With its 200 windows and 165 doors fashioned by enslaved craftsmen and put in place with enslaved labor, Louisiana’s Nottoway Plantation was the South’s largest antebellum mansion, or “big house.” It was also a place that tour guides infamously sold a romanticized and sanitized version of plantation life about, and for generations, those who ran the plantation hosted weddings, graduations and school field trips where Black schoolchildren and their parents often felt diminished and alienated. As The Associated Press has noted, Nottoway “makes no mention of enslaved former inhabitants on its website.”
A fire on Thursday that destroyed Nottoway’s big house led to a predictable response. Some Black people posted selfies presumably taken at Nottoway that showed the burning house behind them. People shared memes that added the images of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, uncharacteristically grinning, to photos of the mansion on fire. Other memes showed Black people enjoying an outdoor cookout with the burning house in the background.
“We’re very devastated, we’re upset, we’re sad,” Dan Dyess, a co-owner with his wife of the plantation resort, told The Times-Picayune | The Advocate. “We put a lot of time, effort and money to developing this property.” Still, after the fire, some voices wryly expressed that all such sites should burn.
Simultaneously, some white people wistfully mourned an irreplaceable architectural gem and moment in American — read Southern — grandeur and responded to the celebrations of the fire as an assault on their “heritage,” the same way many responded in 2017 to the removal of Confederate monuments downriver in New Orleans.
I’m not mourning in the same way that those embracing myths of the “Lost Cause” and the idea of “moonlight and magnolias” are, but I’m mourning the loss of another opportunity to teach about the history of enslavement. Our material history, including at places such as Nottoway, has messages for us. There are bricks where our ancestors’ fingerprints remain, spiritual caches, crystals and sometimes lone cowrie shells reflecting traditional African beliefs.
There are signs there of Islamic practices and practices of the early Black church. Even a rat’s nest found in Charleston, South Carolina, had much to tell us about the past. It wasn’t just a rat’s nest; it had been fashioned from the pages from a 19th century speller. In the darkness, hidden from the enslavers’ prying eyes, we were learning to read.
The destruction of Nottoway isn’t a trending story for me. I am a historical interpreter — not a re-enactor — and such places have been the focus of my research. I even wrote my award-winning memoir, “The Cooking Gene,” tracing my ancestry from Africa to America, from enslavement to emancipation, using the story of African American food combined with the battle over how our history gets told and who gets to tell it.