The Burning of Nottoway Plantation

Years ago, I was having a long lunch with a group of graduate school classmates at one of the most legendary restaurants in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Memorabilia hung on the walls nearby and inside rooms. While I enjoyed my gumbo, I noticed my friends kept looking over my shoulder. The paintings, old menus, and other objects told the story of a mythical south where happily enslaved people worked at the beck and call of the kindly landed class. I had seen these images my whole life, so I was desensitized to them. But my friends who were from other countries like Canada and South Korea lost their appetites. 

Louisiana, like much of the rest of the South, is dotted with former plantations. But on May 15, 2025, the largest surviving plantation mansion of them all burned to the ground, reportedly due to an electrical fire. All that’s left is a portion of the façade. All else is ashes. 

Nottoway, like many plantations, took on a second life as a location for weddings and portrait taking. As of this writing, the website labels Nottoway as a “resort” with amenities such as a gym, pool, and tennis courts. The history tab of Nottoway’s website provides a detailed listing of the diameters of certain oak trees—but nothing about the history of the plantation, how it was built, or what went on there.

Many people, myself included, see the Nottoway Plantation as little more than a former slave labor camp. A place where crimes against humanity went unpunished and many affiliated with those crimes were treated as noble heroes. 

John C. Calhoun, Vice President under Andrew Jackson, often argued that slavery was good for America because it created prosperity for those who were meant to rule. Slavery was lucrative for people like Calhoun. By 1863, many of the wealthiest Americans were from the so-called “planter class” i.e. plantation owners. 

Calhoun also had the audacity to say that slavery was good for the enslaved because it provided them with food and shelter, which they weren’t able to provide for themselves. Movies like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind brought this propaganda into the 20^th century by showing plantations as sites of human flourishing where the best people lived the good life and the enslaved were beloved members of the family. In the later film, Scarlett O’Hara had pretty dresses, more suitors than she could handle, and an enslaved caretaker who gave her motherly advice. 

But these depictions, as we know, were fantasies. No classic Hollywood film tells the story of plantation life from the point of view of the enslaved—that would have dispelled the myth entirely. Such films did not show how enslaved families felt being forced to increase the wealth of others and as their family members were sold off to other slave labor camps. 

There is no question, the enslaved workers at the Nottoway Plantation during the antebellum era were human chattel. They were unpaid and unable to leave. They had no property rights, no rights to their own children, and no rights to their own bodies. Nor could they appeal to the legal system for justice even if they or a loved one had been assaulted, raped, or killed. 

The question at hand: how do we treat the physical locations of such heinous histories?

In Amsterdam, a short walk from the Rijksmuseum and a park full of blossoming tulips, sits the Anne Frank House. Anne Frank, of course, was the young woman who hid with her family from Nazi’s in the attic of this home. Eventually, she was captured and murdered.

And there are the two “Doors of No Return” along the western coast of Africa. These memorials in Senegal and Benin mark the locations where Africans were shipped away from their homelands into chattel slavery. 

In 2023, I visited the Doorway of No Return at the House of Slaves on Gorée Island in Senegal, where expert tour guides gave detailed lectures about the deprivation experienced by humans held in the building. (Some people were kept in the space under the stairwells, an area no larger than a doghouse.) With this context, it was impossible not to be moved at the end of the tour where the guide cleared the way for me to stand at the threshold of the doorway. There were no tennis courts or facials offered at the House of Slaves.

Between 2017 and 2022, I visited Amsterdam three times on research trips. I tried to go to the Anne Frank House repeatedly, but each time I arrived, the line of people queued up to bear witness to what happened there was down the block and around the corner. By all accounts, seeing the interior of the home is a moving experience.

Herein lies the problem with America’s attitudes towards its former slave labor camps: they are divisive because they ignore their own histories. While there are some plantations that attempt to provide context for their past (the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana is an excellent example), there are far too many former plantations where the guides offer revisionist histories designed to make visitors feel unbothered by what happened there. This is especially damaging when many visitors believe they are taking an educational tour. 

Most people would not want to take glamour shots at the site of a human catastrophe. Most people would be appalled if someone threw a party in the place where their great great grandmother was imprisoned and abused. Any attempt to turn the World Trade Center site into a vacation resort would likely be met with widespread resistance from Americans. 

This is because the past must be contended with. Reconciliation cannot come before recognition and mourning. If Nottoway Plantation had been serving the community it was based in, I’d be the first one devastated by its loss. But as it stands, my face is completely dry.