WHITNEY PLANTATION

One does not come here to admire the architectural style of the house (the visit of the main house is, by the way, quite short), nor to take oneself for one of the characters ofGone with the Wind. One comes here to understand life on a plantation, not from the point of view of the rich white owners but through the eyes of the slaves who worked there, body and soul. No less than 350 slaves would have lived there. A memorial, the Wall of Honor, lists all of them. There is no access to the plantation apart from the guided tour. The content of the tour is very interesting and alternates between explanations of life at the time, visits to sites (the house, the church, the huts, the kitchen...) and free time in the memorials erected in honor of the slaves and in a concern for memory. During the visit, one becomes familiar with the working conditions, both very hard and dangerous, accidents in the sugar cane farms, especially when handling the cauldrons and cooking, being very frequent. But the most moving dimension of the visit is the memorials. Here you can read messages and "anecdotes" from slaves who evoke vivid memories and refer to their living conditions on the plantation. The slang texts are not always easy to understand for travelers with poor English. The visit to Whitney is probably one of the most interesting from a historical point of view.