Ancestral whispering: Reflecting on a visit to Whitney Plantation
A note from the author: the following contains reflections from a time in my life when I was just beginning to explore much of the work & space that I move through more deeply now. As such, I recognize in revisiting this work that some of my language has since evolved from using terms like “slaves” to refer more mindfully to my ancestors as enslaved people; similarly, binary references to gender such as “woman” that I once ascribed to without question are now held with more complexity and expansiveness. Regardless, I leave this languaging as it was when I first wrote it, a reminder of how far I’ve come, and all the places I have still to go. Ashé and Amen.
“Wear African clothes” the email said, “and bring a drum or percussion instrument.”
One of those things was easier said than done.
I made this drum once, sitting on the banks of the Red River between Minnesota and my home state of North Dakota; it was deer hide from an animal hunted by a friend of a friend who brought us the skins pre-prepared for us to drape across wooden frames (also pre-prepared for us). But nothing could have prepared us for the process of stretching and tightening the hide across the frame as the sun dried the skin of the drum and our fingers alike, blistering the latter in the process. It was painful, but exhilarating, all at the same time.
It was that drum that I knew I had to bring to Whitney.
I’d never been to a plantation before. I didn’t quite know what to expect. I’d heard there were plantations in the New Orleans area that gave tours, and seen images of grinning, alabaster skinned people getting married in front of grandiose houses I know hadn’t been built by their ancestors. I fretted as I chose my attire for the visit the night before, that the other members of my party and I were going to somehow have to defend the purpose of our visit to Confederate descendents for whom slave holding heritage was a point of pride. I worried for some reason that we weren’t going to be welcome in our “African clothes” and our plans for an “Ancestral Blessing of the grounds.”
The event I was attending was a collaboration between Ashe Cultural Arts Center, the Congo Square Preservation Society, and — I would soon learn — Whitney Plantation itself. It was the first time they’d done anything like this, but fully in line with Whitney’s mission, which is, according to its website “to pay homage to all slaves on the plantation itself and to all of those who lived elsewhere in the US South.” Owned by the Cummings family of New Orleans since 1999, Whitney Plantation has been noted for its cultural and architectural significance since the 1940s. Prior to that point it was owned by German and other European settlers connected to the Indigo & sugar trades. Within the Haydel family that originally purchased the land, each new owner between the 1720s and 1860s oversaw generations of slaves, initially from the Ivory Coast of Africa, and later, the Eastern Coast of the United States, as the slave population on the continent grew to be self-sustaining.
Some of the people traveling with my party were decendents of Louisiana slaves. Only one had direct connections to Whitney. I myself, with ancestry through the Caribbean, had no connection to the ancestors of Whitney or Louisiana. And yet I felt connected. I felt like I had to be there.
I chose for my attire that day a dress my mother had gifted me — one that she’d worn on her home island long ago. I don’t have any photos of the full dress, but if I were to describe it, I’d say the fabric was cotton, the dress ankle length with a three quarter sleeve, loosely form fitting, with vibrant and large orange flowers set against a background of smaller white and pink flowers, and olive green leaves.
“That orange is a warrior color,” said the woman who sat next to me on the bus.
There were 25 of us in all who had chipped in to charter a bus from the Cultural Center to the Plantation. A good 10–15 others met us there. The ride out to Whitney was filled with laughter and small-talk, which I found disconcerting at first, being raised in the stoic North, but I recognized its origins. We were going to commune with the ancestors, after all. Anyone who’s been to a Black funeral knows that such affairs are rarely somber.
Once at the plantation, we convened inside the church on the Whitney grounds, which was actually erected in 1870 after the Civil War, with services that were frequently attended by newly freed slaves. Something I instantly came to appreciate about Whitney Plantation was that it never let you forget where you were. Immediately inside the door of the church, life-size sculptures of Black children were seated in various pews and standing in the aisles. Their faces were young and their clothing floppy and oddly whimsical, but their eyes were piercingly empty. It was haunting. I seated myself in one of the pews amongst strangers, and gradually — in that eery way it sometimes happens as collective consciousness becomes aware of a thing about to begin — surrounding chatter drew to a close and silence wafted over the still air.
Then came the music. The director of research at Whitney Plantation, Dr. Seck, is a native of Senegal who had flown in a friend who played the Balaphon, an ancestor to the Marimba. Accompanying them both were the drummers of Ashe Cultural Arts Center and the Congo Square Preservation Society. They began in the back of the hall without announcement and proceeded down the aisles toward the altar with a degree of merriment that I think suprised even the previously merriest among us, but pleasantly so. Dr. Seck held between his hands a black scarf which he raised above his head as he danced down the aisles, almost with an air of victory, while members of the congregation joined in too, pulling shakers and small djembes out of pockets and purses, or clapping to join in the fray, arms over their heads in the same fashion. As I had recognized before, it dawned on me more fully then, that this was, ultimately, a celebration. A way of announcing our presence to the ancestors, to say “look here, we have arrived. See how we come to you of our own volition, slaves no more.” My drum stayed in its case for the moment, but I joined in the clapping and let out a few yips in spite of myself. Dr. Seck kicked his shoes into the air, gleefully.
The ceremony that followed was a sort of mobile ritual, a combination of Whitney’s usual walking tour (except for the big house, Dr. Seck was very pointed in saying, “NO big house today”), and a memorial of song and spoken word. We paused outside each monument on the grounds raised to commemorate the slaves of Whitney and the surrounding area, saying prayers and singing songs from multiple faiths in many tongues, some of which are ancient or no longer conversationally spoken. Great effort has been taken by the plantation’s current owners to recognize every documented slave’s name, age, and skill, and throughout our ceremony, Dr. Seck was careful to point out any names of which he felt we ought to have particular knowledge. One of these was Victor Theophile Haydel, the ancestor to all the African American Haydels in the area, fathered by one of the last male owners of the original family who purchased the land. Born into slavery, he died a free man, and his descendents have been prominent figures in New Orleans entrepreneurial and political history. He is named on the plantation’s Wall of Honor, where we poured our first libations of gin to the spirits of the ancestors, and sang songs to Eshu/Ellegba (or Ellegua, depending on who you’re talking to).
At each stop on our tour, Dr. Seck, with the help of his accompanying musicians and Sister Sula (Janet Evans, a local Priestess in the Ifa tradition), would inform us of the history of each monument and make tribute to the people who were honored there. Two of the most affecting moments for me here were the offerings made to Yemaya and Ogun.
Yemaya, for those who are unaware, is one of many spiritual “mother” figures in the African Diaspora. She is regarded as a protector of mothers and children. I felt her presence strongly in the “Field of Angels” exhibit on Whitney Plantation, a tribute to all the children who lost their lives in slavery. Dr. Seck described some of the ways in which these children had died, many of them too horrific to describe here. Countless women in our party, myself included, wept openly as he talked. But then, Sister Sula passed a bag of candy around the group, and encouraged us to remember, for every tear that was shed on the earth on which we stood, there was also a child’s laughter. There was joy even in this most inhumane of circumstances. And that was worthy of remembrance too.
And so we sang to Yemaya. We sang for all the mothers who had had their children ripped from them, in life or death, and for all the mother figures in the diaspora still today for whom the effects of colonization still ring with hollow horror in our wombs. But when the lyrics ended, the song continued, increasing in speed and energy, as Sister Sula encouraged us to throw our candies into the air and let them rain down on the ground as an offering to all the children who deserved so much more than their lives on earth allowed them.
Ogun’s offering was similarly filled with vibrant sorrow and joy. This warrior spirit was commemorated at an exhibit honoring the slaves killed in the “German Coast Uprising”of 1811, a tribute rendered in the chilling recreation of almost 60 severed heads that were placed on display as a warning to other slaves in the aftermath of the revolt. Similar to the sculptures of the children in the church, each head’s eyes were piercingly empty, but none of them were nameless. At the front of a monument was placed the representative head of Charles Deslondes, the slave who had led the revolt. Dr. Seck spoke of how, despite frequent (and intentional) divides on the plantations between field hands and house slaves, cooks and overseers (or slave drivers, as Deslondes was), that in the end, all of the enslaved collaborators had to work together to plan the nearly successful revolt. The plan had been to capture New Orleans and proclaim it a free state, similar to what had been done by the slaves in Haiti. Their efforts were suppressed within a day, however, with Deslondes horrifically executed almost immediately upon capture, while his co-conspiritors were subjected to shameful trials and interrogations by slave-holding tribunals and sentenced to death by slave-holding juries.
As Dr. Seck told us all this, Sister Sula produced several machetes from the cart of supplies she’d been pulling along with our tour and drove them into the ground between the heads with a force that felt cathartic to witness. Then, as she poured rum over and around the monument, she led us in a song to Ogun that had a call and response section in it, loosely translated as “we come to honor you.” I don’t think I’ve ever sung with such fierceness in my life. My drum was fully out of its case my then, one hand carrying it, the other hand pounding a heartbeat into its flesh, and with every call and subsequent response, I felt as though I was releasing wave after wave of buried rage that I didn’t even know I had, yet somehow in this radical expression of joy because, hey, ultimately, those slave owners lost in the end. And I am the result. Me and my brothers and sisters, Black as hell, worthy of life. Worthy of joy.
“E a fe re yo” — we want the goodness of happiness.
And we will have it.
We closed our ceremony dancing in the grove outside the Slave Quarters. Mama Jamilah, who I’ve had the pleasure of taking some dance classes with at Ashe Cultural Arts Center, began the festivities, then gradually pulled woman after woman from the crowd, myself included, to join her in the circle, pulsing with the beat of the drums from our core, gathering the air with our arms and offering it to back into the sky as if to say “we feel your presence here, we embrace you and send our love back to where you are.”
The ride back from the Plantation was filled with conversation and laughter similarly to when we embarked on our journey, but I spent most of my time on the bus in silence, just processing all that had been experienced in the last few hours. I had thought originally, somewhat misguidedly, that this ceremony would be a solely solemn honoring of lives lost and devalued over time. But this was so much more than that. Like the building of my drum, it was painful, yes, but also exhilarating. All at the same time. During some of the music making at one point, an elderly woman remarked “I bet these ancestors never thought they would hear their music or see their dances performed ever again on this side of the ocean.” And yet there we were. Living, breathing, still fighting, but free-er and free-er with every passing moment.
In her closing remarks one of the Whitney staff stated that, even as a direct descendent of the plantation herself, she never learned of her history until she started actively looking for it. And once she did that, she said, she started noticing all the ways in which the tools of the masters are still at work today, in business, in education, and the criminal justice system. “That’s how the effects of slavery continue to thrive,” she said, “the system evolves to keep us beaten down, but if we don’t learn how the system was built in the first place, we can’t recognize its workings in our lives today. And we can’t fix what we don’t fully understand.”
I realize that I still have much to learn. And that much of what I learn on this journey may be hard to hear. It’s hard to process a history of trauma and abuse so devastatingly deep and widespread. But it is necessary. We owe it to our ancestors. All of us. We really do. Their blood is not just in our bodies, it’s in the ground we all walk on.
They are watching. They are whispering. We must listen.
