Whipping Pole

This is the plantation the way history likes to frame it — wide, quiet, and beautiful. But look behind the Big House and the truth shows itself: slave cabins lined up like dog kennels, a bell tower used to control every hour of their lives, and a man chained to a whipping pole so small you almost miss him. That’s not an accident. On many plantations, that bell was the first sound enslaved people heard in the morning and the last thing they were allowed to respond to at night. Their entire day was run like livestock. This piece isn’t about the landscape — it’s about how easy it still is to admire the scenery and overlook the system of punishment, control, and humiliation that built it.