March 23, 2026
The Feliciana Parishes of Louisiana
For 74 days in 1810 the current-day parishes of East and West Feliciana in New Orleans were part of the independent Republic of West Florida, which flew a lone star flag. By that point the residents of the Felicianas, including a large enslaved population, living on land that had been stolen from indigenous people, had been part of three different empires. The republic ended with the parishes annexed into yet another country, the United States, though fifty years later they would be part of still another attempted breakaway republic, the Confederate States of America. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Rashauna Johnson, Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago and author of Sweet Home Feliciana: Family, Slavery, and the Hauntings of History.
Our theme song is “Frogs Legs Rag,” composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Louisiana,” composed by Oliver Wallace with Lyrics by Arthur Freed and performed by the Sterling Trio on December 27, 1920, in Camden, New Jersey; the recording is in the public domain and is available via the Library of Congress National Jukebox. The episode image is a lithograph believed to be of drawings that artist Lewis Henry made on the Mississippi River around 1846-1848 with Bayou Sara in the foreground and St. Francisville on the bluff in the background; the lithograph was published in 1857 and is in the public domain in the United States and available via Wikimedia Commons.
Additional Sources:
- “Native Americans: the First Families of Louisiana on the Eve of French Settlement (Online Exhibition),” Louisiana State Museums.
- “Louisiana Purchase Treaty (1803),” The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
- “West Florida Revolt,” by Samuel C. Hyde, 64 Parishes.
- “The History of the Short-Lived Independent Republic of Florida,” by William C. Davis, Smithsonian Magazine, May 2013.
- “The West Florida Republic,” by Anne Butler West Feliciana Historical Society and Museum.
- “The Siege of Port Hudson: ‘Forty Days and Nights in the Wilderness of Death’ (Teaching with Historic Places),” National Park Service.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm your host, Kelly Theresa Pollock.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do.
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[SPEAKER_01]: A little over 100 miles northwest of New Orleans, nestled in hills along the Mississippi River, sits the town of St. Francisville, Louisiana.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The parish seat of West Feliciana,
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[SPEAKER_01]: A few years after the town's 1807 founding, it became the capital of the short-lived Republic of West Florida in 1810.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Long before that, though, the land had been inhabited by societies of Native Americans,
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[SPEAKER_01]: When Hernando de Soto arrived in 1541, he found the tunica living in the region, and he fought them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: European diseases like measles and smallpox killed many of the tunica that de Soto didn't.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When the French arrived in the 18th century, they imported enslaved Africans to the region,
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[SPEAKER_01]: When the British won the Seven Years War in 1763, they acquired the land east of the Mississippi River from France and Spain.
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[SPEAKER_01]: With the exception of New Orleans, which went to Spain in the secret treaty of Fountain Blue.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The land that would eventually become the Felicianas was part of British West Florida, and the British enticed settlers with land grants.
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[SPEAKER_01]: West Florida wouldn't stay British for long, though.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Spanish military leader Bernardo de Golfes, conquered West Florida during the American Revolution.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the residents who had already experienced French and British control suddenly found themselves part of the Spanish Empire when Great Britain seeded both east and west Florida colonies to Spain in the 1783 Paris peace treaty.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Spain, of course, enticed its own settlers to the region.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In 1803, a cash dropped Napoleon sold the Louisiana territory, including New Orleans, which had recently come back to French control, to the United States, for $15 million in the Louisiana purchase, doubling its size for around four cents an acre.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Napoleon did not share any of the $15 million with them, either.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The Felicianas, though, were not part of that Louisiana purchase.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The land remained part of Spanish Florida, a confusing state of affairs, even for residents of the region.
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[SPEAKER_01]: By 1810, the white population of New Feliciana had grown along with their wealth.
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[SPEAKER_01]: produced through the cultivation of cotton and sugar by their enslaved laborers.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Despite their wealth, the white planters were in a precarious position, outnumbered by indigenous and enslaved black people surrounded by the United States, and subjects of a weakening Spanish empire that offered them few protections.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That was the situation in September 1810, when armed rebels attacked a Spanish fort at Baton Rouge, killing two Spanish soldiers.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The rebels declared themselves to be the Republic of West Florida, with St. Francisville as the capital.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Their Constitution was modeled on the U.S. Constitution, and their flag consisted of a single white star on a field of blue, was made by Melissa Johnson, the wife of one of the Feliciana Cavalry, an attempt to capture mobile to add it to the new republic failed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the United States quickly took advantage of the revolt,
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[SPEAKER_01]: President James Madison issued a proclamation of annexation in October.
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[SPEAKER_01]: With Congress out of session, Madison's right to take action was dubious at best, and he had constitutional poems.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But he justified it, based on ambiguity over the border of the Louisiana purchase, and
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[SPEAKER_01]: The annexation would not have been a surprise to the rebels.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That may have been their ultimate goal.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The Republic's governor, full-warship with, had previously been an American diplomat.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Serving as counsel general to France under President Jefferson.
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[SPEAKER_01]: in skiplets and inaugural address at St. Francisville.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He spoke to the possibility of annexation, saying quote.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The blood which flows in our veins, like the tributary streams which form and sustain the father of rivers, and circling our delightful country, will return, if not impeded, to the heart of our parent country.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The genius of Washington, the immortal founder of the liberties of America, stimulates that return, and would frown upon our cause, should we attempt to change its course, unquote.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Even so that annexation came quickly, and without the respect that skip with
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[SPEAKER_01]: On December 10, 1810, just two and a half months from when it began, the Republic of West Florida was no more, and the U.S. flag was raised.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In April, 1812, Louisiana, including the Felicianas, became a U.S. state.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In 1824, Feliciana Parish split into, with St. Francisville becoming the parish seat of West Feliciana, in Clinton, the parish seat of East Feliciana.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In January 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, Luisiana seceded from the United States.
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[SPEAKER_01]: becoming one of the founding states of the confederate states of America in February 1861.
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[SPEAKER_01]: During the Civil War that followed, the Union Army fought to control the Mississippi River.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In 1863, just 12 miles from St. Francisville, the Union Army lay siege to the confederate
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[SPEAKER_01]: The Confederates were defending a fort on a bluff above the Mississippi River, and they held out for 48 days while they were attacked by cannons and rifles.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The longest siege in American history finally ended in Union victory, just days after another Union victory at Vicksburg, giving the Union forces full control of the Mississippi River.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The emancipation proclamation, which went into effect on January 1, 1863, had officially freed the enslaved population of the Felicianas.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But the end to slavery rolled out slowly as the union army took control of the region.
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[SPEAKER_01]: As of the 2020 census,
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[SPEAKER_01]: 15,310 people lived in West Felicia in Apparish, 69% of them white and 23% black.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In 19,539 people lived in East Felicia in Apparish, 58% of them white and 36% black.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Joining me in this episode is Dr. Roshana Johnson, associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, and to author of Sweet Home, Felicia Ana, family, slavery, and the hauntings of history.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I'm Ashana, thanks so much for joining me today.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for having me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm excited to talk with you today.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I'm really looking forward to this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I want to hear a little bit about what inspired you to write this book, I know this is your second book, and first one was more on New Orleans, and this is more of the rural counties in Louisiana.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So tell me a little bit about what got you started on this project.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, I grew up in New Orleans, but my maternal grandmother grew up in this part of Louisiana.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's the Flifiana Parishes.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's rural, very different history, very different reality in the present.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I just wanted to know more about it.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So it started with an undergraduate assignment.
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[SPEAKER_02]: We had to interview our oldest family member, the oldest woman in our family.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It was black women in America, of course.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So I interviewed her.
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[SPEAKER_02]: This was, I think, about 2001, actually cite the paper in the book.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So I interviewed her, and then when I started graduate school, I had a good colleague who was interested in family history, it was becoming increasingly important, and I thought, okay, maybe I will write an article in this vein and think a little bit about family history in this area, and that could be interesting.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And then when I started to do the actual research, I was like, there was a whole lot more going on in that area than I understood.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so it became a much larger, written, much longer project, because I wanted to know more about this region.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I need so much of my field.
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[SPEAKER_02]: You know, has been focused on Atlantic port cities on part of that right with my first book on New Orleans and so as part of the Atlantic world kind of turn over the last couple decades we've really been thinking about circulation and sort of sailors and pirates and people were moving in those ways.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And that's been really interesting, but I wanted to think about how I could bring some of those conceptual questions to a region that seemed to defy the norms of a kind of port city.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's rural.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's, you know, the population is not nearly what it would have been in New Orleans at least at the starting point.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I just wondered, how can I think about some of these
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[SPEAKER_02]: the ways many different kinds of people come together in a space and create that space, not in a port city, but in this rural area to which I, you know, unpersonally connected.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So that's how I got there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Talk to me a little bit about the sources, the archives that you used and, you know, to you talk some about this in the book, but what sorts of things can and can't be found in those archives.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So the thing about Louisiana is there are just a lot of archives, which is unusual like lots of documentation for lots of really unfortunate reasons, obviously.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But they're just really rich archives there.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So for this project, I spent a lot of time in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
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[SPEAKER_02]: at LSU's archives at the Louisiana State Archives.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And there I read just about everything I could get my hands on.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So there were police jury records.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So Louisiana has parishes, not counties, but sort of the parish level governance, sort of day in, day out who bought a new lock for the voting box.
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[SPEAKER_02]: You know, kind of granular detail, you know, can get new chairs for the courthouse level records.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And then LSU also has a lot of family papers, families donated just huge trenches of their own family records.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And then so those can be useful to our correspondence for
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[SPEAKER_02]: financial records for just sort of personal level interfamily conflicts and those sorts of things could be a lot of fun newspapers.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I mean there were far more newspapers in this area than I expected.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I certainly expected New Orleans to have lots of newspapers but I wasn't prepared for the existence of a small but it's certainly quite vocal community of journalists living in this
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so that's kind of the archival side.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But in my own field, there've been a lot of debates about archival research and the limits of using archives to tell the stories of people who were not only excluded from literacy and the ability to read right preserved documents, but for whom these documents were a tool of oppression and extraction.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so one of the things that I tried to do here is
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[SPEAKER_02]: to be both archival but also to be really a neverace as the way I think of it and so I draw on family history stories.
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[SPEAKER_02]: My grandmother told me songs, novels, my cousins, I do an oral history with my cousin who messed with the Madagrad Indians, but the idea is to draw on as many archival records and as many non-traditional sources as I can to get to something that feels like a
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, you mentioned that this region is very different than New Orleans, and it's not just because it's rural and not urban, but also it's not as French right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, this land changes hands a million times with that means for the people who live there.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that's part of what I found so fascinating there.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I think the French heritage in Louisiana just is so prominent for so many reasons and I think both historically and also politically and economically right there are all sorts of stakes too that deep association between Louisiana and the French heritage.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But the thing about this region is, as you're saying, right, there were just so many other people there, right?
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[SPEAKER_02]: Starting with the indigenous people who were there, you know, in building infrastructure and complex communities long before the French claimed it on a map somewhere.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And as we know, claiming it on a map doesn't necessarily mean you're exerting any kind of dominion, right?
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[SPEAKER_02]: That's a much slower process.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So, I mean, part of what I wanted to track was sort of thinking about the Tunica, the home of that, right?
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[SPEAKER_02]: Any number of groups who were there before the French
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[SPEAKER_02]: the French interacted.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But yes, so it's claimed by the French, it then changes hands empirically so many times.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's still very confusing, frankly.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, I think my story really picks up when it's under the British.
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[SPEAKER_02]: briefly, and then under the Spanish before, after 1810, becoming part of the U.S., I think one of the interesting things there is that it was not part of the Louisiana purchase, which is always surprising to people.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I think many people think that the entire state of Louisiana, with the Louisiana purchase, became part of the U.S., and then when they come to this region, I wait a minute.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It was still Spanish in 1808.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, very confusing for all involved and raised a lot of anxieties because I mean these folks really lived in a period in which it was not far fetched to go to sleep one night.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It didn't hard of one empire and to wake up the next floor thing and sort of wonder okay who's who's are we at this point?
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[SPEAKER_02]: So, and you can capture that in archival records where people are expressing that kind of anxiety.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So, yes, it becomes part of the U.S. in 1810, thanks to the West Floor in a Rebellion, which I think of as a kind of early version of Texas, you know, like there's a way that, I mean, the lone star republic, you know, this whole idea of Anglo settlers who are moving to this Spanish area and they rebel and they, you know, ultimately become part of the U.S. and there's all sorts of
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[SPEAKER_02]: But the other part that's important for me here is, you know, I think the way a lot of Louisiana history is written is that we have had a colonial history, 19th century history, 20th century history, and part of what I wanted to think about was how these successive administrations,
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[SPEAKER_02]: and successive colonial errors all worked to build toward this kind of 19th century reality rather than ending the story with the Louisiana purchase or with 1810.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I wanted to think about the ways we can track the ongoing implications and hauntings.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's kind of one of the freeing things I use over the long 19th century through the US period into the rise of
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and so this is not unusual for the south of course, but the wealth in this region comes from both stealing land and stealing labor, which is that mean for the people who continue to live there, you know, what what does that look like the the long history of extracting labor and land.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think part of what I wanted to think about was, you know, how do we give a kind of backstory to President Day inequalities and President Day hierarchies?
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that one of the gifts that I think historians can offer is context to remind us that these things didn't have a history, that they haven't been this way, you know, from time in memorial, but that they
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[SPEAKER_02]: do represent parts of a much longer story that help us to explain our present.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I don't think it's a secret that Louisiana continues to struggle in many ways, right?
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[SPEAKER_02]: Many people in Louisiana continue to struggle financially.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Health, you know, education, you know, name the markers, right?
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's one of the states where
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[SPEAKER_02]: We have to think a lot about the ongoing role of racism, inequality, broadly.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's one of the things that I hope that this work will help us to think through.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I mean, the story, you know, the African diaspora, obviously, I sent to people of African descent.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But I also wanted to do my best to talk about indigenous people, to talk about poor white people, to talk about, you know, the tiny number of Jewish immigrants to this area.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And to think about the ways that any number of people
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[SPEAKER_02]: kind of got by in this region of deep inequality and how, you know, having a fresher understanding of what that history was might allow us to have, I think, more perhaps difficult, but also ultimately productive conversations about how we move forward.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I think that
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[SPEAKER_02]: one of the things that historians, you know, we insist upon is that if everything has a history, and everything is contingent, then it means that we can make decisions that will advance egalitarian democratic goals rather than entrenching these kinds of, you know, racist and classist and sexist hierarchies that can seem so natural, but that, in fact, were produced.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah and it was clear from which you write is that people who were enslaved despite obviously being in brutal conditions wherever they could exert any kind of autonomy did and were building culture.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Could you talk through that a little bit?
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[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, so one of those, I joke that the graduate students, you know, we present all these binaries in year one, and then we explode, but it's so the kind of domination versus resistance, agency questions, you know, those are all the sorts of questions we think through the very beginning of our time as historians, and that I think continue to hunt so much of our own research, and I think that's certainly the case for me.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I wanted to find that balance.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I certainly
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, the horrors of what it meant to try to live under these truly brutal and awful conditions, without reducing people to their status, you know, I really wanted to take seriously the ways that they nonetheless lived, you know, built families and communities, built rich cultures, and that those things also, I think, had a relationship to the ways that they were able to organize politically, right, to not saying that those things were the same, right, that, you know, I do want to hold space for,
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[SPEAKER_02]: the ways individual expression, you know, can mean a lot of different things and that politics can mean a lot of different things, so I don't want to conflate all these things.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But I did want to capture the existence and frankly joy of black life in this region even as I was chronically the difficulties and the struggle because I think both of those things, both sides are actually quite critical to understanding this region and the people who live in it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, one of the brutalities, of course, that we see over and over again is the sexual assault of enslaved women and, you know, even in your own family, you talk about that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One thing you say several times is, you know, we can't know the interior lives of these women, and we can't know the complicated things they may have been feeling.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Can you talk some about what that looks like when you're thinking through the archives and, you know, what you can see and and what you can't really get at.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So I will talk about the silences and what that means for us, but first I think it's important to note that there are a handful of testimonies in which people did in fact talk about their experiences of sexual violence.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I talk about one woman in particular who testified before kind of federal committee in a way that was really quite haunting but also striking.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I mean,
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[SPEAKER_02]: to think about the amount of courage it must have taken for her to do that in that context when you know we know in the present it is still extraordinarily difficult to comfort with those sorts of you know account I mean we're in the middle of a version of that now and in terms of thinking about how difficult it can be to grapple with the meaning of sexual violence.
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[SPEAKER_02]: You know, so for this woman to have done that in, you know, the post emancipation south, I think is just stunning, but also worth remarking.
23:41.938 --> 23:50.595
[SPEAKER_02]: So I do want to, you know, take note of the times people did, in fact, come forward with those kinds of testimonies.
23:50.575 --> 23:58.505
[SPEAKER_02]: But the other thing is, I want to note that within families, right, people didn't fact talk about these things, and that's how I learned about this account.
23:58.746 --> 24:01.149
[SPEAKER_02]: In my own family, that was an adult.
24:01.169 --> 24:07.417
[SPEAKER_02]: This was after, and I think that first interview with my grandmother, this was a few years later, when I was in my grad school coursework.
24:07.857 --> 24:16.228
[SPEAKER_02]: It was very clear I was going to become a historian, very clear that at some point I would do something with her family history, so she had to kind of get it on the record.
24:16.208 --> 24:38.115
[SPEAKER_02]: energy and some of those conversations which was really inspiring and so it was very important for her to tell me about this story at that point and so there is something about truth telling that I think can be healing and so I think it's worth noting that at the same time I think you're right I think the more normal experience for us as historians is silence.
24:38.095 --> 24:42.619
[SPEAKER_02]: And it does raise all sorts of ethical questions about how do we handle this, right?
24:42.719 --> 24:44.441
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, we want to talk about this.
24:44.561 --> 24:56.151
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, you need to note that sexual violence, you know, like lynching, like, you know, math incarceration, we're all technologies of, you know, the reassertion of white supremacy and the post-demands of patient context.
24:56.611 --> 25:06.600
[SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, I do think it requires a certain amount of care because one, I want to think about readers who, you know, have who bring their own complex experiences to this,
25:06.580 --> 25:14.853
[SPEAKER_02]: make reading my book and overly horrific experience for people who've had to deal with this in their own lives, while also doing my best to note this.
25:14.953 --> 25:21.162
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, as a writer, I chose brevity, and so I don't necessarily linger on a lot of details.
25:21.222 --> 25:30.276
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't ask the reader to, you know, sit with this for too long because at, you know, I thought that was the the best I could do in
25:30.695 --> 25:38.663
[SPEAKER_02]: what felt like an ethical but also intellectually accountable approach to such a sensitive topic.
25:39.976 --> 25:43.800
[SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned toward the beginning that you were thinking about family history.
25:43.860 --> 25:47.024
[SPEAKER_01]: This book, of course, is not strictly a family history.
25:47.044 --> 25:54.452
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you say at some point it's a community history, but yet you're also talking about your own ancestors, your own family members.
25:54.892 --> 26:02.440
[SPEAKER_01]: What was that like for you as a historian to be not writing a family history, but thinking about your own family as a writing this book?
26:03.261 --> 26:05.123
[SPEAKER_01]: Terabyte!
26:06.385 --> 26:27.178
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I'm a very private person and I'm not one to put myself at the center of, you know, my work in a certain way, until in my first because I was able to hide a little bit more I think so I then talk a little bit more about my own experiences in the process, but the rest of the book is in many ways I kind of straightforward academic monograph, whereas this one is a lot more personal, which is.
26:27.158 --> 26:32.150
[SPEAKER_02]: pushing me out of my comfort zone, I should say, but I think it's actually been really rewarding.
26:32.491 --> 26:41.753
[SPEAKER_02]: One because, you know, on the intellectual side, again, I'm trying to find every source I can to try to think about this region and to think about the people in it.
26:42.054 --> 26:43.497
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, I think that
26:43.477 --> 26:50.731
[SPEAKER_02]: having access to my own family and with my own family stories, it is actually quite important as a kind of method, right?
26:50.851 --> 26:59.147
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, you know, like, Tully Countryfield talks a lot about this, right, sort of the way that having access to family history broadens the kind of evidentiary days that we're able to have.
26:59.848 --> 27:04.337
[SPEAKER_02]: And so there is something quite meaningful there, but on a personal level,
27:04.773 --> 27:20.419
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's been really cool to watch my family's response to it and then to sort of see, okay, what parts of thing, you know, what comes forward, what do you talk about how does this in some ways memorialize our family while also thinking about a certain approach to the region.
27:20.399 --> 27:25.189
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, I mean, I don't think it's a secret that this is a tricky time to do black history.
27:25.770 --> 27:31.963
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I think that it's just important to show that you can do a number of things.
27:32.083 --> 27:40.821
[SPEAKER_02]: You can do the kind of hard-nosed archival approach where you're doing all the sorts of granular heavy, you know, end noting and foot noting and so on.
27:40.801 --> 27:50.611
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, also talking about some of the fun stuff of being of growing up, you know, black woman in New Orleans in the 80s and 90s, which was, they were certainly challenges, but also a lot of fun.
27:50.671 --> 27:58.699
[SPEAKER_02]: And so being able to talk about how fun it is to go watch the Madagher Indians or to, you know, have go to a second line or listen to bounce music.
27:59.179 --> 28:09.930
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's just really important because again, like, thinking about both the horrors and the hauntings, but also the joy
28:10.737 --> 28:17.566
[SPEAKER_01]: ask a little bit about how you think about family when genealogy is not straightforward.
28:17.606 --> 28:26.917
[SPEAKER_01]: So we've mentioned sexual violence in family and there's also one of your ancestors takes the last name of his and sliever.
28:26.957 --> 28:30.822
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you think through all that sort of tangled web?
28:31.612 --> 28:46.316
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think that's part of why I resisted the label of family history because I think when we say family, even if we complicated things, there is still a way that a certain kind of nuclear biological family emerges when we use that term.
28:46.657 --> 28:50.042
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's why community study deals more kind of
28:50.022 --> 29:11.457
[SPEAKER_02]: natural to me in part because it is part of our own kind of family culture we never drew overly rigid boundaries around biology like we're one of these southern families where I joke they've become to one barbecue your cousin and she's just sort of yeah this is sort of our norm so I've never been overly invested in the kind of
29:11.437 --> 29:22.770
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, family-tree biological kind of, I think of it as the baguettes from the Exodus, I don't know, it's been a while, but like maybe somewhere in the sort of Exodus zone of the Bible.
29:23.151 --> 29:29.178
[SPEAKER_02]: But you know, so I didn't want this to become a kind of chronicle of, you know, this one birthed this one birthed this one.
29:29.538 --> 29:40.151
[SPEAKER_02]: But instead to think in these broader ways about the uses of family, whether that's, you know, the ways empires assigned land grants based on the number of people in the family, right?
29:40.191 --> 29:40.431
[SPEAKER_02]: That's not
29:40.411 --> 29:54.875
[SPEAKER_02]: that's a fairly kind of family history question in the straightforward sense, but that is a way that the actual constitution of a family translates into material possessions, right, in terms of property in terms of, you know, acres of land.
29:55.335 --> 30:00.023
[SPEAKER_02]: So I wanted to think about that, but as you're saying, I also wanted to think about the ways
30:00.712 --> 30:10.568
[SPEAKER_02]: Now this kind of violence can force people to kind of reshape a family, treat this kind of violence, literally reshapes the family and remakes the family.
30:10.708 --> 30:17.559
[SPEAKER_02]: And I wanted to think about how people worked through that as individuals, as members of a family, how that continued to haunt.
30:17.599 --> 30:21.886
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, like my grandmother continued to think about the prospect of sexual violence.
30:22.306 --> 30:27.715
[SPEAKER_02]: In the 1990s, when I had no concept of it, certainly at that time, no real concept of
30:27.695 --> 30:30.121
[SPEAKER_02]: how endemic sexual violence was in the Jim Crow South.
30:30.481 --> 30:37.678
[SPEAKER_02]: And so learning about this project and deepening, and that literature helped me, you know, better understand some of the things she said to me when I was a teenager.
30:38.119 --> 30:42.750
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot more I could say there, but I think you're right that one
30:42.730 --> 30:58.993
[SPEAKER_02]: of my goals here is to think beyond a kind of nuclear biological family and reproduction and instead to think about the many different definitions of family and uses of family and the ways they can translate into very real experiences and inequalities.
31:00.275 --> 31:12.653
[SPEAKER_01]: So you've been talking about the flesianas and anybody who is maybe from Louisiana or
31:13.612 --> 31:36.312
[SPEAKER_02]: Though differences are real, I'd tell you, and they persist, they are serious, and so it was one region for a while, and then early in the kind of 19th century, there was a political split in which, you know, sort of, you know, factions and so on, kind of split, so that West Feliziana is closest to the river.
31:36.292 --> 31:43.445
[SPEAKER_02]: it's wealthier, kind of a more kind of aristocratic vibe, whereas East Flisiana is a bit more hard-scrabble.
31:43.605 --> 31:45.970
[SPEAKER_02]: And those differences persist into the present.
31:46.090 --> 31:49.135
[SPEAKER_02]: And so today, right, West Flisiana is a tourist destination.
31:49.196 --> 31:51.520
[SPEAKER_02]: You can go and see these really charming, clean homes.
31:52.281 --> 31:56.749
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, I mean, when you go, you see the tourist buses coming through and so on.
31:57.170 --> 31:59.835
[SPEAKER_02]: Whereas not so much in East Flisiana,
31:59.815 --> 32:12.168
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, because those were, you know, even in the Antebellon period, I mean, some of these folks were quite wealthy, relatively speaking, but they were known for being, and we're talking free people in land, land owners, obviously.
32:12.509 --> 32:15.872
[SPEAKER_02]: But they were known for being less wealthy than the folks in West Feliziana.
32:16.293 --> 32:17.714
[SPEAKER_02]: And those differences persist.
32:18.055 --> 32:25.823
[SPEAKER_02]: And when I teach by what I teach my undergraduate courses, it's, you know, it's hard to even truly imagine how much wealth
32:25.803 --> 32:35.965
[SPEAKER_02]: the potent, you know, plantations generated and how absolutely just the stark inequalities were, I mean, and so you can still go to these.
32:36.417 --> 32:45.010
[SPEAKER_02]: huge plantations and go on these plantations towards in West Louisiana, especially less so in East Louisiana, but West Louisiana, they're several.
32:45.090 --> 32:46.312
[SPEAKER_02]: And it can go and visit them.
32:46.332 --> 32:47.433
[SPEAKER_02]: One is haunted, right?
32:47.453 --> 32:49.757
[SPEAKER_02]: Allegedly haunted the world.
32:49.797 --> 33:02.075
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's kind of, until you're actually there, it can be hard really to fathom what tens of thousands of acres meant and what hundreds and hundreds of laborers meant.
33:02.415 --> 33:05.580
[SPEAKER_02]: And just how massive these estates could become,
33:05.560 --> 33:14.792
[SPEAKER_02]: and therefore just how much wealth was generated for a handful of people and obviously through the you know extraordinary exploitation and dispossession of many, many, many more.
33:15.793 --> 33:31.973
[SPEAKER_01]: So after this civil war slavery of course is outlawed but the white people of the flissiana's continued to find ways to exploit mostly black people and one of those of course is the
33:31.953 --> 33:36.949
[SPEAKER_01]: a penitentiary, which is still there, which is still doing that work.
33:37.431 --> 33:45.557
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you talk some about what that shift looks like out of slavery, but into the Jim Crow South, which in some ways is still there?
33:45.925 --> 33:58.119
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, one of the things that I found interesting is sort of thinking about that space before it became, you know, kind of the penitentiary and being able to track some of that archivaly.
33:58.499 --> 34:00.421
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it was interesting.
34:00.461 --> 34:01.643
[SPEAKER_02]: There's this one document.
34:01.703 --> 34:05.267
[SPEAKER_02]: It's in New Orleans at the Williams Research Center at the Historic New Orleans Collection.
34:05.707 --> 34:15.038
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's a manual for, you know, running a plantation that, you know, probably had real resonance on some of the plantations that would become what we know of as
34:15.018 --> 34:25.535
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, so to see that kind of before, if you will, and to see how people were thinking about, you know, keeping this space going as a plantation before the Civil War, it's really kind of haunting.
34:25.555 --> 34:30.563
[SPEAKER_02]: And I keep using that word, but like it is sort of the best one that I have for this phenomenon.
34:30.543 --> 34:44.823
[SPEAKER_02]: And then to think about the ways there could be this very dramatic victory at Port Hudson and its very dramatic civil war that, you know, cost hundreds of thousands of lives and all this courage is fighting and hopes of getting to a different world.
34:45.323 --> 34:50.070
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, I do want to take seriously the ways people were able to enjoy their freedom and then to really...
34:50.050 --> 35:03.487
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, try to make meaning of this hard-bought status and so I don't want to move too quickly into thinking about the replication of these hierarchies because, you know, I think it's important to notice, you know, what these people hoped for and what their aspirations were.
35:04.007 --> 35:04.648
[SPEAKER_02]: But you're right.
35:04.708 --> 35:12.157
[SPEAKER_02]: There is this way that so quickly we see one, obviously in the absence of major land redistribution after the Civil War, right?
35:12.258 --> 35:18.285
[SPEAKER_02]: People continue to own these, you know, thousands and thousands of
35:18.265 --> 35:23.010
[SPEAKER_02]: And we see this kind of gradual emergence of this institution that we now know of as Angola.
35:23.171 --> 35:28.016
[SPEAKER_02]: And as the scholars of mass incarceration, you know, they, you know, they all sorts of debates there.
35:28.436 --> 35:45.015
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, but there is something quite jarring about going to this site today that still operates driving the Tunica trace, you know, to this really, like centuries old infrastructure, like driving this trace to this facility that is
35:44.995 --> 36:10.564
[SPEAKER_02]: soul perfectly situated to be both plantation and prison which kind of currently still is right in terms of Mississippi River and this rural setting and jarringly right a beautiful setting right that the it's just you know the land itself is just quite beautiful and then when you have to reckon with the horrors of what goes on behind that gate and and how long they've been going it's really just
36:10.544 --> 36:18.778
[SPEAKER_02]: It's really just distressing, and I think that for me as a historian of slavery, there's a museum, right, you can go to the museum and you can go and look it.
36:19.860 --> 36:33.042
[SPEAKER_02]: Any number of really interesting exhibits, there are in cases that were built by people incarcerated there, and keeping in mind, obviously we associate this with men, but obviously women have been held there and in other sites across Louisiana.
36:33.022 --> 36:46.660
[SPEAKER_02]: It just reminds us of the ways that what had once done a kind of private relationship could become something of a public relationship, the ways that the various stages right, convictly saying, and then moving away from those sorts of systems.
36:47.401 --> 36:55.432
[SPEAKER_02]: I think this reminds me of one of the things that I want to get across in the larger work, which is that it's easy to think about persistence, right?
36:55.552 --> 37:01.881
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, you move from slavery to prisons to these other forms of oppression, and I'm not overturning that.
37:01.861 --> 37:20.307
[SPEAKER_02]: But there is something that I think that's even more distressing, frankly, about the ways that it isn't simply a straight line, but that there are these opportunities when things could have gone differently, and people instead chose to reconstitute various oppressive systems, and then chose to reformulate them again.
37:20.368 --> 37:22.891
[SPEAKER_02]: And we see that in this context of mass incarceration.
37:22.931 --> 37:29.100
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not simply a recreation of slavery, you know, that there are innovations,
37:29.080 --> 37:32.064
[SPEAKER_02]: that also means that we get to innovate as well, right?
37:32.144 --> 37:47.747
[SPEAKER_02]: That these structures are certainly nimble, but, you know, so are we, and that's where I try to end the book with thinking about the ways that thinking about these kinds of reconstitutions of power, you know, our each opportunity is for us to think in different ways about how to do things differently.
37:48.436 --> 37:57.868
[SPEAKER_01]: you open the book, talking about your cousin, Veronica, who's one of the Mardi Gras Indians, which was something I was not aware of and was fascinated by.
37:57.908 --> 38:10.123
[SPEAKER_01]: Could you talk a little bit about that and the interesting conversations that you've had with her about the way that she thinks about presenting herself in the costumes that she's designing.
38:10.897 --> 38:21.649
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, and I should say there was a wonderful article in the New York Times over the weekend about the Madagascar Indians in Super Sunday and so they're just in great images and so if anyone's interested, they're more images there.
38:21.749 --> 38:37.005
[SPEAKER_02]: But you know, this is a very old tradition how it dates to the late 19th century people, you know, like sort of different families claim different genealogies, so people of African descent and or Afro-Native descent, you know,
38:36.985 --> 39:02.503
[SPEAKER_02]: This really rich sort of rituals and practices and languages and movements and they are there are sort of different games across the city that's their term and each year they spend all year making, you know, hand-beating these elaborate, beautiful suits to where about three times a year right and how to grab days, for some days think Joseph's day, their number of key days that they wear them in addition to other things.
39:02.770 --> 39:09.576
[SPEAKER_02]: and they compete over who's the prettiest and they need and they do their rituals and they have their language.
39:10.217 --> 39:13.280
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's really interesting because initially, right?
39:13.300 --> 39:16.343
[SPEAKER_02]: This is not something that was celebrated by the dominant culture, right?
39:16.363 --> 39:18.885
[SPEAKER_02]: This is something that's happening outside of the dominant culture.
39:19.286 --> 39:32.338
[SPEAKER_02]: Many of them gotten to a lot of trouble for doing this, a really important leader, I died in the after, giving a kind of forceful defense of the Madagrac Indians at a city council meeting because of police harassment
39:32.318 --> 39:39.806
[SPEAKER_02]: It's expensive, it's costly, it's time-consuming, they expend a lot of time and money and energy, you know, building these beautiful suits that are a femoral, right?
39:39.826 --> 39:44.331
[SPEAKER_02]: You can't wear the same one every year as the famous song tells us right now.
39:44.351 --> 39:46.613
[SPEAKER_02]: Every year you have to make a new suit.
39:46.633 --> 40:01.549
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, but what I find interesting among so many other things is that in this particular year, my cousin and her larger group decided to do memorial suits, where the, you know,
40:01.529 --> 40:11.380
[SPEAKER_02]: And my cousin Han beat it, this really elaborate and beautiful suit that features images of our grandparents, of our aunts, her mother, my mother, on the wings.
40:12.161 --> 40:28.380
[SPEAKER_02]: And I wanted to think about what it meant for this woman, you know, this woman of size, dark skin, beautiful, the color of the beautiful bridge chocolate, you know, taking up space in the city streets, not the most elite people, not the people.
40:28.360 --> 40:47.681
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, you get invited to, you know, the talks and so on, but who are very much making claims about history and are very much using their artistry to weave a time to family history, weave a kind of narrative, and to think about how that empowers them to take up space in the present and into the future.
40:47.761 --> 40:57.051
[SPEAKER_02]: And so for me, I think that this is a number of things, right, there's just admiring the beauty and admiring the aesthetics of it all,
40:57.031 --> 41:07.288
[SPEAKER_02]: nature of these organizations and the ways that for over a century these kinds of groups have been performing mutual aid and support and avenues for personal expression.
41:07.308 --> 41:13.298
[SPEAKER_02]: And also the ways that they tell us something about how to navigate very difficult times.
41:13.518 --> 41:23.815
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, so many of these are folks who have not had the easiest, you know, of lives and they've had to deal with many, you know, kinds of challenges, you know, New Orleans is not the easiest place for many,
41:23.795 --> 41:46.917
[SPEAKER_02]: Black people work in class people and none the less they're creating these truly beautiful one of a kind suits each year And I think there's something for all of us to learn about the power not only of survival, but of Defiance even on landscapes and then which we're not meant to thrive and if listeners go Google Marty Grow Indians right now, they'll see
41:46.897 --> 41:50.446
[SPEAKER_01]: That was true.
41:50.466 --> 41:50.867
[SPEAKER_01]: I did it.
41:50.967 --> 41:53.113
[SPEAKER_01]: I tried it and there it was.
41:53.133 --> 41:53.735
[SPEAKER_02]: It's true.
41:53.815 --> 41:54.236
[SPEAKER_02]: It's true.
41:54.376 --> 41:57.624
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, but I also talk about this and she talks about this in the process.
41:57.645 --> 42:03.319
[SPEAKER_02]: It gets weird because they are such beautiful students and there are
42:03.299 --> 42:05.822
[SPEAKER_02]: And those pictures land in strange places, right?
42:05.862 --> 42:14.253
[SPEAKER_02]: Like people commoditize these images and don't necessarily get credit to or ask the consent of or profits to these creators.
42:14.333 --> 42:26.208
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it does raise a host of tricky issues in which we see these kind of competing values in which this very own practice comes into conflict with people who want to monetize these images.
42:26.288 --> 42:29.072
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it does lead to some tricky situations.
42:29.152 --> 42:30.133
[SPEAKER_02]: It's true.
42:31.109 --> 42:34.515
[SPEAKER_01]: We'd love to encourage listeners to buy your book.
42:34.535 --> 42:35.877
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you tell them how they can do that?
42:36.538 --> 42:40.324
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, it is available on Cambridge's website.
42:40.705 --> 42:47.977
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's also available through your local bookstores, as well as the large online retailers.
42:49.199 --> 42:51.463
[SPEAKER_01]: Rishana, thank you so much for speaking with me.
42:51.523 --> 42:53.927
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd love to reading your book, and it's been really fun to talk to you.
42:54.312 --> 42:55.173
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much.
42:55.193 --> 43:15.426
[SPEAKER_02]: I enjoyed this conversation and thank you for just engaging this work that's very special to me.
43:23.523 --> 43:52.922
[SPEAKER_03]: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
43:59.770 --> 44:01.732
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening to UnSung History.
44:02.513 --> 44:06.037
[SPEAKER_00]: Please subscribe to UnSung History on your favorite podcasting app.
44:06.518 --> 44:12.004
[SPEAKER_00]: You can find the sources used for this episode in a full episode transcript at UnSung History Podcast.com.
44:12.624 --> 44:18.711
[SPEAKER_00]: To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by UnSung History are in the public domain or are used with permission.
44:19.532 --> 44:25.879
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44:26.433 --> 44:30.131
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44:30.593 --> 44:33.106
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44:33.889 --> 44:37.869
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44:38.210 --> 44:38.552
[SPEAKER_00]: Bye.
00:00.031 --> 00:08.820
[SPEAKER_01]: This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention.
00:09.720 --> 00:12.543
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm your host, Kelly Theresa Pollock.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do.
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[SPEAKER_01]: A little over 100 miles northwest of New Orleans, nestled in hills along the Mississippi River, sits the town of St. Francisville, Louisiana.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The parish seat of West Feliciana,
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[SPEAKER_01]: A few years after the town's 1807 founding, it became the capital of the short-lived Republic of West Florida in 1810.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Long before that, though, the land had been inhabited by societies of Native Americans,
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[SPEAKER_01]: When Hernando de Soto arrived in 1541, he found the tunica living in the region, and he fought them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: European diseases like measles and smallpox killed many of the tunica that de Soto didn't.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When the French arrived in the 18th century, they imported enslaved Africans to the region,
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[SPEAKER_01]: When the British won the Seven Years War in 1763, they acquired the land east of the Mississippi River from France and Spain.
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[SPEAKER_01]: With the exception of New Orleans, which went to Spain in the secret treaty of Fountain Blue.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The land that would eventually become the Felicianas was part of British West Florida, and the British enticed settlers with land grants.
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[SPEAKER_01]: West Florida wouldn't stay British for long, though.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Spanish military leader Bernardo de Golfes, conquered West Florida during the American Revolution.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the residents who had already experienced French and British control suddenly found themselves part of the Spanish Empire when Great Britain seeded both east and west Florida colonies to Spain in the 1783 Paris peace treaty.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Spain, of course, enticed its own settlers to the region.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In 1803, a cash dropped Napoleon sold the Louisiana territory, including New Orleans, which had recently come back to French control, to the United States, for $15 million in the Louisiana purchase, doubling its size for around four cents an acre.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Napoleon did not share any of the $15 million with them, either.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The Felicianas, though, were not part of that Louisiana purchase.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The land remained part of Spanish Florida, a confusing state of affairs, even for residents of the region.
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[SPEAKER_01]: By 1810, the white population of New Feliciana had grown along with their wealth.
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[SPEAKER_01]: produced through the cultivation of cotton and sugar by their enslaved laborers.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Despite their wealth, the white planters were in a precarious position, outnumbered by indigenous and enslaved black people surrounded by the United States, and subjects of a weakening Spanish empire that offered them few protections.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That was the situation in September 1810, when armed rebels attacked a Spanish fort at Baton Rouge, killing two Spanish soldiers.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The rebels declared themselves to be the Republic of West Florida, with St. Francisville as the capital.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Their Constitution was modeled on the U.S. Constitution, and their flag consisted of a single white star on a field of blue, was made by Melissa Johnson, the wife of one of the Feliciana Cavalry, an attempt to capture mobile to add it to the new republic failed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the United States quickly took advantage of the revolt,
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[SPEAKER_01]: President James Madison issued a proclamation of annexation in October.
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[SPEAKER_01]: With Congress out of session, Madison's right to take action was dubious at best, and he had constitutional poems.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But he justified it, based on ambiguity over the border of the Louisiana purchase, and
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[SPEAKER_01]: The annexation would not have been a surprise to the rebels.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That may have been their ultimate goal.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The Republic's governor, full-warship with, had previously been an American diplomat.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Serving as counsel general to France under President Jefferson.
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[SPEAKER_01]: in skiplets and inaugural address at St. Francisville.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He spoke to the possibility of annexation, saying quote.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The blood which flows in our veins, like the tributary streams which form and sustain the father of rivers, and circling our delightful country, will return, if not impeded, to the heart of our parent country.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The genius of Washington, the immortal founder of the liberties of America, stimulates that return, and would frown upon our cause, should we attempt to change its course, unquote.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Even so that annexation came quickly, and without the respect that skip with
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[SPEAKER_01]: On December 10, 1810, just two and a half months from when it began, the Republic of West Florida was no more, and the U.S. flag was raised.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In April, 1812, Louisiana, including the Felicianas, became a U.S. state.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In 1824, Feliciana Parish split into, with St. Francisville becoming the parish seat of West Feliciana, in Clinton, the parish seat of East Feliciana.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In January 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, Luisiana seceded from the United States.
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[SPEAKER_01]: becoming one of the founding states of the confederate states of America in February 1861.
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[SPEAKER_01]: During the Civil War that followed, the Union Army fought to control the Mississippi River.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In 1863, just 12 miles from St. Francisville, the Union Army lay siege to the confederate
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[SPEAKER_01]: The Confederates were defending a fort on a bluff above the Mississippi River, and they held out for 48 days while they were attacked by cannons and rifles.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The longest siege in American history finally ended in Union victory, just days after another Union victory at Vicksburg, giving the Union forces full control of the Mississippi River.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The emancipation proclamation, which went into effect on January 1, 1863, had officially freed the enslaved population of the Felicianas.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But the end to slavery rolled out slowly as the union army took control of the region.
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[SPEAKER_01]: As of the 2020 census,
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[SPEAKER_01]: 15,310 people lived in West Felicia in Apparish, 69% of them white and 23% black.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In 19,539 people lived in East Felicia in Apparish, 58% of them white and 36% black.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Joining me in this episode is Dr. Roshana Johnson, associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, and to author of Sweet Home, Felicia Ana, family, slavery, and the hauntings of history.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I'm Ashana, thanks so much for joining me today.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for having me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm excited to talk with you today.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I'm really looking forward to this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I want to hear a little bit about what inspired you to write this book, I know this is your second book, and first one was more on New Orleans, and this is more of the rural counties in Louisiana.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So tell me a little bit about what got you started on this project.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, I grew up in New Orleans, but my maternal grandmother grew up in this part of Louisiana.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's the Flifiana Parishes.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's rural, very different history, very different reality in the present.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I just wanted to know more about it.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So it started with an undergraduate assignment.
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[SPEAKER_02]: We had to interview our oldest family member, the oldest woman in our family.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It was black women in America, of course.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So I interviewed her.
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[SPEAKER_02]: This was, I think, about 2001, actually cite the paper in the book.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So I interviewed her, and then when I started graduate school, I had a good colleague who was interested in family history, it was becoming increasingly important, and I thought, okay, maybe I will write an article in this vein and think a little bit about family history in this area, and that could be interesting.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And then when I started to do the actual research, I was like, there was a whole lot more going on in that area than I understood.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so it became a much larger, written, much longer project, because I wanted to know more about this region.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I need so much of my field.
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[SPEAKER_02]: You know, has been focused on Atlantic port cities on part of that right with my first book on New Orleans and so as part of the Atlantic world kind of turn over the last couple decades we've really been thinking about circulation and sort of sailors and pirates and people were moving in those ways.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And that's been really interesting, but I wanted to think about how I could bring some of those conceptual questions to a region that seemed to defy the norms of a kind of port city.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's rural.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's, you know, the population is not nearly what it would have been in New Orleans at least at the starting point.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I just wondered, how can I think about some of these
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[SPEAKER_02]: the ways many different kinds of people come together in a space and create that space, not in a port city, but in this rural area to which I, you know, unpersonally connected.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So that's how I got there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Talk to me a little bit about the sources, the archives that you used and, you know, to you talk some about this in the book, but what sorts of things can and can't be found in those archives.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So the thing about Louisiana is there are just a lot of archives, which is unusual like lots of documentation for lots of really unfortunate reasons, obviously.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But they're just really rich archives there.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So for this project, I spent a lot of time in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
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[SPEAKER_02]: at LSU's archives at the Louisiana State Archives.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And there I read just about everything I could get my hands on.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So there were police jury records.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So Louisiana has parishes, not counties, but sort of the parish level governance, sort of day in, day out who bought a new lock for the voting box.
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[SPEAKER_02]: You know, kind of granular detail, you know, can get new chairs for the courthouse level records.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And then LSU also has a lot of family papers, families donated just huge trenches of their own family records.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And then so those can be useful to our correspondence for
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[SPEAKER_02]: financial records for just sort of personal level interfamily conflicts and those sorts of things could be a lot of fun newspapers.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I mean there were far more newspapers in this area than I expected.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I certainly expected New Orleans to have lots of newspapers but I wasn't prepared for the existence of a small but it's certainly quite vocal community of journalists living in this
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so that's kind of the archival side.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But in my own field, there've been a lot of debates about archival research and the limits of using archives to tell the stories of people who were not only excluded from literacy and the ability to read right preserved documents, but for whom these documents were a tool of oppression and extraction.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so one of the things that I tried to do here is
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[SPEAKER_02]: to be both archival but also to be really a neverace as the way I think of it and so I draw on family history stories.
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[SPEAKER_02]: My grandmother told me songs, novels, my cousins, I do an oral history with my cousin who messed with the Madagrad Indians, but the idea is to draw on as many archival records and as many non-traditional sources as I can to get to something that feels like a
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, you mentioned that this region is very different than New Orleans, and it's not just because it's rural and not urban, but also it's not as French right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, this land changes hands a million times with that means for the people who live there.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that's part of what I found so fascinating there.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I think the French heritage in Louisiana just is so prominent for so many reasons and I think both historically and also politically and economically right there are all sorts of stakes too that deep association between Louisiana and the French heritage.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But the thing about this region is, as you're saying, right, there were just so many other people there, right?
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[SPEAKER_02]: Starting with the indigenous people who were there, you know, in building infrastructure and complex communities long before the French claimed it on a map somewhere.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And as we know, claiming it on a map doesn't necessarily mean you're exerting any kind of dominion, right?
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[SPEAKER_02]: That's a much slower process.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So, I mean, part of what I wanted to track was sort of thinking about the Tunica, the home of that, right?
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[SPEAKER_02]: Any number of groups who were there before the French
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[SPEAKER_02]: the French interacted.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But yes, so it's claimed by the French, it then changes hands empirically so many times.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's still very confusing, frankly.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, I think my story really picks up when it's under the British.
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[SPEAKER_02]: briefly, and then under the Spanish before, after 1810, becoming part of the U.S., I think one of the interesting things there is that it was not part of the Louisiana purchase, which is always surprising to people.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I think many people think that the entire state of Louisiana, with the Louisiana purchase, became part of the U.S., and then when they come to this region, I wait a minute.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It was still Spanish in 1808.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, very confusing for all involved and raised a lot of anxieties because I mean these folks really lived in a period in which it was not far fetched to go to sleep one night.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It didn't hard of one empire and to wake up the next floor thing and sort of wonder okay who's who's are we at this point?
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[SPEAKER_02]: So, and you can capture that in archival records where people are expressing that kind of anxiety.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So, yes, it becomes part of the U.S. in 1810, thanks to the West Floor in a Rebellion, which I think of as a kind of early version of Texas, you know, like there's a way that, I mean, the lone star republic, you know, this whole idea of Anglo settlers who are moving to this Spanish area and they rebel and they, you know, ultimately become part of the U.S. and there's all sorts of
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[SPEAKER_02]: But the other part that's important for me here is, you know, I think the way a lot of Louisiana history is written is that we have had a colonial history, 19th century history, 20th century history, and part of what I wanted to think about was how these successive administrations,
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[SPEAKER_02]: and successive colonial errors all worked to build toward this kind of 19th century reality rather than ending the story with the Louisiana purchase or with 1810.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I wanted to think about the ways we can track the ongoing implications and hauntings.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's kind of one of the freeing things I use over the long 19th century through the US period into the rise of
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and so this is not unusual for the south of course, but the wealth in this region comes from both stealing land and stealing labor, which is that mean for the people who continue to live there, you know, what what does that look like the the long history of extracting labor and land.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think part of what I wanted to think about was, you know, how do we give a kind of backstory to President Day inequalities and President Day hierarchies?
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that one of the gifts that I think historians can offer is context to remind us that these things didn't have a history, that they haven't been this way, you know, from time in memorial, but that they
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[SPEAKER_02]: do represent parts of a much longer story that help us to explain our present.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I don't think it's a secret that Louisiana continues to struggle in many ways, right?
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[SPEAKER_02]: Many people in Louisiana continue to struggle financially.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Health, you know, education, you know, name the markers, right?
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's one of the states where
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[SPEAKER_02]: We have to think a lot about the ongoing role of racism, inequality, broadly.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's one of the things that I hope that this work will help us to think through.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I mean, the story, you know, the African diaspora, obviously, I sent to people of African descent.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But I also wanted to do my best to talk about indigenous people, to talk about poor white people, to talk about, you know, the tiny number of Jewish immigrants to this area.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And to think about the ways that any number of people
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[SPEAKER_02]: kind of got by in this region of deep inequality and how, you know, having a fresher understanding of what that history was might allow us to have, I think, more perhaps difficult, but also ultimately productive conversations about how we move forward.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I think that
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[SPEAKER_02]: one of the things that historians, you know, we insist upon is that if everything has a history, and everything is contingent, then it means that we can make decisions that will advance egalitarian democratic goals rather than entrenching these kinds of, you know, racist and classist and sexist hierarchies that can seem so natural, but that, in fact, were produced.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah and it was clear from which you write is that people who were enslaved despite obviously being in brutal conditions wherever they could exert any kind of autonomy did and were building culture.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Could you talk through that a little bit?
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[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, so one of those, I joke that the graduate students, you know, we present all these binaries in year one, and then we explode, but it's so the kind of domination versus resistance, agency questions, you know, those are all the sorts of questions we think through the very beginning of our time as historians, and that I think continue to hunt so much of our own research, and I think that's certainly the case for me.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I wanted to find that balance.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I certainly
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, the horrors of what it meant to try to live under these truly brutal and awful conditions, without reducing people to their status, you know, I really wanted to take seriously the ways that they nonetheless lived, you know, built families and communities, built rich cultures, and that those things also, I think, had a relationship to the ways that they were able to organize politically, right, to not saying that those things were the same, right, that, you know, I do want to hold space for,
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[SPEAKER_02]: the ways individual expression, you know, can mean a lot of different things and that politics can mean a lot of different things, so I don't want to conflate all these things.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But I did want to capture the existence and frankly joy of black life in this region even as I was chronically the difficulties and the struggle because I think both of those things, both sides are actually quite critical to understanding this region and the people who live in it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, one of the brutalities, of course, that we see over and over again is the sexual assault of enslaved women and, you know, even in your own family, you talk about that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One thing you say several times is, you know, we can't know the interior lives of these women, and we can't know the complicated things they may have been feeling.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Can you talk some about what that looks like when you're thinking through the archives and, you know, what you can see and and what you can't really get at.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So I will talk about the silences and what that means for us, but first I think it's important to note that there are a handful of testimonies in which people did in fact talk about their experiences of sexual violence.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I talk about one woman in particular who testified before kind of federal committee in a way that was really quite haunting but also striking.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I mean,
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[SPEAKER_02]: to think about the amount of courage it must have taken for her to do that in that context when you know we know in the present it is still extraordinarily difficult to comfort with those sorts of you know account I mean we're in the middle of a version of that now and in terms of thinking about how difficult it can be to grapple with the meaning of sexual violence.
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[SPEAKER_02]: You know, so for this woman to have done that in, you know, the post emancipation south, I think is just stunning, but also worth remarking.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So I do want to, you know, take note of the times people did, in fact, come forward with those kinds of testimonies.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But the other thing is, I want to note that within families, right, people didn't fact talk about these things, and that's how I learned about this account.
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[SPEAKER_02]: In my own family, that was an adult.
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[SPEAKER_02]: This was after, and I think that first interview with my grandmother, this was a few years later, when I was in my grad school coursework.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It was very clear I was going to become a historian, very clear that at some point I would do something with her family history, so she had to kind of get it on the record.
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[SPEAKER_02]: energy and some of those conversations which was really inspiring and so it was very important for her to tell me about this story at that point and so there is something about truth telling that I think can be healing and so I think it's worth noting that at the same time I think you're right I think the more normal experience for us as historians is silence.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And it does raise all sorts of ethical questions about how do we handle this, right?
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[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, we want to talk about this.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, you need to note that sexual violence, you know, like lynching, like, you know, math incarceration, we're all technologies of, you know, the reassertion of white supremacy and the post-demands of patient context.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, I do think it requires a certain amount of care because one, I want to think about readers who, you know, have who bring their own complex experiences to this,
25:06.580 --> 25:14.853
[SPEAKER_02]: make reading my book and overly horrific experience for people who've had to deal with this in their own lives, while also doing my best to note this.
25:14.953 --> 25:21.162
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, as a writer, I chose brevity, and so I don't necessarily linger on a lot of details.
25:21.222 --> 25:30.276
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't ask the reader to, you know, sit with this for too long because at, you know, I thought that was the the best I could do in
25:30.695 --> 25:38.663
[SPEAKER_02]: what felt like an ethical but also intellectually accountable approach to such a sensitive topic.
25:39.976 --> 25:43.800
[SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned toward the beginning that you were thinking about family history.
25:43.860 --> 25:47.024
[SPEAKER_01]: This book, of course, is not strictly a family history.
25:47.044 --> 25:54.452
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you say at some point it's a community history, but yet you're also talking about your own ancestors, your own family members.
25:54.892 --> 26:02.440
[SPEAKER_01]: What was that like for you as a historian to be not writing a family history, but thinking about your own family as a writing this book?
26:03.261 --> 26:05.123
[SPEAKER_01]: Terabyte!
26:06.385 --> 26:27.178
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I'm a very private person and I'm not one to put myself at the center of, you know, my work in a certain way, until in my first because I was able to hide a little bit more I think so I then talk a little bit more about my own experiences in the process, but the rest of the book is in many ways I kind of straightforward academic monograph, whereas this one is a lot more personal, which is.
26:27.158 --> 26:32.150
[SPEAKER_02]: pushing me out of my comfort zone, I should say, but I think it's actually been really rewarding.
26:32.491 --> 26:41.753
[SPEAKER_02]: One because, you know, on the intellectual side, again, I'm trying to find every source I can to try to think about this region and to think about the people in it.
26:42.054 --> 26:43.497
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, I think that
26:43.477 --> 26:50.731
[SPEAKER_02]: having access to my own family and with my own family stories, it is actually quite important as a kind of method, right?
26:50.851 --> 26:59.147
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, you know, like, Tully Countryfield talks a lot about this, right, sort of the way that having access to family history broadens the kind of evidentiary days that we're able to have.
26:59.848 --> 27:04.337
[SPEAKER_02]: And so there is something quite meaningful there, but on a personal level,
27:04.773 --> 27:20.419
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's been really cool to watch my family's response to it and then to sort of see, okay, what parts of thing, you know, what comes forward, what do you talk about how does this in some ways memorialize our family while also thinking about a certain approach to the region.
27:20.399 --> 27:25.189
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, I mean, I don't think it's a secret that this is a tricky time to do black history.
27:25.770 --> 27:31.963
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I think that it's just important to show that you can do a number of things.
27:32.083 --> 27:40.821
[SPEAKER_02]: You can do the kind of hard-nosed archival approach where you're doing all the sorts of granular heavy, you know, end noting and foot noting and so on.
27:40.801 --> 27:50.611
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, also talking about some of the fun stuff of being of growing up, you know, black woman in New Orleans in the 80s and 90s, which was, they were certainly challenges, but also a lot of fun.
27:50.671 --> 27:58.699
[SPEAKER_02]: And so being able to talk about how fun it is to go watch the Madagher Indians or to, you know, have go to a second line or listen to bounce music.
27:59.179 --> 28:09.930
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's just really important because again, like, thinking about both the horrors and the hauntings, but also the joy
28:10.737 --> 28:17.566
[SPEAKER_01]: ask a little bit about how you think about family when genealogy is not straightforward.
28:17.606 --> 28:26.917
[SPEAKER_01]: So we've mentioned sexual violence in family and there's also one of your ancestors takes the last name of his and sliever.
28:26.957 --> 28:30.822
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you think through all that sort of tangled web?
28:31.612 --> 28:46.316
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think that's part of why I resisted the label of family history because I think when we say family, even if we complicated things, there is still a way that a certain kind of nuclear biological family emerges when we use that term.
28:46.657 --> 28:50.042
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's why community study deals more kind of
28:50.022 --> 29:11.457
[SPEAKER_02]: natural to me in part because it is part of our own kind of family culture we never drew overly rigid boundaries around biology like we're one of these southern families where I joke they've become to one barbecue your cousin and she's just sort of yeah this is sort of our norm so I've never been overly invested in the kind of
29:11.437 --> 29:22.770
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, family-tree biological kind of, I think of it as the baguettes from the Exodus, I don't know, it's been a while, but like maybe somewhere in the sort of Exodus zone of the Bible.
29:23.151 --> 29:29.178
[SPEAKER_02]: But you know, so I didn't want this to become a kind of chronicle of, you know, this one birthed this one birthed this one.
29:29.538 --> 29:40.151
[SPEAKER_02]: But instead to think in these broader ways about the uses of family, whether that's, you know, the ways empires assigned land grants based on the number of people in the family, right?
29:40.191 --> 29:40.431
[SPEAKER_02]: That's not
29:40.411 --> 29:54.875
[SPEAKER_02]: that's a fairly kind of family history question in the straightforward sense, but that is a way that the actual constitution of a family translates into material possessions, right, in terms of property in terms of, you know, acres of land.
29:55.335 --> 30:00.023
[SPEAKER_02]: So I wanted to think about that, but as you're saying, I also wanted to think about the ways
30:00.712 --> 30:10.568
[SPEAKER_02]: Now this kind of violence can force people to kind of reshape a family, treat this kind of violence, literally reshapes the family and remakes the family.
30:10.708 --> 30:17.559
[SPEAKER_02]: And I wanted to think about how people worked through that as individuals, as members of a family, how that continued to haunt.
30:17.599 --> 30:21.886
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, like my grandmother continued to think about the prospect of sexual violence.
30:22.306 --> 30:27.715
[SPEAKER_02]: In the 1990s, when I had no concept of it, certainly at that time, no real concept of
30:27.695 --> 30:30.121
[SPEAKER_02]: how endemic sexual violence was in the Jim Crow South.
30:30.481 --> 30:37.678
[SPEAKER_02]: And so learning about this project and deepening, and that literature helped me, you know, better understand some of the things she said to me when I was a teenager.
30:38.119 --> 30:42.750
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot more I could say there, but I think you're right that one
30:42.730 --> 30:58.993
[SPEAKER_02]: of my goals here is to think beyond a kind of nuclear biological family and reproduction and instead to think about the many different definitions of family and uses of family and the ways they can translate into very real experiences and inequalities.
31:00.275 --> 31:12.653
[SPEAKER_01]: So you've been talking about the flesianas and anybody who is maybe from Louisiana or
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[SPEAKER_02]: Though differences are real, I'd tell you, and they persist, they are serious, and so it was one region for a while, and then early in the kind of 19th century, there was a political split in which, you know, sort of, you know, factions and so on, kind of split, so that West Feliziana is closest to the river.
31:36.292 --> 31:43.445
[SPEAKER_02]: it's wealthier, kind of a more kind of aristocratic vibe, whereas East Flisiana is a bit more hard-scrabble.
31:43.605 --> 31:45.970
[SPEAKER_02]: And those differences persist into the present.
31:46.090 --> 31:49.135
[SPEAKER_02]: And so today, right, West Flisiana is a tourist destination.
31:49.196 --> 31:51.520
[SPEAKER_02]: You can go and see these really charming, clean homes.
31:52.281 --> 31:56.749
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, I mean, when you go, you see the tourist buses coming through and so on.
31:57.170 --> 31:59.835
[SPEAKER_02]: Whereas not so much in East Flisiana,
31:59.815 --> 32:12.168
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, because those were, you know, even in the Antebellon period, I mean, some of these folks were quite wealthy, relatively speaking, but they were known for being, and we're talking free people in land, land owners, obviously.
32:12.509 --> 32:15.872
[SPEAKER_02]: But they were known for being less wealthy than the folks in West Feliziana.
32:16.293 --> 32:17.714
[SPEAKER_02]: And those differences persist.
32:18.055 --> 32:25.823
[SPEAKER_02]: And when I teach by what I teach my undergraduate courses, it's, you know, it's hard to even truly imagine how much wealth
32:25.803 --> 32:35.965
[SPEAKER_02]: the potent, you know, plantations generated and how absolutely just the stark inequalities were, I mean, and so you can still go to these.
32:36.417 --> 32:45.010
[SPEAKER_02]: huge plantations and go on these plantations towards in West Louisiana, especially less so in East Louisiana, but West Louisiana, they're several.
32:45.090 --> 32:46.312
[SPEAKER_02]: And it can go and visit them.
32:46.332 --> 32:47.433
[SPEAKER_02]: One is haunted, right?
32:47.453 --> 32:49.757
[SPEAKER_02]: Allegedly haunted the world.
32:49.797 --> 33:02.075
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's kind of, until you're actually there, it can be hard really to fathom what tens of thousands of acres meant and what hundreds and hundreds of laborers meant.
33:02.415 --> 33:05.580
[SPEAKER_02]: And just how massive these estates could become,
33:05.560 --> 33:14.792
[SPEAKER_02]: and therefore just how much wealth was generated for a handful of people and obviously through the you know extraordinary exploitation and dispossession of many, many, many more.
33:15.793 --> 33:31.973
[SPEAKER_01]: So after this civil war slavery of course is outlawed but the white people of the flissiana's continued to find ways to exploit mostly black people and one of those of course is the
33:31.953 --> 33:36.949
[SPEAKER_01]: a penitentiary, which is still there, which is still doing that work.
33:37.431 --> 33:45.557
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you talk some about what that shift looks like out of slavery, but into the Jim Crow South, which in some ways is still there?
33:45.925 --> 33:58.119
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, one of the things that I found interesting is sort of thinking about that space before it became, you know, kind of the penitentiary and being able to track some of that archivaly.
33:58.499 --> 34:00.421
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it was interesting.
34:00.461 --> 34:01.643
[SPEAKER_02]: There's this one document.
34:01.703 --> 34:05.267
[SPEAKER_02]: It's in New Orleans at the Williams Research Center at the Historic New Orleans Collection.
34:05.707 --> 34:15.038
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's a manual for, you know, running a plantation that, you know, probably had real resonance on some of the plantations that would become what we know of as
34:15.018 --> 34:25.535
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, so to see that kind of before, if you will, and to see how people were thinking about, you know, keeping this space going as a plantation before the Civil War, it's really kind of haunting.
34:25.555 --> 34:30.563
[SPEAKER_02]: And I keep using that word, but like it is sort of the best one that I have for this phenomenon.
34:30.543 --> 34:44.823
[SPEAKER_02]: And then to think about the ways there could be this very dramatic victory at Port Hudson and its very dramatic civil war that, you know, cost hundreds of thousands of lives and all this courage is fighting and hopes of getting to a different world.
34:45.323 --> 34:50.070
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, I do want to take seriously the ways people were able to enjoy their freedom and then to really...
34:50.050 --> 35:03.487
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, try to make meaning of this hard-bought status and so I don't want to move too quickly into thinking about the replication of these hierarchies because, you know, I think it's important to notice, you know, what these people hoped for and what their aspirations were.
35:04.007 --> 35:04.648
[SPEAKER_02]: But you're right.
35:04.708 --> 35:12.157
[SPEAKER_02]: There is this way that so quickly we see one, obviously in the absence of major land redistribution after the Civil War, right?
35:12.258 --> 35:18.285
[SPEAKER_02]: People continue to own these, you know, thousands and thousands of
35:18.265 --> 35:23.010
[SPEAKER_02]: And we see this kind of gradual emergence of this institution that we now know of as Angola.
35:23.171 --> 35:28.016
[SPEAKER_02]: And as the scholars of mass incarceration, you know, they, you know, they all sorts of debates there.
35:28.436 --> 35:45.015
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, but there is something quite jarring about going to this site today that still operates driving the Tunica trace, you know, to this really, like centuries old infrastructure, like driving this trace to this facility that is
35:44.995 --> 36:10.564
[SPEAKER_02]: soul perfectly situated to be both plantation and prison which kind of currently still is right in terms of Mississippi River and this rural setting and jarringly right a beautiful setting right that the it's just you know the land itself is just quite beautiful and then when you have to reckon with the horrors of what goes on behind that gate and and how long they've been going it's really just
36:10.544 --> 36:18.778
[SPEAKER_02]: It's really just distressing, and I think that for me as a historian of slavery, there's a museum, right, you can go to the museum and you can go and look it.
36:19.860 --> 36:33.042
[SPEAKER_02]: Any number of really interesting exhibits, there are in cases that were built by people incarcerated there, and keeping in mind, obviously we associate this with men, but obviously women have been held there and in other sites across Louisiana.
36:33.022 --> 36:46.660
[SPEAKER_02]: It just reminds us of the ways that what had once done a kind of private relationship could become something of a public relationship, the ways that the various stages right, convictly saying, and then moving away from those sorts of systems.
36:47.401 --> 36:55.432
[SPEAKER_02]: I think this reminds me of one of the things that I want to get across in the larger work, which is that it's easy to think about persistence, right?
36:55.552 --> 37:01.881
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, you move from slavery to prisons to these other forms of oppression, and I'm not overturning that.
37:01.861 --> 37:20.307
[SPEAKER_02]: But there is something that I think that's even more distressing, frankly, about the ways that it isn't simply a straight line, but that there are these opportunities when things could have gone differently, and people instead chose to reconstitute various oppressive systems, and then chose to reformulate them again.
37:20.368 --> 37:22.891
[SPEAKER_02]: And we see that in this context of mass incarceration.
37:22.931 --> 37:29.100
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not simply a recreation of slavery, you know, that there are innovations,
37:29.080 --> 37:32.064
[SPEAKER_02]: that also means that we get to innovate as well, right?
37:32.144 --> 37:47.747
[SPEAKER_02]: That these structures are certainly nimble, but, you know, so are we, and that's where I try to end the book with thinking about the ways that thinking about these kinds of reconstitutions of power, you know, our each opportunity is for us to think in different ways about how to do things differently.
37:48.436 --> 37:57.868
[SPEAKER_01]: you open the book, talking about your cousin, Veronica, who's one of the Mardi Gras Indians, which was something I was not aware of and was fascinated by.
37:57.908 --> 38:10.123
[SPEAKER_01]: Could you talk a little bit about that and the interesting conversations that you've had with her about the way that she thinks about presenting herself in the costumes that she's designing.
38:10.897 --> 38:21.649
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, and I should say there was a wonderful article in the New York Times over the weekend about the Madagascar Indians in Super Sunday and so they're just in great images and so if anyone's interested, they're more images there.
38:21.749 --> 38:37.005
[SPEAKER_02]: But you know, this is a very old tradition how it dates to the late 19th century people, you know, like sort of different families claim different genealogies, so people of African descent and or Afro-Native descent, you know,
38:36.985 --> 39:02.503
[SPEAKER_02]: This really rich sort of rituals and practices and languages and movements and they are there are sort of different games across the city that's their term and each year they spend all year making, you know, hand-beating these elaborate, beautiful suits to where about three times a year right and how to grab days, for some days think Joseph's day, their number of key days that they wear them in addition to other things.
39:02.770 --> 39:09.576
[SPEAKER_02]: and they compete over who's the prettiest and they need and they do their rituals and they have their language.
39:10.217 --> 39:13.280
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's really interesting because initially, right?
39:13.300 --> 39:16.343
[SPEAKER_02]: This is not something that was celebrated by the dominant culture, right?
39:16.363 --> 39:18.885
[SPEAKER_02]: This is something that's happening outside of the dominant culture.
39:19.286 --> 39:32.338
[SPEAKER_02]: Many of them gotten to a lot of trouble for doing this, a really important leader, I died in the after, giving a kind of forceful defense of the Madagrac Indians at a city council meeting because of police harassment
39:32.318 --> 39:39.806
[SPEAKER_02]: It's expensive, it's costly, it's time-consuming, they expend a lot of time and money and energy, you know, building these beautiful suits that are a femoral, right?
39:39.826 --> 39:44.331
[SPEAKER_02]: You can't wear the same one every year as the famous song tells us right now.
39:44.351 --> 39:46.613
[SPEAKER_02]: Every year you have to make a new suit.
39:46.633 --> 40:01.549
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, but what I find interesting among so many other things is that in this particular year, my cousin and her larger group decided to do memorial suits, where the, you know,
40:01.529 --> 40:11.380
[SPEAKER_02]: And my cousin Han beat it, this really elaborate and beautiful suit that features images of our grandparents, of our aunts, her mother, my mother, on the wings.
40:12.161 --> 40:28.380
[SPEAKER_02]: And I wanted to think about what it meant for this woman, you know, this woman of size, dark skin, beautiful, the color of the beautiful bridge chocolate, you know, taking up space in the city streets, not the most elite people, not the people.
40:28.360 --> 40:47.681
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, you get invited to, you know, the talks and so on, but who are very much making claims about history and are very much using their artistry to weave a time to family history, weave a kind of narrative, and to think about how that empowers them to take up space in the present and into the future.
40:47.761 --> 40:57.051
[SPEAKER_02]: And so for me, I think that this is a number of things, right, there's just admiring the beauty and admiring the aesthetics of it all,
40:57.031 --> 41:07.288
[SPEAKER_02]: nature of these organizations and the ways that for over a century these kinds of groups have been performing mutual aid and support and avenues for personal expression.
41:07.308 --> 41:13.298
[SPEAKER_02]: And also the ways that they tell us something about how to navigate very difficult times.
41:13.518 --> 41:23.815
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, so many of these are folks who have not had the easiest, you know, of lives and they've had to deal with many, you know, kinds of challenges, you know, New Orleans is not the easiest place for many,
41:23.795 --> 41:46.917
[SPEAKER_02]: Black people work in class people and none the less they're creating these truly beautiful one of a kind suits each year And I think there's something for all of us to learn about the power not only of survival, but of Defiance even on landscapes and then which we're not meant to thrive and if listeners go Google Marty Grow Indians right now, they'll see
41:46.897 --> 41:50.446
[SPEAKER_01]: That was true.
41:50.466 --> 41:50.867
[SPEAKER_01]: I did it.
41:50.967 --> 41:53.113
[SPEAKER_01]: I tried it and there it was.
41:53.133 --> 41:53.735
[SPEAKER_02]: It's true.
41:53.815 --> 41:54.236
[SPEAKER_02]: It's true.
41:54.376 --> 41:57.624
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, but I also talk about this and she talks about this in the process.
41:57.645 --> 42:03.319
[SPEAKER_02]: It gets weird because they are such beautiful students and there are
42:03.299 --> 42:05.822
[SPEAKER_02]: And those pictures land in strange places, right?
42:05.862 --> 42:14.253
[SPEAKER_02]: Like people commoditize these images and don't necessarily get credit to or ask the consent of or profits to these creators.
42:14.333 --> 42:26.208
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it does raise a host of tricky issues in which we see these kind of competing values in which this very own practice comes into conflict with people who want to monetize these images.
42:26.288 --> 42:29.072
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it does lead to some tricky situations.
42:29.152 --> 42:30.133
[SPEAKER_02]: It's true.
42:31.109 --> 42:34.515
[SPEAKER_01]: We'd love to encourage listeners to buy your book.
42:34.535 --> 42:35.877
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you tell them how they can do that?
42:36.538 --> 42:40.324
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, it is available on Cambridge's website.
42:40.705 --> 42:47.977
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's also available through your local bookstores, as well as the large online retailers.
42:49.199 --> 42:51.463
[SPEAKER_01]: Rishana, thank you so much for speaking with me.
42:51.523 --> 42:53.927
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd love to reading your book, and it's been really fun to talk to you.
42:54.312 --> 42:55.173
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much.
42:55.193 --> 43:15.426
[SPEAKER_02]: I enjoyed this conversation and thank you for just engaging this work that's very special to me.
43:23.523 --> 43:52.922
[SPEAKER_03]: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
43:59.770 --> 44:01.732
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening to UnSung History.
44:02.513 --> 44:06.037
[SPEAKER_00]: Please subscribe to UnSung History on your favorite podcasting app.
44:06.518 --> 44:12.004
[SPEAKER_00]: You can find the sources used for this episode in a full episode transcript at UnSung History Podcast.com.
44:12.624 --> 44:18.711
[SPEAKER_00]: To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by UnSung History are in the public domain or are used with permission.
44:19.532 --> 44:25.879
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44:26.433 --> 44:30.131
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44:30.593 --> 44:33.106
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44:33.889 --> 44:37.869
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44:38.210 --> 44:38.552
[SPEAKER_00]: Bye.
