![]() ![]() ![]() In the book’s introduction, Kendi equates the project to “a Black choir singing the spiritual into the heavens of history.” It is at once a song and a continuation of a centuries-old tradition of oral histories, in the form of 80 essays and 10 poems, all commissioned to chronicle 400 years of Black life in America. This museum tour of Black stories was not only a coincidental appendix to that book, but also testament to how aural narratives, for their ability to unfurl in your mind while you are taking in the world around you, can be far more than background. I recognized these as the same echoes that had been with me the week prior, in the audiobook I had been listening to: FOUR HUNDRED SOULS: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 (Random House Audio, 14 hours, 2 minutes), edited by Ibram X. ![]() While walking its grounds I listened to an hourlong audio tour, which seemed to conjure ghosts and whispers. The Whitney Plantation, first opened to the public in 2014, is the only plantation museum in Louisiana exclusively focused on the history of enslaved people. On a recent sunny winter day, I drove 40 miles from New Orleans to a plantation on the southern banks of the Mississippi. ![]()
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