Laura Slave Plantation

The house was built in 1804 by slaves. These were no ordinary slaves. They came from French Senegal/Gambia and were highly prized for their construction skills. Their West African customs had a strong influence in shaping Creole culture. Even their folk tales filtered into our civilisation, for example some of these noted down from the Laura Plantation where eventually published as the Br’er Rabbit stories.

The house is built on pillars, sunk eight feet below ground level because of the soft soil. The pillars raised it above the Mississippi flood level: in the early days there were no levees and the house stood on the banks of the river.

 The owners lived here only during the summer months, to conduct business such as meeting merchants and negotiating sales contracts. The day to day plantation and slave matters was the job of the plantation manager who was in residence 24/7 . For the rest of the year the owners lived in New Orleans.

The balcony doors and the avenue of trees are designed to funnel air through the premises during the sultry, stifling summer heat. I can’t imagine it, but everybody here says the humidity is totally debilitating particularly if you aren’t used to it. No air-con then either.

The slaves were required to work long hours in all weathers but weren’t badly treated here by comparison. The cabins they lived in were very overcrowded but not dissimilar to poor whites’ accommodation throughout the South then and for a very long time afterwards, well into my lifetime. The next photo shows two of the slave cabins. They were used as dwellings here until 1976.

This was a sugar cane plantation and this is one of the cauldrons used for processing the cane into sugar. We could have done with more detail on the tour on how the processes operated and what the slaves did, and less on the owners’ family hierarchy. The hierarchy was so detailed that I’m not sure which French family had the place built and then who ran it for many years before selling out to an equally forgotten German family. Less is more, in these potted histories. But I'm forgetting the cauldron…

After the Civil War ended in 1865 the slaves were declared free. But free to go- where, and do what? So they mostly stayed and carried on as before, becoming share croppers instead of slaves. In this system they work for a proportion of the crops they tend, and that translates into a meagre income. As slaves, their wherewithal was provided. They now didn’t suffer the indignity of being “owned”, and could leave if they wanted, but in practical terms not much changed. Here’s an atmospheric picture of one of their workers.

Verdict on visit: interesting, but could have been a better insight into how their sugar plantation operated through the years. They’re growing bananas there today!