Putting Slavery’s History Front And Center

Joanne Freeman: As Amy Potter just mentioned, one of the plantations the RESET team studied was the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana. It sits on the state’s historic River Road, which runs along the winding Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Dotting River Road are thirteen restored plantations open to the public. But Whitney is the only one that’s completely dedicated to the history of slavery and enslaved people. Our producer Charlie Shelton-Ormond traveled to Whitney to learn more.

Charlie S. O.: As you walk along the grounds of Whitney Plantation, you’re guaranteed to hear two things: the steady buzz of summer cicadas, and the chime of an old iron bell. Visitors are encouraged to ring the bell once in memory of the people who endured slavery on the plantation.

Ashley Rogers: I think that our memorial focus is even above our focus on enslavement.

Charlie S. O.: Ashley Rogers has been the Executive Director of Whitney since the plantation opened as a museum in late 2014.

Ashley Rogers: The memorial focus is what makes us so unique because we don’t have a lot of spaces in this country where it is acceptable to remember and to mourn the history of enslavement and the people who were enslaved, and that is where we center our visitor, and we really want people to not only learn, but to also reflect.

Charlie S. O.: As the only plantation in Louisiana that’s devoted entirely to slavery, Rogers says Whitney has a duty to educate its visitors without sugarcoating history.

Ashley Rogers: The reason why plantations are here is to enslave people. That’s it, right? If you do a tour, and slavery is optional on the tour, as some of them are, well, isn’t that kind of funny? Because slavery was definitely not optional in a plantation. It is the entire reason the plantation exists.

Ashley Rogers: And also, something that I talk about when I talk to interpreters and things, is that even if we think numerically about who lived on the plantation, plantations are black spaces. The majority of people who experienced life on a plantation were black. So if all we’re talking about are the white people who lived on the plantation, we are really missing the majority of life experience on that plantation.

Charlie S. O.: The plantation sits on 250 acres of land in the small town of Wallace on the West Bank of the Mississippi River. Joy Banner grew up in Wallace and is the descendant of enslaved folks at Whitney. Now she’s the museum’s Director of Communications. She says for descendants like herself, the popular plantation sites on River Road are oftentimes contentious symbols.

Joy Banner: I’m from this area and plantations are in the foreground along this River Road and it’s part of our lives. They’re always there. Because of it, I think that we, as a community, have a complicated relationship with plantations. These are very painful reminders and it’s difficult when you see plantations and they are continuing to get economic benefit, and literally it’s in the middle of descendants, and we’re not receiving an of those economic benefits.

Charlie S. O.: In addition to her job at Whitney, Banner is also active in the community. She regularly attends parish council meetings and is the president of a community focus group.

Joy Banner: We talk about plantations exclusive of the community and exclusive of what is happening in the present. I would hope that all plantations and all these sites would feel an obligation to the descendants. I’m proud to be a descendant here and I know sometimes people have a strange reaction to it, but I certainly, when I’m here, I’m proud to tell the story of Whitney because it is the story of my family, it is the story of my community. But I think that Whitney is one of the plantations, maybe the only plantation, that the community feels is at least paying acknowledgement to this system in a way that they feel should be acknowledged.

Charlie S. O.: Today, Whitney is well-known along River Road, but that wasn’t the case the day it opened five years ago.

John Cummings: And I was out there ready to meet the throngs of people who were coming. Four people came. Two of them were lost looking for the Laura Plantation, but I kept them there to take the tour.

Charlie S. O.: John Cummings is the Founder of Whitney. He’s a former attorney from New Orleans. He bought the property back in 1999 from a petro chemical company that planned to build a factory on the land. After Cummings read more about the history of slavery at the plantation, he got to work turning it into a museum.

John Cummings: Here’s what happened. We got it, and again, we didn’t know what the hell we were going to do. We really didn’t. Most people operate on the regime of ready, aim, fire, and we operated under ready, fire, and aim and see if we did anything good. And if we didn’t, just go back and change it.

Charlie S. O.: He spent fifteen years and ten million dollars creating what’s there today. Whitney has come along way since four people showed up on opening day. They expect more than 100,000 visitors by the end of this year.

John Cummings: It’s just rewarding that the people who go there go back and tell everybody about it and then they come. What we’re doing here, representing the facts of slavery unvarnished, and sometimes they’re not pleasant, but we think it’s important that people come to see them because these facts were deliberately withheld from them in their education.

Charlie S. O.: I asked Cummings what it’s like for him walking around Whitney and what really stands out on the grounds.

John Cummings: This church that we have, it’s the Antioch Church, but it was originally Anti-Yoke. It was built by men and women who had been freed from slavery for only two years.

Ashley Rogers: Okay, so we’ll just pop in here real quick.

Ashley Rogers: It’s a very old church. It was built by formerly enslaved people. When the congregants purchased the land in 1868, it was two parcels of land in Paulina, and in that document, it says that the purchase of the land was for the purpose of building Anti-Yoke Baptist Church. It’s Anti-Yoke. It’s in there multiple times. We know that’s not a mistake. And it’s something really interesting and quite beautiful, I think, to us that these formerly enslaved people named their congregation Anti-Yoke, and a yoke being a symbol of oppression and slavery that for them was only three years in the past. There were three men …

Charlie S. O.: As we stood inside the church, Rogers told me about its first congregants in the 1860s, how they had to pull all their money and resources together to buy the land and build the church in Paulina, Louisiana, and how formerly enslaved people built churches like this to unite their families and communities.

Ashley Rogers: I think that’s something that you can feel in a space like this. I love to think about what would those first worship services would have felt like for those formerly enslaved people who had had to pray in secret, who had had to hide their familial or community connections because of the structure of slavery, what it would have felt like to be free in a space like this.

Charlie S. O.: Scattered throughout the church are more than a dozen life-size statues of children. They’re meant to give an imagined face to the kids who were enslaved at the plantation.

Charlie S. O.: As we walked across the grounds, Rogers told me of other ways visitors are encouraged to remember those who endured slavery at Whitney. For example, at the beginning of the tour, everybody gets a card profiling a different person.

Ashley Rogers: It’s funny because so many museums do that and they do it in a way where it’s like, “Then you find out what happened to that person,” and you are that person for the day, and that’s not our intention. We never tell people that’s what it is, but they assume it, so they’ll walk it and they’ll go, “Oh, I’m Hannah today.” And we’re like, “No you’re not.”

Ashley Rogers: We really wanted those tags to be a way for you to keep a person with you, keep a memory of a person with you. I bristle at the idea of trying to make people imagine that they are enslaved people. Nobody alive today can imagine what it was like to be an enslaved person who was taken from Africa and forced across the Atlantic in the middle passage and enslaved here. Even to the extent that there’s modern day slavery, we’re talking about fundamentally different things.

Ashley Rogers: We just can’t understand that, that way, and I don’t want to put a visitor in that space.

Charlie S. O.: As Rogers showed me the rest of the plantation, a summer thunderstorm was brewing in the distance, but before the rain swept in, she showed me inside one more building.

Ashley Rogers: This is an original slave cabin, which still has cypress planks. You can see that there’s no insulation here. It’s a very, very simple style of construction. It would have been cold, it would have been hot. The rain came in.

Ashley Rogers: And usually during slavery, cabins like this, two different families would have lived in a cabin of this size. You have basically a room and a half for a whole family. How many people would live in the cabin depends on the size of the family. I’ll give you an example.

Ashley Rogers: There was a woman on this plantation. Her name was Francoise. She had her first child at the age of 13. She continued to have children. She had five children by the time she was 23, but that means that one side here, this front room with a bed or just pallet on the floor, would be the sleeping quarters, the living quarters, the dining quarters, the cooking quarters for Francoise and whoever else she’s living with, which could be to the order of five more people.

Charlie S. O.: The storm soon arrived with a steady downpour, so we retreated back to the Welcome Center. Inside the building, there’s a long wall that’s filled with notes from visitors recounting their experience at the museum like a big, public guestbook. Both Rogers and Joy Banner say even though Whitney grapples with a tough topic, they’re encouraged to see how the site changes those who visit.

Ashley Rogers: When we talk about slavery and public interpretation, one of the things we talk about is that the words that we have as visitors to describe our experience don’t always fit with what we learned. When you’re learning about the history of trauma and tragedy, it’s hard to say that you had a good visit or that you are happy that you came, but that impulse is there. I always say to visitors when they reach out to me that I’m glad that they had an impactful visit, and I’m glad that they had a meaningful visit.

Joy Banner: I encourage anyone who has a historical site or a home or attraction where slavery or a difficult topic is involved, I would encourage them to embrace it because people want the truth and they appreciate the truth.

Nathan Connolly: We’re joined now by Charlie in our studio. Charlie, tell me more about what you saw in the Whitney Plantation.

Charlie S. O.: Well, there’s a lot to take in at Whitney, but what really interested me was how the plantation has organized its space and how it’s different from most other plantations. Most other plantation sites see the main house or the big house, the house where the white family lived, as the focal point to organize the rest of the space around. But Whitney does something very different in that it uses its main building as the Antioch Church that’s been relocated to the museum. A visitor will first go through the Welcome Center and read more about the history of slavery in Louisiana, and then the tour starts in the church where folks watch a video before beginning to walk around the grounds.

Charlie S. O.: Here’s what Ashley Rogers said about Whitney’s use of space and how it compares to other plantation sites.

Ashley Rogers: For a very, very long time in this country, we have created a thing of plantation tourism and plantation tourism is touring a home, so visitors are confused about what a plantation is. I find this all the time. Even here, people get here and they go, “Where’s the plantation?” We’re like, “You’re on the plantation” because they don’t understand. They think a plantation is a house.

Charlie S. O.: Rogers actually talked to me more about how the white slave-owning family is not discussed much in the tours actually. They’re the Haydel family, and when they are mentioned in the tours – and granted, it does vary slightly tour-by-tour – but Rogers said they are mostly referenced in Whitney’s history when they conduct some business transaction or some business decision that directly affected the people who were enslaved at Whitney. So, they’re presented in the plantation’s history mostly when it affects the enslaved folks at the plantation.

Nathan Connolly: And did you have any sense at all about how patrons and visitors responded to the way that stuff was being presented at the Whitney?

Charlie S. O.: Yeah. It’s interesting to look at the wall in the Welcome Center that’s filled with those notes from people talking about their experience at Whitney. I’ll just say when I was there, I got caught in that thunderstorm, and while I was seeking shelter in the Welcome Center, there were still lots of people who were walking around the plantation to try to squeeze out the last bits of a tour. There’s a lot of white umbrellas, courtesy of Whitney, dotting around the space, which I thought was very powerful – people really going out of their way to get as much as they could out of this experience.