Oak Alley Plantation is a sugar cane plantation in Vacherie, an hour-ish from New Orleans. I was on the fence about doing a plantation tour because plantations are the worst, and they’re romanticized. It seems like one of those things where the people in power write the history. And the tour guide did admit that they have stopped dressing the staff in Antebellum dresses and changed the tour content to include only historic information from the plantation’s archive at Tulane University, so they’re somewhat aware of the problem. Yet no one on the property was Black, neither visitors nor staff.
And while they had a formal house tour with a guide, visitors were on their own for the slavery exhibit where they had to come up with questions to ask the on-site interpreter. Similarly, the tour guide recommended that we watch their video on how sugar cane is currently harvested but never mentioned the harsh conditions of slave-era cane harvesting and processing. (Life expectancy working in the cane fields was shorter than in the cotton fields. Sugar cane goes bad quickly, so it must be processed immediately, night and day without a break, and includes dangers like machetes, furnaces, boiling kettles, and limb-flattening rollers. So cane plantations sometimes saw more deaths than births in their enslaved communities.)
The formal house tour does start with acknowledgement that the home was built by enslaved people who laid the foundation, erected the pillars, plastered and painted the walls, and even made the bricks. They also paused in the dining room to point out that while the family enjoyed a leisurely meal, the fan-provided air conditioning was powered by an enslaved child. (They didn’t let us take pictures inside the home, so I found a photo online of the dining room and the giant fan suspended above the table. You can see there’s a rope routed to the corner of the room by the window where the child would stand and work the fan.)
The oaks pre-date the house, and are an example of a monumental feat only possible using forced labor. The plantation owner wanted mature (ten-year-old-ish) trees, so enslaved people had to dig around the root ball, which was as big as or bigger than the above-ground portion of the tree, and somehow (probably with oxen) drag the tree to its new location. And they had to do it quickly before the roots dried out. It’s tricky to do once, much less 22 times, which is how many times they had to do it to get all the property’s trees up and thriving.
The house went through several owners and fell into disrepair. The final owners, Josephine Stewart and her husband, restored the house and started the foundation that allows the property to be open to the public. Stewart was the house’s longest resident, dying in 1972. She added this garden, which she could see from her bedroom window.
The plantation is 1200 acres, 650 of which are cane fields, a dozen-ish are buildings, and the rest is swamp. (This is the view from the main house to the slavery exhibit.) The weather was perfect when I was there, light sweater weather that turned into t-shirt weather, not humid, and not hot. The tour guide mentioned the heat a few times since it’s something the locals try to avoid. The main house has walls six inches thick, and the home’s third floor is not used as living space but as a way to keep the rooms on the second floor cool. All the French doors are directly opposite another pair of doors for the cross-breeze. The slavery exhibit buildings (which are reproductions on the original cabin foundations) also had doors and windows directly opposite each other.
Oak Alley Plantation is the birthplace of the paper shell pecan industry. An enslaved person only remembered as Antoine was the plantation’s gardener, and he had a gift for grafting trees. After the original pecan trees were wiped out in a flood-induced landslide, Antoine was the first to be able to propagate that variety of pecan by grafting, and Oak Alley ended up with 126 grafted trees. (The trees are gone now, and the land used for sugar cane.) The pecans started to get attention and commendation for their thin shells and exceptional quality. It’s unclear if Antoine lived long enough to see his work become a big deal.
The lives of most of the enslaved people are unrecorded. The only records kept were their first names and how much they were valued at. “Between 1836 and the Civil War,” the sign said, “over 220 men, women and children were enslaved at Oak Alley. Dehumanized and quantified like any other commodity, they appear in sales records and inventories, yet as people they have been forgotten by history.”
“This is a respectful recognition of the people on whose backs this plantation was built. For most of them, a name is all that remains of their story.”
Inside the cabins there was a table and a two-sided fire place.
There was also a collection of cots.
And there were a couple outhouses behind the cabins! Outhouses were a luxury, apparently, with most enslaved people having to use ditches or trees as restrooms. But after Emancipation, people built outhouses for themselves. The moon shape in the door was their equivalent of the men/women sign. The sliver moon (like on this outhouse) was for women, and the full moon (a complete circle) was for men.
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