We had three plantations to visit today, all of which have a focus on the life of slaves, so we set off early again and were at our first one by 9:30. Whitney plantation is focused on the life of Slave people and doesn’t really talk about the plantation owners at all. We walked around the main house and outbuildings. The plantation was started in 1752 by German immigrant Ambrose Haydel and his wife, he and his descendants owned it until 1867. It is owned by John Cummings, a trial attorney, who has spent more than $8 million and nearly 15 years working on the history of slavery. The house was built in 1803 in the French Creole raised style. The pigeonnier, slave quarters and Church are from another plantation. A lot of the tour focuses on extracts from the interviews carried out by the Federal Writers Project, plus other bits of information you wouldn’t naturally know. For example in Africa, people knew when the slave catchers were coming and started to plat seeds into their hair, that way when they got to America they had seeds they could plant to supplement their diet. There were people that lived in the swamps who had run away and lived off the land, they came and visited the slaves and would bring them news and more food if they could spare it, they would also take the seeds and plant them in the forest or the swamps which would supplement the diet, it was this way that Bananas came to Louisiana. Under code noir the plantation owners had to provide a set weight of food but nothing described what type of food it had to be so it was very poor quality, it was the offcuts of meat and usually contained bone but as long as it weighed the correct weight they were within the law therefore these seeds were a great supplement. The other thing I hadn’t realised was that the slave markets were actually held in hotels and the slaves before being sold were well fed for a few days and also provided with new clothes that were actually made for the occasion by Brooks Brothers who made a lot of money out of this. This tour identified the poor living and working conditions many of the slaves lived under, one of the most telling monuments was the one to the 2000 slave children under 2 who had died in the region. A large number of them were just listed as slave infant, no sex, name, date of birth just a listing. From here we went to Evergreen Plantation which was very different again this was a German plantation built in the Creole style, four generations of the same family lived in this home and it was a family farm for over 250 years. The site has been used for a few films so there some slave cabins that were built for the filming, and also for the remake of Roots. Our guide here was a very positive person that had managed to get a part in a couple of the films and to be honest it isn’t surprising, this tour focused on the first family that lived here and it was a really great way of doing it as it was really engaging. Traditionally Creole houses are built three rooms ride and one deep which maximise the air flow both around and through the properties. This guide made it sound like the slaves were almost a partnership with their owners and pointed out that there was no point treating the slaves badly as they could just mutiny and as they had access to weapons (tools) or could poison the food, she made it sound as if they worked in partnership all be it a slightly unequal one. However, probably the most fascinating thing about this house was that during the depression there were a couple of bad harvests where the crop failed and a mortgage taken out on the land couldn’t be repaid so the bank repossessed the house. What they didn’t realise was that there were about 100 tenant farmers living in what had previously been the slave houses, but because they couldn’t be seen from the road the bank didn’t realise they were there so they just carried on living there. They let the side nearest the road grow and allowed the cattle which hadn’t been sold into the house, then as farmers they cultivated the land around their houses with vegetables and if they wanted milk or meat the cows were always available. The bank didn’t actually sell the house for 20 years and it wasn’t until the new owner arrived and realised that they were there, she told them they had to move they said no as they had been there so long they wouldn’t go anywhere, I am not quite sure what happened in the end, I think they may have ended up working for the new owner but I love the idea that they lived there for so long completely free after the life they and their parents had. Our final house was Laura Plantation, this was different again, this tour focused on the fact that the Creoles lived apart from the American mainstream for over 200 years. Three generations of the same family lived here and the granddaughter Laura wrote a journal which provide a lot the information used in the tour, again a different view of how the ‘masters and slaves’ interacted. In the diary she writes about a situation where her mother had interceded when her grandmother tried to sell a woman without her baby, in the end Laura’s father brought the woman so she could remain on the plantation and with her baby. On the other side of the coin he had his family and three children, then he had two slave mistresses who he had 6 children with, it was a very complex family tree but because Creole law says slavery goes through the female line so if slavery hadn’t been abolished they would have remained slaves. All three houses provided great information and were really interesting but it does seem that the view of slavery you have is definitely tainted by your circumstances and what you have read, I am sure all of these situations happened across all of the different plantations. One of the pieces of information we saw really showed how valuable a good slave was, it listed the assets of the owner I think as part of his estate when he died, the house was valued at $2000, the two outbuildings at $1500 and the kitchen, wash house and other dependencies between $300 – $700. The most expensive slave was listed at $1500 and other key workers were $1200 while general servants were valued at between $600 and $800 which means they were worth about the same as the house. By the time we had finished this tour it was past 5pm so we decided to get something to eat locally before the hour long drive back to our hotel in New Orleans.
