295 Whitney Plantation Museum

I'm Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center. A few years ago, learning about the forgotten meaning of the pursuit of happiness changed my life. When the founders wrote that famous phrase in the Declaration of Independence, they meant an ongoing commitment to self-improvement and lifelong learning. This discovery inspired me to write a book, and in my new podcast I explore the founders' lives with the historians who know them best. Plus, filmmaker Ken Burns shares his daily practice of self-reflection. Join me for Pursuit, The Founder's Guide to Happiness. Hello, and welcome to episode 295 of Ben Franklin's World. The podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of our early American past have shaped the present-day world we live in. And I'm your host, Liz Kovart. What does it take to create a museum? How can a museum help visitors grapple with a very uncomfortable aspect of their nation's past? Today, we're joined by Ibrahim Asseq, a member of the history department of the university Sheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal, an expert in the history of slavery, and the director of research of the Whitney Plantation Museum in Louisiana. Ibrahim is here to lead us on a tour of the Whitney Plantation Museum, which is the first museum of its kind in the United States in that it's a museum entirely dedicated to the history of slavery. Now, as we tour Whitney Plantation, Ibrahim reveals details about the creation of the Whitney Plantation Museum, strategies the Whitney Plantation Museum employs to help visitors grapple with a very tough subject of slavery, and lots of information about the history and development of the Whitney Plantation and about the enslaved who worked and lived on the plantation and in early Louisiana. But first, did you know that the Ben Franklin's World Listener Community on Facebook is your gateway to the brand new Listener Run Poor Richards Book Club? Holly and I started a book club last year in the Ben Franklin's World Community and we found that we just couldn't continue it as a full year activity. So Heather and Shari, who are listeners just like yourself, they decided to make a full year activity of it by starting a brand new book club run by listeners for listeners. It's a book club where listeners like yourself are really a part of the conversation. To find out more about the book club, join the Ben Franklin's World Listener Community. Visit benfranklansworld.com/facebook. Alright, are you ready for our behind the scenes tour of Whitney Plantation? Let's go meet our expert guide. Our guest is a member of the history department of the University Schech Ente Dieulp of Dakar Senegal and the director of research of the Whitney Plantation Slavery Museum in Louisiana. His research is focused on the historical cultural ties between West Africa and Louisiana and he's authored a book about these ties, Buki Fe Gombo, a history of the slave community of Habitation Heidel, Whitney Plantation, Louisiana, 1750 to 1860. Welcome to Ben Franklin's World, Ibrahima Sack. Thank you so much. You said all those names quite well. Thank you very much and I really appreciate all of your guidance on that pronunciation. Okay, the history of Whitney Plantation, which is located along the Mississippi River about an hours northwest drive from New Orleans. Whitney Plantation's history dates back to 1752 and in 2014, a man named John Cummings opened a museum on the site of Whitney Plantation with a mission to interpret the lives of enslaved African and African Americans. Ibrahima, would you tell us the story of Whitney Plantation and how it came to be a museum dedicated to interpreting the lives of the enslaved? Yeah, first of all, the Whitney Plantation was founded in 1752. The family that owned it like for more than a century from 1752 to 1867, bought it from another German immigrant. It was a Wichna family, so that plantation dates back to the 1720s. The last Hydel to own it was a lady who went by the name of Maria Azul Hydel. She sold it in 1867 to a businessman from New York. His name was Brades Johnson. He's the one who changed the name from Hydel to Whitney. So in 1999, John Cummings bought it from a chemical company from Mosa out of Taiwan and went around for consulting to learn more about the history of the place. And he found out that place was really special and he decided to give it back to the community under the shape of a museum, the Whitney Museum. I met him in 2000, just one year after he bought the place and we've been working on it since that time. So we did work on it like 14 years, building the memorials, doing much construction for innovation. So I'm not surprised for the success of the place of the museum. This is something that is new. It is the first one in the United States just focused on the history of the enslaved people. 14 years. What kind of work goes into creating a museum? For example, what research did you need to do to build the first museum in the United States dedicated to exploring the lives of the enslaved people who worked on Whitney Plantation specifically and on American plantations more generally? First of all, it is really important to have a historian or historians investigate the history of the place because you can just make up things. You can just sit there and tell general things. It was really important to know the place first, it's the history. Not only the history of the people who lived there, either masters or enslaved, but also the history of the landscape itself, the buildings. And for that you did the input of historians of architecture. And fortunately for us, before John Boarded in 1999, the chemical company that owned the place, wanted also to turn the buildings, especially the big house into a museum of Creole culture. And they did much research, they hired anthropologists from LSU, Lusina State University. And the lead researcher was Jay Edwards, who is a historian of architecture. And he did a good job him and his team writing about the architecture itself of the big house and the outbuildings, the decorations, the paintings that you see at the big house. They did some archaeology, they did much work around that place. But what was missing is really a deep knowledge of the place itself, how it was started, who owned it, who were the people who enslaved over there. So this is really important. And then when it comes to displaying all those discoveries, whatever you find out through the work of historians, you need also museum people, because it is not really easy to set up a museum. And in 2014, before we opened, we had John Cummings hired a museum person. Her name is Ashley Rogers, and she did a very good job that allowed us in a few months to be able to open the place. But before we hired her, John Cummings and his wife, Donna Cummings, went around the world, in the United States especially, in France, to see what people do in museums. We also went by our intuition, knowing that we need to get this museum right. So to tell you the truth, this museum has also the input of people who don't have any background in museum studies, any background as workers for a museum. And I think that one thing that makes Whitney really special. When you say that you needed to get your museum right, what do you mean by that? What did you need to get right? Because at the very beginning, when I met John Cummings, the idea was clear that the Whitney Plantation will become a Museum of Slavery period. So slavery, like you know, has been for a long time taboo. It is not easy to talk about slavery in this country. This country still carries the burden of that history, and people are not educated about it. People learn too little at school, so it was really important for us to base on solid facts whatever we say, whatever we do. That's why we were really serious about investigating the history and also the way to display it in a very simple manner, which will allow people who visit the place for two hours to get out of it, not angry, not feeling guilty, but feeling okay to do something. That's what I always say to the visitors who get on my tour, I always tell them if you get of this place angry or feeling guilty, that means I have failed in my mission. And really the landscape, the memorials, the way they are built, and all of that really helps them better understand the institution of slavery. And that's why I say we have to do things really right, you know. Nothing is perfect in this world, but I think we put the bar really high. You mentioned memorials, and I'm really curious to talk about the different monuments and exhibits that we can see during a visit to Whitney Plantation. But before we discuss the physical museum, would you tell us what Whitney Plantation was like in its history as a working plantation? Would you tell us about the Plantation's founding in the 1720s? Ambrose Heidel, the ancestor of all the heiders of Louisiana, he was brought over here by the French company of the West Indies, with thousands of other Germans who were recruited by the French company of the West Indies to become settlers here. There was a time when many French volunteers didn't want to go to Louisiana because many of the early settlers died. So in the 1720s, Ambrose Heidel owned a little farm downriver from Whitney in St. Charles Parish. And later in 1752, he was wealthy enough, and he moved upriver and bought the Wickener Plantation. That's another German family. So he's the one who really took that plantation to an industrial level. It was just a little farm, and then he kept buying land around it, and his children also kept buying land around the Whitney. And ultimately, the Heidel Plantation covered, let's say, 1800 acres, 1800 acres. So Ambrose Heidel died in 1770, after a 50-year career. He died really wealthy. He was really poor at the beginning, owning just one pig. But when he was able to get enslaved Africans and their children called Kayol, because they were born in Louisiana, working for him day and night, they had people who were rice growers. Because many of the people who were bought from Africa were selected from rice-growing areas because they needed to have a food crop in Louisiana that fits the climate. Louisiana is a very wet country, a lot of water, a lot of rain, flood. So they needed a crop, a food crop, that could grow in the water. So they had rice growers. They had also cattle raisers, whose specialization in Africa is cattle raising. They are called Fulani, the Fulani people. And they had also, all of those who came from West Africa knew something about endigo. And endigo was extracted from a shrub of the same name. The scientific name is endigo ferratenturia. The leaves were harvested when ripe and then processed to extract the endigo, the blue dye, that was exported to Europe and it sold very well. That's what made Ambrose Hydel really wealthy. And after his death, the plantation was under the control of his younger son Jean-Jacques Hydel, who also had a long career, about 50 years from 1770 to 1820. He retired that year and that six years later, Jean-Jacques Hydel also was able to take the plantation to a much higher level. It was under his ownership that the big house on the plantation was built in 1790, when endigo was really booming. And it was under his ownership that the tradition was made from endigo to sugarcane. And the endigo was destroyed by some kind of worms that ate the roots of the endigo. But also, endigo was phased out by a very harsh competition from other countries like India, Guatemala and also in the late 1790s, all the way to 1804, we had that revolution that erupted in Haiti. The people of Haiti decided to fight against the French and they defeated them and many French people left with their people who were enslaved and also free people of color. Most of them went to Louisiana and brought with them the knowledge of sugar making, which was so far missing in Louisiana, and Louisiana could also take parts of markets liberated by the Haitian Revolution. So from 1820 to 1840, the plantation was under the ownership of Jean-Jacques Hydel Jr. and Marcelin Hydel, his younger brother. Those are the children of Jean-Jacques Hydel, the father, Jean-Jacques Hydel Sr. So Jean-Jacques Hydel Jr. and Marcelin ran it for 20 years to 1820 to 1840. Marcelin died in late 1839 and in February 1840, his widow, Marie Azalee Hydel, bought the shares of her brother-in-law who was bankrupt, Jean-Jacques Hydel Jr. was bankrupt. She bought her shares and took control of the whole plantation by herself for the next 20 years, 1840 to 1860. She died in 1860, November 1860, and let me tell you this lady was really rich. In one grinding season, she was able to get from her sugar mills, she had two of them, 407,000 pounds of sugar, that's more than 200 tons, produced in those days with very artisanal means. It was just huge candles put on fire, they burned wood to heat those candles, and with those artisanal ways, she was able to get 407,000 pounds in one grinding season, the one of 1855, 1856. The grinding season here in Louisiana, I started early October and last until late December, that's when they go into the field, cut the cane, take it to the sugar mill, grind it and put the juice to cook on those big candles, the sugar candles, until it becomes raw sugar, brown sugar, that was exported to refineries up north, because they didn't have that many refineries here in Louisiana, very few of them. There was also a by-product of sugar called molasses, and molasses was also exported north to distilleries. So Maddie Heidel was listed among the wealthiest people in Louisiana and certainly in the United States. She was listed in a study dating back to 1860 called the Large Slave Holders of Louisiana. At one time on that plantation, they had about 120 people working day and night for the Heidels, 120 people house in only 22 slave cabins. Yeah, what about the history of the enslaved people who lived and worked on the Heidel plantation or Whitney plantation? What did your research for the museum reveal about the demographics of the plantations and slave population and how the Heidel family came to purchase and even acquire their enslaved workers? When Ambrose Hidel died in 1770, he left behind a workforce of about 20 people, most of them from Africa. And like all the plantation, most of them came from Senegal. Senegal was under the ownership of the French too. So since the company of the French service in these had a contract from the king of France to develop the land in Louisiana and also the king of France granted them the control of the trade along the course of Senegal. So his students say Senegambia, we prefer to say Senegambia, somewhere from the south of Mauritania to Sierra Leone, including Senegal, the Gambia, parts of Mali, Guinea, all the way down to Sierra Leone. So the vast majority came from that area and most of them were rice growers. The settlers in Louisiana needed a food crop that can grow in the water. The answer was rice. And until today, rice is a very important food crop here in Louisiana. Did the French know anything about rice cultivation? No. Neither did the Germans. So that expertise came from West Africa and the people who enslaved there also had all kind of skills. In 1839, at the end of the ownership, the co-ownership of Jean-Jacques Haïdel, Gignot and Marcelin Haïdel, they had about 120 people working at that plantation and house in 22 cabins, two for the domestic and 24 everybody else, including the fieldhands, who did work from can see to can see, from cannot see to cannot see, from can to can. That means from sun up to sun down, they were the majority and they were under the control of the slave drivers. The slave drivers who enslaved people themselves were called commandeurs in French, commanders. They carried bips and firearms and participated into slave hunting to the swamp. The system of slavery was a system of divide and control and slave control started within the plantation and outside of the plantation that was the job of the militia, men on horseback with bips and firearms. And you better have a permit, you better have a pass written permission by your master to justify you being out of his premises. So that was a really big plantation and ultimately the Haïdels had the control of 1800 acres, 1800 acres, that's a lot of land, running deep into the swamp from the river to the swamp on four miles deep, more than four miles deep. So all that was under the care of the enslaved Africans, like I told you most of them came from the Senegambia area, but other people were brought from the bite of Benin, some came from what we call today Nigeria and most of them were Igbo people, Yoruba called Nago and also many people from Central Africa and designated under the generic name of Congo. There was no Bateki, no Baaluba, they were just Congo. We have also people who came from South East Africa, what a long way, from the area of Mozambique, Tanzania, Madagascar, that's a long way and those people on Louisiana plantation under the name Makwa. The study of slavery in Louisiana is really interesting, we know that there is nothing like Louisiana, especially in the colonial period, where we have so much information about the people who were enslaved and the people recorded the nations where they came from and also always notarized, you know, the successions and all that is very important for the study of slavery in Louisiana. That's really interesting, why and what do you think makes Louisiana different when it comes to our knowledge about enslaved people, why do you think the French took or kept such better records about the enslaved people who lived and worked in colonial Louisiana? I don't know exactly why it is so, but maybe it has something to do with the involvement of the church, in France and Spanish colonies, usually they maintain very good records and the church itself also has its own records, but this was mandatory, people were baptized, either they came from Africa or they were born here in Louisiana and when they were baptized, the names went into the Baptist registers, when they died, their names went into their records and those are really very important documents for the study of slavery, but the official authorities also maintained very good records, every parish has a commander or judge who was also a notary public who did the inventories and they really take great attention to record in the nations, the name of the masters, the gender, the age, where they came from, the disease they carried, their skills, but also defaults like being a rebel or maroon or someone who was used to run away, so that's something really special all of the Americas into French colonies and Spanish colonies, the English did not bother too much about that, that's not really a tradition among the English colonies. Now, did your research for Whitney Plantation reveal what daily life was like for the enslaved people who lived and worked on the plantation, you've mentioned that the enslaved worked from sun up to sun down, but what happened during that big period of daylight? On every plantation they have bells, they may blow horn, slave drivers ring the bell early in the morning before the break of day, wake them up, move from cabin to cabin knocking on those doors, come on wake up, it's time to go to work, they go to work, have breakfast on the ground, later in the middle of the day they would ring that bell again for lunch break, then they go back to work until the sun goes down, they ring the bell again and take those people back to their cabin, they wash themselves, cook their dinner, they cook the breakfast too because you have to leave your cabin before the break of day, so it was work, work, work, work, work, and depending on the season you have different things to do, like during the grinding season that was really intense, from early October to late December that was the grinding season when sugar cane became the cash crop of Louisiana, that sugar mill had to turn 24 hours a day, they had to do it quick because they have to expect those cold winds coming down from Canada, you have to think about the frost coming down from Canada, so that's why it was a very intense period and at the time when people worked about 18 hours a day, 18 hours a day and very little time for a rest. After the grinding season people mostly planted new cane starting in February, food crops, they tended the animals, mended fences, they repaired houses or built houses, also maintained the levee, you see you have levees everywhere along the Mississippi River, it was really important to have those artificial levees built, there was no US Army Corps of Engineers, the levees were built by enslaved people, so it was just work, work all the time, we have people who had skills like the blacksmiths, the carpenters, the couples who made the barrels that carried sugar called hogs heads, those people may have a lot of work to do on the plantation but also they were hired out from plantation to plantation all the way to New Orleans and while there the salaries for the master of course but they could get tips, they could get to work extra hours and get paid for it and those who kept that money really tight would be able later to buy their freedom, the code noir, the black code, so the law allowed people to buy themselves out of slavery, so we have another category of people called domestics working in and around big house, they had better food, better clothes because they work around the masters and they were cooks, they washed the iron, they cleaned the house, on this pay time there were spinners, weavers, seamstresses, midwives, performing all kinds of duties that made the masters really comfortable and often times since the master law allowed the master to grant freedom to whoever he or she wanted, that granted freedom went mostly to domestic especially the cooks, when you cook for a family for decades you never poisoned the family, when it is time for the master to make the transition he would leave a line on his will saying that when I die, me and my wife Marie Joseph will be free, Marie Joseph was a cook on the Whitney plantation, the Hydel plantation for many decades when Jean-Jacques Hydel the father was the owner, Jean-Jacques Hydel died in 1826, he's who I've died before him but in 1827, one year after the death of Jean-Jacques Hydel senior, Marie Joseph was freed along with another domestic slave called Celest, one thing I would like to add, besides working so hard for the wealth of the master for his comfort, it was also the duty of these people to entertain the master, if you go to the Whitney plantation in the big house we have displayed a banjo on African banjo, just to demand people it's what they do these to entertain the master too, they will be there singing and dancing, whenever the master had visitors from the north or from Europe or during the holidays like Christmas, like Easter and I would like to finish by telling you there is not much vacation in slavery, they may have a week after between Christmas and the new year eve but after that you have to go back to work, in addition to something that was really special about Louisiana, it was a tradition, it was not over written law, the man who cleared the land may get a piece of land each from the master toward the swamp and once you have your piece of land you grow your own crops, once you make those crops you deduct your food and you sell the surplus to the master to buy clothes and shoes, the only obligation of the master is to give you a barrel of corn on the cob every month, if you don't get that from your master you would get like rations every week and also they buy clothes for you for the summer and clothes for the winter, it is usually two pants two shirts and maybe a coat during the winter and shoes but those things are worn out especially the shoes and many people who once they went bare feet and how do you have time, when do you have time to work on your own plot of land, it was against the law to make them work on Sunday except when there is so much work pressing like during the grinding season, so you work on your own land Sunday but also during the week if the work is not that heavy you may have the permission from the slave driver to go on your own land work there like one hour or two hours before the break of day, I have seen testimonies from former slaves telling how their father used to work at night on his own plot of land to the moonlight, I'm glad you brought that up because I was curious about when the enslaved would work their own land because when you consider their days they were just filled with so much labor on the plantation, now you mentioned earlier that during the grinding season an enslaved person might work 18 hour days, what did all of this intensive labor mean for the domestic lives of the enslaved people, was there any time for the enslaved to form any sort of domestic life or social life with friends and family outside of work? On Sunday, the day of the Lord, that's when they do much washing and taking care of the fuels and the ladies always had some gardens around the slave cabins, in the iconography you see children playing around and usually at night if they're dinner they can gather tell those tales storytelling at the time at night, but also what I have noticed through the testimonies of the enslaved people themselves, there was a lot of life going at night when people snuck out of their cabins and went into remote areas on the plantation to sing and dance and perform their own African originated rituals, but if you do that at night when you are supposed to sleep and be fresh the next morning, technically you are constant as a maroon or runaway and you could be punished for doing that. Now earlier you mentioned all the different places in Africa where Whitney plantations enslaved people came from and you noted the many different skill sets and sets of knowledge that these enslaved people brought with them from Africa to Louisiana and after we take a moment to check out a new podcast, I'd really like for us to talk about some of the different ways that these very different African and African-American cultures intermingled. You may have learned that the Emancipation Proclamation in Civil War Union victories ended slavery in the United States, but so much more went into abolishing slavery than battles and declarations and freedom meant more to black people than eventually being paid for their labor. Ceasing Freedom is a new podcast from Virginia Public Media or VPM which focuses on the agency black people exercised to define what freedom meant for themselves. In Ceasing Freedom you'll hear how black Americans fought to liberate themselves during the Civil War and how they made freedom real by organizing for equality and justice during reconstruction despite every attempt to violently suppress their actions. You'll also hear how black Americans went about accomplishing these feats in their own words. Ceasing Freedom presents these stories through the lens of lived experience drawing from letters, diary entries, autobiographies, and more to showcase voices from United States history that have long been ignored. You can find the Ceasing Freedom podcast at CeasingFreedom.com and you can subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. Ibrahima, would you talk about some of the different ways that African and African-American cultures intermingled in a place like Whitney Plantation and how this intermingling may have impacted the development of life and work on Whitney Plantation and more broadly in a place like Colonial Louisiana? When you think of slavery, think of skills first. And if you read the book of Gwendolyn Midlow Hall, Gwendolyn Hall really investigated, you know, the skills those people brought over here. They really built the economy of this country and also defined its culture too. That's why today we still talk about the Louisiana Afro-Crayol culture. Really, really interesting. People came from all over Sub-Saharan Africa. Many of them, especially those who came from Senegal, they spoke mutually intelligible languages. But all of them who came from West Africa, all the way to Central Africa, even if they didn't understand each other directly, they had a lot in common. In fact, most of them belonged to a family of languages called Niger-Kongo, and it was very easy for them to start a new language called Kail. And they use African words, Native American words, French, Spanish words. All of this was melted into the African grammar. So communication was not a problem at all. And that allowed also African culture to survive along this river. And now rebuilding the culture was easy too. The dialogue of cultures was easy for the African because they came mostly from area, they had like the same system of beliefs. It was easy for them to rebuild their religion and also to hold on to their folk tales and their food ways. So Louisiana is a very interesting case study on the building of what we call the Afro-Crayol culture. It also involved the music, food ways and all of that. I can tell you more about it if you want. Yeah, would you tell us more? At the Whitney Plantation, we insist a lot about culture because the study of slavery, the history of slavery is not only the history of deportation from Africa, the history of the middle passage in the hold of those boats, hard labor, mistreatment on the plantations. We need to go beyond all of that and see how these people not only build the foundations of the economy of this country, I'm not talking only about Louisiana, I'm talking about the whole United States, how they build the foundation of the economy of the country, but also help define American culture and identity. In fact, if you look at American culture, it is so vibrant outside of the United States. And what makes your culture so attractive has something to do that was born on these plantations. And Louisiana has a very special place in it. When we think of food ways, people travel to Louisiana. There are so many tourists who come here every year to have a taste of the culture of the food. They eat gumbo, jambalaya, crawfish, atrophy, couscous, black eyed peas and all of those things. I think two years ago, I heard about a chef in Tokyo serving gumbo in jambalaya in Tokyo, a Japanese chef. If you look at Louisiana, those music called American classical music, really born here in America, those music were born along the Mississippi River. Like when we say blues, jazz, rock and roll, zydeco, all that was born in Louisiana. And how many blues festivals you have outside of the United States? How many jazz festivals you have outside of the United States? The culture is everywhere, including rap, hip-hop and a lot of that. I think that's really important to teach our children how these people built the economy, but also how they defined the culture. That's what will make it interesting and have most Americans be appreciative for black people. Today, white supremacists see them as a burden for America. They even say they should not be here. People are being shot like gaming in the streets of America. We still have mass incarceration going on. Jim Crow is not totally dead in the United States, but the people who promote all that against black people are mostly white supremacists, racists, and nobody was born a racist. We need better education for all children of America. Education is a keyword for reparation that will involve, of course, a lot of money and economic empowerment for black people. Because since the abolition of slavery, there was no reparation whatsoever. And America needs to fix that. And the Whitney Plantation is designed for that. When you get to the Whitney Plantation, you hear about the horrible institution of slavery, but also at the same time, we let you learn and understand how the people contributed to defining what all Americans appreciate today. I think that's really important to have a holistic approach of slavery and make sure also all that knowledge generated by historians and other researchers make sure that that knowledge go into the textbook, put everything on the table for our children. They are smart people and discuss it. That's the thing that will make America greater. America has always been great. We can make it greater by allowing our children to be well educated and they will build a better America where everybody will be welcome. These days, so much of our work and curiosity happens online, whether that's researching early American history or connecting with fellow history lovers. But just like in the 18th century, when letters could be intercepted and documents forged, our digital world comes with its own risks. That's why I use Webroot Total Protection. It's a trusted all-in-one digital security plan that helps protect both your devices and your identity. Webroot offers real-time antivirus protection, a firewall, and a web threat shield that blocks malicious sites before you even visit them. Webroot also has a built-in password manager, making it easy to use and store unique passwords for all of your different accounts. 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You have the historic buildings, those we found over there, and then commence to put much money into the renovation of those buildings. We have slave cabins, original slave cabins. Unfortunately, only two have survived, but also we have bought slave cabins from somewhere else. We have a blacksmith shop, carriage house, overseers house, mill bonds, race bonds for crops and seeds and tools, and the big house. The other section is composed of memorials we built over there. So, the memorials, that's the hard part of slavery when you go through those memorials. Each memorial is built like a virtual cemetery. You will see mostly walls or plaques. The first memorial is dedicated to all the people who were enslaved on the Hydel Plantation. Names I was able to uncover from the archives of the parish, code house, the state archives in Barton Rouge on SNL, the Natural Archives in New Orleans on Poeta Street, the New Orleans Public Library and other depositories. Those were just names in all the registers. Nobody cared about them, but today when you go to the Witte, you will see them. Samba, Kwaku, those African names, you see the nations. So, we put on those walls as much as we can, like the skills, the nation and all of that. So, when you travel to the Witte, you will know that these people, you see the name of the people who suffered over there. On one side of the walls, on the ground is the people born in Africa, born in the 18th century and who came from Africa mostly. On the other side of the wall, that's the 19th century, mostly people who came from the east coast, and that was the generation of the sugar makers. When sleep, people were mostly buried in the woods somewhere. A plantation like Witte name would have a cemetery, a wooded area where they buried the black people. How can you find them? They are sleeping on the unmarked graves. Maybe one day we'll be able to find them, but we'll never be able to either identify them because there was no marking. It's unlike the Catholic Church, just nearby where you can see names like Jean-Jacques Haider, Marcelin Haider and others. The second memorial, like I told you earlier, was based on the work of Gwendolyn Midlow Hall. We downloaded the Louisiana Slave Database, 107,000 entries, names which we engraved on the plantation. We have an engraving station or workshop where the names were engraved on granite slabs, 216 slabs, mounted on 18 walls, so each wall carries 12 slabs. With those names, you see all kinds of names, African names, French names, Spanish names, American names, along with testimonies from the slave narratives that were collected in the 1930s by the Frederick Writers Project, and also pictures related to slavery. That's Gwendolyn Midlow Hall alleys. Very impressive. The third memorial is dedicated to children who died in slavery. And we focus on Saint-Gender Baptist Parish. We went into the archives of the Catholic Church and picked up a period of 40 years from 1823 to 1863. Just to see who died in the parish, it was really amazing. I mean, it was stunning to see the number of children who died in that period. 2,200 children who died in the period of 40 years, including 40 children who died on the high del plantation. Many died who were still born because the mother were pregnant. They had to work in the field from KFC to KFC. Some died of dizzy like yellow fever, malaria, cholera. Some died accidentally by burning, drowning. Some were hit by lightning in the fields because children went to work very early in their lives. They may start by curing water for their adults. And we have some testimonies of children who, at the age of 8, 10, already carried the plow, working like the men and the women. And what is heartbreaking about those children is that childhood ended at age 10. When she reached the age of 10, you are considered as an adult. They put you to the plow and they can sell you away from your mother, your father, and your siblings. So, 2,200 names of children, most of them who died before the second birthday. And the names are engraved on the granite slabs and you can read the date of death, the name of the child, the age of death, and the name of the mother. We call it the field of angels. We use also art to tell the story of slavery. In the middle of that field of angels, there is an angel made with bronze, an angel with African and female features coming down on a plantation to take a dead baby to heaven. So, you see that angel curing that dead baby in the hands. The fourth memorial is dedicated to the people who fought in the 1811 slave revolt. That revolt started on January 8, 1811. By January 12, 1811, they were defeated. Hundreds of people decided to march down the river toward New Orleans. The goal was to capture the city and maybe find a way to a free country, like Haiti or Mexico. They had much determination but not enough firepower. So, they were defeated, taken before tribunals of slave owners. Then they were condemned to death and then taken back to the plantation where they belong and executed, shot to death. They did not stop there. They were decapitated and the heads were posted on poles along the river. From St. James Parish upriver from St. John's Baptist Church all the way to New Orleans and Congo Square. Slavery was terrorism. And you know who was the leader of that revolt? The largest ever in the US? A slave driver. Remember, slavery is a system of divide and conquer, divide and control. But in time of revolution, they all get together. So, those are the memorials you see on the place. And what is really interesting about the museum is that we have a very good introduction in the church. We have a church that was donated to us by the Baptist Church across the river, the entire Baptist Church. That church was built in 1870 by freed slaves, freed men and women who put the dams and nickels together and built their own church at last. In 1999, they had finished the building of a new church and they donated the old church made with wood to the museum. So, that's why we do the introduction. We have a short video, very well done, that explained to visitors our approach to telling the story of slavery. We have the very strong pretension that we tell the story of slavery from the point of view of children. Why children? Because we use the slave narratives, like I said, collected by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s in the middle of the Depression. The Federal Writers Project was created within the framework of the work progress administration initiated by President Roosevelt to fight against unemployment. So, historians, anthropologists, all kind of skills were mobilized. People went to the communities, including black people, to collect those community traditions, memories, and that's how they found out about people who were formerly enslaved, who were born enslaved in, who were still alive. So, those people delivered their memories of childhood, because when they were enslaved, they were children right before the Civil War. So, we have also statues inside the church that represent those people who went to view in the 1930s. Not our senior people, but children. We are studies of children and we call them the children of Whitney. They are made with clay and the person who did the sculptures is an African-American based in Akron, Ohio. And let me tell you, it works. People easily understand that we tell the story of slavery from the point of view of children and that opened the hearts. And that's, I think, a very good strategy. The beginning of the two is really important. Sometimes you can have children who come over there and even others who are sometimes much agitated before they get on the two. But when they get out of the church, everybody's quiet and they follow, they follow you and willing to understand. And most of the time, even you ask them, "Do you have a question for me today?" Do you have a question for me today? Oftentimes they say, "No, they just want to listen, follow you and listen and listen." So, this is our strategy. And when we go to the historic buildings, it is mostly about social life, like when we go to the cabins. And it's also about culture, like when we visit the kitchen of the big house, which is separated from the big house. We talk about foodways. We always find a place like the slave cabinet to talk also about storytelling. Our storytelling was used as a mean of resistance. We talk about the music. We talk about culture at large when we visit those. And that's the second part of the visit. We start with the memorials and we end with the historic buildings where we talk mostly about culture and social life. What about resistance to slavery? You mentioned the Louisiana slave revolt in 1811. But what were other ways aside from revolt that the enslaved people of Whitney Plantation could resist their condition of slavery? People resisted all the time. People resisted in Africa. People revolted at slave dungeons in Africa. People revolted at sea. And when they arrived over here, they tried to escape to run away to go back home. Some committed suicide by diving in the river. But now most of them came from a very strong culture where people go through initiation, rite of passage for men and women. And the most important thing you learn from those rites of passage is how to respect for mother nature, how to protect yourself from your enemies, how to profit from the nature and use mother nature to solve your problems without hurting that nature. They teach you the recipe of life, including your own life. You don't have the right to commit suicide because life is really important. You don't have the right to kill yourself. Whatever you are confronted to, you have to be patient and overcome. So these people, these overcome slavery. They fought all the time. If not physically, they fought using their culture. Tell you the example of storytelling. They would make those stories where they make alive characters from Africa. Like Bro Rabbit, the rabbit came from Africa, lived on the plantation with enslaved people and then made it to Hollywood under the name of Bugs Bunny. They made stories where they ridiculed the master. The master would even be sitting there and listening, not knowing that they are talking about him and making fun of him. But also resistance included physical resistance. And the most important way of resistance was running away. You run away and you don't go toward the river. Some people run away and went to the river like those who run away from the Illinois country, which was part of Louisiana, take the pirogue and just go down to New Orleans. And you know that your home is closer to New Orleans and to the Illinois country. Try to find a way home. But usually when you run away from a plantation, like the Whitney plantation, the Hydel plantation, you go toward the swamp. The best place to hide. You know, you have the wilderness. It's a thick vegetation. You have mosquitoes, snakes, alligators, quicksand. Not all the slave hunters would dare to go there to hunt you down and take you back to the plantation and punish you. They grew food crops in the swamp. They fished, they hunted. They made tools using the material from the Mother Nature, like mortar and pestle to grind, grain and sassafralis, musical instruments, endigovads. And they would go also to New Orleans, travel to New Orleans. They would send one or two fellows to go there to sell whatever they have, buy groceries, buy liquor, gamble. And they killed many animals. It is amazing the number of cows these people killed. I was just wondering what would they do with all that meat, until I found out that the maroons had also like their shops in the swamp. And people go to those, to the swamp to buy stolen goods. Or maybe they would take it to places where they can meet people who are willing to buy those things, including white people, mostly poor white people. That's why they had regulations against buying stolen goods from enslaved people. But when you decide to run away, make sure they don't capture you. If you want to see someone really miserable in the world, we have to see a runaway that has been recaptured. France Code Noir, the article 32, has regulation about runaway slaves. You run away for the first time for a month, they catch you. Your punishment would be to be branded with a hot iron on the shoulder. They burn your shoulder with a hot iron shaped like the fleur-de-lis, the symbol of the old French flag. And then they cut your ears. It becomes your identity. And you know, slave traders inspect your body before buying you. When you see the marks of the weep, missing ears, they know you are a rebel. It would be hard to sell. That's why maroons were sold for a very low price. You run away a second time, they burn the other shoulder, and then they cut your hamstring. I have seen people who were hamstrung and who still run away, but you run away a third time, it was the death penalty. People resisted all the time. And of course, the summum of resistance was revolt. As you've been saying throughout our conversation, history is not always comfortable, and every nation really does seem to have at least one aspect of history that they'd really prefer to forget. Ibrahima, why do you think it's important for Americans in the United States to grapple with their slave past? And are there aspects of this history that you really think Americans need to put more effort into grappling with? Yeah, you know, there's a lot of hidden history in this country, not only in this country, but also all over the world. Hidden history. And people just like to glorify the history, and that doesn't help. In fact, if you look at the world, we have so much trouble in the world because of the manipulation of history that create wars, the manipulation of religion that create wars. We are much in trouble because we've been playing so much with religion, with history, and all of that. If you take the example of America, of course, the founding fathers are so much glorified. They were great people indeed, but they did a big mistake. When they fought the devolution of liberation from 1776 and became totally independent and free from the British crown in 1783, that was the time to say, "This is a land for everybody, no more slavery, and free all the enslaved people." But they didn't do it. Most of them were slave owners. Some of them had children with their slaves, and they kept compromising, and from compromise to compromise until 650,000 children of America died fighting that long civil war. And then they passed the 13th Amendment in 1865. We thought it was over, but it was just a new start for a new kind of slavery. It was the time of Jim Crow that lasted 100 years when black people were re-enslave under another name, the same game by different names. It lasted 100 years. And in many ways, Jim Crow was worse than slavery. That was the time of lynchings. People fought and died just to vote. I would say even these people maybe would not mind, you know, letting them, if they're civil rights, but just let them be. Allow them to prosper. They came out of slavery with skills. They could take care of themselves, but the white supremacy would not let them be. You build your business and they burn it overnight. And the most important example is the burning of the black wall street in Greenwood, in the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921, when hundreds of talented entrepreneurs were killed overnight and their businesses burned to the ground. Just because one black young man was accused of harassing a woman, and it was not true. So with all of that, you know, what people learn at school about this tragedy, it is really tragedy. And here in New Orleans every year we commemorate the Ma'afa. That's the African Holocaust. Ma'afa means tragedy. So how much people learn about all this tragedy in school? How much people learn to allow them to understand why black people are so poor? Why they had bad schools? Why they struggle with violence and drugs? Why their children are incarcerated or massed into prison business? Why their children are being killed like game in the street of America? All that is rooted in the history of this country. But you know America had to solve this problem and the best way to do it was to allow this generation to learn about it. If you don't know a problem, how can you fix it? We have a saying, "But home in Senegal, truth is like fire. You may choose to sit on it, but not for too long. You better solve the problems hidden in history hurts." Now we should jump into the time warp. This is a fun segment of the show where we ask you a hypothetical history question about what might have happened if something had occurred differently or if someone had acted differently. Now as Ibrahim mentioned earlier, in 1811 there was a great slave revolt along the German coast of Louisiana. At least 125 slaves walked off their plantations to participate in this event known as the German Coast Uprising. Now the uprising was unsuccessful, but it took militia units two days to quell the revolt that killed 95 people. The government of Louisiana then tried and decapitated dozens of individuals that it had felt guilty of participation in this revolt. Now Ibrahim, how might the history of Whitney Plantation and slavery in Louisiana have been different if the German coast uprising had been successful? What if the 1811 slave revolt was successful? The course of history would change dramatically. I think it would generate a general uprising all over the U.S. South and that would have changed the course of history. So they didn't win. I think they don't even think they could win that battle. Although they had much determination, they had very weak firepower, but still they kept on going. They did not go back. They knew they were going to die and they knew the only thing they will get from it for trying will be a song that will never die and people will be talking about them until the end of earth. So that's what it say and that would maybe celebrate those revolutionaries. They did something the founding fathers did. You know the founding fathers when they signed the Declaration of Independence, they knew if they failed they would be hanged. Good for them they did not fail, but these people who went into revolt failed and they had to pay the price of failure. But anyway, they left behind a song that will never die and people will always celebrate their bravery. Does Whitney Plantation have any special events or exhibits coming up that we should be aware of? Every February we have a program for Black History Month. We pick a day for the blessing of the grounds and we invite the Catholic Church, the Baptist Church and also priestess from New Orleans. So we start with a blessing from the church and then we keep on going with our African-based rituals and we go from memorial to memorial to the slave cabins. We then go to the big house and it has a lot of it goes with a lot of drumming, dancing and singing and we have the support of the Arshay Cultural Center in New Orleans. The Arshay Cultural Center is the heart of the Black community over there. So they have drummers, dancers and all of that and every year we hire Black priests from New Orleans who lead the procession. The other thing is during Juneteenth we have also celebration at the plantation, the celebration of freedom and also we have a good program for Juneteenth too. So we are just going into a new phase. John Cummings will donate the plantation to a non-profit organization we have already created, the Whitney Institute. We'll be able to raise a lot of money and maybe hire a producer to start a festival on that plantation, a festival that will happen every year and where you'll have people performing, African people, European people and people from all over the world who like blues, jazz, zydeco, rock and roll and have them perform over there on the Whitney Plantation and that festival will go also with food, the exhibit of artifacts and things like that. That's for the future but right now we have Juneteenth and Black History Month. Now if we still have questions about Whitney Plantation or slavery in Louisiana, how can we get in contact with you or someone on your staff? When you go on the Whitney Plantation website, Whitneyplantation.com, you have our contacts over there. Fantastic. Ibrahim Esek, thank you for spending time with us today and for taking us through the history of slavery in early Louisiana and the Whitney Plantation Museum. Thank you so much. The study of history is not always comfortable nor should it be. History is primarily the study of human societies. It's the study of people, actions, decisions, interactions and behaviors. Mostly, history is the study of who we are and how we came to be who we are as a people. And as we know, humans do amazing things. They make scientific discoveries, discover new places, found nations and do all sorts of work to better the world around them. Of course, as we also know, there's a flip side to this. Humans do amazing things and they do horrific things. They start wars, commit atrocities and enslave one another. The past is the past and we can't change it. But by studying the past, we can better understand how and why the people of the past acted as they did, how society has developed as it has, and we can learn how we might act differently. This is in part why the study of slavery is both so uncomfortable and so important. We can't undo the fact that early Americans held other human beings in bondage and imposed a lot of control and violence in the lives of the enslaved. But we can learn from it. We can learn how and why early Americans enslaved others, why they imposed such control and violence, and we can follow how the system of slavery created views about race and systems of control and violence that we still deal with today. And this is the work that Ibrahima Sekh, John Cummings, and the staff at the Whitney Plantation Museum undertake every day. How can they help visitors better understand the United States' uncomfortable slave past? How can they help people understand how and why slavery developed and what slavery meant for the enslaved? As we heard from Ibrahima, the staff in exhibits at Whitney Plantation undertake this work with compassion. They don't gloss over the violence and terror of slavery. They try to help visitors grapple with those realities in a productive way, in a way that makes them receptive to listening and learning about the lives of the enslaved, and about the many contributions Africans and African-Americans have made to the history and culture of the United States. Whitney Plantation is a very powerful place, and I hope you get the opportunity to visit it. Look for more information about Whitney Plantation, Ibrahima and his book Buki Fegumbo, plus notes and links for everything we talked about today on the show notes page. Friends tell friends about their favorite podcasts, so if you enjoy Ben Franklin's World, please tell your friends and family about it. And if you really love Ben Franklin's World, please help support it by becoming a subscriber to the Ben Franklin's World subscription program. Learn more at benfranklonsworld.com/subscribe. Production assistance for this podcast comes from the Omahandro Institute's digital audio team. Joseph Edelman, Martha Howard, Holly White, Karen Wolfe, and Peyton Young. Breakmaster Cylinder composed our custom theme music. Finally, slavery is such a big aspect of the early American past. So what other aspects of slavery would you like to investigate more? Let me know. [email protected]