Much of Louisiana’s early riches came from sugar but there was a bitter history behind the wealth. Pam Jones finds the truth of the slavery that built the region difficult to swallow.
In a sweat-filled, hurricane-prone, dual-existence city, the rhythms of oppression were some of the first sounds that filled a refuge in Louisiana.
On the outskirts of New Orleans, men and women brutally torn from Africa beat bamboula drums to create deep, fluid rhythms one day a week in a place that became known as Congo Square.
Their 1800s music and market place was tiny in size, but of incalculable significance to those who spent the rest of the week in chains, metaphorically or literally. Freedom came but one day a week, as per the "Code Noir" (the French Catholics-written rule book that said slaves got Sundays off). Every Sunday, they tried to get back some of their culture, sanity and dignity. Every Sunday, the drums and banzas (a ukulele-like instrument made of gourd) came back out.
Today, Congo Square is part of the leafy Louis Armstrong Park, located in the Treme neighbourhood near the French Quarter.
A brass-peopled statue curves in front of the Mahalia Jackson Theatre for Performing Arts and nearby sit statues of Satch himself (Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong) and other jazz greats. It’s a peaceful place, with duck ponds and trees. It’s gruelling to realise parts of it were based on such emotion and suffering.
The Code Noir said the enslaved could buy their freedom and many sold goods in Congo Square to raise money to become Free People of Colour.
The reality was more complex. Few wanted freedom for themselves if their children were still slaves, and in southern society ethics and economics were complicating factors of emancipation. And for the enslaved, there was the repugnance of needing to buy oneself.
The rhythms played at Congo Square can still be heard in the modern jazz of today, and there are other, lesser celebrated, Louisiana "monuments" to the ignominy of slavery too.
They include buildings occupying land that saw crimes of humiliation and humanity take place on a daily basis.
On the corner of St Louis and Chartres Sts once stood the St Louis Hotel, also known as the City Exchange Hotel. It served as one of New Orleans’ many slave markets: an 1849 map shows more than 50 slave markets around the city, and auctions were on the list of must-see sights for many well-to-do locals and visitors.
The Omni Royal Orleans Hotel now stands in its place and on the opposite corner is a modest plaque marking where another slave exchange, Pierre Maspero’s, also stood.
Tourists now amble past both sites, probably oblivious to the shame of what happened beneath their feet. Here evil prospered on a daily basis, derogation and degradation standard treatment of those bought and sold like cattle.
The history of New Orleans is tied to the history of Louisiana, which is tied to the history of sugarcane plantations, which cannot ignore the history of slavery.
Questions of how anyone survived the humiliation and physical persecution of slavery are answered (or not) variously by plantation houses outside New Orleans.
New Orleans became the centre of the slave trade in the United States. By 1722 there were an estimated 3000 slaves in the city, which was where the owners of rich plantations had their "town houses" (mansions).
Initially, cotton was king, then sugar cane was planted, which produced molasses, which was used to make rum.
It was a journey of riches but city life was brutal on even the wealthy; New Orleans’ climate and topography (it was built on a swamp, sinking partly below sea level) meant death from yellow fever, malaria, cholera and dysentery was common. Hurricanes also struck relentlessly. It was not a city for the weak.
On the plantations, gentrified owners experienced an especially golden era in the 1820s, when business boomed.
New Orleans was the wealthiest city in the US because of Louisiana’s sugar plantations and trade on the Mississippi River.In the 160km of river from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, there were 1400 sugar plantations, all with river frontage.
This was where slaves did all the work and could be hamstrung (their muscles cut so they couldn’t walk or run) or killed if they tried to escape.
Some were branded. Laura Locoul Gore, who wrote of her childhood at the plantation that would eventually bear her name, wrote in her memoir of her shock at seeing a red-hot iron used to mark young calves.
"When I saw them take the red-hot iron from the fire to brand the young calves or cows, I would stop up my ears, turn my back and run ... it was so cruel that I shivered whenever I thought of it, but there was a greater shock in store for me yet ...
"One day as I stood on the top of the well where water was pumped into a long trough for the horses and cattle to drink, a weather-beaten old negro named Pa Philippe, whose work it was to pump the water, was standing close to me. On his creased and wrinkled old face I saw the letters
"V. D. P.
"I pointed my finger to his face and asked ‘Oh, Pa Philippe, what is that mark on your forehead?’ He turned to me and laughed in a hard, cackling old voice, saying ‘Lord, child, don’t you know this is where they branded me when I used to run away?’ "
Laura’s writings only brush the surface of the complexity and perversion of southern slavery.
On Laura Plantation, the owners liked to consider themselves fair employers of slaves, giving them privileges other plantation owners did not and allowing a level of assimilation into the family. The ultimate assimilation also contributed to future generations: Laura’s grandmother’s brother, Flagy Duparc, had no children with his wife and none listed on the family tree, but in fact fathered four offspring on slaves working on the plantation.
But integration did not mean equality: slaves still did all the work, and mixed-race offspring were not considered heirs. Despite his family knowing full well the four children were Duparc’s, they were never acknowledged as such, nor given any inheritance.
Laura Plantation was owned and operated by four generations of women but Laura later shunned the role of plantation owner, leaving the plantation and returning only in her old age.
Built in 1885 by West African slaves, the house was restored in 1993 and is now central to tours around the plantation.
Guide Joseph Dunn spoke compellingly of the injustice suffered by slaves and put a personal and poignant slant on everything he told us; the story of Laura Plantation was one not of the house but of people, he said. Any gathering of possessions was insignificant compared to the lives of those who lived there.
Out the back, four slave cabins remained from the dozens that were once there. In the plantation house, "inventories" of slaves were galling and repugnant.
Between 1808 and 1850, more than 400 slaves were born or bought, lived and worked on the then named Duparc and Locoul Plantation.
Jean-Pierre (25), a Creole mulatto from Louisiana, was described as a highly skilled worker in the fields and valued at $100,000 (current value $US). Smathe (20), of Moco, was "mentally disturbed" and worth only $10,000. Adelaide (25), of Quesy, and her 9-month-old daughter were jointly valued at $40,000. Patience (24), of Moco, who had "no redeeming qualities at all" and her 18-month-old son were jointly valued at $35,000. Angelique, of the Congo, who tried "to run away and was a very bad housemaid", was worth $26,000.
For me, the disquiet deepened at Oak Alley plantation, where a presentation from costumed southern belles focused on the parties and frippery of those who owned the plantation, and slavery was a self-tour out the back.
Rows of reconstructed cabins were dotted with information about the lives of those who were house slaves and field slaves.In one cabin, a panel introduced a wall of names of slaves known to have lived there.
Between 1836 and the Civil War, more than 200 men, women and children were enslaved at Oak Alley, it said.
"Dehumanised and quantified like any other commodity, they appear in sales records and inventories, yet as people they have been forgotten by history. This [the panel] is a respectful recognition of the people on whose backs this plantation was built. For most of them, a name is all that remains of their story."
Earlier, another guide confirmed that visitors to the plantation found the contemplation of slavery confronting and difficult to comprehend.
Did many whose ancestors were slaves come here, I asked?
"No," she said.
"It would be almost too much for them to bear," I said.
She nodded, without words.Oak Alley is one of the most famous plantations of all, its tree-lined entrance and Greek revival architecture feted by film-makers and featuring in many movies filmed in the South (Midnight Bayou, Interview with a Vampire ...)
In an area beside the gift shop, I drank a mint julep (three parts bourbon, one part mint syrup, one part water), unprepared for the desperation the images of slavery would create within me.
I looked around at the buildings and wealth generated from the barbaric treatment of others, and failed to see the grandeur.
- Pam Jones travelled to Louisiana with the assistance of IPW (International Pow Wow conference).
If you go
For more information, go to:
• lauraplantation.com
• neworleansplantationcountry.com/plantations
