The Mississippi Delta landscape’s beauty masks a brutal slave-based sugar economy

Evidence

The Mississippi River is and always has been the lifeblood of the region, nurturing the southern Louisiana soil and linking this place to a many-centuries-old Atlantic market in sugar and the enslaved. It bears witness to all that has happened here—the human beings stolen, shipped, and sold on plantations, the harsh realities of lives cut short by sugar. The road that leaves the Whitney Plantation follows the river, which snakes along just beyond the grass-covered levees. On most days there’s not much traffic. The land is quiet and sun-drenched, with round hay bales that lie like small animals resting peacefully atop the grass. There is something idyllic about the landscape, but there is nothing innocent about the history of this place, where human beings corrupted nature to do great harm to humanity. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 309

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s essay on trees as infrastructure — here the river itself is infrastructure that enabled the sugar-and-slave Atlantic market.