On Thursday, flames engulfed the Nottoway Plantation in Iberville Parish, Louisiana—one of many largest remaining antebellum mansions within the South. The fireplace raged for hours, in the end decreasing the 165-year-old construction to ashes. And whereas native officers mourn what they describe as a “cornerstone of our tourism financial system,” many people—particularly these descended from the enslaved—felt one thing else completely: launch.
The ancestors are talking. Are you able to hear them?
To be clear, nobody celebrates destruction for destruction’s sake. However what burned that day wasn’t simply timber and brick. It was the rotted coronary heart of a story that has too typically romanticized the horrors of slavery and the brutal techniques that upheld it.
Let’s be trustworthy: plantations are crime scenes. Interval.
Nottoway, with its opulent structure and manicured grounds, stood as a monument to wealth constructed on human struggling. Constructed in 1859 by John Hampden Randolph, the plantation was dwelling to 155 enslaved Black individuals. Their labor, their ache, their stolen lives—that is the untold story behind each chandelier and Corinthian column.
So after I see headlines describing the mansion as a “image of the grandeur and the deep complexities of our area’s previous,” I can’t assist however ask: for whom?
As a result of for descendants of the enslaved, grandeur isn’t what involves thoughts once we hear “plantation.” We don’t see elegant ballrooms or bridal photograph ops. We see sweat and scars. We hear the crack of whips. We really feel the burden of our ancestors’ chains.
That’s the true legacy of Nottoway—and of each plantation that also stands within the American South.
The fireplace that diminished Nottoway to rubble has been known as a tragedy by some, however it could be nearer to a reckoning. As crews battled flames that began within the attic and unfold all through the four-story construction, we have been reminded of what nonetheless smolders beneath the floor of this nation: a refusal to totally reckon with our previous. To mourn the lack of a plantation as if it have been a sacred relic is to disregard the reality of what it represents.
It’s necessary to notice that Nottoway wasn’t only a historic dwelling. In recent times, it had grow to be a luxurious resort, a marriage venue, and a so-called “instructional web site.” However let’s be actual—what sort of training sanitizes the blood-soaked floor it stands on? What number of of these vacation spot weddings ever acknowledged that vows have been being exchanged the place youngsters have been torn from their moms, the place individuals have been offered like livestock?
This isn’t historical past. It’s historic revisionism with a contemporary coat of white paint and a present store.
We hear quite a bit about “preserving heritage” and “respecting historical past” on the subject of locations like Nottoway. However what’s being preserved? Whose heritage is being honored? As a result of if we’re not honoring the reminiscence of the enslaved—if we’re not telling their tales—then all we’re doing is glamorizing atrocity.
And let me be crystal clear: to romanticize the antebellum South is to be utterly absent of the ache it inflicted on thousands and thousands of Black our bodies. It’s to decide on nostalgia over justice. It’s to drape horror in Spanish moss and name it tradition.
In a Fb put up, Iberville Parish President Chris Daigle wrote, “Whereas its early historical past is undeniably tied to a time of nice injustice, during the last a number of many years it advanced into a spot of reflection, training, and dialogue.”
Respectfully, reflection with out fact is denial. Dialogue with out accountability is noise.
We don’t want extra locations that “evolve.” We’d like locations that acknowledge. That title the horror for what it was. That heart the voices of the descendants, not simply the {dollars} of the vacationers.
As a result of the reality is, Nottoway by no means belonged to Louisiana’s tourism financial system. It belonged to the individuals who constructed it with their naked fingers. The individuals who suffered there. The individuals who by no means obtained to depart.
So no, I don’t mourn the lack of a plantation. I mourn the lives that have been misplaced in bondage. I mourn the continued erasure of their humanity in service of southern gentility and mint julep mythology.
Because the ashes settle alongside the Mississippi River, allow us to not be so fast to rebuild what was by no means ours to start with. Allow us to sit on this second. Allow us to take heed to what the ancestors are saying.
As a result of generally, essentially the most sacred act is letting one thing burn.
Burn, child, burn.
Not out of vengeance. However out of fact. Out of liberation. Out of the necessity to lastly, absolutely, bury the lie that plantations have been something lower than websites of American terror.
We hear you, ancestors. Loud and clear.
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