Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans ed. by Laura Kilcer VanHuss

Abstract

Reviewed by: Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans ed. by Laura Kilcer VanHuss Perry Carter Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans. Laura Kilcer VanHuss, Editor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2021. x and 243 pp., ills, notes, index. $45.00 cloth (9780807174791). Before beginning this review, I need to state for the sake of transparency that while I do not personally know Laura Kilcer VanHuss, two of the people she cites in her introduction, David Butler and Stephen Hanna, are colleagues of mine. For five years we worked on a project that examined tourism at River Road plantation museums, one of which was Oak Alley Plantation, where Kilcer VanHuss works as a curator. This edited volume can be summarized as a deconstruction and a re-narration of the southern plantation myth. Put plainly; it is not Gone with the Wind. It is its antithesis. The nine essays center around yet counterpose themselves to Marie Adrien Persac’s map/painting Norman’s Chart of the Lower Mississippi, an 1858 hand-painted map showing plantations bordering the Mississippi River from Natchez, Mississippi, to New Orleans, Louisiana. Replicas as posters can be purchased at most plantation museum gift shops in the New Orleans region. Norman’s Chart is a conveyor of the plantation myth. A myth of a genteel landed aristocracy of 19th-century entrepreneurs and their families living a life of luxury on their estates. But, the enslaved are missing from this narrative. Those who, through their coerced labors, made their enslavers’ life of luxury possible. In this volume, part of how the plantation myth is deconstructed is by de-conflating the master’s house (his mansion, the Big House) and the plantation. The master’s home is the front face of an agro-industrial complex powered by enslaved labor, the actual plantation. At most plantation museums today, all that remains of the plantation is the master’s home. The true creators of the plantation are effaced. These essays examine various aspects of the plantation. The chapter by Laura Ewen Blokker scrutinizes the architecture and built environment of the plantation. She notes that Louisiana in 1860 was the state with the highest concentration of enslaved persons — 48.4 percent. Accordingly, a large portion of Louisiana’s built landscape was occupied by plantations. Suzanne Turner, in her chapter, interrogates plantation landscapes. Here she notes that instead of “moonlight and magnolias,” that “a series of landscape-altering interventions transformed what was essentially forest and wetlands into a managed agricultural entity, one that required tremendous financial investment, primarily in the form of enslaved labor” (50). [End Page 360] The chapter by Charles Chamberlain traces the political power of the planter elite and the role it played in the aftermath of the 1811 German Coast Slave rebellion, which up to that time was the largest slave rebellion in the United States. Creole planters such as Noël Destréhan and Jacques Villeré used their increased status from the trial (if it can be called that) of the rebels to run for political office. In a unique chapter, Christopher Willoughby describes 19th-century medicine/race science on the plantation. He shows how the pseudo theory of environmental determinism was used to justify the enslavement of Black people. He also shows how the toils of the plantation broke and debilitated Black bodies. Willoughby has some great sentences in his essay like this one on the spread of cholera: “While physicians during this period often saw cholera as the product of the local environment or personal sin, the disease was undoubtedly imported in the bowels of agents of commerce” (114). William Horne writes about the plantation as a base of Black power during the reconstruction period in Louisiana. Former enslaved people’s networks of kith and kin forged through subjugation created a formidable political activist movement during reconstruction. They were so successful that white supremacists in the state had to resort to violence to suppress them. This violent suppression was pinnacled in the Colfax massacre of 1873, where 60 to 100 Blacks were murdered. The massacre effectively ended Black political participation in Louisiana for 90 years. The power of visual imagery is the...