Deep South Day Five: Plantations

 

Laura Plantation

Today we visited two plantations and we were left with much food for thought. 

The Laura Plantation, located a short distance west of New Orleans and situated close to the banks of the Mississippi River had a typical plantation style house with wrap around porches, an above ground basement, and it was shaded by strategically planted live oaks.  The house was placed and built to take optimal advantage of any available breeze blowing up from the nearby river.  The day was pleasant but sultry; our guide told us the heat is usually oppressive and stifling much of the year.

The family that began this plantation kept their main residence in France, only using their Louisiana property when it was necessary to deal with their sugar cane business which kept the money flowing.  It was also a place to put family members who were out of favor in virtual exile.  The women of the family seemed to be the strong arms, the matriarch Nanette, Laura’s great-grandmother, was business savvy and ruthless, traits she passed on to daughter Elizabeth.  Elizabeth once sold a three-year-old child away from her slave mother, even though it was illegal to do so before the child was ten, and even though her own son tried to dissuade her.  He ended up buying both mother and child to ensure they remained together.

Laura’s grandmother, Elizabeth, was much like her mother, Nanette, before her and just as ruthless.  When Elizabeth’s brother Louis and his French bride, Fanny, had a daughter, Elizabeth’s dreams of inheriting the family business seemed less than likely.  When baby Eliza turned sixteen she developed a bad case of acne.  Louis and Fanny were outgoing people who were active in the social circles of the rich and famous of the day.  When their beautiful girl became not-so-beautiful they were determined to fix the problem.  They returned to France from the plantation to seek the latest treatments available.  The arsenic used to cure the poor teenager ended up killing her.  The belief of the day was that the sicker the treatment made you the better it was working.

Fanny was so devastated at the loss of her beloved girl that she shut herself away in her bedroom, back on the plantation, for the rest of her days. She said her vanity had killed her child and she must pay the price for this great sin.  As we stood in the small unassuming room with its canopied bed in the corner, it wasn’t hard to imagine that Fannie was still hovering in the air, wrapped in her grief and unable to rest in peace.

With the death of Eliza, Elizabeth’s ambitions were back in play.  Louisiana inheritance laws confuse me completely but one thing I did pick up on was that the order of birth was important, not the gender., Elizabeth had two children, a daughter Aimee and a son Emile.  It seemed the ruthlessness followed the female line.  Emile, known as a “sensitive” child (not a compliment back then), was sent to military school overseas at around 10-12 years old and was not permitted to return for 30 years. He eventually did come back to the plantation and was married to his second cousin, a homely woman who had a number of miscarriages, each a cause of celebration for the scheming Elizabeth and Aimee, who both wanted Aimee’s children to inherit.  Finally, though, Emile and Desiree gave birth to their miracle child, Laura, and her aunt and her grandmother’s hopes of inheriting the estate in its entirety were dashed. They actually referred to Laura as the little robber who came to take what they saw as theirs.  Like I said, I couldn’t quite follow our tour guide’s explanations (she talked faster than my brain could follow) on inheritance rules but the gist of it was that Laura would become the sole owner eventually, even after attempts by her grandmother to drive Emile’s share of the estate into bankruptcy.  Laura was the last family member to live at the plantation. She eventually moved with her husband to Missouri and the plantation was sold, with the stipulation that it must remain named Laura Plantation. Many changes occurred during her life; when she was born Abraham Lincoln was president.  When she died, it was JFK.

Cane Sugar Vats

The plantation house was painted in brilliant colors with contrasting trim, fitting into the lush vegetation like an exotic flower.  The inside was less dramatic, the rooms rather small and modest, although luxurious compared to the primitive slave shacks out back.  The kitchen is no longer there but had been a detached building when it still existed.  Due to the extreme heat and the huge fireplace used for cooking the risks of fire were too great to have it be a part of the main house.

Since this plantation’s purpose was to extract every penny possible from the sugar cane trade, it not only grew the cane but processed it.  This was the accepted modus operandi of those days; each plantation needed its own processing operation in order to be successful. Huge cast iron vats, large enough to bathe in, were placed over roaring fires to cook down the sugar cane, with slaves moving the boiling cane to progressively smaller vats until brown sugar resulted.  I cannot imagine the intense heat that these poor people labored in. 

Slave shack for two families of 7 each

The horrifying living conditions of the slaves, forced to give their lives to provide luxury and ease for others who were inferior in every way that matters, is difficult for me to even contemplate.  The life expectancy for female slaves was late twenties and for males, late thirties.  Men often died from kidney failure due to dehydration, working long hours in brutal heat with little to drink. 

Children were expected to work when they could walk, usually by 2 years old.  One of the responsibilities assigned to young children was to take food to the workers in the fields, sometimes 2-3 miles away.  They were forced to whistle as they walked to assure they were not eating any of the food in their wagon. What is even harder to understand than the cruelty perpetrated on these innocent children is that the male slave owners had often fathered them.  How is it possible to treat your own child like an animal?  Or worse than an animal? 

One rationale is that they were believed to be subhuman. Yet this theory embraces self-deception at its most blatant. Since the French and Spanish who initially settled Louisiana were Catholic, the only religion allowed at that time, all slaves had to be baptized and given Catholic burials.  Did they baptize their dogs, cows, and horses?  I think not. Why would they sleep and procreate with something not human? So, obviously they knew deep within their cold, dark souls that they were abusing their fellow men and women.  It is incomprehensible to me, and on a level of evil right up there with Hitler and Nero.  And in some countries, it continues even today.  So what am I doing about it?

We went next to Oak Alley Plantation and the house looked like it was straight out of Gone With The Wind. It was much more luxurious than the Laura Plantation.  Huge pillars and massive wrap-around verandahs, all brilliant white, sheltered the large front and back doors.  Inside, a foyer bigger than some rooms in my house, led to a sweeping staircase and the bedrooms on the second story.  Another set of steps, steeper and less imposing, led to a third floor, I’m guessing to rooms for the house slaves. Or possibly guest rooms. 

A large dining room was to the left of the entry way, an imposing table down the center and a fireplace taller than I am along one wall.  Suspended above the table was a large wooden apparatus, shaped somewhat like two back to back musical staffs with straight boards between them like the lines on sheet music.  About three or four feet high, it was suspended from the ceiling and attached to a rope that led to the corner of the room.  A slave child would pull the rope during mealtime to move the air over the table, helping to cool the diners, and prevent flies from roosting in the food.  The armoires, tables, sideboards and beds were all over-sized and would have been far too large for normal-size rooms.  With fourteen foot ceilings and wide-open spaces these rooms were more than sufficient to the task though and did not look crowded at all.

Oak Alley Plantation

The long lanes in front and behind the house were lined with massive live oaks.  Our guide told us they were about 250 years old.  Since their life expectancy is 500 years they are merely middle-aged.  Their trunks bowed to the ground and where they touched new root systems formed.  I could just picture my grandchildren’s excitement if they had trees like this to climb. 

Out back were a few remaining slave shacks and two small weather-beaten outhouses. The stark contrast in the lives lived by two different people groups in such close proximity, yet worlds apart in their daily experiences, could not have been greater.  The cards they were dealt had nothing to do with their worth, their skill level, nor their genetics, since many of the slaves were also blood relatives of the master of the house.  Rather it was oppression of those who were captured by those who had the money, manpower, and resources to enforce their will upon others.

These plantations are beautiful, yet permeating the very air around them is the oppressive history of malice, greed, cruelty, and suffering that was present every minute of every day during their years of occupation.  As King Solomon said “It’s better to live alone in the corner of an attic than with a quarrelsome wife in a lovely home.” Proverbs 21:9.  This was especially apropos to the Laura Plantation where the matriarchs of the family spread their avarice all around. 

The last of the legitimate heirs are long gone now.  Yet hundreds of people remain from their bloodlines.  A recent reunion organized at Laura Plantation for any persons descended from the family patriarchs and the children they begat with their slave girls yielded close to 200 attendees, from pale-skinned to darkest black, according to our guide. She described it as a very interesting few days, and her tone of voice suggested that old conflicts are still not completely healed.  Much of these privileged slave-owners lives were spent fighting amongst themselves, grasping for everything they could get with little thought about the welfare of others.  Utter misery spreading out from them like ripples in putrid swamp waters.

Like everything in life, not every situation was the same.  There are historical accounts of good people in the south, many of them, and of bad people in the north.  Many of them.  But on these two plantations at least, life was not peaceful for those in charge, nor pleasant for those who labored dawn to dusk.  One could almost feel the long-gone victims of injustice crying out, and the cruelty of their abusors hovering like an invisiable cloud over the beauty of our surroundings.  As our guide said at the end of our tour, “If I see either Nanette or Elizabeth lurking about, I’m out of here!”