The Felicianas, a rural stretch of Louisiana farmland, sit far from the centers of power that usually anchor United States histories.
In her new book Sweet Home Feliciana: Family, Slavery, and the Hauntings of History, University of Chicago Assoc. Prof. Rashauna Johnson argues that's exactly why the region matters.
“A close look at the Felicianas shows that experiences of time and space are not universal or objective—they are dynamic sites over which a global assemblage contested the meanings of family, race, colonialism, slavery and freedom,” wrote Johnson, a U.S. historian.
This region of the south, Johnson argues, offers a microcosm of social tensions that have persisted from the colonial era to today. The parishes of East and West Feliciana border the eastern banks of the Mississippi River north of Baton Rouge and south of Natchez, Mississippi. This seemingly quiet area historically played an outsized role in the global economy through its intensive cotton industry.
Sweet Home Feliciana tells three stories—of family, region and the world—that highlight histories of contested placemaking. It follows the region’s transitions over time, while also questioning how we define these shifts.
To construct the history, Johnson drew from a range of sources and interpretive techniques. These include official records, personal correspondence and cemeteries as well as oral histories and popular culture references.
Some of these oral histories are from Johnson’s own family. The book presents this compiled narrative in a way that plays with time, allowing for the reader to consider how high-level events and personal stories intermingle.
Sweet Home’s preface is set during Mardi Gras 2016 as a point of entry into thinking about history and family, then moves into the 2020s to explore the current landscape in the region. From there, Johnson’s book shifts to the more distant past—the Seven Years’ War—and continues in a more chronological fashion to about 1900.
“Within each chapter, I'm trying to play with the tensions over whether or not this is a story about progress or development, or a rejection of progress and development as defined by those in power,” she said, explaining that she tries to explore and present each time period “on its own terms.”
“I want to show that doing that still means that we're going to come away with an understanding that each person living in those times had a different experience or relationship to those specific times.”
About 15 years ago, she said, historians of capitalism honed in on the region explored in her book—and others like it—because of its role in the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of capitalism, through its cotton production. Within this framework, Johnson focuses on the actual people whose lands were dispossessed and whose labor fueled this kind of development.
“For them, I don't know that they would use a term like development to explain the emergence of cotton that was going all around them,” Johnson said. “For them, this had to have felt like something very different—perhaps we could use a term like regression.”
In her writing, Johnson uses the perspectives of different actors to consider each period through its own lens, rather than take a presentist view. She points to her ancestor Virgil Harrell, whose history Johnson traced with uncovered documents. This paper trail follows his life of being born into slavery in the high antebellum period and witnessing the Civil War as a young man—living near the Battle of Port Hudson—before getting married.
“Focusing on a person's life in that specific way allows us to think about the ways individuals experienced these massive and world-changing events that are now the key points on a U.S. history timeline in the 19th century,” she said. “But for them, they were real experiences that they had to make sense of and figure out how to move through as real people.”
Sweet Home’s epilogue, Johnson said, returns readers to the present, reflecting on the current stakes of historical work. In some ways, she said, the book closes by meditating on what it means to think about Black history and the history of slavery and emancipation in the present.
“The ability to zoom from the individual level to the more abstracted level is so interesting and so powerful,” Johnson said.
—This article was originally published on the Social Sciences Division website.
