Laura Plantation’s Shameful Tour

Imagine visiting Auschwitz and the over-compensatingly proud German tour guide presents a narrative fixated on the social melodramas of the former SS officers, their dysfunctional families with whacky nicknames like “Gaschamber”, takes the occasional jab at the Allied liberators, and makes only the most fleeting mention of the inhabitants of the camp who were worked to death or just summarily exterminated.

Welcome to the best analogy my disgusted soul can concoct for the tour we experienced of the Laura Plantation, billed and recommended to us as a sober and honest site that explores the painful history of slavery in Louisiana.

It’s been several days since we left and I’ve still yet to fully process the experience, but I am certain that none of this impression is either overstated or the result of hypersensitivity.

Our tour guide, a middle aged woman who boasted of having given roughly 2000 tours at this site, could not help but cover her extraordinary callousness with tasteless jokes, often directed at a young visitor, perhaps 10 years old. The attempts at humor would be inappropriate at best given the context, if they weren’t also so incredibly revealing.

Much of the time was spent on the various comings and goings of the wealthy family who owned the property and its slaves, and a few bits on the several house slaves with whom – we were assured – they were quite fond. However, the many more men, women, and children who toiled in their fields for generations being whipped, raped and brutalized to create the wealth of this family ranked barely a mention but for a few quick asides. Likewise, the glorious Confederates were barely deserving of an insult, and only ever on the basis of personal flaws like business incompetence – even finding an opening to joke about a man whose nickname was “the Whip” – while creating for herself plenty of opportunity to insult the Union, President Grant, Reconstruction, and to promulgate a general notion of both-sideism that entirely undermines an honest assessment of the role of Southern society in enslaving and exploiting millions of innocent people.

Early in the tour we were repeatedly admonished not to record video or audio of the tour – only photographs – and in retrospect it seems patently obvious why. If anyone has the fortitude to visit this site for a tour, please do so anyway.

I look forward to sharing this post with the management once I track them down. I’ve been reassured by several local friends and a number of positive reviews online that this was an exceptional and unusual experience there. I hope so, which makes it even more important that I document our recollections.