:: Stacie Evans
Black in the South
I spent my hard-earned money to send myself to Louisiana. New Orleans. Yes, for Mardi Gras, but mostly to visit Abigail and her husband Patrick who are living in Thibodaux. It wasn´t my first trip to or through the South. Years ago I drove from Florida to New York and went, more recently, to visit Abby when she was at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
The Florida-New York trip was with a boyfriend, and I was too distracted by him to pay truly conscious attention to the fact that I was in the south. I remember being surprised by the number of pickups with gun racks . . . and by the number of men who actually had red necks. I remember buying a postcard in South Carolina of the whitest, blondest little girl I´d ever seen holding a boll of snowy cotton. Over her head were big, proud letters spelling out "Southern Gold" . . . I was never sure if that referred to the white child or the white cotton. I remember being happy when the drive ended.
The Tuscaloosa trip was much more about "going south." All those Confederate flags . . . To say nothing of the surprise and shock of realizing that I had unwittingly integrated several of the restaurants Abby and I went to . . . I even had an unpleasant run-in with an Alabama State Trooper. I capped the trip with a tour of the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham. Which was WAY heavy . . . but not nearly as heavy as walking outside and realizing that so much of what I´d seen in the museum had happened right where I was standing . . . the church where the four girls died was right across the street!
Side by side with all the weirdness, though, were plenty of things that made Tuscaloosa--and my excursions to Mobile, Gulf Shores, Aliceville and Eutaw--a great trip . . . But for all the things I was enjoying, for all the great people and good times, there were plenty of troubling things, too. It just seemed so strange that I had made such an effort to take myself to the Deep South. Yes, Abigail was there, but was that a good enough reason? If she had gone to school in South Africa under apartheid would I have gone? Yet there I was in Alabama . . . and the knowledge of where I was was sometimes oppressive, weighing on my head like an anvil.
After that trip, Abigail, Patrick and I made tentative plans to do a History of the Blues Tour. We would follow a loosely sketched path taking us to such sites as Muddy Waters´ birthplace and Robert Johnson´s grave. I was in love with this idea, excited with the planning . . . until I began to think hard about it, until I began to see it on a map. I would be driving through a part of the country that terrified me deeper than I was able to articulate. Everything in me has always told me not to go to Mississippi, and yet I was planning to take myself right there . . . and I´d be driving in a car with my two white, Jewish friends . . . it was too Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman for me, even for 1998. I didn´t go on the tour.
: :
Somehow, even with all this advance mental planning, I wasn´t prepared for any real "I´m in the South" reaction on my New Orleans trip. Everyone talks about New Orleans as if it´s somehow "other" than the rest of the south. And it´s true that, because southern Louisiana is so Catholic, it is very different from other parts of the south, but it´s still the south. Thanks to reading James Gill´s Lords of Misrule, which is sub-titled, "Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans," I knew there was plenty of ugly history in Louisiana, but I still wasn´t really prepared. I was prepared for the de facto segregation of the New Orleans public school system and the old-line Mardi Gras krewes. I wasn´t prepared for things like plantation tours that glorify the halcyon days of the antebellum south. I wasn´t prepared for the statue in Baton Rouge--erected in 1927 and, though relocated, still standing today--dedicated to "the arduous and faithful service of the good darkies of Louisiana."
: :
The plantation tours were the most surprising for me. I mean, I know there are tours of other terrible things. Concentration camps, for perfect example. But those are different. They are open to the public so we can go and put our hands on horror; they serve a "lest we forget" purpose. They are not there to make us long for the return of the Third Reich. The plantation tours aren´t about pain. They are about stately homes and beautiful women and mint juleps and fabulous antiques and courtly manners and manicured gardens and oh-don´t-you-wish-you-could-live-like-this.
There´s a relatively new tour, at the Laura plantation, that has caused a real stir along the River Road. The guidebooks and the locals all mention it as a place to go, saying the Laura tour is so different from the others, that it gives a more authentic picture of plantation life. The guidebooks even claim that the tour gives an idea of the slaves´ perspective because slave narratives were used to piece together the story of the plantation. This "more realistic" picture of slavery comes with the purchase of a ten-dollar admission ticket. Ten dollars is steep, and for a plantation it seems particularly high . . . I couldn´t help but feel that, as a descendant of slaves, I should have been let in for free. But I paid my ten dollars . . . and proceeded to be frustrated, angered and depressed by the tour.
The Laura tour is different. The guides aren´t white women in Scarlet O´Hara costumes. Instead, our guide was an older black woman . . . which pleased me but was also like getting my tour of Tara from Mammy. Our group was quite large and, after fifteen or twenty minutes, we split in two. Half went off with an older, sort of professor-y white man. Abby, Patrick and I chose to stay with Mary--our original guide--convinced that she was the secret to hearing more of the rumored slave perspective. It made sense: black people giving plantation tours must have some dirt to dish, must have stories to tell that the ladies in the hoop skirts would studiously avoid.
At one point Mary told us that because Laura was a Creole plantation, only French was spoken in the house. Strangers were greeted from the top of the stairs. If they said hello in French, they were invited to join the family inside. If they spoke English, they conducted their business on the steps. Mary asked if anyone spoke French, and I raised my hand. Now, this is ME we´re talking about, and Mary certainly wasn´t blind. She pointed to me and said to the group, "If we were living back in those days, she would be the only one welcomed into the parlor to sit with the family." Yeah, I don´t think so. I mean, that´s not even funny. Why pretend we don´t know where we are, what we´re talking about, or what happened here? I know she´s got a script to follow, but I wanted her to amend it. I wanted her to say: "Well, if she were white she´d have been welcomed into the house . . . "
We were told that the man of the house once took great pains to make sure a particular slave and her child weren´t sold off the plantation . . . "Well, you see," Mary explained, "that slave was his mistress and that was his child." His mistress? His MISTRESS? This is just the sort of oh-we-daren´t-say-the-real-words thing that pisses me right off. I´m sorry, but I can´t buy all that "love-relationship" crap we get fed. (Who can´t see that slanting the Sally Hemmings story keeps Thomas Jefferson a blameless, palatable founding father?) Can we please say what was really going on? We´re talking about rape--over and over and over. But that story was clearly supposed to be another outrageously open and honest thing that you´d never hear on the other tours. (I could only handle the Laura tour, so I have no idea, but I´m guessing that most of the other houses choose not to mention slavery at all. Tour guides as mock Scarlet O´Haras are all fine and well, but I have to believe someone would protest if there were mock slaves on hand to be ordered about, auctioned off, whipped.)
What else did Mary tell us? We were told about the shack that was used for breeding slaves. It was meant to shock us. "Can you imagine?" Mary asked. Well, of course we can imagine! If we can´t imagine, there is something so seriously wrong with our understanding of American history that a single plantation tour isn´t going to help us. There was a story about a slave whose face was branded with his owner´s initials because he had tried to run away . . . but it wasn´t an open door into a discussion of the treatment of slaves. In truth, the story wasn´t about that slave at all, but was meant to introduce us to Laura, the good-hearted little girl for whom the plantation was named, who was horrified by what had been done to this man. And there was the story of Nina, originally the head cook, who was eventually given the luxury of her own kitchen in which she´d have to cook only for the retired matriarch . . . as long as she built the place herself. More fantastically, we learned that 200 Senegalese slaves built the house--really well and in 11 days, no less--and that they had been bought specifically because the Senegalese were famous for being good architects and builders (so perhaps building her own kitchen wasn´t as hard for Nina as I imagine).
These stories seemed to be the whole of the "slave perspective." I´d be curious to read the narratives that are rumored to have informed the Laura tour. Ok, so we heard a few bits and pieces, and there was even a plywood figure of Nina so we could put a face with the story. But do all of these things really add up to any kind of "perspective"? I guess we wouldn´t have heard some of these things if we had been at Oak Alley or Madewood, but what really did we hear, what did we learn? So little of the scraps we were thrown touched the lives of the people who worked that land, built that house. And that rankled. Laura is using the "slave stories" angle to bring in the tourists. The house is less spectacular than its competition, so maybe it needs that hook. But isn´t anyone else troubled by the fact that we come to hear slave narratives and get Mary trying to shock us by telling us that plantation owners used to breed slaves? I almost have more respect for the plantations that focus only on their grandeur and beauty, on their antiques and the fab costumes the guides get to wear. They bypass the itchy problem of slavery by ignoring the existence of their slaves altogether. Problematic and galling--naming their tour packages things like "Romantic New Orleans" and "The Good Old Days"--but maybe better than using the slaves to bring in tourist dollars. Problematic, but at least there was nothing about their advertising that suckered me into a visit.
Several of Laura´s slave cabins have been preserved and moved close to the house. They aren´t part of the tour but are available for viewing. Mary discouraged us from taking a closer look. There was nothing to see, she assured us, and the ground was muddy. Only four of us braved the slightly damp trek. The cabins are, surely, the most tangible bit of "slave perspective" at Laura--though not, it turns out, unique. San Francisco plantation in Garyville has at least one cabin on show, and Evergreen plantation in Wallace has twenty-two . . . all of which are talked up in the guidebooks and, apparently, particular attention is paid to including them in the tours.
I walked away from the main house, past the tiny garden, across the wet grass. Laura´s cabins are spread over a small "L" at the far end of the house´s large yard. All are raised on bricks and sit a few feet off the ground. They are shallow, grey, totally open--no shutters, no doors, no real dividing walls inside. They are so abandoned, so forlorn, so dead held against the loving restoration up at the main house. Not that it would make sense for them to be carefully renovated. How crazy that would be, how unreal. But seeing them like this--uprooted, labeled for the tourists--is unsettling . . . as if, even now, the people who lived here are worthless.
I wanted and didn´t want to take pictures. It seemed base, somehow. But I wanted a record, something to hold in my hand. I thought they would disapprove, the people who had lived there. But surely my desire to hold them was less crude than the current owner´s desire to keep earning off them. My photos don´t give me what I was looking for, what I wanted to take away, what I touched there, the pain, the connection. The cabins look as I described them--dead, abandoned, sad--but so does Laura itself. I didn´t look for long. Couldn´t. The cabins were both unreal and too real all at once. I took my pictures and walked back.
Wrapping the whole experience with a neat bow--because I guess just walking through the site of something awful isn´t enough--we had the wonderful news that soon there will be a BED AND BREAKFAST at Laura! Yes, really. And I´m sure it will do wonderfully well. I just can´t imagine what pleasure anyone will get out of sleeping in such a place. It´s as disgusting as opening a spa at Dachau or Treblinka. But people will go. Of course they will. There are B&Bs in other plantation houses, and they do a fine business. So of course people will go.
Which brings me to the other people on the tour. I know why I was there. But they all came in on a sightseeing bus. No way did they drive so far from New Orleans just to go to Laura. Surely those people were doing the circuit of River Road plantations. I wanted to get in everyone´s face and ask why, ask what they thought they were seeing. Why do white people go to plantations? What are they looking for? That isn´t fair, of course. The desire to see pieces of your past, to hear true stories about slavery isn´t the personal property of black people. But there is something suspect in the success of the plantation tours, in the numbers of people--almost all of them white--who flock to see these places, who crowd in on each other to listen to Scarlet talk about the glory that was Tara.
I had a better reaction to being at Laura than I thought I would. I wasn´t sure I´d be able to go at all. I have painful, physical responses to places like that, even to reading about atrocity. When I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee I was sick for days, angry and crying at home and in public. I wasn´t sure what being on an actual plantation would do to me. I didn´t freak out . . . not in the way I had feared, but I was too upset to speak. After we left, I had SO much to say, so much I wish I had said during the tour, but I know if I had tried, I would have lost it. I´d probably be there still, crying in some corner.
: :
I keep coming back to the slave cabins. Mary told us those shacks were in use until the late 70s when the last tenants were forced to leave. The late 1970s. People--whole families--were living in those cabins. Some had put in plumbing and electricity. Some. The late 1970s.
Maybe that explains part of what I felt. Because that connection is only thirty years old, not one hundred thirty. Right. Here is the difference in 1975 between my family scratching by in Rotterdam, New York and an equally poor black family in Vacherie, Louisiana.
Slave cabins. Lived in until the late 1970s. The late 1970s. What were those nights like? Sleeping where so many slaves had slept? Living in the shadows and sadness and dreams of so many who had come before.
: :
The Laura tour was huge and heavy for me, but there were smaller, just as telling things. All the "Black Americana" displayed in shop windows. The candy company with Aunt Jemima as part of its logo and an enormous, founding-fathers-style portrait of her hanging in the shop. The feeling I got in restaurants when we were out in the country that I was stepping over a line by coming in and ordering as if I was anyone . . . anyone white. Louisiana´s nickname is "Sportsman´s Paradise"--dead animals mounted all over the place--and I had a distinct feeling in a tiny restaurant in Cocodrie that if I didn´t finish and go in a hurry, I´d be next up on the wall. Cane fields were a distressing surprise. Too close to the past. Spanish moss I´ve always thought I´d like, but it was creepy and deadening and made me think about lynchings. The bayous and the grey-black swamps conjured lynchings, too . . . and runaway slaves lost in those murky, mossy places, tracked by dogs, killed by alligators. I was glad when the offer of a swamp tour didn´t pan out.
And there was our part-time tour guide--a New Orleans native, a friend Abigail and I made in college. She was free with advice about what to see and where to go and had a lot to say about how wonderful New Orleans was . . . except for the Tremé district. She was very clear about how we should never go to Tremé, that we wouldn´t find anything there but dead bodies because it was so dangerous . . . well, maybe it is dangerous, but so is the whole city. It´s got a frighteningly high crime rate. But Tremé is the blackest part of town. Coincidence? I wish I could believe that. She didn´t warn us about any other neighborhood . . . certainly not her own chi-chi Garden district, though that is where her car was stolen and where other friends have been mugged. There is plenty to see in Tremé--museums, Congo Square, the area that used to be Storyville, second-line parades, the Mardi Gras Indians and Bone Gangs--yes, it´s black New Orleans, but black New Orleans is a big part of what has made the city so special.
: :
For all the things that were upsetting, there were so many things that really pleased me. It was New Orleans, after all. It was Mardi Gras. There was, naturally, all the fun food. Beignets and snowballs, kettle corn and jambalaya, muffalettas and gumbo, po-boys and--most wonderful surprise of all--drive-through daiquiri stands. Crawfish are a category alone. There´s crawfish boil, complete with corn, potatoes and garlic--a revelation. And then the crawfish themselves, which go in everything. Etouffée, sandwiches, gumbo . . . though that whole squeeze-the-tail-and-suck-the-head thing was a turn-off. And the city . . . the amazing houses on St. Charles, their spectacular, cut-glass windows lit up at night, the lovely, ridiculously-slow street car that carries you past them. The way even shopping malls have dramatic, arched entrances, and everyone will tell you Popeyes serves the best rice and beans in town. Shotgun houses. Preservation Hall. The all-woman Cleopatra parade out in Houma on Lundi Gras. Finally understanding what Live Oaks are, and getting to see them everywhere we went. The long, music-filled drives between New Orleans and Thibodaux--Greg Brown, Lucinda Williams, Violin, Sing the Blues for Me, Jimmy Reed, Emmy Lou Harris, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Iris DeMent, John Jackson, and a guitarist from the Ivory Coast whose music was clearly the long lost cousin of Zydeco. And, yes, Mardi Gras--with all its over-the-top raucousness and bead-catching and costumes.
: :
Other things were just about me, not necessarily particular to a northern black person going south. All the "GOD BLESS AMERICA--WE FEAR NO EVIL" signs in front yards and along the highway. The huge billboards on the drive into town showing a black hand joined with a white in a shake of fraternal solidarity . . . against the creeping invasion of labor unions. And remembering all the things my parents told me about their lives growing up in the south. Things they told as jokes but which seemed so hateful . . . like my mother´s story about the principal in her all-black elementary school who made the children sing "Old Black Joe" every morning. Remembering that my mother´s family is from Louisiana and that somewhere in New Orleans lived--and maybe still live--the two great aunts who so hated my grandmother that they put a curse on her.
And my realization, after nearly two weeks in town, that I had pointedly avoided going to see the Mississippi. I had been only steps away from it on more than one occasion. I spent all that time down on the River Road at Laura, for example, where it was just over the levee, but somehow my back had always been turned, my eyes had always had somewhere else to look. I´d had no choice but to see Lake Pontchartrain--it was part of the scenery between Thibodaux and New Orleans--but I had avoided the river. That river.
Mississippi again. That feeling. Even, clearly, about the river. As strange as this may be, it isn´t all that surprising. There was the failed History of the Blues tour. And before that, during the Tuscaloosa trip, Abby suggested some detours into Mississippi. I passed. And now, here in New Orleans, Abby wanted to take me to see some beautiful town or some lovely something in Mississippi. She insists that Mississippi is scenic and interesting. She seems as determined to get me there as I am to stay away.
I did finally go see the river. On my last day in the city. At the very end of the day, Abigail and I walked out across the streetcar tracks and I had my look at the Mississippi. Of course it´s harmless. Isn´t it just a river, after all? I´m not so sure. It lay there, completely passive, flowing easily under bridges, keeping the Natchez afloat as it waited for its next load of river tourists, reflecting the soft blue of the late-day sky. Nothing ominous. So why did I want to turn my back again and walk quickly away? I can´t begin to explain it. I only know that I didn´t want to be standing there, looking at that river.
What am I so afraid of? It has to be something beyond the obvious, something outside the things I know, the things I´ve seen. It´s too visceral to be rooted in logic. Tied, maybe, to that hunted feeling I had in Cocodrie. I´ve felt it other times, times that made even less sense. Like when I read Peter Matthiessen´s In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. So certain that I´d step out of my sunny Brooklyn apartment and into . . . I don´t know . . . danger, ambush, capture. It´s always the same. Hunted. I´ve shaken it off with the scolding that I´m overly sensitive to things I read, things I see. I eventually chose to accept a friend´s pronouncement that in some past life I was a fugitive--from the law, from an abusive husband--running.
Only here, now, do I see something that makes so much more sense. And how ridiculous that I never saw this before. Every other time the feeling has hit me, I´ve thought cops, husbands, soldiers . . . even Nazis. Never my own very obvious history, the first place I should have looked.
Hunted. Yes. Because maybe in that past life I was a slave, a slave who ran and was chased. And was caught? Is that why the terror is so strong? Is that why I won´t go to Mississippi?
: :
Crazy, right? Of course. But feeling it all the same. And feeling it as we drive past the swamps and along the bayous makes sense. They are places I would have run to, run through . . . places I´d have been run to ground by catchers. Feeling it in that restaurant in Cocodrie makes sense: surrounded by kill, surrounded by the men who´d have set the dogs on me.
Is this feeling some bizarre sense-memory . . . of a past that may be mine but only vaguely, only historically? I have lived easy when it comes to that. Had opportunities, had choices, had freedom of movement and the right to say no. But this memory hits strong, fills my nostrils like hot smoke. I will turn a corner, walk into a room, step off a train . . . and be caught. It will be that simple.
It isn´t every moment. Naturally not. Mostly I am enjoying myself, laughing, taking in all the new. But then it is there again. And there again--a heavy, thick wave of fear as I step out of Café Beignet, as I wait for the tram on St. Charles. My heart catches and I have to tell myself, actually have to tell myself, that I am fine, that no one is stalking me, that no one will spin me around by a yank of the arm and call the lie of my freedom. It is solid in my throat, this fear, so real my palms sweat.
: :
Don´t misunderstand--for all this, I felt at home in New Orleans, felt so "Yes, this is the place." I didn´t want to leave, began to think about moving in permanently. Yes. Even that. Despite everything.
And maybe that makes sense, too. The south is, after all, full of black people who didn´t leave. Because sometimes you stay even when your neighbors hate you, even when you know everything they´ve done to you, everything they could still do. Because it´s home.
But what does this mean for me, who has lived her whole life in the northeast, who has spent her whole life looking down on the south, turning her back? How can I come here and find that it sounds and smells and feels like home? No one looks at me funny if I order grits with my breakfast or syrup with my biscuits. And this must come from my parents. From my childhood spent in the north, reviling the south . . . but fed by it, too. Because, yes, my comfort food is the food they were raised on: fried eggs and grits, cornbread cereal, greens cooked with pork, rice with giblet gravy. And because, while there was the "Old Black Joe" story, there were so many others--about Juneteenth, alligators, my mother´s dizzying social life, how my father´s parents met. All of this--in my head, my heart, my marrow. Things I loved about a place I learned to stay away from.
But I haven´t stayed away. I am here, and I fit. People look in my eyes and I am familiar to them. And wasn´t that, then, the most fabulous thing I found in New Orleans? This ready acceptance of me as "one of us" by every black person I met--the flambeau bearers, people in shops and on the street, the high school dancers and majorettes in the Bacchus parade . . . even when we were way out in the country and I was clearly a city girl. I don´t always get that here at home. I get much more "sizing up"--a careful judgment of the way I dress, my hair, the way I talk. What does this mean for me?
In my heart, I am still standing behind the house at Laura, looking at those cabins. Slave cabins. Can I really be standing there looking at slave cabins? Standing there, up out of my privilege, my life of food on the table every night, no beatings, no rapes, all the books I could ever want and the time to curl up and read them.
Slave cabins. Who am I if not for these people? They made me. Just as Laura and her family up at the big house made me. Is this why I turn my back so completely? That I would rather be Athena, born whole out of God´s head--or America´s--rather than here, looking at the swamps and slave cabins that birthed me.
: :
My brain still hasn´t digested the whole thing--my going to the south or the things I´ve found there. It feels important for me to go because it´s my past, my family´s past . . . and because of the overarching importance of the south in my existence as a black person. If Abigail had gone to study in South Africa, I would never have visited her there. That wouldn´t have been the same. This is my home as surely as any place I´ve actually lived. My family: from Louisiana, from Texas, from the Carolinas. Maybe I don´t need to digest this. Maybe it´s just enough to go, enough to see some of this foreign, internal landscape, to give face and shape to the shrouded history that sleeps at the back of my brain.
© Stacie Evans 2003