yourlocalforeign:

kimreesesdaughter:

kimreesesdaughter:

purplechocolatekisses:

kimreesesdaughter:

I just left a plantation tour in Louisiana. I have a lot to say…

SAY IT!

I honestly thought I knew everything about slavery. Not so.

The owner of this particular plantation had it built by slaves for 3 years. Every brick was handmade. Over 120,000 bricks on 2,000+ acres of land (this place was huge.) The clay used for the bricks came from the Mississippi River. The majority of the slaves are buried under the Levees and water. Some are buried with their Masters. Not allowed to live with them but could be dead with them.

Before you enter the house, there’s a list of slaves who lived here including their age and how much they were purchased for. 124 total. Some slaves were worth as little as $25. As young as 5 years old.

On this particular plantation, the owner was big on punishment…he used noise making neck restraints. Imagine three 4lb balls around your neck with bells inside. Children were restrained by ankle locks that connected between their ankles.

This was a sugar cane plantation, one the worst practices to involve slaves because of its danger. A lot of slaves were decapitated, amputees and killed from the fields and machinery. A lot of kids lost their lives creating sugar. Speaking of children, a child stood in the living room and operated the fan with a string while guests ate dinner. As young as 3 years old.

Here’s what shook me even further: Before the Civil War, a lot of slave owners were going in debt and could not afford their properties and were not producing enough cotton and sugar to maintain their lifestyles. Slaves were used as HUMAN CREDIT CARDS. Slaves were a guaranteed line of credit. You could get HALF of your property’s value depending on how many healthy and able slaves you owned.

My people were human credit cards and lines of credit to BANKS. We were property. We were labeled as equipment and nothing more.

There is no such thing as a good slave owner. They owned my PEOPLE and used them as checks and balances. This cycle continues with prison and brutality. I do not want to hear shit about “Why can only Black people say this or that?” I don’t want to hear shit about “we’re all human.”

And by the way, not one of those slaves are at rest. Those spirits were so alive, you could feel their presence, their pain and someday, their revenge.

The front of the house and yard. This plantation was huge. Just thinking about my ancestors tending to all this land…

SOME of the enslaved names, ages, race and purchase price.

The living room.

Interior.

The dining room. That piece hanging above the table is ORIGINAL to the house. That’s the fan that a slave as young as 3 years old had to operate manually with a string.

The view from the balcony in the main hallway. This is how they looked over the slaves while they worked in the yard.

*sigh* Names of the enslaved that occupied the shacks. Children included. Their names are written inside one of the shacks. I’m not sure if there are other names inside other shacks because I could only handle 2. After I saw the punishment equipment, I left.

Slave Shacks. These are NOT the original shacks. These were built to imitate them.

Slaves for Sale Ads.

The landscape of Slavery throughout the United States in 1860. JUST 1860. Let that sink in.

Note: The last time the home was OWNED by a Louisiana citizen was 1972. This is her original bedroom, her lipstick is STILL on the dresser. This is why the house has been updated since slavery times because it was occupied up until 1972. Regardless, this used to be where house slaves slept.

This really fuckin happened, don’t let white people tell you that it’s in the past & to let it go.

dessa-lux:

“To put it yet another way, in my country where Dukes are actually a thing, there are a grand total of 30 (6 members of the Royal family, 24 others), and while the amount of Duchies in the Kingdom has varied a bit over the years, this number has remained relatively stable.  By contrast, although I don’t have access to hard census data for the 19^thcentury, Google reliably informs me that there were 2,651,939 people in London in 1851. And, if we take the extremely conservative estimate that only 0.1% of them were people of colour, that means that in the mid-19^th century there were 2650 POCs in London compared to about 30 Dukes in the whole country. So, from a certain perspective, a historical romance about a person of colour set in England in the mid-19^th century is 88.3 times more plausible than one about a Duke. But because we’re used to seeing stories about Dukes in the 19^th century and we aren’t used to seeing stories about people who aren’t white or heterosexual in the 19^th century,  stories about the absolutely tiny number of high ranking members of the landed aristocracy seem natural and normal to us while stories about the proportionally much larger number of marginalised people living in England at the time feel implausible or disorientating, even though they’re actually more reflective of the lives of real people.”

-Alexis Hall, Obligatory RITA post (with added musing about the historical category)

thoodleoo:

• “so is murdering all of your relatives just, like…a thing if you’re emperor”
• (upon hearing about hadrian and antinous) “WHAT. i want a boyfriend to make a cult for me and order a million statues of me when i’m dead!!”
• “can i ask a question? why is nero Like That?”
• “i wouldn’t want to be a roman emperor because i like my life, i enjoy living,”
• “so are all roman emperors basically gay?”
• (when i told them that caligula was called little boots because of a tiny soldier’s uniform he wore as a child) “awww how cute!!”
• (when i told them that caligula grew up to be…well, caligula) “aWWW LESS CUTE”
• (while researching the emperor their group was assigned) “how did our guy die? oh, assassination, big surprise”
• “oh, he boiled his wife and son alive! what a family man”
• (upon hearing some of the frivolous and/or authoritarian laws some emperors supposedly instituted) “gee, that sounds familiar…”
• (while reading aloud their group’s presentation on hadrian) “and i love to spend time working on my wall- make rome great again, y’all”