statues “represent these former slaves as they were at the time of emancipation: children. Whitney presents the stories of these children as told in their own words. The visitors are introduced to the lives of the enslaved workers based on the recollections of those who endured, and who shared the stories of their lives as children in slavery.” (whitneyplantation.org, 2020). Likewise, the ‘Allées Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’—named after the influential Louisiana historian who created a database of more than 100,000 slaves who lived in Louisiana from 1719 to 182022–are composed of commemorative plaques on walls with the names of the 107,000 Blacks enslaved in Louisiana compiled by Hall’s database. This insistence on memorializing those whose names and voices were erased and silenced is a singular part of what visitors of Whitney Plantation experience during their visit, an experience that differs greatly from the fantasy-based plantation tours: there is no ‘feel-good’ presentation of history at Whitney Plantation. In other words, the whole range of atrocities that existed during slavery is unmitigatedly presented as part of a sobering experience for the visitor, which includes walking by a graphic, gut-wrenching memorial dedicated to the enslaved victims of the 1811 German Coast revolt23 (cf. figure 3)—which Dr. Seck considers as “the most important station” of the tour24.
Figure 2. “The Children of Whitney” at Whitney Plantation Museum
Photo: Melaine Harnay
Figure 3. Memorial of the 1811 slave revolt at Whitney Plantation
Photo: Melaine Harnay
17Practices in plantation tours are progressively and undeniably evolving towards a more inclusive depiction of the history of the slave South. Nevertheless, it is also obvious that the traditional, sentimentalized vision of the Old South remains widespread in tourist plantations. It appears too that the question of the representation and memorialization of slavery during these tours is heavily loaded politically. In some cases, the content of the visit of a plantation reveals a political agenda that goes beyond the issue of slavery. It is almost as if these romanticized plantation sites have become holy territories for Confederate pride. In 2015, it was discovered that Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who on June 17 perpetrated a mass shooting at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, murdering nine African American churchgoers, had visited several historical plantations and Confederate landmarks of the region. On one of the photographs he took during his “Confederate pilgrimage,” Roof can be spotted posing in front of the Big House at McLeod Plantation25. With such a conspicuous display of bigotry, one may easily understand the need for the counternarratives about the history of slavery in plantation tours, such as Whitney’s, to become commonplace. And yet the road toward social awareness seems far ahead and the damage done by these sentimentalized tours severe. Despite the emergence of new interpretive strategies focusing on the African Americans’ experiences, plantation museums remain unattractive tourist destinations for Black people, as if they had internalized the fact that these historical places were still tailored for a white audience. And they are, regrettably, not that far from the reality of plantation-museums: according to a survey conducted by scholars Perry Carter and Candace F. Bright (2016, p. 268), most of the visitors of tourist plantations are well-off white people over 5026. Here, tourist plantations face a business conundrum: how can they reconcile the inclusion of the history of slavery and of the enslaved with the diversity of tourists’ expectations? The question implies an extensive study of visitors’ typology and expectations when touring a plantation site. Some scholars have started to discuss this question, by trying to determine who the typical visitors are and how they may very well influence the content of the plantation tour itself (see Bright and Carter, 2016; Alderman and Modlin, 2016). Foreign tourists, especially Europeans, for example, tend to expect a significant discussion on slavery when they visit a plantation, but they also represent only a small portion of the patronage. Conversely, some visitors might just go on a plantation to experience the “fantasy of the Old South living.” In other words, how does a tourist plantation take on the topic of slavery when one part of the visitors might welcome such an inclusion whereas another would feel deeply disgruntled about it? In both cases, the tourist plantation faces the risk of losing attendance and therefore revenues. There is also the question of Black visitors: shouldn’t the plantation-museums now become places designed to welcome particularly African Americans after having neglected their experiences for so long? Jane Boddie, Director of Evergreen Plantation, told me that they were increasingly receiving descendants of slaves willing to learn more about their ancestors27–raising another range of questions having to do with the field of tourism, and more precisely “roots/genealogy tourism.” A lot more research is necessary to answer these questionings. The motivations behind representational changes in tourist plantations may be key to understanding the reluctance of many plantation sites to fully engage in a complete incorporation of the history of slavery and of the enslaved as part of their tour experience. Sites adopting the train of reforms simply for new business opportunities and profits are likely to fall short of their laudable intentions to discuss the topic in the first place. On the other hand, activist sites dedicated to promoting exclusively the story of the slaves from the onset, like Whitney Plantation, may encounter other representational issues. Because after all, one might argue that the type of memorialization of slavery found at Whitney Plantation is as politically engaged—some would go as far as saying ideologically tainted—as the white-centric interpretation of most tourist plantations. In a discussion with Director of Research at Whitney, Dr. Seck, reacting to this type of criticism, explained that “we cannot satisfy everyone” and that the real problem “[was] to do nothing.” Quoting John Cummings, former owner of the plantation-museum, he continued: “we may be doing something wrong, but at least we’re doing something…”28
Flux RSS-small120.jpg)
