name of the plantation in the movie original sin

“I remember looking at their faces across the room,” Harrell said. Their struggles have stayed with her since hearing them and remembering the haunting images of their faces. “I felt like I was in the room with newly freed people, and I can understand why they didn’t want to talk about this.” “They talked about how hard it was … about not having enough food to eat,” she said. Women recounted having watched their children being hired out to other plantations, and daughters molested and raped by the “straw boss” or foreman who supervised workers, she said. Harrell said 95 percent of them were African-American while the rest were just poor including Hungarians, Poles, Italians and Hispanics. Was this just on paper? What about the people left on Waterford Plantation? Whitney Plantation? The history books failed to teach us that slavery wasn’t truly abolished, just on paper, but in actuality it was not for hundreds of thousands of people left behind.”

I was 13 years old, and the history books are teaching me that slavery was abolished and Lincoln freed the slaves. “1973 is really, really not long ago,” Harrell said of when the modern day slaves finally left Waterford Plantation. They also owed on medical bills, which she said could total more their entire month’s wage. They were indebted at the commissary store for things like matches, candy, tobacco and bread, said Harrell, who also found Waterford Plantation records in Whitney Plantation records. “It was just people taking advantage of people who did not have the means to leave,” she said. Harrell recalled a letter she saw on Whitney Plantation concerning a man who wrote about needing approval by the plantation owner to get his belongings and was determined to pay his $25 debt so he could leave. But she said many of them also lacked the resources to leave or had nowhere to go, and the generations – as many as up to five – stayed on well into the 1970s because they couldn’t leave. “Peon” was short for peonage or involuntary servitude, which Harrell said those held on Waterford Plantation told her was perpetuated primarily through debt. They referred to themselves as ‘peons,’ meaning, ‘You can’t get away … because they were in debt.’” “To see a man cry and see the tears in their eyes, it was just heartbreaking for me,” said Antoinette Harrell of when she met with them nearly 20 years ago.

Name of the plantation in the movie original sin