In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana by Stephen Small (review)

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• In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana by Stephen Small
• Tanya L. Shields

In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana. By Stephen Small. Atlantic Migrations and the African Diaspora. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2023. Pp. xiv, 254. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4556-6; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4555-9.)

Stephen Small’s In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana explores the lives of the enslaved by looking at the physical spaces they occupied: their cabins. Small focuses on “how power and access to resources lead to certain types of social remembering and social forgetting” in the remnants of slave cabins on three plantations in Natchitoches, Louisiana (p. 178).

The core chapters showcase Small’s main claims about the discursive and ideological framing of tour narratives. Small asserts that integrating the enslaved quarters would undermine plantation sites’ “grand narrative,” which emphasizes elite white southerners’ gentility, romance, and paternalism, while leaning heavily on visitors’ expectations to maintain the status quo (p. vii). Countering this ubiquitous heritage tourism script, he argues that cabins were “places of community, shared experiences, and family . . . [and] places of relative independence, autonomy, and decision-making free from the wretched surveillance and unrestricted violence of white racism” (pp. 195–96). Alongside paying scrupulous attention to the materiality of the dwellings, he pieces together information on the people, known and unknown, who lived in them, on the respite cabins provided to their enslaved residents, and on their use in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, phrases like “no definitive proof,” “little documentary evidence,” and other mitigating language stifle Small’s claims, highlighting that the archive of documentary evidence about enslaved people relies on reading contextually (pp. 96, 131). Small suggests methods of historically grounded speculation as we await an ever- growing body of archaeological research. [End Page 633]

Small explains that heritage tourism in Natchitoches was framed by the commemorative work of white women in the postbellum period. Women of all races, ethnicities, and classes commemorated the dead, but “White women of all classes had primary responsibility for commemorating their dead husbands, brothers, and sons. Elite white women took the lead” (p. 47). He juxtaposes how competing interests reflect current concerns. Melrose plantation, originally called Yucca plantation and owned by Louis Métoyer, a Cane River Creole of color, was bought by Joseph Henry in the late nineteenth century. The property was inherited by Joseph’s son, John Hampton Henry, and his wife, Carmelite “Cammie” Henry, who administered the property after her husband’s death. As Small details, the twenty-first-century tour, despite the rich Black history of the plantation, focuses on three female figures: the Black founder of the Métoyer family, Marie Thérèse Coin Coin; Cammie Henry, who founded an artists’ and writers’ colony; and famed African American folk artist Clementine Hunter. Small argues that this focus represented a “narrative of symbolic annihilation” of the lives and experiences of most Black people who lived and worked on the plantation (p. 172). Critical to Small’s narrative is ownership—and who owns plantations still matters. Partly due to greater financial and human resources, two other plantations, owned by the National Park Service, Oakland and Magnolia, achieve “relative incorporation” by addressing Black experiences in abstract (albeit not always in humanizing) ways (p. 184). By contrast, Melrose’s tourism operation formed under the auspices of the elite commemorative class, and it is a nonprofit with limited funds and staff. Against these examples, the very quest for survival as well as a lack of invitation has kept Black participation in heritage tourism on the margins.

Ultimately, Small’s work reminds us that what Saidiya Hartman refers to as “the afterlife of slavery” (Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route [New York, 2007], p. 6) not only remains with us but also stubbornly shapes our daily interactions. While at times repetitive, Small’s claims about plantations’ grand narratives and his spatial and temporal challenge...