The Cutting Season and the Wailing Season
As I noted in prior weeks, I’m sharing a series of reflections after visiting the Whitney Plantation (aka Habitation Haydel) during a four-week road trip this summer. On the late-June day we visited, the sun was hot, the humidity was high, and I couldn’t imagine being...
Understanding the Lay of the Land at the Whitney Plantation
As I mentioned last week, we visited the Whitney Plantation during our recent month-long road trip. This museum in southern Louisiana focuses extensively on the experience of enslaved people rather than glorifying the slave-owning “masters.” In this post, I want to...
Pondering Spaghetti Lots and Slavery
Have you encountered the term “spaghetti lots” before? It’s a phrase I heard growing up in the North Valley of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It doesn’t refer to an abundance of pasta, but to the shape of land plots along the Rio Grande River (shown above), which runs like...
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