PLANTATION REVELATION

NATCHEZ, Miss. —  The South holds plenty of untold stories. One of them is that Margaret Mitchell wrote almost all of “Gone With the Wind,” and conjured up the world’s most famous plantation house, while dwelling in a cramped apartment on the ground floor of an 1899 Tudor-style urban Atlanta home. She called it “The Dump.”

Yet Tara, that grand plantation Mitchell built from fantasy in her 1936 novel, stands taller in the American popular imagination than Gatsby’s mansion, sturdier than the Little House on the Prairie. Thousands of tourists arrive in the South every year eager to admire the columns and banisters of someplace just like it.

These visitors are seldom disappointed, and my wife and I were curious enough to spend several days last summer touring old homes and plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana. We got an eyeful, and an unexpected earful.

The eyeful was simple enough. Thanks to the efforts of architectural preservationists and the pervasiveness of Confederate nostalgia, dozens of elaborately restored antebellum homes and plantation houses fill downtown Natchez and dozens more line the Mississippi River as it wriggles south from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. The number of them remaining seems impressive, until you are reminded that once, 350 plantations shared the river between those two Louisiana cities, 80 miles apart.

The earful was another matter. Most antebellum home and plantation tours, we soon learned, have been honed over time to meet expectations formed by Margaret Mitchell’s book, even though her Tara stood in neither Mississippi nor Louisiana but northern Georgia. Guides often wear period attire, and their scripts are rich with details about antique furnishings, damage done by Union troops and the bygone habits of the Southern aristocracy. But for all these years, there’s been something missing from these tours. It’s only now, 134 years after the end of the Civil War, that a handful of plantation tours are beginning to give substantial attention to the slaves who built and sustained these households.

At Magnolia Mound, a 16-acre 1791 home museum in Baton Rouge that’s run by the East Baton Rouge Parish Recreation Commission, director

Gwen Edwards in 1996 obtained a slave cabin from a rural property about 30 miles away. After restoration and research, the museum on Sept. 9 unveiled a new slavery-based tour called “Beyond the Big House: The Other Story.”

At Shadows-on-the-Teche, an 1834 home in New Iberia, La., museum staff and local high school students have worked together since 1995 on a tour stressing the “living foundation” that slave labor provided the home’s former owners. Museum director Pat Kahle said she’d been hearing more questions from guests about slavery in the last few years, and that “we are starting to have black visitors. We didn’t 10 years ago.”

And in a 1,000-square-foot room on the Tezcuco Plantation in Ascension Parish, La., a crusading self-appointed museum director named Kathe Hambrick has founded the fledgling River Road African-American Museum. Hambrick nine years ago returned to Louisiana after being downsized from an IBM job in Los Angeles, but said she was startled by the absence of slaves from the stories told to most plantation tourists. So in 1994 she persuaded Tezcuco’s owners to give her some space and started assembling exhibits, including a roster of 700 slave names from local plantations.

“People say, ‘An African American museum at a plantation?’ ” Hambrick said. “And I say, ‘Well, where else?’ ”

Hearing this new spin--or not hearing it--can make an antebellum house tour a fascinating event: not only a lesson in architecture, but a study in sociology.

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The logical way to tour the antebellum homes of Louisiana and Mississippi is to fly into New Orleans, rent a car, drive north for 172 miles to Natchez, then slowly make your way south along the river.

Natchez sits on an abrupt bluff overlooking the Mississippi, its streets rich with antebellum houses. Monmouth Plantation House is among the most prominent.

It was a sticky July evening, the sun a low orange wafer over the slow-moving Mississippi, when we rolled up the looping driveway of Monmouth. Built in 1818 and fronted by four white columns, the main house was once owned by an attorney, planter and Mexican War veteran named John Quitman. Quitman, a vocal defender of slavery, was too old to fight in the Civil War. When Union troops took control of Natchez in 1863, they pillaged Monmouth and hacked down many of its oaks for firewood.

But now its 26 carefully coiffed acres unfurl flawlessly with fountain, garden, pond, oaks and Spanish moss. In 1978, Encino developer Ron Riches and his wife, Lani, bought the place and invested heavily in its renovation. They now have a bed-and-breakfast with 25 rooms. When the front desk puts callers on hold, they hear the “Gone With the Wind” theme.

We got the most affordable room in the place for $112.50. Our room, on the ground floor of a companion building, included a fireplace and four-poster bed. We arrived too late for dinner in the big house’s dining room, but we did get the tour in the morning.

Our guide, Dottie, who looked about 18, told a dozen or so of us about the Quitman family and explained how an odd piece of antique furniture in the sitting room had served as a shield to keep the fireplace heat from melting the wax-based makeup favored by ladies of the day. Dottie didn’t say much about the lives of slaves, except to point to the second story above our room, where some slaves were quartered, and to note the inaccuracy of the wallpaper in the main hallway, which included images of Virginia slaves in aristocratic attire.

About 15 historic homes are open year-round in Natchez, most offering daily tours. Then there are the bed-and-breakfasts, more than three dozen of them, several operating in the same homes that offer tours. All of those properties, and about 15 more, go into full swing in spring and October, when Natchez Pilgrimage programs wistfully celebrate the city’s history with house tours and performances, including up to four costumed Confederate pageants weekly. This spring’s pilgrimage runs March 10 to April 10.

The pilgrimage dates to the early 1930s. In 1990 a gospel concert and recitation about local African Americans were added to the program.

Yet as things stand now, said Bill Justice, chief ranger at Melrose, an antebellum estate in Natchez owned by the National Park Service, “if you just go around the houses here in Natchez, you won’t get the full view of slavery. But more houses mention slavery than did three years ago. It will come. The public wants to know this stuff.”

Meanwhile, a Natchez tourism management council, appointed by Mayor Larry “Butch” Brown, has been working since 1997 on recommendations to promote better guide-training and inclusivity in the texts of local tours. In February, the Natchez Assn. for the Preservation of African-American Culture is expected to open in new quarters in the former city post office.

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Heading south from Natchez toward New Orleans, we learned to look for oak groves amid the sugar cane plantings because, craving shade, plantation owners typically surrounded their homes with oaks. We also learned to make a distinction between the Anglo-American plantations, founded by English-speaking Protestant families (painted white or gray), and the Creole plantations, founded and run by French-speaking Catholic settlers (bright pastels).

The most famous Louisiana plantation, Oak Alley, once a Creole property, sits about 60 miles north of New Orleans near the town of Vacherie. Its 28 Doric columns are set at the end of a striking double line of arching, gnarled oaks. It draws about 200,000 visitors a year. Now owned and run by the nonprofit Oak Alley Foundation, the plantation offers daily tours, lunch and five rental cottages.

One plantation tour veteran calls Oak Alley “Tara, in a more dramatic natural setting.” When it comes time to write tour scripts, administrative director Zeb Mayhew said in a telephone interview, he and his staff bear “Gone With the Wind” expectations in mind. “Yes, we put our gals in hoop skirts and we serve mint juleps,” Mayhew said. “We don’t dwell on slavery. We hear too much about the ugly story of slavery. Slavery was a fact of life then.”

On our improvised tour, we missed Oak Alley altogether and headed instead for Laura and Madewood, two nearby Louisiana plantations that resemble each other about as much as a crepe resembles kidney pie. Yet at both sites, tales of plantation days take provocative turns.

The Madewood Plantation Home, where we spent one night, was built in 1846 and looks like a governor’s mansion. Its 21 rooms are connected by broad hallways, and descending the elegant central stair from bedrooms to the atrium is likely to make a traveler feel like gentry.

The scale is grand and the price substantial--$215 for a night--but that includes dinner for two. Our lodgings were in the master bedroom, a massive room with a 16-foot-high ceiling and floor-to-ceiling windows opening to a sun-splashed balcony where we could lean against the bright white Doric columns and survey the countryside. Dinner was excellent, especially the shrimp pie and corn bread. It was just before dinner that we met Mike Hawkins and got a brief resume. Hawkins, 46, came to Louisiana in 1993 to work on a doctorate at Louisiana State University’s Department of Geography and Anthropology. His specialty was historic sites in the South. Soon after his arrival, Hawkins started taking Louisiana plantation tours, and in December, he and co-author Jean Rahier published an academic paper on how slavery is overlooked on plantation tours, titled: “Gone With the Wind Versus the Holocaust Metaphor.”

But Hawkins is no longer an outside observer. In February 1998, he signed on as manager of Madewood. One of his first duties was rewriting the tour.

“The hardest thing about changing the narratives,” he told me, “is getting both guides and tourists to focus on the historical, social and economic contexts in which these magnificent piles were built and run, rather than being focused entirely on the material objects.”

The 14-acre Laura Plantation headquarters, just a few miles away, is marked immediately as a sort of rebel in Rebel territory. It has no bed-and-breakfast, no hoop skirts, no mint juleps. To reach the garish yellow, green, orange and red main house, you pick your way past a few weather-beaten wooden outbuildings that once stood elsewhere and housed plantation overseers.

Behind the partially restored big house stand four unrestored slave dwellings, eerily empty spaces with splintered floorboards and flaking paint visible through rustic windows and door frames. Once, when the plantation covered 12,000 acres, there were not four slave shacks but 69, housing about 200 slaves. Aside from the 60-minute general tour, visiting groups of 12 or more can reserve 90-minute specialty tours focusing on women, slaves, children or wine.

Operated as a for-profit venture, the Laura Plantation Co. is a partnership of 30 investors, and the Laura people are shrewd marketers. On fashionable Royal Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans, you’re likely to encounter a shop called Le Monde Creole, an outlet of the company that offers books, souvenirs and walking tours and also urges travelers to visit the plantation.

Inside the main house of Laura, the guides told us tales of the family that owned the house. For four generations from 1808 to 1892, the plantation was managed by women, lastly Laura Locoul (granddaughter of the plantation’s founders), for whom it was named. As we stood on the back porch looking out at a stone water well, guide Loreili Becnel eased into a story from 1868, when Laura was 7 years old.

“She was playing on top of that water well when a 65-year-old black man, Pa Philippe, came to get water for his mule,” said Becnel in a Creole accent. “Well, Laura knew who he was, but she’d never been that close to him before. And she noticed he had a scar on his forehead.”

When the girl asked the old man about his scar, he told her how, as a young man, he had tried to escape the plantation. Caught, he was taken to the head of the plantation, who happened to be young Laura’s grandmother. Then, Pa Philippe told the girl, her grandmother pressed a hot branding iron into his forehead.

Horrified, the girl ran to her mother, hoping the old man was lying.

“Her mother sits her down,” Becnel continued, “and says, ‘Laura, he’s not lying. You’re gonna find out that a lot of people here on this plantation have done some terrible and cruel things that you’re too young to understand. But you remember this: The people on this plantation are no better and no worse than anywheres else.’ ”

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GUIDEBOOK

South’s Hospitality

Getting there: You can fly from LAX to New Orleans on Southwest, Continental, Northwest, United and America West. Round-trip fares start at $198.

Where to stay: In Mississippi, Monmouth Plantation, 36 Melrose Ave., Natchez, telephone (800) 828-4531; 28 rooms, rates $145-$355. Natchez Pilgrimage Tours, tel. (800) 647-6742, serves as reservation center for about 30 B&Bs.; In Napoleonville, La., Madewood Plantation House, 4250 Highway 308, tel. (504) 369-7151. Rate: $215, with dinner for two.

Where to tour: In Mississippi: Melrose Mansion, part of Natchez National Historical Park, tel. (601) 446-5790, tours, $6 adults. In Louisiana near Vacherie: Oak Alley Plantation, tel. (800) 442-5539, tours, $8 adults. Laura Plantation, tel. (504) 265-7690, tours, $7 adults. Shadows-on-the-Teche, tel. (318) 369-6446, in New Iberia, tours, $6 adults. Magnolia Mound, tel. (504) 343-4955, in Baton Rouge, tours, $5 adults. On Tezcuco Plantation, near Burnside, La., River Road African-American Museum and Gallery, tel. (225) 562-7703, $3 adults.