Smith opens his essay on the Whitney Plantation with a harrowing description of the fifty-five ceramic heads stacked on pikes, crafted to mimic the likeness of the fifty-five men executed in the wake of the 1811 slave revolt. The graphic image is a new exhibition at the Whitney, which strives to bring attention to the largest yet significantly understudied slave revolt in US history while also highlighting the savage cruelty of the slave owners’ response.

Smith narrates how in January 1811, Charles Deslondes—a mixed-race slave driver at the Whitney Plantation—led a coalition of hundreds of slaves to march down Louisiana’s River Road, raiding slave-owning properties and gathering weapons along the way. Ultimately, the revolt was put down within forty-eight hours by federal troops and a local militia of white men who had increasingly feared such a revolt after the successful Haitian Revolution in 1804.

Once Deslondes was captured, his “hands were chopped off, the bones in his legs were shattered by bullets and he was burned over a bale of straw.” Many of the other rebels were slaughtered by the white militia on site, and their decapitated heads were taken and placed on pikes lining the levee as a warning to other slaves. This was the history that the Whitney Plantation was attempting to capture with their new exhibit.

Smith then recounts the provenance of the plantation, which was originally purchased in 1752 by German immigrant Ambroise Heidal before going on to become one of the most successful sugarcane enterprises in Louisiana, producing over 350,000 pounds of sugar in 1844. In recent history, the plantation was purchased by John Cummings, an eccentric multimillionaire, in 1998 as a real estate investment. However, once Cummings began to unravel the past of the site and grapple with his own underdeveloped knowledge of American slavery, he decided to turn the site into a museum that would center the voices of the Black experience, not just at the Whitney but across the South.

Yvonne Holden, the director of operations for the Whitney Plantation, took Smith on a guided tour through some of the displays the site had curated in order to tell a story that has largely gone unrecorded and unrecognized. First the pair visited the Antioch Baptist Church (originally named Anti-Yoke Baptist Church), which was constructed by freedmen as a place of worship after the Civil War and ultimately donated by its congregation to the plantation. Inside the church were placed over two dozen hand-carved statuettes of small children, an exhibition called The Children of Whitney designed by artist Woodrow Nash to bring attention to the children born into slavery.

These children are pictured on the lanyard each visitor is handed, as well as an excerpt from the Federal Writers’ Project—an initiative from the 1930s that documented 2,300 firsthand accounts of slavery from formerly enslaved people, as well as 500 photographs. The next memorial the pair visit is the Wall of Honor, which commemorates the 354 people who were enslaved on the Whitney Plantation. In addition to names, dates of birth and death, and tribal affiliation if applicable, the wall contains several quotations from the Federal Writers’ Project in order to add depth and texture to the names. The final memorial Smith describes is the Field of Angels, which honors the lives of 2,200 enslaved children who died at Saint John Baptist Parish between 1823 and 1863—many from malnutrition and avoidable diseases.

Analysis

The Whitney Plantation contrasts strongly with the Monticello Plantation in the sense that it purposefully centers the Black experience. While Monticello runs tours specifically on the history of slavery...