Looking Back to Move Forward

Travel advisories caution against visiting Louisiana in August. They warn that many shops are closed. It is hot—made hotter by humidity. Undeterred, my husband and I fly from California to accompany our eldest grandson to Xavier University for freshman orientation. The week is full—campus tours, faculty introductions, sessions on financial aid and student services, and small joys like student-only skate nights—but it is also a crossing. He is stepping into a future, and we have come to witness it.

As expected, our three daughters, two younger grandsons, granddaughter, and son-in-law come along. On most visits, we make the ninety-minute trip northwest of New Orleans to Franklin, my mother’s hometown. Memories of her stories running through cane fields, darting in and out of boxcars, chewing sugarcane, plucking oysters from the creek across the oyster-shell road—shape our sense of place. She spoke of standing in the kitchen watching her mother stir pecans and sugar into pralines in a cast iron skillet. She told these stories not as nostalgia, but as instruction. The land matters. The land must be kept. Her mother said it first, and she repeated it to us: what we hold, we must not lose.

Neighbors greet us recounting these stories as though they are shared property. Stories of grandmother’s gumbo and crawdad boils, grandfather’s never-ending additions to the house, and the latest news of kin dropping by. They remind us of what we already know: memory lives in repetition.

But Franklin will have to wait. This time, I have another destination in mind.

“Looking back to move forward,” I say, invoking a Yoruba proverb of learning from the past to forge the future.¹ Truphena Mukuna, (2024, July 16). "Embracing Afro-centric philosophies to decolonize research," Integration and Implementation Insights. https://i2insights.org/2024/07/16/afro-centric-research-philosophies/ Its utterance quiets the chorus of groans, eye rolls, and reluctant sighs that greet my announcement: we are visiting the Whitney Plantation.

I usher everyone into the cars earlier than necessary: the grandsons into the first SUV with my husband and me; the girls follow in the second. Coolers brim with water, Gatorade, fruit, and ropes of red licorice. Sugarcane rises on either side of the highway, tall and insistent, bending slightly in the wind. I watch it pass and think of my mother as a girl moving through it, unseen except by those who know where to look.

We arrive at Whitney Plantation fifty minutes before the tour. The heat is immediate, a presence rather than a condition. Car doors open and empty bottles tumble out. We register and wait.

The gallery offers relief—air-conditioning, exhibits, souvenirs—but the children refuse it. They choose the outside, the heat, the open space where their bodies can move. Inside are replicas of French slave ships, displays on the Code Noir, photographs of the enslaved. Inside is knowledge they are not yet ready to claim.

My husband, predictably, strikes up a conversation. Where are you from? Missouri? I have relatives there. His voice carries easily across distances, building bridges where none are required. I drift instead toward the porch swings—white-painted wood suspended from thick rope—and sit with the girls. The boys wander off, phones raised, searching for a signal. My two-year-old granddaughter breaks free, chasing dragonflies, her father trailing just behind her, close enough to catch, far enough to let her run.

When the tour begins, our guide introduces the plantation not as a relic, but as a system. The Code Noir, adopted in 1724, governed every aspect of enslaved life—movement, religion, punishment, reproduction—while prohibiting property ownership, interracial relationships and freedom.²"Transcription of 'The Code Noir' (The Black Code)." National Park Service, (2024, October 2). https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/transcription-of-the-code-noir-the-black-code.htmIt was law, but it was also permission. It authorized a way of being that extended beyond itself, embedding into custom, into expectation, into the architecture of everyday life.

Even after the transatlantic slave trade was outlawed, the guide explains, the French refitted ships to evade British patrols. Law shifts; practice adapts. The system holds.

My granddaughter wanders toward a statue—a child rendered in stone, placed near the edge of the gallery. She reaches out, touches its hand, tilts her head, and studies its face. She does not yet understand enslavement, separation, loss. She understands only that this is a child, and she is a child, and there is something here that invites recognition.

Outside, my eldest grandson pauses at the steps of a slave cabin, his body unconsciously mirroring that of another child statue seated there. He is six-foot-five, on the cusp of adulthood, about to begin his first semester at Xavier. And yet, in this moment, he is aligned with a figure meant to signify loss, rupture, a childhood denied.

The younger boys move differently. The youngest plows through the cabin with his brother in tow, they pause briefly at a bed—wood frame, thin mattress, quilt stitched with care—and then move on. Their bodies resist stillness.

My youngest daughter lingers at the threshold. Her face tightens. She has spent years engaged in anti-incarceration work, organizing, advocating for clemency. She would not call herself an abolitionist, but her life suggests otherwise.

The terra-cotta statues that dot the landscape mark the presence of children who labored, who suffered, who were separated from kin.³Debi Lander, Exploring Art at Whitney Plantation, April 2, 2019. https://bylandersea.com/2019/04/exploring-art-at-whitney-plantation/ They are not abstractions. They are interruptions.

We move toward the sugar kettles—large, rusted, half-spherical pots arranged in a long line across the grass. Some are taller than my granddaughter, wide enough to hold a body. They once boiled cane juice into sugar, the commodity that built fortunes, funded expansion, sustained an economy.⁴Louis Joseph Thibodeaux, "Etienne de Boré’s Sugar Kettle: A sweet chemical engineering story", Chemical Engineering History, March 12, 2013 Louisiana State University. https://www.lsu.edu/eng/che/files/about/history/etienne-de-bores-sugar-kettle.pdf

Today, sugar remains a multi-billion-dollar industry in Louisiana.⁵Khalil Gibran Muhammad, "The Barbaric History of Sugar in America," New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/sugar-slave-trade-slavery.html Before the Civil War, the US South ranked among the largest economies in the world, its wealth extracted from land and labor held in bondage. At its height, this plantation produced hundreds of thousands of barrels of sugar annually.⁶Ben Estes, (2025, September 12). "Whitney Plantation teaches about the horrors of slavery," Verite News, September 12, 2025. https://veritenews.org/2025/09/12/devils-bargain-whitney-plantation-slave

Injury is inevitable. Limbs are lost in grinding machines. Infections spread. Complicated by substances excreted that delay healing.

My mother’s stories surface again, unbidden. Two uncles blinded while refining sugar in the 1930s and ’40s. My eldest daughter takes a solo walk among the kettles, contemplating the whispers of the past with those of her grandmother’s.

I stop at a misting station, lift my face to the fine spray, and feel immediate relief. For a moment, I consider the heat—how oppressive it feels, how it drains the body—and then I stop. The comparison feels wrong. Indulgent. The narratives we have just heard describe labor from “can’t see to can’t see,” from before dawn until after dusk, without reprieve. I lower my face from the mist and stand still for a moment.

“Alright, Xavier!” someone calls out, and I am pulled briefly back into the present. I nod toward my grandson, who stands beside me, absorbing what he can, deflecting what he must. He will carry this differently. I do not yet know how. Conversation swells around me, but I recede into silence.

A cage rises ahead—an iron structure, rusted to the same reddish-brown as the kettles, mounted on a stone base. Inside are three cells. Solid walls divide them. Bars at the back frame a clear view of the Big House. Power is not hidden. It is displayed, made visible, reinforced through proximity.

Causes for imprisonment were numerous—working too slowly, speaking without permission, gathering. Runaways’ punishment was more severe: first offense: ear severed, body branded; second offense: crippled, branded again; third offense: Death.⁷Estes, "Whitney Plantation teaches about the horrors of slavery"

My youngest daughter pokes her head in, takes a glimpse, backs down the stone steps, and vanishes in the direction of the creek after scooping up her niece in her arms.

My eldest daughter, my mother’s favorite, draws me to a patch of sugarcane seeking comfort from her grandmother’s stories. It eludes us both.

Jolted by a fear familiar, my middle daughter beckons the boys close with candy bars, chips, and juice from a bulging backpack. They trail behind her on a dirt road leading to the church. Each moves away from the structure, away from the logic it represents.

At the Big House, opulence contrasts sharply with the cabins. Cypress wood, hand-hewn from swamps, forms a structure of bedrooms, parlors, fireplaces, murals painted on the ceilings, and ornate moldings. Water is piped in from a cistern at the rear of the house. Built without nails and designed to circulate air to make the heat bearable. Nine-columns accent a veranda overlooking the courtyard. Wood panels painted to resemble marble on the veranda augment a façade of symbolic wealth.

The kitchen stands apart, filled with iron pots, wooden tools, and a massive mortar and pestle. The original owners, the Haydels, never lived on the plantation.⁸Synder, M. (2024, September 5). Amy Laskowski, "What a Southern Plantation’s Paper Trail Can Reveal About the Lasting Legacies of Slavery," The Brink: Boston University, September 5, 2024. https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/whitney-plantation-paper-trail/They elected to reside in New Orleans, distant from the labor that sustains their wealth.

The heat presses in. My chest tightens. My husband guides me to another misting station as the weight of history and temperature converge.

Under sprawling oaks, my middle grandson leads me to one of the stone benches bordering the cobblestone courtyard. My daughter hands me a bottle of water. I sit inhaling the oaks and the Mississippi trying to steady myself. I hear fragments: John Cummings purchased the plantation in 2010, it opened as a museum in 2014. The narratives center on the enslaved. Skilled labor—blacksmiths, carpenters, cooks, farmers—made the plantation economy possible.

After emancipation owners bound the formerly enslaved to the plantation under new contractual terms with a paternalistic framing of labor owed in exchange for basic needs.⁹Laskowski, "What a Southern Plantation's Paper Trail Can Reveal." A moral economy of enforced indebtedness converted bondage into financial dependency under the guise of freedom. The plantation economy did not disappear. It transformed. Debt replaced chains. Sharecropping and tenant farming reframed coercion as contract. Wages withheld. Credit manipulated. Mobility restricted.

Freedom is renamed, not realized.

I think of my mother again, of her insistence on holding land, on maintaining a foothold. I think of Franklin, waiting for us still. I think of the difference between working land and owning it, between inheritance and dispossession, between memory as burden and memory as claim.

“Looking back to move forward.”

Enduring more than they dared, I bypass the memorial of sixty-three sculpted heads mounted on steel rods—revolutionaries who staged the largest slave revolt in the US South, executed and beheaded for it.¹⁰ Estes, "Whitney Plantation." Brutality and beauty commingled, the truth held in iron and silence. This history will find them. Not today.

At the honor memorial, the scale shifts. Granite slabs stretch across the grounds, each engraved with names—over one hundred thousand Africans enslaved in Louisiana, documented by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall.¹¹Clay Risen, "Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, 93, Dies; Created Database of Enslaved People," New York Times, September 14, 2022). https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/us/gwendolyn-midlo-hall-dead.html Names that once existed only in ledgers, in inventories, in records of property.

I move slowly along the wall, reading what I can, knowing it is not enough. Each represents a life that exceeds its inscription.

My granddaughter stands beside me, quiet now. She places her hand against the stone, tracing the letters she cannot yet read. The names blur. My grandmother’s voice rises instead. My eldest grandson stands a few feet away, his gaze fixed, his body still.

“You’ve witnessed more at a young age than most folk in a lifetime,” my grandmother begins. “Millions tossed from their homes during the housing crisis, the Great Recession and the mass protests that followed, a pandemic that brought the world to a halt and the event that keeps revisionists busy to this day, the attack on the United States’ capitol by white nationalists.¹²Joseph P. Bishop and Tyrone C. Howard, "The COVID Effect: Unlocking the Education Potential for a Generation of Learners.," Teachers College Record, 127 (6–7) August 24, 2025. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01614681251368325, 3–21; Sarah Burd-Sharps, Impact of the US Housing Crisis on the Racial Wealth Gap Across Generations, Social Science Research Council, June 2015. https://www.ssrc.org/publications/impact-of-the-us-housing-crisis-on-the-racial-wealth-gap-across-generations; National Public Radio, "The Jan. 6 attack: The cases behind the biggest criminal investigation in U.S. history," December 17, 2025. https://www.npr.org/series/g-s1-34466/january-6-capitol-riot Who will hear your story of shutting down the Golden Gate bridge to protest rising poverty or you as a flickering name in a box—muted, a small square on a screen—in high school during the pandemic. These experiences shape who you are and the decisions you’ll make while at Xavier and long after. The heat down here is more than the temperature. Papa and I bought land to ensure you’d never have to suffer the indignities of working the land for someone else. Our table was always graced with the abundances from the land. Oyster, shrimp, crab, and catfish flowed in the creeks. Collards, yams, tomatoes, and pecans ripened on our land’s rich red clay soils. Papa’s carpentry and me teaching music kept us housed, clothed, and fed. The land is the language. This is what we carry forward—not just history, but the obligation to witness it.”

“Who were you talking to Precious?” I ask my grandson. “Oh, nobody Nana. I must’ve dozed off,” he replies.

Back in the SUV, air-conditioned and quiet, I catch fragments of the boys conversation—something about descendants of the enslaved working the land until 1975. I close my eyes.

About the Author

Sharon Fuller earned her Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy and Management from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an ethnographer whose research explores coastal environments, cultural traditions, and lived experiences among Indigenous communities of the African Diaspora. She has served as a lecturer in Applied Human and Environmental Science at Sonoma State University. Her publication "Indigenous Ontologies: Gullah Geechee Traditions and Cultural Practices of Abundance" in the journal Human Ecologies (2021) offers a new framework for conceptualizing indigeneity in the Americas.

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• fAfrican American History
• fAgriculture
• fAfrican American Studies
• fGeography
• fMemory and Memorial Cultures
• fMuseums
• fRace Relations
• fRural Studies
• fSlavery
• fTravel and Tourism