Laura Plantation: Louisiana's Créole Heritage Site

This guide to Laura Plantation near New Orleans opens with a count: nearly four hundred enslaved men, women and children passed through this raised Creole house between 1800 and 1862, while the white family's genealogy survives down to the exact birthdate. It follows Alcee Fortier, a young neighbor who began walking out to the cabins in the 1870s to record the stories enslaved workers told about a trickster rabbit named Compair Lapin, published in 1894 as Louisiana Folktales. You'll hear how those tales spread as far as Senegal, told almost word for word the same way decades later. The cabins where Fortier once listened still stand a few steps from the house.