The African American Experience in Louisiana

whatever the disposition of the slave owner toward his slaves, he depended upon them for his
financial gain and sickness was detrimental to production and profit. Some planters had the
interiors and exteriors of their quarters limewashed in efforts to improve hygiene. 49
By the end of the antebellum period, the form of dwelling that emerged as the most
common among slave quarters was the wood-frame, double, side-gable cottage with center
chimney. Most often in Louisiana, these cottages had a small, full-width front porch. Window
openings were typically void of glass and were covered only by a simple board and batten
shutter. The average size of the double houses was between twelve by twenty-four feet and
sixteen by thirty-two feet. Double cottages served two enslaved families, while single cottages
of similar construction served one family unit. Plantation records indicate that a typical family
unit included four to five people. While the two-room, side gable cottage was a prevailing
design, it was but one of a myriad of slave dwelling forms that could be found on Louisiana’s
plantations. At Woodland Plantation in Plaquemines Parish, slaves were housed in two-story
brick houses. Myrtle Grove in Plaquemines Parish had thirty-two foot square brick houses
divided into four rooms with a center chimney. 50 At Barbarra plantation in St. Charles Parish, a
Creole mode of building was apparent in the hip-roofed, four-room design and bousillage
construction of a slave quarter. 51
All of these designs were the choice of the planter. By the nineteenth century in
Louisiana, slaves did not design their own homes although those slaves with building skills were
often enlisted to erect the buildings or perform needed maintenance and may have had some
impact upon the final product via this work. Some scholars have contended that the slave quarter
cannot be considered a home, but rather a dormitory where exhausted laborers had just enough
time to rest between sundown and sunup, but others argue that enslaved people made the quarters
their own – a private space apart from the oversight of the planter. The latter find evidence in
slave testimonies and material culture remains that enslaved people asserted their own
prerogative over the domestic spaces assigned to them. In his study of Louisianan and Jamaican
sugar plantations, Roderick A. McDonald concluded that, “slaves assumed extensive command
over what happened in and to their houses. Despite amorphous questions concerning property
rights, for most practical purposes the slaves largely determined life and living patterns in the
quarters and behaved as property owners.” 52
Each individual slave cabin was simply one part of the whole which made up the quarters
and cannot be understood in isolation. Only the quarters of house servants stood relatively alone
within proximity to the big house, while the quarters of field hands were clustered together
nearer to the agricultural work of the plantation complex. On smaller farms there may have been
only a few slave cabins, but on larger plantations where the numbers of slaves exceeded 100
there were necessarily many slave cabins. Examples of the ratios of cabins to slaves in 1860 are
as follows: forty-two to 155 at Nottoway in Iberville Parish, thirty to 124 at St. Emma Plantation
in Ascension Parish, nineteen to ninety-five at Linwood in East Feliciana Parish, and thirty-five
of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University, 1993), 122-66.
49 Ibid., 669.
50 Poesch and Bacot, 131-132.
51 John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 162.
52 McDonald, in Vincent, 678.
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