Historians such as Wilma Dunaway are now establishing that slavery was a highly profitable business for the slave owners as well as for the northern banking and commercial interests that supported them. Popular culture has left behind the romantic and highly deceptive images of slavery in the last century projected by The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind to provide in their stead the realism of movies like Twelve Years a Slave and Django Unchained. Especially for those of us who have never watched Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates, there is the profound sense of shock that we realize that, in this context, Quentin Tarantino is a realist.
These strands come together on the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, the blacksmith shop of which was used as the setting for the scene in Django Unchained in which Django is tortured.
The recently restored Whitney Plantation is one of a series of plantations along the Mississippi above New Orleans. The tours of the others celebrate their white columned houses and the leisure of the White owners of those houses, their imported furnishings, their gardens and their gracious way of life. John Cummings, the attorney whose project the Whitney Plantation has been, takes a different approach, making it into a monument for the enslaved Africans themselves, their horrific lives, their early deaths.
Cummings has placed a large, now rusted, iron cage between the blacksmith shop and the big house. About six feet high and twenty feet long, it was used to display the sufferings, and often enough the death throes, of slaves bull whipped in front of their fellows and families for defiance, attempting to escape, or for nothing at all. They were left to bleed in that cage in the Louisiana summer heat, in the winter rain, in the clear line of sight from the covered porch in the rear of the second floor of the big house. One can visualize the Haydel family, owners of the plantation, the men and women, the children and their visitors, taking tea on that porch on a summer’s afternoon, talking among themselves of the doings of their relatives and neighbors along the Great River Road or about the politicians in the capitol, Baton Rouge, just across the Mississippi, while one of their slaves, perhaps one of their mulatto daughters, screams as the bull whip strips the skin from her back and she is tossed naked into that iron cage.
Each member of the Haydel family, of the families of slave owners all along the river, had a personal slave, often given to them when each—owner and owned—was a child. The slaves slept on the floor, at the foot of the owner’s bed or just outside the bedroom door. White infants were nursed by enslaved Black women, who slept on the floor next to their cradles, in some cases forming life-long relationships. White people of the former slave-owning class in the South had similar upbringings not so long ago, or may even have such experiences today. The memory of some of these relationships were (and still) viewed sentimentally by their White participants. These sweet stories are part of the myth, the ideology, of the Southern way of life. Of course they are no longer stories about master-slave relationships, and yet even master-servant relationships are not true human relationships based on a mutual recognition of equality. They are stories of domination.
The legacy wrought by slavery and White Supremacy upon black children of the Whitney Plantation still haunt their descendants (and those who claim ancestry from other slave children) today thanks to American public education.
That cage behind the big house on the Whitney Plantation, perhaps replacing one worn-out from use, was manufactured in Philadelphia. The owners of the Philadelphia iron works profited; the plantation owners gained an instrument to help preserve the Southern way of life. Just as that exchange united the North and the South in a common cash matrix, so did it and the persistent exchanges on other levels infect Northerners as well with the racism of Southern slave owners (thinking again on the popular culture level of Gone with the Wind and the like, and on the political level of the Fugitive Slave Act and continuing White Southern dominance in Congress).
The tour of the Whitney Plantation begins at a church, built by and for ex-slaves elsewhere in the region and moved to the plantation as an entrance to the lessons taught by the docents. The church contains statues of slave children, reminiscent of those created by the artist Kara Walker, standing at the ends of the pews, witnessing. In a corner there is a bust of Pope Nicholas V, he of the Papal Bull justifying the enslavement of Africans. The next exhibit, a few dozen yards around the back of the church, is a set of memorial walls with the names of those who had lived as slaves on this property and the next is a set of Vietnam Memorial-style walls covered with the names and ages of the children who had died there before their fifth birthdays.
After this there are slave cabins, that blacksmith shop, the carriage house, mule stable, kitchen and the pigeon towers, the cage, and finally the big house, with its genteel atmosphere. The tour is a form of adult education. It is a course in American history, in the sociology of the plantations, in the morality of the owners of those plantations, their influence on race relations even today.
Education is not limited to elementary and secondary grades. It begins at birth and continues throughout life. Some of it is formal, some not. It is difficult to distinguish education in the usual sense of the word—reading, writing, arithmetic; quantum mechanics and philology—from education as the transmission of ideology or as the promotion of commercial products. Proctor & Gamble spends half a billion dollars or more on one form of education: making their products known and attractive to consumers. Political parties and those paying for them spend billions of dollars on another form of education, which also has the purpose of making their products known and attractive to the people they wish to influence.
Efforts to educate White people to accept racism as natural began in Europe as early as the sixteenth century Papal Bull of Nicholas V and rapidly took root in the Americas. Those efforts have been, continue to be, highly successful. The White police officers shooting Black children have been educated in this way so that they do not think that they are doing anything wrong. The school superintendents preferentially funding schools attended by White children do not think they are doing anything wrong. The school principals paddling or suspending Black girls and not White girls for similar behaviors do not think they are doing anything wrong. They have been carefully taught.
Different lessons are taught by the Whitney Plantation.
Visitors to the Whitney Plantation leave with images difficult to get out of one’s mind: Those artfully decorated rooms in the big house. That cage. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
