Review: The Whitney Plantation, Wallace, Louisiana
Photo by Elsa Hahne, from The Whitney Plantation collection
the Whitney Plantation Museum: More than a Tourist Attraction
From Can’t See to Can’t See
By Alex Jennings
My trip to the Whitney Plantation Museum was not easy. I hadn’t been in the ten years since it opened, although I read about it avidly whenever it appeared in the headlines. My feeling was that such a place needs to exist, especially in Louisiana, the most carceral state in the most carceral country on Earth, but I felt that I, personally, I was educated enough on Black history and the particulars of slavery that I was in no great hurry to check it out for myself. It wasn’t until we knew we were about to leave the region and move to Chicago that my wife and I decided to visit for ourselves.
I’m a transplant to Louisiana. Born overseas to a US diplomat father, I mostly grew up in suburban Maryland—Columbia, to be exact. A little way into the woods bordering our subdivision was Blandair Farm, a 300-acre former slave plantation whose main house, slave quarters, and satellite buildings were well within walking distance from my home. This was the 1980s, when children—especially in the suburbs—had a lot more freedom to roam, and my brother and I spent a lot of time exploring the buildings and even the mansion. Neighborhood kids firmly believed the place to be haunted, and it wasn’t until much later that we learned how right we were, at least in the metaphorical sense.
Whitney Plantation is not positioned as a vacation resort or wedding destination. Instead, it aims to teach visitors about the history and legacy of slavery in Southeast Louisiana. First off, they do an excellent job. The museum exhibits are well-maintained, exhaustively researched, and the tour copy is clear, concise, and used both for guided tours and self-guided ones, where visitors listen to it through an electronic device that leads them through the property.
The day was hot and bright when we drove from Baton Rouge to Wallace, Louisiana. The clouds stood piled in the sky, and there was a baked ceramic quality to the blue. It was May, but the heat had already rolled in with a vengeance, letting us know it would be a long hot summer this year. I preferred visiting in the heat. I’ve always loved the hotter months when South Louisiana simmers in its bowl, and unlike most people my size, I don’t mind the sweat, the shimmering humidity, or the way the air itself seems to buzz. It also helps me imagine how the kidnapped people who were forced to tend, harvest, and process indigo, rice, and sugarcane crops felt laboring in the blazing heat.
The tour begins by explaining that the people enslaved on the plantation had to work “from can’t see to can’t see,’ that is, from dawn ‘til dusk. The guided tour began with Antioch Baptist church, but the self-guided version ends there. That building is not original to the property. Built by former slaves, it was first erected across the river in Paulina, Louisiana, and later moved across the bridge in three pieces, then reassembled on the plantation grounds.
The church was established and built by the Anti-Yoke society, and the self-guided tour makes a point of informing listeners of the church’s abolitionist history. The church itself was very familiar to me. Back in Maryland, I grew up attending Locust United Methodist Church, which was built in 1871, also by freed slaves. The original building is lost to time, but I imagine the same hardwood floor, the same regimented wooden pews, the same wooden railing along the altar.
The blood- and agony-soaked plantation grounds are genuinely beautiful, full of gesturing oaks, well-maintained gravel pathways, and the buildings have either been maintained or restored and rebuilt over the generations. The Big House, though, was particularly depressing. I’m sure that in its heyday, it was considered grand and palatial, but it’s maybe half the size of a respectable McMansion. As I toured the museum, I couldn’t help thinking how so much blood, terror, and pain it cost to build and sustain this shitty little house and the shitty little families who owned it.
Much of the museum is focused on the German Coast slave revolt of 1811, my knowledge of which was vague, going in. The monuments, the exhibits, and the statues to the would-be revolutionaries whose forces were broken (and whose heads were mounted on pikes after their rushed trial in New Orleans) affected me at least as deeply as the monument to all the enslaved children who died at the site before reaching adulthood.
The only negative thing I have to say about my experience at the plantation is that I disliked the statues of enslaved children. It’s not that I disliked being reminded of child slavery, it is that I disliked the look of the little statues’ eyes. It was almost as if they were missing. To me, it looked almost like these children’s souls had been stolen along with their bodies, their labor, and their futures. The purpose of the museum is to highlight and emphasize the humanity of the people forced to labor there over generations.
The point of my writing all this is not to itemize the horrors of chattel slavery—for anyone looking for such accounts, they abound. It’s worth mentioning, though, that in February of this year, The National Park Service withdrew the 11-mile stretch of the Great River Road on which the Whitney Plantation is situated from consideration for National Historic Landmark designation by the National Park Service at the urging of Louisiana officials.
The move was considered a win for economic development in Louisiana, but I find it particularly galling, considering the hue and cry that rose up when it came to the prospect of removing Confederate Statues. It was argued that taking down the statues amounted to erasing history and destroying southern heritage. Whitney Plantation Museum seeks to preserve that selfsame history and heritage and teach audiences about what went on plantations like this one. It’s almost as if the erasing of heritage wasn’t the real issue.
My greatest challenge in writing about the Whitney Plantation Museum and the important work being done there is fitting my impressions into something of a digestible length. I would suggest that anyone visiting or living in Louisiana visit it, regardless of race or ethnicity. The museum teaches something that is often missed in historical accounts of slavery—the fact that it was not just Black history, and that teaching it is not “divisive,” it’s anything but.
American slavery was not a white experience or a Black experience, it was a nightmare in which we were all chained together—Black, white, or other, free or enslaved. To soften our understanding of it, to allow its horrors, its impact, its influence on American and world society ever since is not just dishonest, it’s actively harmful, to all of us.
To ignore or erase the past is not to set the oppressor free, it’s to perpetuate a cycle of hatred, theft, and moral rot…and we pretend otherwise at our peril. Seeing the plantation museum goes beyond simply knowing its history. As the descendent of slaves on both sides of my family, I couldn’t help but wonder as I looked at the overseer’s house, the restored blacksmith’s cabin, the enormous cauldron’s used to refine sugar cane juice, whether any of my own ancestors set foot or labored there. I have no way of knowing because one of the most important aspects of chattel slavery in the United States was the erasing of history, of culture, of identity. The severing of self for Africans and for their tormentors.
The main difference between Blandair Farm in Maryland and the Whitney Plantation Museum is that Blandair’s history has been lost. I’ve searched high and low for information about the place and found little to nothing—certainly no accounts from the enslaved people who work there. Like Blandair, Whitney Plantation is also desperately haunted, and now that I’m older and wiser, I understand that they are not haunted by the literal spirits of the dead, but by atrocity, by blood and human suffering, by a history that many Americans would rather ignore.
The conservative fight against Critical Race Theory and complaints over its “divisiveness” doom our country to a myopia, a refusal to come to terms with where we’ve been and what we have done. This actively divides the country we are from the country we see when we squint our eyes, and gaze into a warped mirror designed to make us feel better about ourselves and our history.
Click here for The Whitney Plantation website, with more details and visitor information
Alex Jennings is a writer and author. Click here to find out more about his work. or follow him on Bluesky.
Sign up for your free, weekly arts and culture newsletter: