The problem with using the word ‘plantation’ in the South today | Opinion

The largest remaining antebellum plantation mansion in the South has burned to the ground.

Fire crews worked 18 hours late last week trying to extinguish the fire that eventually engulfed the 53,000-sqare foot home at Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana. Its architecture was iconic, with 22 white columns like those on the White House. There were 64 rooms and 365 doors and windows. A bar. A restaurant. Pool. Tennis courts. And 40 rooms for overnight stays.

It was a massively important tourist draw, with people from all around the world visiting every year. It served as a museum to this country’s dark origins. Nottoway’s first owner had 155 enslaved people and owned 6,200 acres of property.

While I won’t cheer its demise like some have, neither will I shed a tear. Because I’m from South Carolina and have a home a long jog from a “plantation,” and a short drive from several others. I also regularly see such communities on my drive between South Carolina and North Carolina.

Unlike Nottoway, they are plantations in name only. They aren’t aren’t places where the enslaved toiled. They are places whose names capitalize on this country’s inability to grapple with its past.

There are Surfside Plantation and Windsor Plantation and Sago Plantation. Developers named such housing developments “plantation” because that word evokes the image of Southern elegance like that found in “Gone with the Wind” in the minds of their target audience.

That’s what several developers and builders told me when a colleague and I tallied up the number of “plantations” in South Carolina years ago. And there weren’t just housing developments. We found about 2,000, including a bank. Most had no historical ties.

What does that have to do with Nottoway? Nothing. And everything.

The beauty of the Nottoway mansion on a 31-acre property, which includes majestic centuries-old trees standing guard like good soldiers, was so seductive, it was considered an ideal wedding venue. That’s not coincidence. It’s design.

The United States of America has been expert in glossing over the evil perpetrated on this soil. Where whippings and rapes routinely occurred, there was also elegance and grandeur, noblesse. The young couples who choose to say their vows at such places focus on the aesthetic and ignore the brutality.

Enslavers could rape Black women in the morning, work enslaved Black men and Black women to near death in the afternoon, and dress in their finest clothes and sip tea and entertain guests in the evening, regaling them with stories that illustrate the power of the Christian God while the Black women who were raped in the morning served those guests.

Yet there are no signs that say “Sago Concentration Camp” or “Surfside Beach Concentration Camp” or “Windsor Concentration Camp.” Because developers know that “concentration camp” evokes only feelings of horror, disgust, dread, trepidation and fright.

Because naming a gated community a “concentration camp” is so unimaginable it feels absurd typing these words.

Because that’s as it should be.

Some places should not be remembered for anything other than what they fundamentally were. That enslaved Black people endured and survived, and even found ways to maintain their sanity and souls, is no reason to dress up an evil that was with us before this nation’s founding.

One of those Black people was a woman named Rose Graham Jackson, an ancestor on my mother’s side who straddled the era of enslavement and freedom.

Places like Nottoway paved the way for 21st century developers who use “plantation” to name residential enclaves, first with alluring architecture that distracts from the blood of the enslaved in the soil, then with the addition of resort-like attractions.

That’s not coincidence. It’s design.

That’s why it’s hard to ignore the symbolism of the largest remaining antebellum plantation mansion burning to the ground during an era in which teaching this country’s true racial history is being criminalized.

The terror and sadness “plantation” evokes in the minds of many of us never mattered as much as the vision “Gone with the Wind” inculcated in the minds of many others.

But it should.