A new book views rural Louisiana’s history on its own terms

Sweet Home Feliciana weaves individual, regional, and world stories to explore Black history and how it’s shaped.

Historian Rashauna Johnson, associate professor of U.S. History and the College, cycles through lenses, at times taking a broader view and otherwise zooming in to consider the period within its own terms. In her latest book, Sweet Home Feliciana: Family, Slavery, and the Hauntings of History, she uses this approach to examine the global transformation of a rural region in Louisiana, and what it tells us about power, roots, and what shapes our histories.

“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,” she writes in the introduction, adding that slavery and the eras that follow defy linear and progressive concepts of time. “ ‘The’ past and our relationship to it have never been singular,” she continues, “nor are those plural pasts behind us.”

This region of the south, Johnson argues, offers a microcosm of the competing temporalities that have given life to conflicts from the colonial era to the present. It borders the eastern banks of the Mississippi River north of Baton Rouge and south of Natchez, Mississippi, and its most famous town is St. Francisville, Louisiana. By focusing on a relatively small space over a relatively long time, Sweet Home Feliciana uses granular details to build an account of the making and unmaking of power and privilege over generations.

The book tells three stories — of family, region, and the world — that highlight histories of contested placemaking from the late eighteenth century to the earliest days of the twentieth. It blends scales of history that range from the personal to the regional, and from the regional to the global and back, creating a narrative that can speak to the interwoven threads of these histories. It follows the region’s transitions over time, while also questioning how we define the successiveness of those historical transitions.

The book itself, as Johnson references in the introduction, plays with time, allowing for the reader to consider how a greater, abstract history and granular, personal stories co-constitute one another, rather than play at distinct, unrelated levels. Johnson draws from a range of sources and interpretive techniques, including periodicals, police jury records, probate and marriage records, personal correspondence, family papers, and similar documents, as well as popular culture and performances, cemeteries, material culture, and oral histories.

Some of those oral histories include her own family’s. 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. She also includes conversations with her grandmother — who passed away 15 years ago — from a project she completed as a sophomore undergraduate student.

“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 says, 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 says, historians of capitalism gave great consideration to the region explored in her book — and others like it — because of its central role in the history of cotton production, the Industrial Revolution, and the emergence of capitalism. There are time-based arguments within words like industrialization and economic development, and it’s important to plot this region in the emergence of global capitalism; however, she argues that it's also important to think about 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 says. “For them, this had to have felt like something very different; perhaps we could use a term like regression, (something) that certainly wouldn't suggest things like civilization and modernization.”

Her goal throughout the chapters is to consider each period through its own lens, rather than take a presentist view: How can we use the perspectives of different actors (simultaneously) to find the contexts embedded in each stage in the progression of the region? For one example, she points to her ancestor Virgil Harrell. The documents she found suggest he was born into slavery in the high antebellum period, then witnessed the Civil War as a young man — living near the Battle of Port Hudson — and got married, per a marriage certificate Johnson located. She was able to track an individual’s continuity through major abstracted events like slavery to emancipation. 

“Zooming in 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 says. “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 says, returns readers to the present, reflecting on the current stakes of historical work. In some ways, she says, the book closes by meditating on what it means to think about Black history and the history of slavery and emancipation in our current moment, along with the tensions and political contests within the field of history and within our larger society. It also considers how Johnson, as a historian, approaches that conversation through her work.

Johnson’s approach allows for a reflection on power, specifically the ways actual people in certain places hoarded and bequeathed it over generations, and the ways the dispossessed lived, died, resisted, and refused. She explores regional “roots” at a time when nationalists, fascists, and others have adopted the word — along with similar words like “place” and “heritage” — to signal their distinctiveness from (and superiority to) others. The book also helps readers consider how people of African descent created places for themselves on lands where they were forced to settle, acknowledging the complex histories that have shaped individual histories.

“The ability to zoom from the individual level to the more abstracted level is so interesting and so powerful,” Johnson says. She suggests that this is a lesson we can take away today: We have the opportunity to create different presents — and therefore our own histories — that can be consistent with our own values and aspirations.