“At the time of our wedding, I didn’t realize that the Houmas House Plantation was previously one of the largest sugarcane plantations in the South and that hundreds of enslaved Black people built it and its grounds.”
That’s from an essay by Lauren Salles, who wanted to show Momentum’s readers how she came to have a big fancy plantation wedding and why now — years later — she regrets the choice of location. Plantations are big money nowadays. They remind some folks of a genteel, more civilized time when men wore suits and women wore dresses and everyone stayed in their place. The only problem is that plantation chic and those genteel memories have abusive and bloody histories. Salles dives into it in one of Momentum’s most-shared stories of the year.
