Whitney Plantation: One Hundred Seven Names

The tour at the Whitney Plantation does not begin at the big house.

It begins in the memorial field, where the names are.

One hundred seven enslaved people who lived and worked on this plantation have been identified by name. The names come from the Federal Writers' Project slave narratives, collected in the nineteen thirties when interviewers traveled the South finding men and women old enough to remember their own enslavement. They come from notarial records, because in Louisiana, under the Napoleonic Code, every sale of property had to be registered with a notary, and enslaved people were property, so their transactions are preserved in the state archives. They come from church baptismal registers, because the Catholic Church in Louisiana recorded the names of enslaved children brought for baptism. The Wall of Honor at Whitney, dedicated in two thousand fourteen, makes those names legible in stone.

The founder of the Whitney Plantation Museum, John Cummings, spent about twenty years and more than ten million dollars of his own fortune converting the antebellum site. He was a white New Orleans attorney. He said he had learned almost nothing about slavery in his Louisiana education and decided to spend the second half of his life making what he had not been taught available to others. The museum opened in two thousand fourteen as the only institution in the United States built to center the experiences of enslaved people rather than the planter family.

What that centering means, concretely: there are no tours of silver collections or period furniture. The slave quarters have been preserved. The memorial field holds sculptures by the artist Woodrow Nash, depicting enslaved children, because Louisiana's antebellum plantation records show that children made up a significant portion of the bound labor force. The notarial records document specific people bought and sold: ages, genders, estimated skills, prices paid, which family members were separated in the transaction.

Whitney Plantation sits forty-five miles upriver from New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi, in Wallace, Louisiana, in the corridor that was once called the German Coast because of the nationality of its earliest European settlers. The enslaved people who worked this stretch of river organized the largest slave revolt in American history in eighteen eleven, the German Coast Uprising, when somewhere between two hundred and five hundred men marched downriver toward New Orleans before being stopped by federal troops. That event is commemorated at the museum as well.

The names in the memorial field are not all of the names. They are the ones the records preserved. The ones the records did not preserve are the ones the system intended to erase.