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'This was not a roit, not a spontaneous' uprising. It was a well-thought-out and disciplined attempt to bring down an oppressive dictatorship.'
Destrehan Plantation stands about 36 miles upriver from New Orleans - a French colonial mansion with eight pillars and a grand gallery facing the levee of the Mississippi in St. Charles Parish. (In Louisiana, counties are called parishes.) The building and its grounds symbolize a line of dynasties, the fortune of which turned on the toil of enslaved Africans.
With the studied eccentricity of an actress, the tour guide in a long gown, hat and veil, served pieces of a grand Southern past at Destrehan that January Sunday. Her account of the house and its lineage was studded with details about various owners, the antiques, furnishings, how meals were prepared, how the mansion was built and subsequently restored. Slaves were a minor theme woven through her remarks. They ate twice a day, lived out back and had various duties. But slaves-as-people were shadows to the tale of the French and Creole planter families. No slave dwellings or recreations appear on the grounds. Although the gift shop carries a small assortment of books about African-American history, slaves have a scant presence in Destrehan's persona. If African-Americans have won February as the month to celebrate their history, much of their story remains buried.
Selling an idealized past
The beauty of the plantation houses can be so stunning as to seem outside of time, in some aesthetic limbo without a whisper from the black people who worked the fields and big houses and suffered in ways that most of us can barely imagine. Perhaps the economic logic of tourism selling beauty, an idealized past - is why the tour guide never mentioned one of the major episodes in Louisiana history. In 1811 a trial at Destrehan culminated in 21 slaves convicted of fomenting a revolt. They were sent back to plantations they had escaped, shot to death, the bodies decapitated and heads posted on spikes as a warning to other slaves.
Two of the slaves were executed on Jan. 15, 1811, in front of the plantation house owned by Jean Noel Destrehan.
"This was the largest slave revolt in America," said Leon Waters, a New...