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They look like so many butterflies, with their satin hoop skirts and shimmering parasols, twirling carefree in the midmorning sun. Ladies of the Old South, greeting guests at broad steps that lead to towering ivory mansions whose wraparound verandas sport fluted Doric columns. In the doorways stand stately grandees in linen suits whose pastel colors match the oleanders bracing the house foundations.
Mockingbirds sing pretty scat songs in ancient live oaks lining the oyster-shell carriage-way. A Mississippi River breeze soft as butter brushes the broad lawn.
The whole scene is as evocative as a Thomas Kinkade painting, and even though this is the 21st century, not the 19th, one is tempted to look for Br’erRabbit amid the hedgerows.
But something’s missing. Something big and real and not as pretty as a song. Everything here was built on slavery. Happily, a growing number of historic sites across the South are offering visitors a more complete picture of the glorious, now-dead plantation past. To quote William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Today, busloads and boatloads of tourists flock to historic plantation estates across the South—many but not all along the Mississippi—to gawk at a kaleidoscopic pantomime of antebellum life, a nostalgic and alluring fantasy rendered “real” only by fiction. Most famously, Gone with the Wind rewrote the American popular image of the pre-war South, and the landscape of “old times there are not forgotten” became a fever dream only now being healed. As handsome as the estates are, as thrilling as the inherent romantasy, as heartfelt and superficially authentic as modern depictions may be, it was all a mirage built on the backs of millions of humans.
About 4 million, to be exact, more than a tenth of the US population.Human beings who were legally just property like any ox, who worked for nothing and could not determine their own lives, but were the basis of the fortunes that built these mansions. Only recently have the realities of that era joined the light of day next to the satin shine.
The premier example of historical honesty is Louisiana’s Whitney Plantation, upstream from New Orleans, flanked by dozens of examples of the old fantasy along what’s called, for tourist purposes, “Plantation Alley,” the Great River Road along the Mississippi’s west bank. Hundreds of sugar cane and rice plantations clustered here where the climate and land were favorable, and the river provided ready access to New Orleans. Today the area is a hugely popular day trip from the Crescent City, and riverboats carry tourists rather than sugar to and from the plantations.
But Whitney is dedicated not to satin fantasy; rather, to telling the story of slavery, on which this 250-year-old property depended, like every other in the South, until 1865. Guests wander through the rough-sawn wood slave quarters, gawk at the huge tureens in which sugar was boiled in the Delta heat, tour a garden dedicated to the countless children who died here, and view an unvarnished exhibit on the history of the slave trade. Descendants of Whitney Plantation enslaved families still live in the area, and some have risen high in American life—Marc Morial is president of the National Urban League.
Nor is the entire experience mordant. Mimi, an interpreter, tells me that the Louisiana staple so subject to love/hate commentary, okra, came here carried by African slaves. “They called the seeds ‘gumbo,’ which is how the stew got its name.” I ask her personal position on okra, and she laughs.
“I grew up with it. Steamed with a little butter and salt. Still love it exactly like that.”
Another famed Southern food icon dates back to plantation days, she adds. “Hush puppies” were fried lumps of cornmeal that big house cooks tossed out to farm dogs to lure them away from the outdoor kitchens.
I spend a few minutes watching the peaceful scene from a bench in front of the old mansion. A school bus from Birmingham pulls in, full of kids, mostly black, on their way to a basketball tournament in New Orleans. They wander the grounds, phones in hand, some making videos for their TikTok feeds. I marvel at the fact that the history here is almost as foreign to them now as to me.
Personal stories of enslaved people have their own hall of honor atNashville’s resplendent Belmont Mansion, once the center of a large hilltop estate. One wall holds a roster of the estate’s enslaved people whose names are known today—an incomplete record, as names were not recorded along with census data for the 32 enslaved people here at Belmont in 1860. A portrait of one, Eva Snowden, depicts a woman who was born into slavery, freed after the war, and worked at the mansion where she partnered with a compatriot named Mark Baker— a descendant of slaves held by the Washington family. Yes, as in George Washington, “father of our country.”
And at Belle Meade outside Nashville, once the antebellum South’s most prominent Thoroughbred farm, tour guides make a point of blending in the stories of the enslaved people who made this edenic pastoral possible. The1860 census recorded 136 enslaved people here, one of the largest such groups in Middle Tennessee, and as at Belmont, Belle Meade historians have been attempting to recover as much information as possible about the many workers whose skills as grooms, handlers, blacksmiths, cooks, farmers, carpenters, masons, herders… The 5,400-acre farm would not have been possible without them, and a special guided tour, “Journey to Jubilee,” focuses on their stories. “We tell their stories quite simply because they are as much the story of Belle Meade as anyone else,” explains the site’s Rachel Buckingham.
Perhaps most telling of all, at Monticello, the world-famous Virginia mountaintop bastion built by Thomas Jefferson, visitors today encounter point-blank information about Jefferson’s implacable lifelong commitment to slavery—especially his notorious relationship with Sally Hemings. It’s hard not to consider the author of the Declaration of Independence one of history’s greatest hypocrites when, as one of Hemings’ descendants put it, almost every day heraped a woman who had no choice in the matter, and bore him six children.
Long ago, when I was in high school in New Orleans, the famous caféacross the street had a “WHITES ONLY” sign on the front door. That was illegal, but no one enforced the law, and we lunchtime customers could occasionally see the bizarre spectacle of the black servers and cooks who ran the place enforcing the race ban. In my lifetime!
Forty years after that, I was dumbfounded to hear a historic plantation guide tell a tour group that the place’s enslaved people didn’t have things as bad as one thinks. “They got medical care and vacations,” she declared, bald-faced. Even had their own church. Sure, they got medical care—a broken leg would be splinted so its owner could go back to work once it healed. And everybody got the week between Christmas and New Year off because the farm shut down.
“But their children were still sold off at the age of 10, right?” I asked. She pursed her lips in a prim line and nodded grudgingly. Then we had the chance to try our own hands at picking cotton, which qualifies me to report that it was miserable work indeed.
I’m not urging that people avoid mainstream historic plantations (trust me, pass up the cotton picking) any more than I’d suggest boycotting Disney World. Nostalgic allure is a powerful force.
So I’m delighted to report that the plantation fantasy is, thanks to a growing community of thoughtful people with integrity, becoming gone with the wind, to borrow the name of that famous historic sham. At Whitney Plantation, at Nashville’s Belmont Mansion and Belle Meade, at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and I hope at dozens of other historic sites across the South, the story that should be told finally is.
Both sides. Glamorous and disturbing.
The truth does not always make men free—but it’s an infinitely better start than fantasy.
For more on life in the South, click here.
Lifelong journalist and editor Eric Lucas lives on a small farm on an island north of Seattle, where he grows organic hay, garlic, apples, beans, and corn.
