At a Site of Remembering: The Whitney Plantation and the Graves of the Lost

Phoenix Chapital is a Robertson Scholar majoring in English Literature, pursuing the Human Rights Certificate, in the class of 2027. Phoenix is one of our 2026 Human Rights Summer Research Grant winners and a featured guest blogger. Grant winners will be sharing an inside look into their experiences on the Duke Human Rights Blog this summer and fall as part of our Student Stories: Summer Research Series. Read Phoenix's first blog post from earlier this summer, Summer in the Cities of the Dead: New Orleans Cemeteries During Hurricane Season.

Sometimes, to see the future, you have to look to the past.  

My research in New Orleans this summer has focused on memorialization and burial practices in a region where environmental precarity threatens both the living and the dead. I am exploring the differences between predominantly white cemeteries and predominantly Black cemeteries to better understand how methods of burial and preservation can lead to dispossession even beyond death.   

Earlier in the summer, I visited the St. Louis Cemeteries and wandered up and down the rows of tombs at Valence Street, Joseph, and Metairie. Through both my research and observations, I came to understand how disparities in the way cemeteries are constructed, where they are located, and who maintains them undeniably contribute to how they will exist in the future.  

While much of my project involves engaging with historians, preservationists, groundskeepers, and memorial masons in the present, as well as exploring the current state of cemeteries around the city, I also wanted to understand the historical context for my research. While researching the places we might one day lose to neglect and decay, I became curious about the things we had already lost.  

I went to museums, archives, and history sites to see what the past could teach me about the future.  

The Historic New Orleans Collection is filled with invaluable documents that guided my exploration of the city’s historic organization. Maps from the 1800s and early 1900s showed me how much the landscape of the city has changed, how property and land have been given and taken away from marginalized communities over the years, and how certain places (such as Girod Street Cemetery, a historically Black above-ground burial site) were lost.  

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It was stifling when I arrived at the Whitney Plantation, nearly an hour outside New Orleans. I’d driven straight for miles down River Road, which was once lined with the Italian and Greek-inspired mansions of the sugar plantations tucked behind looming oak trees and Spanish moss. Now, you can go miles without seeing one, though a few still remain. I remember visiting Destrehan Plantation, built in 1787, on a field trip in elementary school — with its yellow walls and green shutters. It was stunning, sitting there among the hard grass, and I had to remind myself what it was built for.  

Whitney Plantation is similarly beautiful, in the way only a haunted place can be. The site has been turned into a popular museum, and Black visitors from all over milled about the property, ducking into exhibits and crouching down low to read the iron plaques in front of the slave quarters, jail, and Big House.  

It was surreal in a way to witness people who I knew probably had ties to this plantation, just like my family does, walk the same paths that their ancestors walked before them. It reminded me of two things. First, that the legacy of racialized dispossession in death did not end with slavery. It continues today in many forms. Second, it reminded me of the importance of memorialization and recognition, of having a site to mourn, remember, and celebrate. History is not just an inevitable byproduct of existing. History is what we make it — who we write about, who we photograph, who we bury, and who we refuse to forget.  

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It’s not easy to remember, though. The Wall of Honor, a memorial at the Whitney constructed to honor those who were once enslaved on the property, forces what could have easily been erased to be immortalized on granite slabs. Still, only the first names are written: Jean Baptiste, Valery, Cato, Patience, Betsy, Little Charles, Mourning. I wanted to find my ancestors, who I knew once walked these grounds, but it was impossible to find them in this sea of the forgotten. 

After my visit, my grandmother asked me if I could feel the ghosts of our family around me as I walked the plantation grounds. 

“No,” I said. “They’re gone. They didn’t stick around.” 

But as I reflect on it now, I think I was wrong. Maybe the ghosts of the past didn’t stick around in the literal sense my grandmother was alluding to. But by standing at the foot of their memorial, didn’t we, those who exist in the present, call them back to us, in a way? 

To me, the Whitney Plantation represents the legacy of erasure and neglect: the enslaved, the marginalized, those who were denied not only resources and personhood in life but also in death. We do not know where their bodies are. For most, we do not know what became of them in the last years of their life. There are those who undeniably rest somewhere under the Whitney’s supple soil, and those who may have escaped only to decay in an unmarked grave somewhere east down River Road.   

But the Whitney Plantation also symbolizes hope, in a sense. There is a pervading idea that what was lost can be recovered. And if we are proactive enough, what could be lost can instead be preserved.  

I hope to continue this research throughout the school year. There are many people I would still like to talk to, who I hope can illuminate for me the intricacies of preservation and restoration and point me toward more marginalized histories. 

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