“Art is a wound turned into light.”
The church in the Whitney Plantation, where statues of black enslaved children stand
“People do plantation weddings…” My jaw dropped. I wasn’t listening to the tour guide anymore. My brain had reached its capacity, unable to comprehend anything else, which usually happens when I wreck my brain over a tough finance problem. It was too baffling. Celebrating where a black enslaved person was lashed to death over not hitting absurd cotton-picking targets. Celebrating where enslaved people were beheaded for attempting to rebel against being enslaved. Celebrating where blood, sweat, and tears had been shed. It’s just wrong.
As I started my way into the Whitney Plantation, every step seemed like I was stepping through barbed wire, bleeding more and more as I went deeper. Statues of children in ragged clothes in every corner, their faces burning with despair, forever stripped of childhood innocence. I felt each kid trying to scream for help but not finding the words or more accurately, not having anyone to listen to them. Reminds me of a recurring nightmare I had where I would lose the ability to scream in times of need. The enslaved people were stripped of their voice and their freedom, constantly in shackles whilst enduring the worst physical and mental pain one could imagine.
The plantation was disturbingly quiet. It was piercing my ears. No birds chirping. No sliver of wind. Only nature and trauma. The silence was loud.
“Slave Rebellion Heads” in the Whitney Plantation, representing the hundreds of enslaved people beheaded after the 1811 slave rebellion
It kept getting worse and worse. I was walking from exhibit to exhibit, listening to the accompanying audio about the stories of trauma behind each location. I noticed something sinister in the distance: a bunch of metal circles on what looked like sticks. It was some sort of statue I couldn’t yet make out. As I got closer, my heart sank. The metal circles were depicted to be the heads of enslaved persons. The exhibits tell the stories of those beheaded after the slave uprising of 1811, the heads propped on sticks by the slaveowners to terrify the rest of the slaves. I froze. I felt my emotions shifting from shock and sadness to pure anger. Being a descendant of survivors of the Armenian Genocide, this hits close to home. The sheer evil in humanity is sometimes unfathomable. I can’t help but imagine a descendant of an enslaved person walking through this plantation, seeing the exhibit of their people beheaded. I can’t imagine the pain.
“Who has the rights to the story of a place? Are these rights earned, bought, fought and died for? Or are they given? Are they automatic, like an assumption? Self-renewing? Are these rights a token of citizenship belonging to those who stay in the place or to those who leave and come back to it? Does the act of leaving relinquish one’s rights to the story of a place? Who stays gone? Who can afford to return?”
This site once was a house, wipe out by Hurricane Katrina, located in Lower Ninth War of New Orleans
As I walk further into the plantation, I can’t help but think of the role locations play in history. The Whitney Plantation will never be anything other than the stories of the hundreds of enslaved people mentally and physically abused to subservience and death. As much as one tries to forget, the silence is deafening. The significance of location in stories is a common theme throughout The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom. Throughout the book, Sarah wrestles with the concept of memory in a place. She wanted to forget the memories of the Yellow House, the worn-out home the children were often embarrassed by, where they had to experience a lot of hardship. But when she sees the house destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, she is perplexed. Her brother walks into the frail house, searching for the bits of memory that the hurricane had wiped out. Over the course of the novel, Sarah leaves New Orleans but ends up settling back in her hometown, pulled by memories of the Yellow House, despite the destruction of its physical structure. As much as a place gets changed by outside influence, stories get engrained in places. The plantations where people have weddings will always be the plantations where innocent children, women, and men were brutally abused into servitude and killed. The memories will never die down.
“I did want the Yellow House gone, but mostly from mind, wanted to be free from its lock and chain of memory, but did not, could not, foresee water bum-rushing it.”
A house affected by Hurricane Katrina in the Upper Ninth area of New Orleans
The day before visiting the plantation, we watched 12 Years a Slave, a movie about Solomon Northup, a free person of color who was forced back into slavery for a period of a few years. Slavery is not only characterized by the mental and physical abuse endured by the enslaved, but the years completely erased from lives. Solomon Northup is a classic disturbing example. The period of years he was forced into slavery represents the years stripped from him as a husband, as a father, and as he later finds out after he is freed, as a grandfather. In the powerful scene when he returns home, his little kids have grown into adults, in the blink of an eye. His daughter has gotten married and has a child, a child she has named Solomon Northup. Tears uncontrollably flowed down my face. Solomon represents the thousands of enslaved people stripped of these memories, stripped of opportunities, stripped of love and every other positive emotion. These are years Solomon and people like Solomon never got back. The memories that burned into history, burned into sites like the Whitney Plantation. Frozen memories stripped of life.
The black trauma did not end with the abolition of slavery. As we have seen in our study of black history, the system has time and time again failed African Americans. The legacy of slavery was continued through the Jim Crow South and sharecropping. Moving into the 2000s, in New Orleans East where The Yellow House was based, many houses destroyed by Hurricane Katrina still have not been rebuilt. This is due to deep economic and political issues of the area, such as the subpar insurance in the region that left many in desperate situations. Driving through these communities in 2024, I had to do more research to get the full story. One way the government failed low-income black communities in southeast Louisiana was by failing to replace the fragile levees near these communities, causing them to collapse during the hurricane, which inflicted immense damage and pain. The pain that persists throughout generations.
“Without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up. I was now the house.”