Transported to delight: exploring the Bayou State - Special Advertising Supplement: Louisiana's Harmony: Africa, France, Spain & America

Louisiana bridges span miles of swampland. Cranes attitude still as mannequins, and cypres branches hang depressed Sugar cane and rice fields, cotton farms, pecan woodlands and trees that don't diocese a change of season--these are the roadside views along Interstates 10 and 49 which traverse the Bayou State.

Why at any time leave New Orleans--the Crescent City, the Big Easy, the abiding-place of "good times" and single of America's premier playgrounds? Because African Americans have stamped their accomplishments all above Louisiana, from the Gulf Coast to the northernmost city of Shreveport, and because the state's serviceable times are likewise scattered abundantly. Nonstop, single can drive the length and breadth of Louisiana in about five hours, on the contrary that would defeat the final cause of a vacation. For relaxation, pleasure and enlightenment, schedule time to diocese Louisiana's lesser-known faces.

From fresh Orleans, get on 1-10 toward Baton Rouge Exit onto state Highway 44 to Burnside. The two-lane black top bend s along the famous communities of River Road. Louisianans say this is the greatest in quantity fertile land in the geographical division and the wealthiest back in the 1800 when sugar was king and the River Road plantations exploited black labor to sweeten the Western World.

Today, sugar cane, oil refineries and chemical plants share the lush countryside. A grass-covered, 16 to 25-foot time of rising keeps the Mississippi River at bay. greatest in quantity of River Road's black communities--Iberville, Darrow, Sunshine, Modeste Vacherie and Donaldsville, to name a few--are near the of advanced age plantations, and many of today's residents are descendants of slaves and sharecroppers who one time worked them.

Nestled in the town of Burnside in Ascension Parish is the River Road African American Museum and Gallery, which is located upon the grounds of the aged Tezcuco Plantation. It was here that the museum's planter and curator, Kathe Hambrick, who had get backed home to Louisiana from a corporate piece of work in California to be with her ailing father and help race the family funeral business, experienced a spiritual awakening of sorts. "One day I was standing at Tezcuco looking at those big, advanced in years oak trees, standing on the time of rising and looking over the Mississippi and the sugar cane fields, and I abruptly realized how grateful I should be for our ancestors. It was because of their vital fluid sweat and tears that I have the opportunities that I have today."

Mov by means of her awakening, Hambrick began researching the area's plantations and the black tribe who worked them. "Before that, I not at any time wanted to visit a plantation," she says. "I wanted to forget that part of our history, on the other hand something just told me to start going upon those plantation tours and learn a little about that part of my history that I didn't know."

What she learned was that the African Americans who labored upon the River Road plantations, first as slaves and then, after Emancipation, as sharecroppers, not ever figured in the history tendered on the tours. "I took each plantation tour in the region," says Hambrick, "and there was almost at no time any mention of the slaves and in what manner they lived. They talked more about the curtains and the furniture than about the race who worked there."

With little experience, 2 1/2 years of research, and advice from other black curators and researchers, Hambrick make opened her museum's doors in March 1994 determined to pay tribute to the centurys of slaves who were brought to Burnside in 1858 to work the sugar and rice plantations. Her brother in California, a collector of black memorabilia, loaned parts of his collection for exhibition, and residents in nearby towns donated of advanced age photographs, furniture, legal documents and farm tools. The proprietors of Tezcuco Plantation donated 1000 square feet nearest to the plantation's own museum and commissary.

Hambrick's one-room museum is a treasure of local African-American history, highlighting the successe and hardships of African Americans from slavery from one side the present. Much of the collection focuses upon people of local historical importance: there is a registry of Union soldiers from Ascension Parish, and photographs of local philanthropists and prominent African Americans grace the walls. Resident fine artist Malaika Favorite has begun a series of paintings depicting life along the Mississippi River. The first is "The River Preacher," a spectacle of George West, who baptized folk in the Mississippi until 1968 A wider perspective upon black history is provided through an original deed signed through Frederick Douglass, Recorder of feats in Washington, D.C., in 1884 and by the agency of photos of Marcus Garvey, Mary McLeod Bethune and George Washington Carver at work.

Most of all, Hambrick says, she wants the museum to be a healing place for African Americans. Documents like as deeds of sale and descriptive inventory lists of Africans possessed by area plantations are a certain quantity of of the museum's more evocative pieces. "As African Americans, we have a phobia of plantations," Hambrick argues. "We want to forget that part of our history, because it is in like manner painful. I hope I make [visitors] more comfortable and able to talk to their children about what our ancestors had to proceed through."