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13. A Place with a Past Ever-Present
- Louisiana State University Press
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107 13 A Place with a Past Ever-Present When I first visited Evergreen Plantation about fifteen years ago, it had only recently been opened to the public. Knowing that each River Road Plantation has a unique personality and an individual story to tell, I was curious to see what this one might offer. I couldn’t tell much from the road; all I could see through its stately fence was a gracious white brick mansion with a curving staircase and a couple of white brick outbuildings set amid a sprawling green. As I soon discovered, however, Evergreen is the only antebellum plantation in this area, and one of the few in the South, that survives essentially intact; its big house and a complement of dependencies, as such outbuildings are called in the lingo of plantation architecture , remain in place. Evergreen resembles those nineteenth-century paintings in which the artist portrayed a plantation as a small, almost self-sufficient village circumscribed by neat borders of sugarcane . Here it was—in three dimensions. So many antebellum properties along the River Road have been diminished over time, with buildings lost, moved, or destroyed. At Evergreen, however, little is missing: the old sugar mill was torn down in the 1920s and a post–Civil War Baptist church in the quarters was ruined during Hurricane Betsy in 1965. Otherwise, it is still 108 River Road Rambler much as it has been, including continuing to be a working sugar farm. I followed a docent through the property, touring the big house that had begun life in the late eighteenth-century as a Creole farmhouse and that was updated to its classical revival appearance in 1832, following the architectural fashion of the time. I admired the contingent of surrounding buildings—pairs of garçonnieres and pigeonnairs , a kitchen, a milking barn, a carriage house, stables, the domestic slave house, a neoclassical privy, and I noted other structures, both older and newer, beyond the immediate orbit of the mansion. But the most striking aspect of Evergreen’s landscape was located some distance to the rear of the mansion complex. Down a long white shell drive lined with two-hundred-year-old moss-draped oaks is the elegantly somber layout of twenty-two nearly identical weathered cypress cabins. This is the Evergreen slave quarters, looking much as it would have when the last of them had been completed in the 1850s. Here, Evergreen’s slave families and their free descendants lived until 1947. I hadn’t known that such a place still existed. Slave cabins along the River Road are not unusual; I’d seen the small rustic buildings here and there, singly or in pairs, on the grounds of other plantations or relocated to a museum. But I’d never before seen a quarters whole and real. As I looked from the top of the cabin row down the shell road set beneath the sculptural oaks, it looked like a movie set. It is not. The Evergreen’s quarters is authentic , confirmed by the only known historic map of the plantation, a rendering created by the Mississippi River Commission in 1876, which shows a configuration of Evergreen’s buildings identical to what I saw, including the eleven slave cabins strung along each side of the road and encircled by identically placed fields of sugarcane. That first visit had been in winter, when a leaden sky overhung the countryside and the palette of the landscape was muted. The weathered cabins, the color of dense smoke, crouched under gray tin roofs patinaed with rust and the muted greens of mosses. Even the short brick piers that supported each cabin seemed weathered to their [3.235.46.191] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:12 GMT) A Place with a Past Ever-Present 109 own rusty color. The subdued colors, the elegant simplicity of the architecture, and the symmetry of the layout of the place made the quarters affecting, even a bit haunting, and I wandered slowly down the shell road beneath the oaks, surprised at its emotional power. But subsequent visits in more favorable weather have been equally affecting. So I was not surprised to learn later from Jane Boddie, Evergreen’s property manager, that my response was common. The intrinsic meaning of the quarters as a community of people, a village unto itself, often affects visitors—both black and white. No one, she told me, is able to avoid confronting the issue...