Black History Month Photo Essay: The Louisiana Plantation

February 25, 11:24 AMDenver Dining ExaminerStan Dyer

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Frankly, Scarlett...

It is always good to travel, visit other places and learn history from a different vantage point.  For this author, a tour down the “Old River Road” in Louisiana provided just such an opportunity. 

I chose the Old River Road tour because it was the site of the great slave revolt of January 8, 1811 led by Charles DesLondes.  I hoped to learn more about the revolt, but found the tour covered more about plantations and plantation life in the state than it did anything else.  In fact, the details of what happened that day in the early 19th century were almost an afterthought.  Nonetheless, the tour did advance my education and it was quite an eye-opening experience.   It is one thing to read about history, and quite another to almost touch it. 

For one thing,  I had this picture in my mind of all plantation houses being big and white.  That may be true in some places, but not in Louisiana.  In Louisiana, the Creoles from the Caribbean were the first to farm the land on a large scale.  Creole plantations tend to be smaller and very colorful, resembling, naturally, plantations still in existence in the Caribbean, their homelands.  The Creoles actually were the sophisticates of the region and looked down on the Europeans and the Arcadians who came to the area later as uncouth and uncivilized.  In fact, the divisions are still apparent today in the City of New Orleans which is divided by Canal Street with the European Garden District on one side, and the Creole French Quarter on the other.  Nonetheless, whether Creole or European, the need for a cheap, readily available workforce on large plantations led all to own African slaves, and made New Orleans a major slave port and market.

On the Creole Plantation, the slave quarters, of course, were separate from the main house, and most slaves never entered the main house in their lifetimes.  One thing I learned that seems obvious now but I never considered before was that the Plantation kitchen was separate from the main house to reduce the possibility of fire destroying everything.  The food was cooked over an open fire in the kitchen and carried by slaves to a small room near the dining room in the main house before being put on plates and served.  Slaves carrying the pots into the main house were required to “whistle” to prove they weren’t eating any of the food. 

The Creole Plantation I visited still had some of the slave quarters completely intact.  They were there because, even after slaves were freed, most knew no other life and had nowhere to go.  So, they stayed on the plantation and worked as either tenant farmers or share croppers.  Since the plantation was now required by law to pay wages, former slaves working on the plantation kept accounts at the plantation store.  At the end of the year, the slaves were held accountable for everything they bought at the store, used on the plantation or broke in the line of work.  Generally, when the balancing was done, most slaves either used up any money they made during the year or still owed the plantation.   In that sense, they were still slaves and little changed for either the plantation or the chattel property.  This situation remained virtually unchanged long after the legislation became law.   In fact, the very quarters I viewed were occupied until just a few years ago.  The method of accountability and use of the "company store" was later adopted by Anthracite Mines for itheir workers when coal became a popular fuel source and is noted in the song by Tennessee Ernie Ford, “Sixteen Tons”.  Similar references are found other places as well as in John Stenbeck's, "Grapes of Wrath".  In some places in the world today, including America, similar or worse conditions persist. 

From the Creole "Laura" plantation, the tour next went to the Oak Alley Plantation, just down the road, and offered another revelation.  For some reason, it never occurred to me that all the plantations are constructed as near the Mississippi as possible.  Of course, when plantations ruled the South, the river was their highway and the easiest way to both get supplies to the plantation and product to the market.  Once inside Oak Alley, I found it interesting how small these plantations really are. 

The plantations look big from the outside, but things look different inside.  It kind of reminded me of the Molly Brown House in Denver.  It, too, looked big, but inside were tiny rooms and “tall” hallways that gave the sense and feel of big, but really were not.  That’s the way Oak Alley was.  The hallways were wider than those at Molly Brown's, but much higher.  We were told that is because the people who built the plantations were a lot smaller than people are today.  Women in the early to mid 19th century were only about five feet tall and men were not much bigger, topping out between 5’2” and 5’5”.   By the time the Browns built their house in Denver, things had not changed that much.

At Oak Alley, the kitchen arrangements were the same as at the Creole plantation, but the kitchen was now gone, as were the former slave quarters.  With women in hoop skirts serving mint juleps, it was apparent that they were trying to promote the “Gone with the Wind” image of Southern plantation life and not reality.  Nonetheless, I know history better and am more aware of the truth, but I did enjoy the mint julep.  If you have never tried one, the version I had reminded me of a mojito made with bourbon.  Standing on the grounds of the great plantation sipping a cool beverage, it is easier to imagine what a life of servitude must have been like.  With the freedom of the Mississippi just a few hundred yards away and the reality of bondage all around, life must have been hard to endure.  It is not a wonder that there were so many slave revolts in American history and that Charles DesLondes both risked and lost his life trying to escape bondage and find freedom. One thing is for sure.  If the plantation life depicted in "Gone with the Wind" ever really did exist, it was the exception and not the rule.  Slave life then, just as now, was not an easy lot, and, if we forget the past, we are destined to repeat it. 

If you never have visited an old plantation, I hope you enjoy my photo essay and can feel the same things I felt.  If you have visited, I hope you learned as much as I did and share your knowledge with your friends.  The legacy of slaves and plantations is that slavery, in any form, never was glorious and still exists.  We all need to continue working to eliminate it.  Visiting these historic sites helps keep the image of history fresh so we never close our eyes to the truth.