I can’t believe it’s ready our fifth day in New Orleans. We’ve experienced so much so far, but there’s still so much more to do and see.
We began the morning by going to breakfast at Cake Cafe and Bakery. We both enjoyed a breakfast of black beans and rice, eggs, and guacamole and salsa, compete with another one of those New Orleans delights that you simply must enjoy while you are here, a king cake, a confection made of a Danish type dough laced with cinnamon and filled with cream cheese, topped with excited pipings of Mardi Gras colored frosting (gold, green, and purple), and adorned with a small, plastic baby, representing Jesus. This is a traditional cake enjoyed during the days leading up to Lent, and more typically the baby is hidden within the cake, as whoever receives it in their slice will receive good luck, but they also are, incidentally, responsible for bringing a king cake to the next party.
Moving on from breakfast, we took a jaunt outside the city to visit some plantations. Our driver, Richard, who is associated with Old River Road Plantation Tour, was filled with stories about the area around us as we made our 45 minute drive to the plantations, from the cypress tree forests and how the Spanish moss that grows on the trees is neither Spanish nor moss, from how it was more costly to refurbish the Superdome after Katrina than it was to initially build it, to wonderful little facts about the length of the Mississippi and the levees that surround it.
Our first stop was Oak Alley Plantation, which was the less interesting of the two plantations on our itinerary. It’s so named because of these 28 giant live oaks that create a magnificent tunnel of foliage leading to the house, the massive trunks of the oaks columned on both sides of the tunnel that runs for about 800 feet or so. The plantation is home to a mansion that was built from 1837-1839 by slave labor under Jacques Roman who had exchanged the property with his brother-in-law Valcour Aime who had purchased the land in 1830. The mansion, probably designed by Roman’s father-in-law, Joseph Pilié, is a Greek revival design, the building itself a square, painted mainly white, complete with grandiose Doric columns that stand at the perimeter of the house, supporting a balcony that extended around the whole exterior. The inside is smartly decorated as it might have looked in the 1800s, and the tour guides are all dressed in period clothes that white women of the day may have worn.
All things considered, Oak Alley is kind of rather your standard Southern plantation mansion, the kind of mansion that when you hear someone mention “Southern plantation,” you’ll think of Oak Alley. (Indeed, the location has been used extensively in film and television, most notably in the 1994 film, “Interview with he Vampire,” and more recently in 2012’s “Django Unchained.”) Perhaps the tour guide just wasn’t very good (her Southern accent was mesmerizing, nonetheless), or perhaps the content of the tour left much to be desired (we heard mainly about the white owners and not too much about the slaves who lived and worked there), but the whole experience was somewhat lacking in greatness. It all felt by-the-numbers and routine.
However, the whole trip was more than worth our money when we got to visit Laura Plantation. This plantation is built in the Creole style, meaning that instead of Doric columns and a white exterior, there are modest beams of wood supporting a balcony, and the whole exterior is painted in bright, bold colors of blues and yellows.
And our tour guide, Rose, was absolutely fantastic! She had a kind of “preacher” talk about her, adding an “uh” sound to the ends of some of her sentences, as in, “This is a Creole house-uh, and it’s painted so that everyone would know it’s a Creole house-uh,” and while she may not have been dressed up in period clothes (it was a khaki and light blue polo affair instead), she had such passion for delivering the stories about the house to her guests, which made the whole visit so worthwhile. We learned how the house had been built by slaves from 1804-1805 under a man called Guillaume Duparc who had petitioned Thomas Jefferson for the land and how after his death just four years later that the plantation fell under the ownership of his daughter, Elisabeth, who married into the Locoul family. The plantation eventually would be managed by four generations of women (quite unusual in those days), until 1891 when Laura Locoul Gore sold it to Aubert Florian Waguespack.
This was all terribly fascinating, but what was even more fascinating and moving was listening to stories about the slaves. As we headed out to the slave quarters in the back, we were introduced to the so-called “Code Noir,” a list of rules created by Louis XIV that decreed how slaves ought to be treated: they must be baptized Catholic, white men must be fined for fathering children with slaves, children between a male slave and a free female were free, but those between a free woman and male slave were not free, a slave who struck his master or his mistress, wife, or children would be executed, and the list goes on, Naturally, as Rose told us, no one cared about any of the Code Noir.
Even more devastating, however, was how after the American Civil War when the slaves became paid workers, the former slaves had no where to go except stay on the plantation. They may have been paid workers, but where do you suppose they spent their money they earned from the company? Yes, the company store. It was all a terrible circle that lasted all the way until 1977, the last that the slave quarters were occupied by black workers.
And to think that there are people in the world (like despicable people like Bill O’Reilly) who think white privilege doesn’t exist, to this day in 2015, even in the face of stories like these where direct consequences of slavery endure until 1977. The Civil War was only a mere 150 years a ago, and the Civil Right act only a mere 50. These things can’t fix centuries of unjust treatment towards an entire people overnight, and shame on anyone who denies the existence of white privilege, or any other unjust privilege for that matter. It is a fact and it is real.
In the end, though, I highly recommend a visit to these plantations. Seek out Old River Road Plantation Tour if you haven’t got a car while in New Orleans, otherwise just make your way to Laura Plantation for sure. It was an intense, emotional experience that will be with me forever.
As we made our way back to town, we decided first to have some sazeracs and Pimm’s cups at a bar called Napoleon House, then we made our way to Latitude 29, where we enjoyed wonderfully balanced tiki drinks called the Zombie and the Hawaii 504 (so much better than the overly sugary crap you get at Psycho Suzie’s in Minneapolis).
Dinner followed immediately after at the Gumbo Shop where we enjoyed what they called the Complete Creole Dinner, where you got to have a three course meal for a modest $25, choosing from a selection in each category. We decided to go with seafood okra gumbo to start (but we couldn’t resist adding barbecue shrimp for a little extra), crawfish étouffée (Gumbo Shop is known for their crawfish) with macque choux corn (stewed corn with onions, peppers, and tomatoes), and bread pudding to finish. If you’ve read all previous posts on my NOLA trip, you will know that we’ve tried much food and drink while down here, and that everything has been sublimely delectable and supremely decadent and satisfyingly delicious, and all of this applies to our dining experience at the Gumbo Shop. In fact, if I had to choose just three places you simply MUST dine at while in New Orleans, you MUST go to, in no particular order, the Gumbo Shop, Cochon, and Coop’s. Absolutely exquisite dining experiences, all of them!
How could anything possibly top all this?