On our ghost tour, our guide warns us that New Orleans is a haunted city. Ghosts are everywhere, she tells us, roaming throughout the French Quarter, taking up residence in apartments, in old hotels, in alleyways. Her stories are fantastical and sensationalized, the kind of stories you tell after dark holding a flashlight under your chin: stories about jilted lovers, vengeful murders, corpses stuffed away in trunks.
She’s right, to a degree: New Orleans is haunted. But when I think of the ghosts that linger here, I don’t think of any of the tall tales that our tour guide spouted. I don’t think of apparitions through windows or phantoms crawling on ceilings. This is a city haunted by its own dark, treacherous history.
““The historicized past is everywhere I walk in my daily rituals.””
What used to be a cotton factory in the Business District
In her memoir The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom is all too aware of the inescapable “historicized past” of New Orleans. In previous blog posts I have described how this city has a sort of immortal life; how, walking through the streets, it’s impossible not to look at all of the dated architecture without being instantly transported to times of the past.
But this has a cutting double edge; that past is rooted in racial tensions that stretch all the way back to its foundations. This is glaringly, horrifyingly apparent on our walking tour through the Business District, mere streets away from our hotel. Our walk is brief and short, lasting less than fifteen minutes, but along the way we stop again and again for Andrew to inform us that there was once a slave pen on this corner, and this corner, and this one, and here, too.
I stop counting after the first few, unable to wrap my mind around this. Every day we walk these streets back to our hotel, where we are promised comfort, privacy, beds to sleep on for the next beautiful morning in New Orleans; and, every day, we pass by these sites where people once lived in unthinkable conditions, their humanity stripped from them completely. For the past couple weeks I’ve been reveling in the beauty and the glory of New Orleans’s history, thrilled to report back to my family about all the buildings and places that have been here forever. But this history suddenly takes on its full weight, baring ugly, jagged teeth.
““When a person dies in a place they become the place and nothing is ever the same again.””
I feel those teeth sinking into me the moment I set foot in the Whitney Plantation. It is deceptively, sickeningly beautiful: ivy grows thick on winding trees, shrubs line brick pathways. Colorful birds skip by, chirping and singing, and I can’t help but think of how wrong it is that birds should sing in a place like this, as if they could know the kinds of horrors that took place here a century ago.
I feel the ghosts here in The Whitney Plantation possibly more than anywhere else. They’re everywhere, making themselves immediately present at the Wall of Honor, which bears the names of hundreds of people who were enslaved on the Whitney. I try to read as many as I can, knowing that I won’t remember them all, and this fact horrifies me.
The Wall of Honor is one of many memorials at the Whitney; the ones that stick and sting in my chest the most are the Slave Revolt Memorial, dedicated to the enslaved individuals who were killed after organizing an uprising on the German Coast of Louisiana, as well as the Field of Angels, dedicated to the thousands of enslaved children who died in St. John the Baptist Parish.
The Wall of Honor
The Slave Revolt Memorial (thank you to Alice for these photos)
These memorials are somber reminders of the past—and reminders don’t feel adequate enough. There are no memorials or reminders or words that feel big enough to capture the pain and the scale and the tragedy of the South’s enslaved history; although we try, we can never fully remember these experiences that we never lived through, and therefore will never fully understand. As I walk through the Whitney, I stop focusing on remembering, and instead I try not to forget.
William Frantz Elementary: one of the first desegregated elementary schools in the Deep South
““The mythology of New Orleans—that it is always the place for a good time; that its citizens are the happiest people alive, willing to smile, dance, cook, and entertain for you; that it is a progressive city open to whimsy and change—can sometimes suffocate the people who live and suffer under the place’s burden.””
And this is the wild, sad phenomenon of New Orleans: returning to the city, it’s difficult not to forget. Everywhere, people seem so intent on convincing you that this is the place to be, selling stuffed alligators, dancing in parades, playing live jazz throughout the streets. For a city with a history that is so entrenched in shame, there’s a great deal of pride everywhere you go. I wonder if this is almost a way of compensating for all of the tragedy, or maybe more accurately, of coping with it. Sarah Broom puts it into words far better than I can: “Everything was life and death; if you didn’t laugh you could die inside, too.”
I think back to our walk through the Garden District—one of the richer, whiter neighborhoods in New Orleans—where, despite the beauty and elegance and upkeep of the mansions, so many of the sidewalks were uneven, ruptured with oak trees whose wild, stretching roots couldn’t be contained under concrete. New Orleans is a lot like this, I think; all of its beauty is built on the roots of deep trauma and melancholy, and those roots spill out everywhere, erupting through cracks. But the people here go on building—building families and lives and communities, building on top of all of this—building anyway.