of the Plantation Wedding Industry

“This Place is their Legacy”: Uncovering ENDNOTES the Dark History of the Plantation Wedding Industry

In 2018, the usually unproblematic and beloved Hollywood couple, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, faced significant criticism regarding the location of their 2012 wedding celebration. The backlash started after Reynolds commented on his excitement over the premiere of the film Black Panther, a film celebrated by critics and fans for its Black representation. Fans called Reynolds a hypocrite for praising the black-centric film after he and his wife had chosen the infamous Boone Hall Plantation and Gardens, formerly a prosperous plantation site which utilized slave labor, as their wedding venue.1

The controversy over Lively and Reynolds’ poor choice of wedding venue has raised awareness of the problematic nature of plantation weddings as well as the plantation tourism industry in general. Media outlets such as The Washington Post and lifestyle magazines such as Town and Country have addressed the controversies. For example, in his article “Isn't it romantic? No, it isn’t,” journalist Michael Brice-Saddler speaks to the work of organizations such as Color of Change, writing that “those plantations are featured on WeddingWire, one of several popular wedding planning websites now working to disallow vendors from using language that glamorizes locales with a history of slavery. The effort comes after Color of Change, a civil rights advocacy group, sent letters urging Pinterest and the Knot Worldwide… to cease promoting plantations entirely.”2 In a similar manner, in Town and Country, author Olivia Hosken writes that “a beautiful mansion and sprawling estate cannot

be separated from a horrifying violent history” and that “these are monuments to American slavery, not a place to hold a celebration or a backdrop for beautiful photos.”3 Wedding photographers such as John R. Legg, who has photographed couples celebrating their nuptials at former plantations, observes that “at these sites, white guests, whether visiting for weddings or historical tours, do not want to be confronted with traumatic history.”4 He adds later that “many Americans are attracted to the narratives about the past focused on wealth, the history of great men who gained power through the labor and dispossession of others”5 and concludes by declaring his decision to no longer photograph weddings taking place at such sites.

Beyond the celebrity gossip and media outrage over the issue of plantation weddings, scholars exploring plantation tourism have asked: why is it problematic, historically-speaking, to treat the site of a former plantation as an aesthetically pleasing wedding venue? The first response to this question is the origin of these plantations. Using a Marxist perspective, historians Matthew Russell Cook, Candace Forbes Bright, Perry L. Carter, and E. Arnold Modlin draw attention to the fact that “the entire plantation was only possible through the labors of enslaved people.”6 Moreover, when the labor and death of these slaves is ignored, “the dead labor of the enslaved is being reanimated as a profit generating engine in the experience (event-based) economy.”7 Cook, Bright, Carter and Modlin see plantation tours and weddings as an extension of the exploitation of former days where the work of the slave is taken for granted and remains invisible. Their article includes interviews from various anonymous plantation owners who also speak in terms of the economics of running a plantation tourist and wedding location; for example, they quote “Plantation A” owner as saying that “weddings will always be my cash cow.”8 Comments such as this one indicate the financial rewards of using these sites as “amusement spaces”9 rather than recognizing them as locations of historical traumas.

Beyond the economics of plantation tourism and weddings are the ahistorical narratives of the rhetoric used to promote a plantation and its events. This language is based more on nostalgia and a romanticized view of the Old South rather than the historical realities of the people who worked and lived there, especially the Black slaves. Historian Melaine Harnay points out that “these plantations offer visitors a mythical representation of the Old South during the antebellum era, which is a glorified and whitewashed version of the period of slavery.”10 In other words, the traumas and historical injustices so integral to these

spaces are either ignored or glossed over. Harnay calls this ahistorical and mythical approach the Lost Cause ideology. Looking at the history of plantations through this lens gives tourists and wedding parties the impression that they are in a place that was historically inhabited by “benevolent masters [who] lived in harmony with their happy, loyal slaves.”11 Cook, Bright, Carter, and Modlin also identify nostalgia as interfering with the presentation of accurate historical narratives, writing “the plantation has become a focal point not simply of national curiosity but of national nostalgia.”12 In other words, cloaked in Gone-with-the-Wind-inspired imagery of the wistful life of the Old South, the tragic history of Atlantic slavery is masked.

Many former plantations sites function today as tourist attractions and wedding venues. Three of them represent the full spectrum of ways the historical narrative of slavery is presented, both explicitly and implicitly: Houmas House Historic Estate and Gardens, Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, as well as Whitney Plantation. On one side of this spectrum is Houmas House, which fails to provide any meaningful acknowledgement of the many slaves who labored there. Magnolia Plantation lays at the center of this scale, as they include a statement of acknowledgement regarding the tragic history of their site but continue using imagery and language which contradicts this recognition. Finally, Whitney Plantation is a plantation transformed into an education center, focusing solely on the history of slavery that occurred there. In exploring this sampling of sites, the historical themes of trauma and dead slave labour versus nostalgia and the myth of the benevolent masters of the Old South can be seen in varying degrees. Ultimately, there are “wrong ways” and “better ways” of running a former plantation site and the three presented here are illustrative of these approaches.

Houmas House Historic Estate and Gardens

Houmas House is a former plantation site in Louisiana that hosts various plantation and garden tours, provides hotel accommodations and a variety of dining options and, of course, weddings. The plantation website states that “the mansion has been restored to the antebellum era, reflecting the opulence and wealth this sugarcane farm boasted in the 1880’s,”13 reflecting Harnay’s claims about nostalgia and the Old South. Regarding its history, Houmas House provides a lengthy history of the plantation, describing in detail its various owners, the importance of the Mississippi River and sugar crops, and the changes made to the house over the years. When it comes to accounting for the many slaves

whose labour made the plantation profitable, the writers of the Houmas House website offer one sentence: “The Houmas Estate had a frontage of thirty-five acres front on the Mississippi River, comprising the Donaldson, Clark and Conway tracts, and contained over twelve thousand acres of the finest quality of cultivable land, and a work force of over five hundred and fifty slaves, and was without exception, the finest property possessed by a single proprietor in America.”14 The website’s authors see the work of black slaves in the context of the wealth of the white plantation owners. The five hundred and fifty slaves who worked on the farm remain anonymous, faceless, and dehumanized while the roughly one dozen white owners are spoken about with detail. As Cook, Bright, Carter, and Modlin have claimed, in ignoring the Black slaves who worked at Houmas house, the site is being treated solely as an amusement space rather than a historical site that tells the Atlantic history of slaves in a way that is accurate and respectful. Even the way weddings are advertised makes clear that the owners of the site have no intention of speaking on the dark history of their location with phrases such as “a stunning setting for memorable weddings” and “ceremonies beneath the oak alley and with the Houmas Mansion as a backdrop, provide picture perfect moments.”15 Just as with the history portion of the website, the wedding information fails to disclose the problematic history of the plantation, again proving Harnay’s point that plantation tourism sites serve to provide visitors with a nostalgic rather than a historical experience.

Magnolia Plantation and Gardens

Like Houmas House, Magnolia Plantation and Gardens offer not only weddings but also social and holiday events. The phrases “Charleston's Most Visited Plantation”, “the oldest public tourist site in the Lowcountry” and “America’s Last Large-scale Romantic-style Garden” are prominent on their website.16 Turning to the wedding venue section of the webpage, viewers will see, amidst the many promotional photographs, a brief history of the site. It begins “the Drayton family ownership of Magnolia actually began with a wedding”17 and continues with the story of the nuptials of Ann Fox and Thomas Drayton who received Magnolia as their wedding present. In light of the scholarship mentioned above, particularly about plantation sites making visitors feel nostalgia for the days of the Old South, this is an interesting anecdote to use in promoting a wedding venue. When the website

writers claim that they are “thrilled you’ve decided to join your history to ours!”18 they are likely pointing to the history of the plantation owners, rather than the Black slaves that were forced to work there. Even so, while the connections to the Old South nostalgia are similar to those of Houmas House, Magnolia Plantation recognizes the legacy of the slaves of the site, albeit briefly:

Before Magnolia was a public garden, it was a rice plantation worked by enslaved laborers. These men, women, and children did the work that made the money that made the Drayton family rich … [and]without the forced labor of enslaved men, women, and children, the Drayton family could not have risen to prominence. Simply put, Magnolia owes its very existence to enslaved workers. Every visitor to Magnolia should remember, appreciate and honor the men, women, and children who lived and died in servitude here. This place is their legacy.19

While this acknowledgement is more than what Houmas House offers, for many historians or advocates of racial equality, these few sentences are not adequate in acknowledging the historical tragedy of slavery. Furthermore, the final statement that “this place is their legacy” ring hollow, especially when considering the actual business practices of the plantation which focus more on the entertainment of their visitors than portraying the plantation for what it was.

Whitney Plantation

In stark contrast to both Houmas House and Magnolia Plantation, as well as many other existing plantation sites, Whitney Planation does not offer weddings, amusement tours, or other social events. As stated on their website, “Whitney Plantation is a 200acre former sugar plantation turned historic site dedicated to telling the history of slavery in the United States from the perspective of the enslaved Africans, African-Americans, and Creoles of Color who built America’s wealth.”20 While other plantation sites offer various wedding packages, Whitney Plantation offers a variety of exhibits, all intended to educate visitors on the history of slavery of this former plantation; these exhibits include “The History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” “Slavery in Louisiana,” and “Grass, Scrap, Burn: Life & Labor at Whitney Plantation After Slavery.”21 In addition to the education provided onsite, the website itself is rich in information regarding the Cheburashka007, Statue at the Field of Angels at Whitney Plantation, plantation itself, the production December 23, 2019, Wikimedia Commons. of indigo and sugar cane, the Atlantic and Louisiana slave trades, as well as slave resistance. Furthermore, rather than host events such as weddings, Whitney hosts a virtual book club as well as seminars on topics such as “Climate and Race.”22 In general, Whitney Plantation appears intentional in creating a space that is focused on highlighting the history of the site, avoiding turning the plantation into an amusement space, and rejecting any ideas of nostalgia of the Old South.

Karolina Zyra

MAIH (History stream)