I awoke to discover that we were famous. Well, not really, but there on the front page of the Times-Picayune was a picture of the parishioners of Saint Anna’s marching down Esplanade, and there on the left side of the picture was John. I pointed it out to Leigh, one of our hosts, and she seemed equally excited. She laughed, “You’ve only been here one day and you’ve already made the front page of the paper!” John was even happier - well, he was after he had had his first cup of coffee.
We packed up and called a cab. We were scheduled to pick up a car from the Hertz office in downtown New Orleans. Leaving town was surprisingly easy and it took us only about 45 minutes to arrive in Vacherie. We were going to explore the River Road, the home of some of the great antebellum plantations of Louisiana.
Our first stop was probably one of the most historically typical plantations, though miles removed from the image implanted in childhood imaginations from Gone With the Wind. This plantation was called “Laura” and it billed itself as a “Creole” plantation. The narration from our guide here was really interesting. He pointed out a couple things about the house itself. First, he noted how brightly it was painted in garish colors, more typical of the West Indies than our idea of southern living. The French-speaking planters, still the majority for a hundred years after the Louisiana purchase, sought to distinguish themselves as culturally as possible from their English-speaking neighbors, and bright colors were useful to immediately proclaim that this was a Catholic and French-speaking home. Secondly, he pointed out how small the house was. The Creole planters lived in New Orleans as much as possible, and certainly did so during the winter social season. This was more a working farm than a house, and the family only lived here when it was necessary to plant and harvest the sugar cane crop.
There are apparently more documentation for this history of this house than there are for most Creole plantation houses mostly because Laura, the last and most reluctant family owner, wrote down the history for her children. She was apparently appalled by Gone With the Wind and she wanted them to know what plantation life was really like, and particularly how brutal it often was. In the basement of the house there are full-size statues of the various early family members. It is a little cheesy, but it helped as the guide told about the beginnings of the farm.
There house itself is no more than 1600 square feet, smaller than an average American tract home today. Although furnished with period antiques, you could tell that it was not particularly fancy furniture for its time.
The best part of this tour was its frank discussion of slavery. It is pretty typical in Louisiana to hear about how the Code Noir was more humane that the typical southern slave law and that there were more free people of color here than anywhere else in the south. This may have been true in theory, our guide noted, but who was really enforcing these laws? There were a number of extant slave cabins on this property, many of which have been destroyed on other plantation. Each building below houses two families, at least 5 people sharing an 8 foot by 8 foot room. “Laura” was a sugar plantation – the soil below Baton Rouge is not dry enough for cotton – and it was both an extremely lucrative crop for its owners and one which required intense and crushing labor for its production.
Our next plantation is probably the most famous on the River Road, Oak Alley. It has been featured in many films particularly Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte. This was also a plantation built for French-speaking planters, but it was built in the late 1840’s as the craze for Greek Revival architecture had hit New Orleans. It looks more typical of the plantation homes that the Americans built. It takes its name from the allee of Virginia Live Oaks which run from the house to the River. These had been planted perhaps a century earlier by an unknown first resident.
Our tour guide here was Gilda, shown below. We liked her. She had the perfect hard inflections of the Cajun accent and a gravelly voice which sounded like she had spent more of her life on a bar stool. But she did a good job with her script. Oak Alley is more a monument to the gracious Confederacy myth of Gone With the Wind.
The most interesting part of the narration discussed all the different ways they built the house to stay cool. The house is basically made of brick, and the walls are 18 inches thick in spots. This, of course, helps keep it cooler. The veranda shade every window completely. Incidentally, the columns are also made of brick covered with wood and plaster. The rough wood floors were originally covered with marble.We could not take pictures inside the house, and there was not much of interest there except a huge fan which hung over the dining room table and which would have been swung back and forth during the meal to keep the insects away.
We stopped by Thibodeaux to see the Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center. It was a big disappointment, and we did not stay long. The town itself is pretty ugly. I sometimes read a blog by a woman who lives in Thibodeaux. She never made it sound particularly wonderful, but I somehow thought it was a bit more picturesque. There are a couple cute blocks downtown, but the pointless commercial sprawl reminded me of Biddeford, Maine.
We continued on to Napoleonville where we are staying the night. John had read about Madewood, one of the plantation homes which is operated now as a bed and breakfast. Madewood is on one of the major bayous, not on the river itself. Like Oak Alley, it is done in a Greek Revival style. It is an American plantation, not a Creole one, and its original owners came from Wales through North Carolina.
We were greeted by fellow guests who introduced themselves as Connie and Herb. Connie asked us where we were from and pointedly said she hoped we were not from “the Northeast”. She laughed loudly as she made these comments. I noticed that both she and Herb were drinking.
John and I found our way to our room and looked around the place. It was not quite as wonderful as it seemed in the guidebook. Our room was clean and neat and had two large antique beds. We walked around the house – it was sort of neat to have the run of the place – and looked in all the rooms. It just did not have that kind of Tara feel that I guess I expected. It seemed more like the place that the rich people in town live in a Faulkner novel or a Hellman play. There seemed a real sense of trying to recapture and preserve a past that was irretrievably gone, no matter how much Spanish Moss you hang on the trees.
Still, this is hardly unique to Madewood. It seems to be the story of almost all the plantation houses we have seen, and it is certainly one of the great cultural narratives of the South.
The downside of staying in any kind of bed and breakfast is that your experience largely depends on your fellow guests. If I had been staying at Madewood with a large group of interesting people, I would have had a great time. Unfortunately, our only other guests were Herb and Connie. The rest of the evening was a nightmare.
Connie had only just started drinking when I met her on the patio. John and I dressed for dinner, as requested, and went down to the parlor for wine and cheese. Connie and Herb were still looking like they had just left a NASCAR event and both were drinking the wine pretty freely. I looked at the two of them and just saw John’s cousin Diane and her husband Jim. As Yogi Bera famously said, déjà vu all over again.
We managed to stay off politics for most of the evening, though I do vaguely remember some reference to “goddamn Obama” somewhere. They apparently did fairly well flipping houses before Katrina, but they lost most of what they had made when the hurricane destroyed a couple of properties they were preparing to sell in New Orleans. As long as we stayed on the hurricane or their adventures living somewhere on the outskirts of San Diego – the trailers by the Salton Sea were all that I could visualize though I am sure it was better than that – we were safe. The conversation took some strange turns. Connie announced that she was a Pugh and therefore related to the people who had originally owned this place. She also confided in us that the Pughs were witches and warlocks in Wales and that sometimes in her sleep she spoke in the ancient Welsh language. Herb tried to quiet her every time she moved into this topic.
Dinner was OK. David, our cook, had put some time into it, but it had been served up in the kitchen and was already cold by the time we had it. After dinner was over, we retired for coffee and brandy to the parlor. This was when I could not stand it any more and I left for me room. John hissed “Coward” at me and stayed around for longer. I just dread breakfast tomorrow.
