Editor’s Note: This week is a continuation of guest writer Shirin McArthur’s reflections on her visit to the Whitney Museum this summer. This post is a compilation of three posts about what Shirin learned. Follow the links to find more details from her experience.

The Whitney Museum in southern Louisiana focuses extensively on the experience of enslaved people rather than glorifying the slave-owning “masters.” In this post, I want to share some of what my husband Henry and I learned from our tour guide about the experience for the enslaved community at this one of over 46,300 US plantations that were in existence in 1860.

For starters, the land lay close to the Mississippi River. In fact, the slave owners’ plantation house, pictured above, was initially built on stilts because of the frequent flooding. Especially during hurricanes, countless enslaved people were washed away and drowned. The master’s response? Purchase a new batch of slaves. Truly, these enslaved people were seen as valuable but replaceable property, just as we would view a car or computer today.

Yet the master benefitted greatly from the wisdom which enslaved Africans brought from their native lands. Enslaved people built their own homes—and the master’s—using African architectural designs that increased airflow in muggy summers and storage solutions that kept foods cool. Africans knew how to cultivate rice much more efficiently than whites.

The land on this particular plantation, which was known as Habitation Haydel prior to the Civil War, initially grew indigo and cotton, but later transitioned to sugar cane. The plantation also grew a secondary crop: more slaves. Known as a “breeding plantation,” one of the Haydels’ goals was to increase the number of enslaved people who could be bought and sold across the South. (In the 1860 census, there were 4 million enslaved people of African descent living in the US.)

When we toured the plantation buildings and grounds, I found myself paying close attention to the language used by our guide. She carefully spoke of “enslaved people,” not “slaves,” which reinforced what I’d been learning in our antiracism reading. I’ve intentionally tried to use that language in these reflections, except when recounting the perspective of the “masters.” I also have been thinking about the political right’s use of “dog whistle politics,” which hint at racism for those “in the know” while avoiding explicitly racist terminology. Language is both fundamental and complex in every culture—something I know well after serving more than eleven years as a freelance editor!

How do we know what the enslaved life was like? Most formerly enslaved people didn’t want to talk about it after the Civil War, even with their families. That was the past, and they were focused on a freer future. However, we do have some narratives because of a little-known (to me anyway!) project of the New Deal’s WPA (Works Progress Administration). People were employed not only to build roads and bridges. Writers were also hired to write down American folklore. When formerly enslaved people began talking about their experiences, someone realized that this was literally a legacy in danger of dying out and began to focus intentionally on first-person accounts of the enslaved experience. The result was Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938, which “contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves.”

However, as our guide pointed out when we toured Habitation Haydel, these formerly enslaved African Americans didn’t tell much to the white interviewers except what they thought the whites wanted to hear. Still, these interviews provided previously unrecorded windows into the enslaved persons’ experiences and perspectives.

Two phrases that came out of these stories refer to the seasons of life for enslaved people in the antebellum South. The worst part of the sugarcane growing season was harvest, from September to December. It was called the “cutting season” because of both the process of cutting down the sugarcane and how the mature sugarcane leaves would cut through human skin like knives. Enslaved people were worked for even longer hours, and masters purchased additional slaves to obtain the necessary human labor for this hectic, hellish season.

After the cutting season came the “wailing season.” This was when the master sold off the excess slaves he no longer needed after the harvest. Since this also provided him with an opportunity to reassess his entire workforce, this often involved the splitting up of families—hence the wailing.

As you can see, it truly was a compelling visit. Please join me in prayer for all souls who have been enslaved throughout the course of human history—and especially for the millions of Black people who endured slavery in the American South. Please also pray for the souls of the enslavers who chose to act in such cruel and inhuman ways. Then consider how you can support efforts to end different types of slavery around the world today—because it’s still happening in too many places and modes.