Tag: slavery

San Antonio

Welcome to Texas.

We visited Dallas and Austin to see family and friends, so no photos from those spots; but San Antonio was something else. It was much more of a pleasant city than I expected, insofar as it wasn’t overly built up like Dallas, and the architecture reminded me of eastern cities (I’m provincial that way). It also has a fantastic river walk that leads to the site of a former brewery, which now contains multiple funky shops and restaurants.

Of course, it is still the south in some respects.

The big attraction of San Antonio, of course, is the Alamo, which is downtown, the city having filled in all the space around it. The original Alamo complex was much larger than the small fort we see today (and the iconic façade was the fort’s church), which explains why the battle took as long as it did.

So here are some fun facts about the Alamo. First, a lot of the items in the Alamo Museum collection—papers, weapons, other metal goods—were donated by the musician Phil Collins, who has been obsessed with the Alamo ever since he watched the Disney series Davy Crockett as a child. Second, when the guide told us the story of the Alamo, he cited an eyewitness account of the battle given by “Joe,” servant to Commander William Travis. However, General Santa Ana had given the order to give no quarter to the men of the fort. So why did Joe survive? Because Santa Ana spared the women, children, and slaves. One of the unmentioned causes of the Texans’ revolt against Santa Ana was that the Mexican government wanted to ban slavery in the state of Texas, and the Texans weren’t having it.

Next: more Texas.

Whitney Plantation

Whitney Plantation is an educational center that discusses plantation life from a slave’s point of view.

The Whitney Plantation—originally the Heidel Plantation, named for the original owners—was active from 1752 to 1975, in other words, both before the Civil War and then after the war, with sharecroppers working the land. At its height, 100 slaves lived on the Whitney Plantation and produced sugar cane for the Heidel family.

Here is the plantation house. It is not a grand plantation house; it is only one room deep (with a rear balcony). Note the painted decoration, including the painted marble effects.

And compare that to the slave quarters.

Sugarcane production was brutal. “Slaves in the Louisiana sugar cane world lived what the former slave and civil rights activist Frederick Douglass termed a ‘life of living death.’ The average life span of a mill hand was said to be only seven years — a message that circulated widely among enslaved people who feared being sold into bondage in sugar fields.”1 The leaves of the sugarcane stalk have sharp edges; slaves harvesting sugarcane plantations often suffered deep cuts as they worked the fields. Meanwhile, the slaves who pressed the cane into juice could lose limbs if they got themselves caught in the mechanical rollers; and the slaves who boiled the juice to crystalize it into sugar risked being scalded. It’s all awful.

  1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/opinion/sugar-land-texas-graves-slavery.html ↩︎

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑