THE CORRIDOR: Episode 2
Sugar is Made With Blood
Before gas, oil, and benzene, there was sugar. This is the story of the first industry that exploited people in the corridor–an industry that brought the ancestors of today’s residents to the area and laid the foundations for the modern petrochemical industry.
Guests
JESSICA MARIE JOHNSON
Jessica Marie Johnson is a historian, writer, an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University and ecosystem witch (director) at LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure. She is the author of the multi-award winning book Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020) and co-editor of Computational Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). Her work explores histories of slavery, African diaspora, and Black life in the Americas as well as Black data and the Black digital humanities.
Stephen mistretta
joseph dunn
For more than 30 years, Joseph Dunn’s understanding of Louisiana’s distinct cultures, languages, and heritage has afforded him the opportunity to work at the highest levels of the state’s tourism and cultural industries. After three years as Executive Director of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL), he began work as an independent tourism & cultural entrepreneur in 2014. Currently, his primary role is to oversee the communications, public relations, and marketing efforts at Laura: Louisiana's Creole Heritage Site, where he also participates in research projects and the construction of the interpretive narrative of the historic site.
JOY BANNER
Dr. Joy Banner is Co-Founder and Co-Director of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit foundation committed to the liberation of the Black descendant community through the dismantling of inequitable and discriminatory economic, environmental, and social systems inherent in the violent legacies of slavery. As part of this work, Dr. Banner is on the front lines of the struggle against environmental racism in the form of petrochemical plants along Louisiana’s River Road, otherwise known as “Cancer Alley.” After earning a Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, she taught business communications, marketing, and entrepreneurship at the university level where she advanced to Chair of the Management program. Joy is a proud member of the local descendant community with rooted ancestry that can be traced to the 18th century.
Credits
The Corridor is presented by Threshold and Auricle Productions. Jaha Nailah Avery is the lead reporter and host. Writing, mixing, and production by Erika Janik and Sam Moore. Music by Joy Clark and Todd Sickafoose. Executive produced by Amy Martin. Learn more and support the show at thresholdpodcast.org.
Transcript
[00:00] INTRODUCTION
AMY: You’re listening to The Corridor, presented by Threshold. To learn more and support our work, go to threshold podcast dot org.
JAY: Cafe Du Monde, baby! We got three beignets covered in powdered sugar, so pillowy and soft.
Welcome to The Corridor, I’m Jaha Nailah Avery and as you can hear… I’m at Cafe du Monde, one of the most famous places in New Orleans.
JAY: I got to knock some of this sugar off, though. It's just so much sugar is literally like I have. It's a layer of just caked powdered sugar.
JAY: Beignets, if you haven’t had one, are pillowy square doughnuts topped with a mountain of white sugar. Cafe du Monde has been selling coffee and beignets in the French Quarter since 1862.
JAY: But what's so funny? They give me these tiny little glasses of water. You need more than that because the sugar is just, like, out of control. But it's so good.
JAY: The sugar served here is from Louisiana. Sugar is a major commodity in this state. And not far from Cafe du Monde is another landmark to sugar, one that most visitors to the French Quarter likely miss.
JAY: I'm standing in a very interesting spot because I have the French Quarter right in front of me and the mighty Mississippi behind me. And we're actually near a marker that is dedicated to the transatlantic slave trade to Louisiana.
JAY: This spot, just steps from Jackson Square, is where thousands of enslaved people entered Louisiana, starting around 1718. Many of those people would end up working on sugarcane plantations outside New Orleans. But their journey started right here in the French Quarter.
JAY: So although this spot is very when you think of the French Quarter, you know, people think of debauchery. They think of the hurricane drink and maybe actual real hurricanes. They think of the food and the bars and just the nightlife. But really, a little over 200 years ago, have we been standing here? We would have seen hostages kidnaped from Africa being forced off of slave ships onto this very space and taken to slave pens throughout the French Quarter, holding pens that existed all over this city, especially concentrated in the French Quarter and sold at public auction.
JAY: In the 19th century, Louisiana’s prosperity depended on sugar and sugar depended on slavery.
JAY: In our last episode, we heard about how petrochemical plants along the Mississippi are mapped out almost perfectly onto former plantations. From the perspective of a lot of people I talked to here, these two industries have more than just borders in common.
JAY: In this episode, we’re going to explore the story of the first industry that exploited people here and how that history connects to what’s happening here today.
JAY: Before petroleum, chloroprene, and benzene…there was sugar.
[03:40] A SEG
JAY: There’s no place in this country like Louisiana. You already know that if you’ve ever been here and gone to a drive-through daiquiri stand! But the history you learn here in Louisiana really depends on who’s telling it.
LOUISIANA SUGAR CANE JINGLE: Sugar cane, sweet sugar cane.
JAY: At St. Joseph Plantation, this jingle was part of a video shown before the tour. Neither the video, nor the tour itself, even mentioned the enslaved people who were trapped on that plantation. Fortunately, there are places that do tell that story.
JOSEPH: For enslaved people who were working in that sugar cane, it’s extremely hazardous…
JAY: This is Joseph Dunn, director of marketing at the Laura Plantation in St James Parish.
JOSEPH: Sugar cane leaves are razor sharp, so they had to be covered from their head to their fingertips so they wouldn't get sliced up by the leaves. And inside those fields, you're going to have all kinds of rodents. You have poisonous snakes.
JAY: Although cotton was king across much of the south, in the 19th century, Queen Sugar ruled the River Parishes. It’s why the Laura Plantation is here.
JAY: The Laura is one of many historic plantations open for tours in this area but with one big difference. The Laura focuses on its French-Creole heritage. Creoles were a distinct cultural identity in Louisiana defined by native birth, the French language, and Catholicism. On one of my visits, nearly everyone was speaking French. But like the other plantations here, it, too, is an opulent estate made possible by sugar and slavery.
JOSEPH: So, a lot of people are surprised when they come to visit with us that there's no cotton. Well, this is not a cotton place. Everything south of Baton Rouge along the Mississippi River, all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. Once upon a time, it was all sugar cane fields.
JAY: Sugarcane is a tropical plant. It looks kind of like bamboo crossed with corn. Its tall stems are filled with sweet nectar that’s processed into the sweet treat we know and love. Harvesting sugarcane is incredibly labor intensive - and dangerous.
JOSEPH: When harvest time comes, that's going to start late September, early October. And the enslaved people would have been divided into groups. So you can imagine women, young adolescents, 12, 13 years old, you know, big enough physically to swing a cane knife and imagine that they are working in groups and they're grabbing the cane with their left hand, and they're cutting the cane with their right hand as close as they can to the ground.
JAY: Enslaved men, women, and children worked around the clock during harvest time.
INTERVIEWER: Do you recall having watched your mother do sugar cane?
GEORGIANA WILLIAMS JACK: Oh, yes. I worked in the field with her.
JAY: This is an oral history interview with Ms. Georgiana Williams Jack, who remembers cutting sugar cane as a little girl in Louisiana in the 1920s, much the same way they did it in the 1800s.
GEORGIANA WILLIAMS JACK: I was young and I tried to go help her. I was too young to play with a cane knife. You know those big cane knives?
INTERVIEWER: Yes, ma'am.
GEORGIANA WILLIAMS JACK: I would take a butcher knife and I would flag the cane and she would top them.
INTERVIEWER: Now, when you say flag the cane, what does that mean?
GEORGIANA WILLIAMS JACK: You get the flag off the cane. The cane's got flag.
INTERVIEWER: Okay. Is it the leaves on it?
GEORGIANA WILLIAMS JACK: Yes, but it's long, and if you don't watch yourself, you get cut by it.
JAY: Once harvested, sugarcane has to be processed immediately. Every plantation had a sugar mill on site to crush, heat, and boil the juice from the stem. It was basically a refinery in the field. Here’s Joseph again describing the boiling process:
JOSEPH: There's a whole series of giant iron pots. They're usually three, sometimes four of them that are in different sizes. So they start in the largest pot, and they work through a process of evaporation and reduction down to the smallest part, which means that they are having to lift this boiling sugar cane juice and pour from one pot to the other.
JAY: The sugar mill, with its billowing black smoke and nauseatingly sweet smell, was usually located right beside the slave quarters. Enslaved people lived their whole lives in its shadow, the most dangerous place on the plantation.
JAY: It wasn’t just Louisiana or the South that benefited from this system.
JOSEPH: We want things to be in pretty boxes. The North is abolitionist, the South is slaveholding, but its northern banks who are holding lots of mortgages for enslaved people, who are financing the trade.
JAY: Slavery was big business for people all over the world, even for those who didn’t enslave people personally. Northern banks provided financing for southern plantation owners to buy equipment, land, and people. And many other parts of the world economy relied on the trade of products produced with enslaved labor.
MUSIC
JESSICA: Sugar was like liquid gold, right?
JAY: This is Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson, associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins.
JESSICA: Louisiana slave owners, were often looking to places like San Domaine, you know, present day Haiti, looking to Cuba.
JAY: These were the sugar colonies that drove European expansion in the New World. By the 1700s, sugar had become the most important traded commodity on the planet. But it took longer for Louisiana to enter that global market.
JESSICA: The problem in Louisiana has always been that the climate causes frosts in the winter that occur too early for the sugar cane to take hold. There's only a certain region within Louisiana where you have the kind of temperatures that you need in order to support sugar cane as a crop. The kind of sugar that gets harvested, and refined, in Louisiana is just not of the same quality. So it can never really compete on the global market.
JAY: Things began to change for Louisiana in the 1790s though. A powerful revolution in Haiti abolished slavery and destroyed a big piece of the global sugar supply. Some expert sugarmakers fled Haiti and settled in Louisiana—one of them, a free man of color named Antoine Morin, helped make the first granulated sugar in the state. All of these developments gave wealthy planters an opportunity.
JESSICA: The sugar slave owners who are able to make sugar cane take hold are able to make a significant profit in the market. It is gangbusters.
JAY: The most successful planters were also the most industrial, using high yielding varieties of sugarcane, incorporating steam engines, railroads and conveyor belts, and burning cane stalks to power the mill. Some of them organized enslaved people into six-hour shifts during harvest time. Planters focused relentlessly on efficiency, feeding the byproducts of industry back into the sugar making process.
JESSICA: In 1843 Norbert Rillieux, who was actually a free man of color, invented the vacuum pan, that essentially is a kind of technology that allows for sugar cane processing to go easier.
JAY: This method of boiling cane juice with steam and recycling that steam at each step produced Louisiana’s finest sugar yet, chemically pure and bright white. Rillieux’s process, called multiple effect evaporation, didn’t just work for sugar. It’s useful for all kinds of industrial processing and is used by plants up and down the corridor to this day.
JAY: But even with these technological advancements, sugar planters still needed labor, and lots of it. And for that, they turned to another big business in Louisiana: slave trading.
JESSICA: The number of enslaved people who are moving through New Orleans is massive…They're going to be sold at one of the many markets or by one of the many agents in the city…And New Orleans’ slave market is feeding the enslaved population across much of the South.
JAY: The seaport and river made the city an ideal place for exporting cotton, sugar, and other goods made with enslaved labor. Those same waterways also brought people to be bought and sold. Jessica says that before the Civil War, New Orleans was the busiest slave market in the nation. By the 1820s, one in three people in the city was enslaved. And when you walk by the old buildings in the French Quarter, you’re walking through this history.
JESSICA: the trade itself, the actual economics and the market, the Wall Street-ness of slavery, was a critical piece of the city's architecture, its geography and much of its wealth and finances. So that even though most of the enslaved people were coming to New Orleans are actually moving out beyond the city and even beyond Louisiana, that slave market is a critical piece of New Orleans experience.
JESSICA: It's it's it's the reason the quarter exists and the reason the quarter was able to become what the French Quarter is.
JAY: Slave traders kept enslaved people in pens in buildings throughout the French Quarter. They brought them to auction at commercial centers called “exchanges,” some of which were located in fancy hotels. Among the most famous and beautiful was the St. Louis Hotel and Exchange. Six days a week, humans were sold in the lobby there. You can still go to that lobby today—it’s in the Omni Royal Hotel.
JAY: People sold in New Orleans ended up enslaved all over the south and even further west, many on cotton plantations. But some ended up in the River Parishes, where they entered a brutal hierarchy of forced labor. And even if they had experience on another plantation, it didn’t help much when it came to sugar, which was much more industrial.
STEPHEN: If somebody is sold from Virginia, they don't grow sugarcane there, nor is a cotton, tobacco or rice plantation an agro industrial complex. It doesn't require a factory. So they don't have skills in any of those things. They're typically purchased for general farm labor.
JAY: This is Stephen Mistretta, a site interpreter at Oak Alley Plantation in St. James Parish. Today, Oak Alley is a major tourist attraction, but in the 19th century, it was a factory farm for sugar. I met up with Stephen by the reconstructed cabins of slave row. The people who once lived in these cabins kept the operation running, day and night.
STEPHEN: Between 110 and 120 people. That's the amount of people to efficiently run the plantation…You have a 2 to 1 ratio men to women. You have a 2 to 1 ratio, unskilled men to skilled men on the plantation.
JAY: People did all kinds of jobs besides growing and cutting cane.
STEPHEN: Teamsters, blacksmith, carpenter, something like that…Typically slaves that are born here. And so they'll be the ones who are trained on more skilled jobs.
JAY: Skills tended to pass down through families.
STEPHEN: Typically, children live parallel lives to their parents. So it starts with what the father is. Skilled fathers have skilled sons. Apprentice age for skilled labor is about 11 to 13 now. Before that, they'll know the cultivation of sugar before that because that's a less dangerous job. And so maybe by the time they reach 8 or 9, they might know how to cultivate the plant.
JAY: Everything revolved around one building: the sugar mill.
STEPHEN: The mill is the central location of the plantation, not the big house, because it is the most important building on the plantation. If you don't have somebody who can work it, you don't have a sugar cane plantation.
JAY: Enslaved laborers did work at all levels of the operation, from cutting stalks to boiling cane juice. And the person in charge of the mill - the most important job - was often an enslaved man.
STEPHEN: Every plantation is going to have a sugar maker, or possibly more than one. And those people are the most highly valued because they're the ones who make or break the plantation, more than anybody else. They're the ones who know what it takes to make cane into sugar.
JAY: That person also had to know chemistry inside and out.
STEPHEN: Well, you have to have you have to have an eye for it. You have to be able to see the changes. You have to boil the juice at the correct temperature for the correct amount of time. To where the juice will become syrup and the syrup becomes molasses and the molasses granulates into raw sugar. So you have to know when's the right time to move it from kettle to kettle. And when you have to stop the fire so it can granulate down.
JAY: One wrong move, and the cane juice scorches, or turns into hard candy.
STEPHEN: What you want is granulated sugar. Not molasses. Nor do you want candy. The real gold is with granulated sugar.
JAY: White gold. Americans and Europeans couldn’t get enough of it, and that demand transformed the River Parishes. Kettles from the old mills are still a common sight in this area. The largest are about the size of a hot tub, and nearly every plantation has at least one on display. It’s a constant reminder of the commodity that shaped the world.
STEPHEN: Once they stopped using them in the mills, people started using them to decorate their yard. As a matter of fact, they make them out of fiberglass today if people want to decorate their yard with it.
JAY: You heard right - you can now buy a synthetic sugar kettle made from petrochemicals.
JAY: These kettles are leftovers from a brutal system. Enslaved adults and even children worked near open flames, boiling cane juice, and grinding rollers. They poured red hot juice from one kettle to the next with ladles. Accidents and injuries were common: people were cut by cane knives, dragged and crushed between grinders, burned by exploding boilers, and scalded by churning kettles of cane juice.
JAY: And on top of that speed mattered. Sugar planters wanted efficiency. Cane had to be cut, crushed, and boiled as fast as possible. As the scale and the profit increased, so did the suffering. Here’s Jessica again:
JESSICA: Because the pace is so grueling, the level of brutality rises to meet that pace. So the power that slave drivers had, the kind of brutal whippings, the brutal kinds of punishments, the punishment for running away, all of these are at intense levels in order to to keep control of the enslaved population, as well as to keep the slave population moving, to keep them working at a pace that is, you know, for all intents and purposes is incredibly inhumane.
JAY: Conditions were so severe, and injury and death so common, that there was a constant demand for more labor. The death rate on a sugar plantation exceeded the birth rate.
JESSICA: And then there's also just the kind of everyday inhumanity of slavery. Enslaved people describe having to literally, like, squat and give birth in the field, having to cut cane all the way into them giving labor. Those are also parts of the experience. Knowing that you literally have to work until you drop, is part of the terror of slavery that enslaved people experience.
JAY: In the era before widespread fossil fuel use, the energy being used to make consumer goods faster and cheaper was the life force of human beings.
JESSICA: So it's not it's not a life that you want to live. It's not a life that was sustainable. Life does not last long on a sugar plantation.
JAY: In 1808, the United States banned the importation of enslaved people, making the transatlantic slave trade illegal. This created what historians have called the “Second Middle Passage.” People who had been in the United States for generations were uprooted from other parts of the country and brought to Louisiana.
JESSICA: I think we can say that in a lot of hindsight, for enslaved people to be sold to the sugar plantations is like the worst kind of experience that you can have.
JAY: The difficulty of the work wasn’t the only thing that made it hard. Here’s Stephen from Oak Alley again:
STEPHEN: It's going to be hard for a bunch of reasons because it's a culture shock. You're moving from an area that's, first of all, English speaking to French, speaking from Protestant to Catholic, from cotton to sugarcane, from whatever environment they got up there to tropical.
JAY: Louisiana had been a French and Spanish colony for two centuries, a history that profoundly shaped the region. I can imagine what this would have been like for my own family. My ancestors were enslaved on a cotton plantation in eastern North Carolina. They spoke English, followed the traditions of the Baptist church, and had their own local traditions. Had one of them been sold to Louisiana, it would have been a huge change.
JESSICA: The Louisiana and New Orleans route is a special nightmare for enslaved people in this moment. And being sold away to the south broadly is especially terrifying because there is the understanding that you will probably never, never see that family, that multi-generational, generational family again, if you are sold…It’s the uncertainty that is as terrible as the sale itself. And the lack of control and autonomy over your future, over your body, over who is going to have control over you. That’s one of the hardest parts, and one of the brutal parts of the enslaved experience.
JAY: Everyone knew that being sold to Louisiana was basically a death sentence. This is from an account by Jacob Stroyer, an enslaved man born on a plantation outside Columbia, South Carolina. He’s remembering the moment his sisters were sold down to Louisiana.
JACOB: Louisiana was considered by the slaves as a place of slaughter so those who were going did not expect to see their friends again.
JACOB: Some were yelling and wringing their hands, while others were singing little hymns that they were accustomed to for the consolation of those that were going away. ‘When we all meet in heaven, There is no parting there.’ When the cars began to start, the colored people cried out with one voice as though the heavens and earth were coming together. As the cars moved away, we heard the weeping and wailing from the slaves, as far as human voice could be heard. From that time to the present, I have neither seen nor heard from my two sisters, nor any of those who left on that memorable day.
JAY: Jacob never saw or heard from his sisters again.
JAY: If you’ve heard of one person sold to Louisiana, it might be Solomon Northup, a free Black man who was kidnapped from New York and sold into slavery. In his 1853 book, Twelve Years a Slave, he detailed his time on cotton and sugar plantations. Here he is describing the harsh conditions inside one sugar-house:
NORTHUP: the grinding and boiling does not cease day or night. The whip was given me with directions to use it upon any one who was caught standing idle. If I failed to obey them to the letter, there was another one for my own back... I had no regular periods of rest, and could never snatch but a few moments of sleep at a time.
JAY: We know that people all over the country knew about the brutality of sugar plantations, because Northop’s book was a bestseller, and he became a sensation on the abolitionist lecture circuit.
JAY: But even though people knew the human cost to making sugar, they still wanted it. The global demand for sugar only grew in the 19th century. By the 1850s, a quarter of the global sugar supply came from Louisiana. Before the Civil War, the average sugarcane plantation was worth about $7 million in today’s dollars. Louisiana became the second richest state. The cornerstone of that value lay in the enslaved people held hostage on these plantations. Black people provided the skills and the labor for the industry, and in return, they suffered and died.
JESSICA: It's not a lot of time. It's not a full life. And it wasn't expected to be. Slave owners did not invest in creating families. They are invested in having able bodies that can harvest the sugar and maintain the sugar processing.
JESSICA: Sugar is made with blood.
JAY: Despite all the suffering and the lack of control over their lives, enslaved people here still had families. They formed communities and connections to the land. And many of the people you meet in the corridor today are descendants of those same families.
JAY: We’ll have more after this short break.
Break
[26:10] B SEGMENT
JOY: if you are a black person with roots, a couple of centuries in this particular place, then your folks were enslaved on several of these plantations.
JAY: Welcome back, I’m Jaha Nialah Avery and this is Dr. Joy Banner, co-founder of The Descendants Project, an organization that advocates for Black communities with generational ties to slavery in the River Parishes.
JAY: Where were your ancestors enslaved?
JOY: At Whitney Plantation in Wallace and then Laura Plantation. And then we're finding some that were at maybe a couple of other plantations in St James Parish. So a little bit north, a little bit west of where my hometown is, and then in Evergreen.
JAY: Joy grew up nearby, and like many people here, she lives only a few miles from the plantations where her ancestors were enslaved.
JAY: Unlike other people here, though, Joy herself…is a plantation owner.
JOY: I don't diminish, I don't shame, I don't blame any black person for saying ‘I don't want to go on the plantation,’ but it's our right to go on to our plantation if we want to.
JAY: In 2024, The Descendants Project purchased the place we’re standing in today - Woodland Plantation in LaPlace, Louisiana. The house is mostly empty on the day I visit, our voices echoing across the bare wooden floors. In the home’s more than 200 year history, it has never had Black owners…until now.
JAY: Joy was drawn to this plantation by something that happened here in 1811 - the largest slave uprising in American history. Joy walks me into one room.
JOY: So the first blows that have happened in either of these two rooms and there's an upstairs part. So it could have happened there.
Reading about the 1811 slave revolt and the like, going in the yard or going on a porch and reading about the 1811 slave revolt is quite a different experience.
JAY: The uprising began on the night of January 8, 1811. An enslaved driver named Charles Deslondes led a group of about 25 people into the house at Woodland, where they attacked the planter and killed his son. Seizing weapons and militia uniforms from the house, they headed south to New Orleans. This was a well coordinated and organized revolt, and it wasn’t just about this one plantation - it was about destabilizing the institution of slavery. Many of the rebels had fought in the successful independence movement in Haiti a decade earlier. Others had fought in civil wars in Africa. Their goal was to capture New Orleans, and establish a free black state.
JAY: Joy is still looking into whether her ancestors were actually involved.
JOY: I wonder, like how far the conspiracy, how well known was it, was it on both sides of the river? And how much was like the underground network contributing to the rebellion? Like were there people who were smuggling weapons or goods or passing along information from the east to the West Bank? Like what did that spy network look like?
JAY: As the rebellion advanced, they confiscated horses and weapons. They gathered supplies. At every stop, they were met with cheers and excitement. By late afternoon on January 9th, they’d traveled 25 miles, and more than 500 people had joined the rebellion. New Orleans was within reach.
JAY: But Deslondes and his followers never made it to the city. A group of American militia and planters descended on the uprising. Dozens were killed, including Deslondes. It came to a brutal end. The heads of about hundred of the participants were put on poles running 60 miles along the river road, the road that still runs through the corridor to this day.
JAY: Even though the rebellion wasn’t successful in taking New Orleans, Joy finds inspiration in the fight.
JOY: I think they were fighting more for the liberation of the generations coming after them. You know, I think that was their biggest prayer for freedom for all of us collectively in their future generations.
JAY: From the ashes of this revolt rose many other uprisings, not just in Louisiana, but all over the South. Word spread from plantation to plantation, with the name Charles Deslondes whispered on slave rows everywhere.
JAY: Today, the story of the uprising isn’t well known outside of this area, despite being the largest of its kind in American history. The existential threat to white power led planters and politicians to downplay the revolt, including the skill and coordination of its leaders.
JOY: So this history is traumatic, yes. But it's also hella interesting. We as black Americans, especially in small communities, we have the most compelling stories.
JAY: Joy grew up just across the river from Woodland Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana, surrounded by her family and its history. Wallace is a free town, created by and for newly freed people after the Civil War.
JOY: My neighborhood was founded by my great grandparents. And so it's about 125 years old. And so my neighborhood and my community is my family.
JAY: Many of these free towns were located right on the edges of plantations where residents had formerly lived and worked.
JOY: Woodland quarters is the black community. That's the neighborhood that grew from the descendants of Woodland Plantation.
JAY: For Joy, owning a plantation is a way to upend the common narrative around these historic places, a narrative that often ignores slavery entirely, focusing only on the fancy homes and gardens of the planters.
JOY: And really, what is the irony in all of this is plantations were black spaces, they were black spaces.
My ancestors built it. My ancestors are still buried in those sugar cane fields, and so it's sacred space.
MUSIC
JAY: The Civil War upended the plantation system in Louisiana and across the South. Agricultural production slowed, because, well… its expensive to make sugar without slavery. Some plantations adopted new technology to stay in operation, while many others shut down.
JAY: For Black people in the River Parishes, the work of sugarcane stayed mostly the same from slavery to freedom. Land ownership remained largely in the hands of white planters. That left freed men and women little other choice but to work in the fields and live on slave row, just as they had before emancipation. At the Laura Plantation, people worked the fields and lived in the slave cabins all the way until 1977.
JAY: Owning a plantation was something Joy felt called to do, but it isn’t just about the past. Joy has seen dozens of plantations get bulldozed and replaced by petrochemical plants. For her, saving the plantations that are left also means saving land from heavy industry.
JOY: The difference in one more plant coming is one more person getting cancer. The difference and one more plant coming is one more community that has been there for 300 years. One more community being completely wiped away. One more plant means the history that's foundational to the understanding of the building of this country.
JAY: Joy has spent years fighting against the expansion of the plants in the corridor. She helped lead the effort to stop the construction of a giant grain export facility in her home town. But more than just stopping industry, Joy wants to create more economic opportunities in the corridor that can compete with the plants. And she sees tourism - these plantations - as an integral part of charting a new future led by, and for, local people.
JOY: First of all, black people need to be in the history and they need to be benefiting from this tourism industry that was built off the backs of their ancestors and people who still live here. And so then that turned into us fighting for the community, but at the same time fighting for a greener industry besides industry. And then it just all kind of merged into one.
JAY: The economic, social, and political conditions that made the River Parishes ideal for sugarcane are also what made this area ripe for petrochemicals. Both are industries that were cultivated, supported, and upheld by the state government.
JAY: And today, on land that once grew acres of cane now stand acres of pipes, tanks, and waste pits. Some of these plants make artificial sweeteners, made from petrochemicals and exported all over the world, just like sugar was 200 years ago.
JAY: To Joy, this transition from one industry to the next almost feels inevitable.
JOY: And so, you know, there's so much put into capitalism, economic development that’s so similar to the plantation economy. And when you say ‘how could this happen,’ I'm like, when you put it, you know, face to face with the plantation economies, how could this not happen?
JAY: Like sugar, we all use petrochemicals—but also like sugar, only some of us bear the consequences of making it.
JAY: Next time on The Corridor….
BARBARA ALLEN: So it goes back pretty early where the oil companies and later the chemical companies were buying plantations and then using that land for their facilities.
JAY: How Louisiana traded one industry for another.
Credits
AMY: The Corridor is presented by Threshold and Auricle Productions. Jaha Nailah Avery is our reporter and host. Writing, mixing, and production by Erika Janik and Sam Moore. Music by Joy Clark and Todd Sickafoose. I’m executive producer Amy Martin. Learn more and support the show at thresholdpodcast.org.
Threshold Newsletter
Sign up to learn about what we're working on and stay connected to us between seasons.