1/2/2023 0 Comments Great river road trip plannerThe enslaved people who built the white-marbled Acropolis in ancient Greece. Wherever we travel, we find stories of past pain. And one day and one night wasn't enough to explore the big land and the big ideas behind the Big Houses on the Great River Road.īut it was a start. Words - and names - do indeed matter.Īs ever, I feel in life, there isn't the time I feel I need. The invidious and insidious effects of language laid bare. Slave quarters, slave labour, the slave trade.Īt the Whitney, they were enslaved individuals, enslaved workforce, the enslaved. I also began to notice, through the unrelenting rain, the different effects of language.Īt Oak Alley, and perhaps in the world I'd seen before, slaves were slaves were slaves. Names that weren't people's own as their personal identity was too complicated, too unnecessary for commercial use. With slavery, I had nothing to hold onto, no previous life story to hold with me and guide me hand in hand.Īnd even here, the stories stood in fragments. The details of Anne Frank's house seemed as real in my head as they were beneath my feet when I arrived in Amsterdam. Questioning Slavery: A Matter of Time? Of personal stories? Of.?īut by the time I had reached each of those places, I'd heard story upon story, detail after detail about some of the so many individuals involved. She introduces us to the children's graveyard, the Spanish Creole Big House, the slave cabins and the Antioch (anti-yoke) Baptist Church.īut it is the memorial wall that begins to shift my perception the most. Somewhat fittingly, we arrive in the all-consuming rain.Ī tall, trim woman leads a tour, a commanding spark behind her eyes. Somewhat incredibly, it's the only museum in Louisiana of its kind. The Whitney Plantation in Wallace opened its doors in 2014, 262 years after its construction, to tell a different side of the story: the view of plantation life through the eyes of those who lived and worked here as slaves. She is not alone, she is but one of a number of children, some with hats, some without, all with shoulders stooped and challenging eyes. One of the most well known, to undersell it just a touch, is the Oak Alley Plantation near Vacherie.Īmerica's First Slavery Museum on the Great River Roadīut as thoughtful as this section is, it is nothing, I repeat nothing to the gut punch realisation and examination of slavery that takes place at the Whitney Plantation Museum.Īnd it is here where I find the girl, lingering around the white-planked Antioch Baptist Church. Louisiana's River Road runs from the heady mayhem of jazzy New Orleans along the Mississippi towards the state capital of Baton Rouge - and as it follows Old Man River, it sinks itself into its comfortable and uncomfortable past.įor this is where you'll find those AnteBellum Southern mansions, all columns and land, plantations and gowns and sugary belles with blooming bustles where Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett strut, stride and simper through the undergrowth (that Gone with the Wind began in Georgia rather than Louisiana is, for artistic purposes, neither here nor there.)Īlong a distance of around 70 miles, the Great River Road spans both sides of the Mississippi with mansions set back from the water, each driveway grander than the next. The broad river lying between the two becomes a spacious street. Driving the Great River Road From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the great sugar plantations border both sides of the river all the way, and stretch their league-wide levels back to the dim forest of beaded cypress in the rear. And the sculpture alone is enough to break my hard-to-be-broken heart. But something in her face, her slumping shoulders tells that something's wrong.Īt the age of four, or maybe five, the household inventory lists her as a slave.Īnd it is the only life she has - or will - ever know. Haunting, hesitant, ready to tip-toe into church where bare legs would have dangled over polished wooden seats, she stands frozen beneath a white-aired watchful god.
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