Plantation Tour Introduction
So, when you travel down to a place, you are sure to encounter its history. For many, this is one of the primary appeals when signaling out a specific destination. Absorbing history gives a chance to learn the fascinating story of a place different from your own home. When I came to New Orleans, this was no exception to that trend. I wanted to discover the area’s history and sought ways to do it.
Then it came to me – a plantation tour! One of the most obvious fragments of the region’s story is the slavery of African people having taken place in the area for centuries. However, this cast immediate doubt on me. Was it really something I wanted to do? After all, we all know slavery. We hate slavery. But we’d be lying if we said we could just escape its looming shadow. So what do you do?
I suppose it’s relevant to say that I am a person of color, half African American with that side of my family’s roots in the American South, making this endeavor all the weirder to me. Would I be paying a strange sort of homage or just perverting the memory of my ancestors? The thought of visiting a plantaton caused a strange feeling to bubble up in my stomach. In the end, I decided to go for it, internal questions be damned. I would face them later – I told myself.
I ended up booking a dual plantation tour during my stay in New Orleans. The more the merrier I guess. I booked a Double Tour, featuring two plantations, those being the Laura Creole Plantation and the Oak Alley Plantation. These were the two that seemed to come up the most when I did my research.
For the record, this post’s purposes are just to review the tour itself. I don’t want to make a value judgment for all readers on how to approach visiting plantations, what you’re allowed to feel and so on. My vantage point as a Person of Color is important though. I found it beneficial to include it for any other people of color who have an interest in these things. But, for clarity, this post is mostly just a review with my personal feelings and thoughts sprinkled through it. With that out the way, let’s go!
Table of Contents
Basic Info
I booked both of my tours via the tour company called Cajun Encounters. And you can find the very package I did here, along with the other plantation tours on offer. Oncemore I chose the package of Laura Plantation and Oak Alley:
Since this is a double tour, the price is a bit jacked up. With taxes included, expect to pay a little over $106 per adult or $78 for a child under 12. The price includes pickup and transport by bus with most pickup spots situated outside popular New Orleans hotels. You choose the one closest to you and receive a QR code to show the bus driver when they arrive. However, in my experience, the bus driver will just ask for your name instead. When I took the tour they picked me up on Canal Street, one of the city’s biggest thoroughfares.
The bus ride was quite nice to the first plantation, this being the Laura Creole Plantation. My group was about 7 or 8 people with a few more that only booked one plantation for the tour. In their case, they were split up from us two-timers later on.
Anyways, back to the drive and let’s jump to present tense now for funsies.
The friendly bus driver tells stories about Louisiana culture and history. It begins with New Orleans but expands to the rest of the state as we move westward from the city. He explains some of the demographic history of Louisiana, just to give one example. Entering real plantation country, you pass by bountiful beautiful plots of land. It’s home to famous old plantations like the one portrayed as Candyland in Django Unchained. Seeing spots like that, you really feel like you’re diving backward in time.
Timewise, the whole ride from New Orleans to Laura takes about an hour and a half.
What to Bring
- Photography Equipment: ie a phone or camera, anything to clickity click with
- Sunscreen: It gets quite humid down there
- Bug Spray: Especially at Oak Alley the insects can be quite aggressive
- Money: We stop at gift stores before and after the plantations. You can buy water and snacks there as well
Thoughts Going In
I will keep this piece short as I want to save my personal opinions for another post possibly. However, it is relevant to get some things out of the way. Traveling alone, I was reluctant to take this tour. I feared how the tour could present the delicate subject matter. Most people I’d encountered in New Orleans were very friendly. However, upon entering the tour bus, I still found myself on high alert, anxiety rising. The tour consisted of a majority of elderly Caucasian people, setting the alarm bells ringing. Yet, I decided not to rush to conclusions just yet.
That’s not to say I immediately suspected some weirdness but I was curious how the stories of the plantations would be portrayed. I’d heard stories of people visiting plantations in the South and knew things could get suspect. I had to keep my own misgivings and paranoia in check though so far.
Laura Creole Plantation Tour
We begin with a guided tour of the Laura Creole Plantation. A matter of contention within my group at least was the use of the term Creole and what exactly this meant. According to our guide, Creole is the term for the general mixture of cultures present in Louisiana, a mix of French, Acadian, African, Native American, Haitian, Spanish and more. Thus Creole is an umbrella term and other terms associated with Louisiana such as Cajun are subgroups of Creole. With that distinction out of the way, the owners of this plantation were French Creoles who passed down the reigns through the generations.
We start the tour off inside the home, beginning under the main entranceway. They introduce us to the family that owned the plantation. Then we receive a history lesson on them and their business. We go underneath the houses and look at the wooden pillars used to hold the entire edifice up. We learn about the culture of Antebellum Louisiana and the brutality of slave life on sugar plantations like this one.
Laura Plantation was unique for its day; at times a women-owned plantation featuring several dynastic disputes between rival claimants to the plantation. This becomes a core part of the narrative of the plantation as the tour goes on.
From there we proceed upstairs to see the lavish living quarters of the family. Again we learn a little about their wealth, its roots in forced labor, and the strife that came to both sides of the spectrum in such a society. The interiors are gorgeous in their upper-class ways, offering a gleaming view of what Antebellum wealth looked like in Louisiana. It’s undeniably beautiful despite the twisted past.
As we exit the main building into the vast fields outside, you can once again revel at the building’s wondrous design. It boasts bright and warm colors beset by the dark blueprint behind its inception. We learn more about the slaves themselves, along with details of the area’s construction. Next, we maneuver outside towards the Slave Quarters. They consist of small wooden cabins whose facades are miles away from the grandeur of the plantation’s centerpiece building.
On the way down, we stop in a narrow shed, whose purpose seems to just be to shield us from the sun in order for us to learn more about the buying, selling, and exchanging of human life that took place here. It’s quite harrowing to see and hear the stories of people reduced to prices and stats but nonetheless essential to get the full picture. More disturbingly, we learn about the sexual relations perpetrated by slave owners at the Laura Plantation via a family tree featuring several mixed-race children brought up as slaves working under their father.
Entering the Slave Cabin, of which there seems to be only one open to visitors, we find nothing more than a small wooden cottage resembling a shed. It’s housing little beyond the bare necessities of beds, tables and cooking areas. As we explore the quarters, the guide explains the day-to-day lives of the slaves, how grueling working sugar plantations can be, and how they managed to make the most of their existence nonetheless.
The last stop on the journey through Laura takes us through the yard and by this big decrepit building once designed to be the special home of one of the plantation’s rich proprietors. She wanted an extra and extra exuberant plot of residence for herself. Unluckily for her, she never lived to see its completion… I think. If that’s wrong blame the tour not me. It’s still that American education system bruh.
Thoughts
I enjoyed the Laura Creole Plantation more than I assumed I would. When the tour began and we heard about the French family behind the plantation I already felt a little uneasy. A lot of their story is on overcoming personal hardship and learning to lead a successful business, a bitter narrative when you remember that said business is capitalizing off human suffering. They focus a lot on the female ownership point of the story, which is valid I would assume, knowing the sexism and misogyny of the time. However, for me, it’s still constantly undercut by that nagging little thing called slavery.
Nevertheless, they handle the subject of enslaved people with tact, brevity, and care. The story of the slave labor that built the Laura’s profits stays consistent. They make it side-by-side with the story of the family and the building itself. They never allow visitors to see the location for anything less than the whole picture of what it was, good and bad. As much time as they spend on the owner’s story, it never takes away from the story of the enslaved people and it feels like real efforts were made to show both sides of the equation here.
With all that done and out the way with, I would truthfully recommend the Laura Plantation Tour as I found the place beautiful, the history fascinating and the tragedy handled with care. I have no real complaints personally and I am like an S tier complainer!
Now! On to Oak Alley!
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