Southern Plantations Weren't So "Romantic" For Blacks

As you drive down I-75 in Georgia, bold billboards advertising "Plantation House" periodically pepper the landscape. Perched just off certain exit ramps are the plantation houses themselves: wide, white and fronted by columns. They're like a dream — aren't they?

Across the antebellum South, such plantation homes are the site of much tourist romanticization. The stately mansions conjure up the idea of lost causes, genteel living, dashing men with accents that flow like honey and alabaster-skinned women in ornate dresses.

But this vision of history is too easily divorced from the lives of the enslaved black people who made it possible.

Over the years, at least two white women have gushed to me: "I would just love to go back to that time!" Presumably, these women did not consider that for them to be "Scarlett" of Gone With the Wind, I would have to be a darkie working in the fields. My family would have to live in bondage as chattel — our very lives dependent on the whims of our masters. Life in the antebellum period wasn't simply colorful and romantic, it was dependent on free labor and the dehumanization of people of color.

As an African-American descendant of slaves, when I read Gone With the Wind, I didn't think about how grand it would be to be Scarlett O'Hara — I wondered how awful it must have been to be Mammy. As an amateur genealogist, I have seen my ancestors listed in documents as property, just like the fine china and horses on the Southern farms where they lived. Once you've seen that, it's hard to perceive the way the South still venerates its old culture as somehow benign.

Far too few plantation home tours for tourists even mention the lives of enslaved black people at all. Guides cloak history by using euphemisms like "servants," or by focusing on architecture and interesting tidbits about the lives of the plantations' white owners. A 2009 study of 20 North Carolina plantation homes by East Carolina University, for example, found that seven didn't mention slavery at all and only three made efforts to reflect the experiences of black people who lived and worked on the land.

Some go even further, presenting a whitewashed vision of slavery as a positive force. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, several plantations tours "create the image of happy slaves cared for by benevolent masters." The article quotes Meredith Hall, who owns Darshana Hall Plantation, as saying, "I think that there's a real misconception of slavery; it was a relative thing. This family tried to treat people well. They kept the families together. ... They had a pretty good reputation with regard to slavery."

What's more, some plantation homes have actually started welcoming tourists to spend the night in slave quarters — ones re-imagined as charming suites, of course. For example, Virginia's Edgewood Plantation boasts "eight luxurious and charming guest rooms; six in the main house and two in the former slave's quarters." One of those rooms might be Prissy's Quarters, "an enchanting retreat, with rose-covered, vine-canopied queen bed."

So here's what we've learned: slavery was a "relative thing," and slaves slept in quaintly comfortable rooms with flowered bedspreads. How crass can you get?

James Baldwin says, "American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it." Right now, the version of the antebellum South that tourists get to see is pure fantasy — one that erases the histories of black Americans.

As Derek Alderman, who authored the plantation study, puts it, "These plantations were not just about their white owners." No, indeed. The mansions we pose in front of today are sites of a brutal history that should never be forgotten or papered over, lest it be repeated.

Photo Credit: Corey Ann