There are dozens of plantation tours in the southeast. When I lived in Charlotte some 12 years ago, I visited several of them along the East Coast from Virginia to Georgia. Every one of them romanticized the antebellum period, glossing over slavery like it was a minor and perhaps slightly inconvenient part of its history. When the tour guides were asked direct questions about the enslaved, the irritation on their faces were obvious. It’s entirely possible in the age of BLM those tours have since changed their tune, but based on the brochures and websites promoting elegant wedding events featuring one white face after another, I rather doubt it.

It was important to me that our children get the heart-wrenching truth. The horrible mar on our country’s history. On McLeod’s website, it states:

“McLeod Plantation Historic Site is not just a place for memorialization and a place of conscience, but a place where the transformation of conscience can occur.”

For Rhodes, I knew not much would sink in, but Siena and Porter have really begun to do a lot of studying into Black history. Siena has done several school reports on some of the influential players, including Harriet Tubman, MLK, Jr., and Rosa Parks. The children have joined me in protests and John and I have been very vocal and honest about Black history and the BLM movement. 

“It may be called a plantation,” our guide, Jeff began, “but in reality, it was a slave labor camp and should be regarded as such.” Jeff skipped the white-washed history and instead gave us the stark realities of what life was like for the enslaved and how their ancestors live today. I appreciated Jeff’s humility and honesty right from the start.

“I am a white man telling the enslaved’s stories. I will never speak for them, I can only share their stories. I am constantly learning and listening. I invite you to return to hear tours from other guides, as everyone knows different things and has a different perspective. There are several women who are of Gullah (Geechee) descent and tell the history far better than me.”

Jeff detailed how cotton was harvested and processed by showing us plants behind the McLeod house. It was 70-degrees in the middle of our December visit, and hot in the direct sunlight – no shade to be found stretching over the vast fields where cotton plants once grew. Gnats nibbled at our ears and buzzed around our nose and eyes. In the summer, those same fields would be 90 to 100 degrees of blazing high-humidity heat. The air would be buzzing with hungry mosquitoes, gnats and noseeums, with cockroaches, mice, and snakes skittering afoot. Alligators are also a common pest in the lowcountry.

An enslaved person was expected to pick upwards of 100 to 150-pounds per day, and they would be supervised by a slave driver on horseback who was heavy-handed with a whip. Once the cotton was picked, the enslaved would bring it to the proessessing shed – an open-window rustic shack in the shade of a large live oak tree.

Because of their smaller hands, women and children would pick through the cotton bolls, clearing it of seed and bugs, and other unwelcome debris. It was then processed and baled in large, heavy containers. Day in and day out. Dawn to dusk. Punishment severe. No end in sight. And the McLeod’s getting more and more weathly with each boll.

If an enslaved person was considered unruly or “out of line”, masters would often pay the jailers at the Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon in Charleston to torture them. Shackled in chains underground in the dark with no comprehension of day to night, they would be whipped repeatedly, then salt would be poured onto the wounds. Disease, malnourishment, and infestations of rats and roaches ran rampant in the dungeon. 

Jeff told us the story of Leah, a five-year old girl purchased by the McLeods. Five years old, the same age as Rhodes. Ripped from her mother’s arms from the next island over, never to see her parents again. Leah remembers traveling a great distance to get to Charleston. The adults were all blindfolded and bound together in chains. Nobody had shoes or foot coverings on. They stumbled through marshland, rocky paths, and rough cobblestones, whipped if they started going too slow or their bodies slunk from the heat and exhaustion. Leah remembers how everyone’s feet were battered, bruised, and bleeding. Yet they were forced to march on. Finally they landed at the Slave Mart in Charleston.

Plantation owners would come and invasively examine the enslaved, test their strength and aptitude before bidding on them. Splitting families apart. Treating them as if they were nothing but cattle to be bought and sold. Owned.

An older white southern woman on the tour asked, “But weren’t some of the slave owners decent? You hear stories of how sometimes they had good relationships.”

I responded, “How good of a relationship can you possibly have if you are owned and treated as property? There can be no genuine kindness when you own someone.”

Those romanticized stories told in Hollywood that try to alleviate white guilt make for dangerous lasting impressions.

Jeff discussed the Civil War and the Assimilation. Despite the enslaved becoming free, they were still far from equal. After the war, if an African American didn’t have a job, they would be considered vagrants and were imprisoned. So desperate men and woman would go back to their previous owners begging for jobs and a place to live. Plantation owners still needed the workforce, so rented out clapboard shacks to families in exchange for labor. The African Americans becoming what really amounted to as indentured servants. Free, but not really free at all.

Leah would become one of the freed who stayed on the plantation with her husband, raising their children in a small one-room clapboard shack. Leah left behind over 100 descendants, many of whom still live in the area and carry on the Gullah/Geechee traditions.  Her youngest grandchild died in 2016.

2016. Two generations prior and her kin was enslaved. That’s not that long ago. A blink of an eye in the scope of time. When we (white people anyway) think of slavery, we think of it as being a long, long time ago. But the wounds are still gaping and raw. The backbone and infrastructure of America was built by the black bodies who were stolen from their homelands, tortured, raped, their families ripped apart, forced to abandon their spirituality, and forced into labor.

Somehow they carried on, they persevered. Now it’s our turn to fight for their descendants. To never forget. To do everything we can to fight for equality, to end systemic racism, and make our world safe for all. United we must stand.