I’ve been thinking lately about the time I toured a plantation museum in Tennessee in 2014.
I wrote about what a strange experience it was to discover you can get a guided tour of a plantation museum in America and learn next to nothing about slavery.
Our tour guide that day was warm and friendly and he told us all kinds of stories but he didn’t invite us to discuss slavery.
His discussion focussed on the landscape, architecture, design features and fine furniture of the mansion.
We also learned lots about the greatness of the plantation owners but next to nothing about the people who cleared the land and built the plantation. I don’t think he even mentioned how the wealth, so clearly on display, depended on the forced labour of enslaved people.
Today, a handful of plantation museums in America attempt to address slavery but not without pushback. A quick scan of the comment sections of plantation tour websites reveals that while most visitors are grateful for having their eyes opened to the truth about slavery, there are others who would rather not hear about it and get deeply annoyed when they do.
They feel threatened by tours that attempt to reframe the past to include the lived experience of the enslaved peoples who worked the plantations. These visitors, overwhelmingly white, complain these tours are biased, depressing or even a racist attack on white people.
“Would not recommend. Tour was all about how hard it was for the slaves,” wrote one reviewer of the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana.
“… this was my vacation and now we are crossing plantation tours off our list, it was not what we expected. I’ll go back to Louisiana and see some real plantations that are so much more enjoyable to tour,” wrote another.
These visitors view plantation museums as romanticized tourist attractions or as wedding venues. Quickly search "plantation weddings" and see what I mean. They’re attached to the myth that says plantations were idyllic places. They want a feel-good plantation story much like the one I got when I toured Cragfont.
A change in the plantation narrative clearly upsets some visitors but so do changes to the vocabulary used to tell plantation stories.
Words obscure or illuminate the truth. They can shift the way we view the past. Some, for example, find labour camp a more accurate description than plantation. Others find it very one-sided and disruptive.
If I were to write that blog post today I would be more thoughtful with my words.
I would write enslaved Africans and not slaves (as I did six years ago) to describe the people forced to work the tobacco plantation at Cragfont.
The words enslaved Africans dignifies their humanity and remind us that slavery is something done to people. Those forced to work the labour camps were African citizens kidnapped from their homes. Men, women and children. Mothers and fathers.
The history of slavery is hard to look at. It’s unpleasant and heartbreaking and not unlike learning about the Holocaust. Germans are not proud of their history, I’m sure, but they at least seem to own it. They have as many as 24 Holocaust museums and monuments.
There are only a handful of plantation museums in America that try and address the horrors of slavery. There are even fewer completely dedicated to the subject. I hope this changes and people, especially white people, grow the courage to face the truth about the past no matter how uncomfortable it is.
Black lives today depend on it.
In terms of plantation stories that are feel-good, I leave you with this one.
