Blues, haints and bayous: snippets from the Deep South: Plantations and poverty

We planned a drive around plantation homes on one of our days in New Orleans. We started on the south side of the Mississippi where most of the plantations were sown with sugar-cane in days of old. The sun was shining, the houses and lands surrounding them were flat, even the stubble seemed to be shining. Some were spectacular, simply begging to be photographed, so it was easy to imagine life was idyllic in days long past.

If you were not a slave. Tho’ some slaves must have have enjoyed their work, even so. Antoine, at Oak Alley Plantation, for example, was an excellent craftsman. Renowned. He was responsible for grafting a variety of paper shell pecan tree bearing a nut that was able to be cracked by hand. His trees were planted here, and far and wide in plantations elsewhere in Louisiana. He must have been proud. We would stop for a photo, oftentimes, when we came across a pecan plantation throughout Louisiana. They are lovely still. Likely thanks to Antoine's successful pecan.

Oak Alley Plantation is named for its line of glorious live oaks, a double row of 28 of them. They were planted in the seventeen hundreds and were noticed and recorded by monk travellers soon after that, so stunning were they even then. The architect of the new plantation house built in the 1830s was inspired by the alley of oaks to design the house with 28 tall columns, repeating the pattern. It is one of the most photographed sites in America.

Tucked away under a tree in the back, by contrast, is one of the slave huts. Two families would have sheltered in such huts. Today a tree is there shading it. I hope there was a tree in those days as the corrugated iron roofing would have been no protection after a hard hot day slashing sugar canes.

We moved on to Laura Plantation, a typical Creole plantation house on stilts, without a hallway, where you enter one room via another. Here on a 12,000 acre sugar cane, pecan, rice and indigo property there were some 69 slave cabins, with 186 working slaves. There was a communal kitchen, water wells and an infirmary. It paid plantation owners handsomely to maintain their slaves health. To that end Laura also had chicken pens and vegetable gardens. And live oaks as shade.

We stopped for lunch further down the road in a grim little town called Gramercy. The ladies at the local bakery spoiled us with their lunch special of shrimp over rice and a chocolate chip cookie. Their bakery made French bread that we could have taken away by the ton: a first. They were amused by our accents and made us say their names aloud so they might laugh. We happily obliged. They were delightful.

Their downtown was not. Gramercy has some big business in its surrounds — a massive state-of-the-art sugar refinery, for one, but still, one in five folk, in this town, live in poverty. Some of their accommodation is little different today than conditions two hundred years ago.

After lunch we crossed over to the north side of the river and visited some of the properties there. One that stood out was San Francisco for its 'steamboat gothic' architecture. It really is quite eccentric and the colours accentuate that. It, too, is on stilts, to catch the breeze, and it too, opens room to room, Creole style.

All its plantation landholdings and slave quarters have been gobbled up by massive petroleum gas refineries. We could barely photograph this plantation house without their intrusion. This side of the Mississippi is completely ugly now, a never-ending skyscraper mess of mile upon mile of rust coloured cranes, metal tanks, towers and rigs pocking the shoreline. Scarring it forever.

Making a fortune, no doubt. Though not much of anything is rubbing off on the surrounds.