Monday, February 24, 2014 - Laura Plantation

The only one up, I make myself a cup of tea without falling over or destroying the kitchen, a minor miracle.  Is Catholic New Orleans saving even me, the eternal heathen? Tinky, my walker, helps me navigate. He’s a bit worse for wear but still serviceable.  Poor Tinky, last week’s dip in the bayou didn’t do him any good.

Yesterday’s rain brought incredible humidity to New Orleans or simply restored the status quo. I could wring the air like a sponge and water would pour out. My mother would call this weather close, as in the humidity is closing in on you, stealing your breath. I do feel somewhat suffocated.  Despite the soggy atmosphere, I have escaped Denver’s winter and rejoice in parachuting into summer.

Jumping into Pearl, we drive out of the Big Easy heading toward the Laura Plantation.

Riding along, I think back upon my American History classes, sadly mainly comprised of an ad nauseum repetition of the glories of the thirteen English colonies.  I recall feeling immense pride in the pioneers, my ancestors, who marched west across the continent with a flourish, embracing their manifest destiny. Neat, tidy and beautiful, isn’t that America’s history?

Perhaps not, eh?  As an adult, I’ve accepted my ignorance, realizing that my education completely disregarded the contributions of Spanish, Indian, African and French people in founding and constructing the States.  Today, we hope to cure a bit of our missing education by learning about African slaves and Creoles – specifically the rich, slave-owning planter class who ruled Louisiana before the Anglos arrived.

Arriving at the plantation, we buy our tickets and meet our guide, Susan. Susan, a Creole herself, spent six years in France, attending the same college that Bloodroot attended for his study abroad.  Could the world be any smaller?  Susan tells us that all Creoles are related and/or know each other. Her mother informed her that her grandparents knew the plantation owners, bringing an interesting irony to her current employment. 

Our history class begins.  The Louisiana country Creole arose from a blending of three very different cultures: Western European (French & Spanish), Western African (primarily Senegal & Gambia) and American Indian. Wealth overruled color in Louisiana, creating a place where social class mattered far more than race.  As such, most Creoles possessed mixed blood.  One of the Laura matriarchs was half Micmac Indian.  Created by mixing French, Choctaw, Wolof and other African languages, Creole speech bears little resemblance to French, even Quebecois French. (Our history’s been whitewashed again!)

  

Our tour commences with a walk through the alley of hundred-year-old trees up to the front of the big house.  People planted rows of trees in front of plantation houses.  The trees served an important public health role, funneling the breeze from the Mississippi into draughts that would blow through the wide open front windows keeping everyone cool. With the white-hot humidity pressing in around me, I thank the Goddess for air conditioning.  Accepting environmental guilt, I acknowledge that today’s world would benefit from people planting tree alleys and opening their windows instead of living in tightly sealed electricity-sucking boxes.  Ah well, back to the 1800s.

Tree alley - not the Laura Plantation

Entering the basement of the big house we’re greeted by the Duparcs, full-size cardboard cutouts of the original owners. As Louisiana became American with the Purchase, Guillaume Duparc received most of his land as a reward for his service in the Revolutionary War. In 1804, his wife Nanette began construction of the big house.

Nanette bought the services of a local construction expert, a master Senegalese boat builder enslaved by a neighbor.  This brilliant man, name lost to history, created a house sitting atop brick columns.  Underground, the columns expand into pyramids. (The whole column, viewed from the side, has the silhouette of a key: a pyramidal underground base supporting a shaft.) The underground pyramids spread the weight of the house over a huge area – without them, the columns would act like spears, puncturing the soft silty sand beneath, causing the entire structure to sink into the Mississippi river-mud.  

Laura was a sugarcane plantation on the banks of the Mississippi. Around 600 feet distant, we see the levees holding the rebellious river to her course.  Anticipating recurrent spring floods, the construction crew built a water tight first floor using tongue and groove and peg construction methods – nary a nail.  Most surviving plantation houses in Louisiana used this house-boat design.

After supervising the creation of this engineering marvel, Nanette outlived her husband by over fifty years, becoming sole ruler of the plantation. She spent most of her days screaming at her children and slaves and generally being very nasty; her sons and daughters were all terrified of her. Finally, a rebellion claimed her life – though not a (well-deserved) slave rebellion. Nanette refused to leave when the Civil War came to her front porch. Ignoring the pleas of her children who fled for their lives, she dared a Civil War Yankee gunboat cruising up the river to shell her. They obliged.

I tour the plantation, riding in my manual chair and, needless to say, the plantation lacks an elevator.  No matter! The boys hoist me up 15 steps to the first floor.  Our tour guide Susan and the current plantation owners cheer us on, applauding the boys’ accomplishment. 

People used the downstairs for storage and lived upstairs, where they caught the delightful breeze funneled in from the alley (allée) of pecan trees. Now we see the cooling windows, all of them really more like open doors, facing the Mississippi. Insect screening did not yet exist, so a slave posted near the doors wielded a broom to bat out anything that came in besides the welcome breeze.

We learn more about the family: apparently, Creole men didn’t last too long. Wasting their bodies on drinking, whoring and gambling, they tended to die in their 40s.  The stronger, sturdier women (perhaps just less afflicted by cirrhosis and syphilis) lived into their 80s or perhaps their 100s, even back then. When her time neared, the matron would evaluate her entire extended family.  She would choose her most intelligent relative as the next president of the family enterprise – generally another woman.  Family allegiance formed the basis of the Creole world. The entire family was expected to work under the motto “the family is a business and the business is the family.”  If you didn’t work, you weren’t family and were shown the door.

Before being completely ostracized, though, the family gave relatives one last chance by sending lazy men, difficult children, and awkward relatives to France as the cure for any vice. If you were a duelist, a murderer, a philanderer - off to France with you!  The family expected you to wise-up before returning.

The antebellum Creoles struggled to preserve their world as the Louisiana Purchase brought the Anglos and Anglo ways.  The new arrivals painted their houses white, which the Creoles found ludicrous, knowing that all Louisiana structures quickly succumb to mold.  The Creoles preferred their sturdy, logical green, but slowly began to paint their houses white too, fearing any difference would invite criticism and attack.  Creole women, all astute business people, had always held the purse strings and conducted business in their bedrooms – a double whammy of horror to the Anglos.  When the newcomers in self-righteous indignation refused to treat with them, the Creole matrons responded by setting up men as dupes in the living room. The men always lacked real power, serving only as faces to comfort the Anglos.

We leave the big house, descend the stairs (me again carried), and head out to the slave quarters.  We tour the small extant slave cabins. Two families lived in each one.

Growing sugarcane in Louisiana, an annual weather dependent gamble, could pay off handsomely or result in financial difficulty.  Many plantations piled on debt to purchase slaves, becoming quite highly leveraged.  A plantation could survive one bad year but several years’ losses could bankrupt the owners. 

Sugarcane, a tropical crop, died immediately in the lights frosts of subtropical Louisiana.  Every autumn, the enslaved workers toiled ceaselessly to bring in all cane before the first tendrils of winter appeared. They cut down the long, tall stems in the fields, then crushed the sugarcane in a mill as the foreman stood by with a machete ready to chop off in any limb that became entangled in machinery. Using open fires, the workers converted the crushed cane into sugar syrup – often burning themselves, at times badly or even fatally.  Enslaved people didn’t live long on cane plantations; the grueling dangerous work reduced the average life expectancy to around 40 years of age. Masters in the rest of the South would threaten their slaves with sale and deportation to Louisiana, a very effective fear tactic.

In the French colonial world, a Code Noir established by Louis XIV, governed the treatment of slaves.  The Code required slaves to have the same holidays as all other Catholics.   Slavery followed the status of the mother, as a free mother bore free children no matter who sired them, but an enslaved mother always produced enslaved children. The Code required masters to provide suitable housing, reasonable provisions, and prohibited breaking up families with prepubescent children. The Code legitimized corporal punishment but not torture or mutilation. 

The meanest and most successful owner of the Laura Plantation, Elisabeth Duparc, ran the place with an iron fist. She hired other slaves to catch runaways, then branded them “VDP” (Veuve [widow] Duparc Prud’homme) on their faces. The Code permitted branding of runaways, but on their shoulders, not faces.  Obviously, the Code was laxly enforced.  Elizabeth also purchased 30 teenaged women and six men to sire plentiful young slaves, gloating about the numerous resultant children ten years later. Various family members assisted in paternal fertility.

The Code required masters to baptize their slaves to bring them into the Christian fold. Unfortunately, baptism provided a record for the tax collectors, making it in the family’s best interest not to baptize their slaves. Laura had 161 slaves officially but probably actually trapped closer to 350 souls. Elizabeth, nothing if not parsimonious, provided housing for 300 people.

Creoles, we learn, only obey laws they agree with. This explains today’s drive-through daiquiri stores in New Orleans as well as sporadic compliance with the Code Noir.  One man, a New Orleans resident, bore responsibility for enforcing the Code.  Although he had the authority to remove slaves from plantations, he accepted bribes.

Susan points to the Mississippi and tells us that director Steve McQueen filmed the terrifying movie 12 Years a Slave  at the Felicity Plantation, a couple miles down the river. Susan expounds, “Everything in the film is basically true.  There’s nothing good to be said about slavery.”

The movie tells the story of a freeman in New York tricked and sold into slavery in Louisiana. Without legal recourse, he lived as a slave for 12 years. (The penalty for enslaving a free person exceeded the penalty for killing a black person, so people enslaving free people would just kill them if challenged. Also, a person of color couldn’t testify in a court of law.)

In contrast to the film and to Felicity Plantation, Laura slaves had large gardens, hen houses, pig pens, and could also supplement their rations with fish, squirrel, rabbit and other small game. Even so, cultivating sugarcane resulted in a horrible, brief life.

The years passed and little changed on the plantation.  When the owners ran away during the Civil War, the slaves stayed in their homes.  Upon returning, the owners saw that their former property had cultivated large gardens, maintained the hen houses and pig pens, but let the cane go. Through the 1930s Depression, people again remained on the plantation, in many ways virtually untouched, cultivating their gardens and living off the land.

Finally, we come to the story of the would-be last owner of the plantation. Laura Duparc Lacoul, rebelled when selected by her grandmother to reign as matron when the time came. Although the family commanded her, pleaded with her, and even renamed the place after her, they could not entice her to stay. Laura had watched her grandmother Elisabeth at work; she saw the slaves with brands on their faces. From a young age, Laura refused to become her grandmother. “Running a plantation,” she thought, “will grow callouses over your heart and kill your soul.” 

She never took up the mantle her grandmother tried to pass down, and instead ran off. Eventually, when the property was bequeathed to her despite her objections, she sold it, married a Protestant, and moved to Missouri. Later in life, when she found her children reading the mythological novel Gone with the Wind, Laura felt impelled to write her own book describing the realities of chattel slavery and plantation life.  Much of the biographical information we know of the owners comes from this book.

In a bizarre twist of fate, the Laura plantation’s rebirth as a historical site resulted from Alcée Fortier of Tulane University collecting West African folktales of B’rer Rabbit (Compair Lapin) here.  As a Creole, he spoke the local language and could record the oral histories.  Susan retracts her earlier statement to say, “Well, B’rer Rabbit is the only good thing that ever arose from slavery.”  The current owners purchased Laura out of bankruptcy intent upon restoring it as a tourist attraction.  They haven’t had the best of luck, having to rebuild the big house after a major electrical fire a few years back. Next, they plan to create museum of slavery.

Without doubt, this is the best historical site I’ve ever visited in North America. Based upon Laura Lacoul’s book and 5,000 pages of documents discovered in the Archives Nationales in Paris, the tours radiate authenticity. I give the Laura Plantation the mega-nerd seal of approval.

With Creole history spinning in our heads, we drive back to New Orleans contemplating dinner, wine and both the role and cost of sugar in all of our lives.