11:23 AM-
We’re headed out of New Orleans today, towards Laura Plantation. Our transport is an old schoolbus from Jefferson Parish, driven by an elderly lady named Linda. The freeways are elevated over swampland, and in the diffuse, odd light of midday the dead trees springing up thick as fog. The day is warm, the air is humid, and it’s not hard to imagine why the bayou is home to so many ghosts. The roads are pitted, or the suspension on the bus is burnt—either way, the ruts make us bounce two or three inches from our seat, like startled cats. Christal and Paloma and the rest of the company make it a game with the baby—headbanging and bouncing along with the sudden shocks. Oddly, like any classic school bus, the girls are up front, and the boys are in the back.
Laura Plantation is halfway to Baton Rouge on Freeway 18, and the brochure (stolen from the lobby of our hotel) describes it as a Creole plantation—on the back, an endorsement from the Lonely Planet Travel raves “Best history tour in the USA!”. Bit of a strong statement. It is, apparently, the largest collection of family artifacts original to a Louisiana plantation, and also home to where the original Br’er Rabbit folktales were recorded. The tours are apparently 70 minutes long. Our schedule has us there until 4:15. This discrepancy confuses the boys in the back.
11:54 AM-
The freeway opens up eventually into flatland. A sign points to Laura Plantation off to the right. The area is sparse, decayed—houses close enough only to be loosely called neighbors. A Family Dollar store sits down the street from a First American and a United Way bank. Across the street, a handwritten sign advertising barber services hangs on the door of a ruined brick building. We come up on Laura Plantation, and pull in. It’s much as you would expect, with the entrance/exit of the tour leading through the gift shop. Peculiarly, a sign states that we should now allow 55 minutes per tour. (This confuses the boys even more.) The shop also smells of molasses.
The tour had just departed, but a woman named Amethyst offers to catch us up. Laura Plantation is much as one would imagine a plantation to look like—a vast, colourful house overlooking vast fields, with smaller shacks out back serving as slave-quarters and animal pens. Huge, gnarled trees greet us as we are led down to the basement where the other tourists, and our tour guide Joey, meet us.
Joey is of medium height, wire-framed glasses, stubble, late 30s (though I suck at evaluating age) and speaks in the present tense about people who have long ago entered the ground—“The Viscont continues to be governor until America annexes Louisiana…” He also frequently gestures at the painted flat-wood representations of the figures whose life he narrates, who are wrapped in period clothing and thus look peculiarly like friezes, or statues flattened by history. His patter is fluid, well-rehearsed, carefully funny. He pronounces “memoir” as if he has said it a thousand times.
The Laura Plantation is intriguing in that it seems it is a good example of illustrating a lot of cultural differences between Creole-Louisiana plantations and Deep South plantations. For instance—it was run for 84 years, across three generations, solely by women, a statement which, for relevance to the past is classic Creole and for relevance to the present brings a lot of knowing grins to the lips of the ladies in the tour group. As our guide runs through the history of the family, starting in the past and working forward, he moves us through the basement, which is dusty and frozen—the way museums set in old houses often are, that peculiar feeling of preserved time. The story that he tells, which he spins as he moves through the house, is peculiarly Southern Gothic—a mother, for instance, shutting herself in her room for 20 years as self-imposed punishment for her role in the death of her child.
12:39 PM-
The tour guide points out the first sign of Katrina—a grandfather clock, that had been left in the care of a family whose home had flooded. On the clock is a border on the wood, under which the lacquer has faded. It is about 5 ½ feet high.
Laura, whose memoirs comprise the core of the tour, is a descendent of the family who owned the plantation who lived from 1861-1963—an extraordinary span of years, as the tour guide pointed out, in that her early years saw slaves working on the plantation and her final years saw the heyday of civil rights, and the end of segregation. This life-meets-history twines oddly with what we are doing here—learning the stories of others, and finding out how to use our own.
3:13 PM
Leaving Laura Plantation and back near the hotel, we grab a meal at the Please-U Diner, which pretty much looks exactly like its name: decorated in tones of brown, homey, filled with cluttered charming decorations of random tchotchokes and a TV with HLN on soft in the back. The waitress, a middle-aged blond woman by the name of Dee, takes our order—she calls us, individually, either “baby” or “darlin’” and makes sure we never go wanting for sweet tea. The food is massive, fried, Southern, and delicious.
5:25 PM
We arrive at Ashé Cultural Center and meet Mama Jamilla, who (in keeping with many of the women who run Ashé) is a powerfully-built black woman, the kind who immediately commands respect. Ashé itself is housed in a large, warehouse-style room which has been broken up into little rooms by plasterboard partitions. It’s filled with African art and clothes, mingled with photos of various seminal Civil Rights moments (including many of Dr. King). It’s an intriguing combination of art gallery, shop, kitchen, cultural hub, and information center. The women are entirely welcoming. They apologize for the smell of burnt popcorn.
7:19 PM
Christal leads a class with Sisters Making A Change—a community program based out of Ashé that provides health and wellness services as well as exercise and movement classes to any that come. Those who come are mostly women, mostly of colour—they range from 70 to an adorable 7 (and a half!)-year-old, who rocks out to Christal’s movement, which is intense enough to break a sweat, but not so intricate and intimidating that everyone gets lost. There are about 30, 40 people dancing. Christian DJs—thus, we fly across the floor to the croons of James Brown and the howls of Michael Jackson. Afterwards, the Sisters showcase the most epic second-line the Company has ever seen, a rousing dancing circle up on the stage where each sister individually takes a solo, showing off their moves, dancing with a palpable joy. We are seriously impressed.
In return, we show the beginning of Falling Sun, Waking Moon, as a sampler for our show. The stage is somewhat smaller than at Middlebury—James cracks his head on one of the crawl-backs into the wall.
The Sisters serve dinner—rice & sausage and green-bean stew. As we eat, Mama Jamilla lays out the history of the program—a service that, in her own words, provides assistance for “everything from Acne to Zits.” Ashé itself is steeped in social justice—founded in the 70s, it is down the street from the Free Southern Theater, and was established as a haven for artists who didn’t have a place to show their art. It should be said, though, that it is not exactly for Abstract Impressionism—as Mama Jamilla says, it’s not “an art for art’s sake place.” Carol, the program director, adds: it’s a place for “creating opportunities to share stories.”
7:54 PM
Introductions all around. Christal starts by introducing Middlebury College, and explaining what it is—“not a trade school, but a school where you learn to think.” Then Company sounds off, running down the line with names, majors, and place-of-birth—and then the Sisters introduce themselves. They are everything from schoolteachers, both retired and continuing, to lifelong dancers, to a woman who describes herself as an ex-substance abuser, to a woman who described herself as a “Katrina survivor” (the only one who mentions it in the room—here, Katrina wells up through the cracks, like water under floorboards, present by how little it is seen.) After the introductions, a peculiar thing happens—the atmosphere of the room changes, subtly. We are not part of this family, suddenly—make no mistake—but our outsider tinge has lessened. After the introductions, we break off into little groups, and mingle—Sister and Company alike.
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