The Past Walks with Us

By Michael Penn MA'97

"We're going on to New Orleans, no matter what happens."

At the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, I'd seen footage of an original Freedom Rider, beaten bloody by a mob that had blockaded the bus he was riding. He was lying in a hospital bed, weak and obviously in pain. But when a television reporter asked him what he was going to do, his answer was firm. The ride would not stop before its destination.

And so we headed to New Orleans, merely the halfway point of our own Freedom Ride, but a place that many of us had already seen as an emotional crescendo. In other circumstances, a bus full of students would have been overjoyed to go to a city synonymous with the carefree excesses of youth. A few in the group did talk with excited anticipation about French Quarter clubs and favorite spots to drink Hurricanes. But the chatter was subdued when Genella Taylor reminded the group what New Orleans held in store. We were headed to see, among other things, an old slave market and a plantation. "When I saw New Orleans on the agenda, I cried," she said.

As Taylor predicted, the Big Easy wasn't so easy. We walked a very different path through the French Quarter, led by Greg Osbourne, a genealogical researcher who had studied the ancestry of slaves in the region. Osbourne showed us slave quarters (now popular studio apartments) and led us through the city's old cemeteries before bringing us to the center of the Quarter and the St. Louis Hotel, an upscale hotel with a doorman and an elaborately gilded lobby filled with what one student described as "cash green" couches and easy chairs. That lobby, Osbourne explained, had been the center of slave trade in the Mississippi region during the mid-1800s, when plantations upriver grew profitable. You wouldn't know the hotel's past by looking at it today, except for two telltale testimonies, neither intended by the hotel management. The first clue came from the hotel's sound system, over which the managers were playing Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue" as background music. As Werner reminded us, "Kind of Blue" is a staple of the jazz impulse that was essentially borne out of slave music. Davis was a direct inheritor of the music made by slaves in nearby Congo Square - some of whom were likely brought to the St. Louis Hotel lobby as goods for trade.

To see the second clue, we walked outside to the side of the hotel, where the fading remnants of an old painted sign were visible. The sign, Osbourne told us, used to read "Slave Exchange." Part of the sign - the "Slave Ex" - was covered up during a remodeling of the hotel. Now the sign just reads, "Change," an irony that wasn't lost on anyone.

It was with that same unintended irony that the afternoon's destination, the Destrehan Plantation, advertised itself as a "step back into another time." A magazine ad for the former plantation, now a tourist site, promised "costumed tour guides" who would epitomize the gentility and grace of plantation life. The students understood that the plantation was a business, catering to tourists who desired a Scarlett O'Hara fantasy of the Old South. But they weren't about to be so easily won over by the hanging moss and live oaks. It was, in their perspective, a place of human tragedy - a place that Werner described as dripping with evil. Imagine confronting evil, only to have it dressed up in swirling skirts, offering you a mint julep.

The bus plowed into the swampy outskirts of Mississippi, and soon the building was visible through the oaks. Tyson offered a prayer, before we entered, for "the souls of the people who were brought here in the bottom of an African slave ship." Across the row, I could see Michelle Gordon, an African-American student from a predominantly Southern family, shaking with sobs.

Earlier on the trip, she had talked about the regret she felt about not learning more about her heritage when she lived in the South. Part of her trip was a personal odyssey to see what she could no longer ask her departed relatives. Her tears spread like a chain reaction, and soon the bus echoed a chorus of sorrow. It was devastating.

But, in another way, it was comforting. The students had built deep wells of understanding and respect for almost every other person on the bus. What the professors and planners had hoped would happen did: the students had forged a community. They fed off each other's strength and shared each other's pain. As horrifying as the plantation visit may have been, it would have been far worse to do it alone.

Not that many students didn't find the plantation appalling. A video that preceded the walk through the grand house made almost no mention of its slave history, except to note that the house was built "with the help" of slaves. Strangely, the video was told from the point of view of the house itself - which seemed like an attempt to focus people's attention on the beauty of the land, architecture, and antiques, and not the human story within. At one point, the narrator, as house, said that during the 1970s it fell into a period of neglect and decay, when vandals broke the windows and stole many antiques. These times, the house went on to say, were the toughest times in its history. At that point, Tyson broke the silence by singing, "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen. . . ."

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