Karen Galloway . . .

A while back I received a comment on a blog regarding Angeles Plantation from Karen Galloway.  I am paraphrasing but she said her family did business with J H Morrison which is my great great grandfather, Walter Christian Morrison's father.  She said she had never heard the names Brunswick or Angeles only names alike Morrison or Beaud.  She further said she had a sales receipt for or with JH Morrison.

I answered Karen and but got no reply.  I tried several times to trace her down.  I did eventually find a Karen Galloway but she had recently died.  So we missed each other.  Hopefully she is in heaven and now knows the whole story now.

I suspect Karen's family were slaves owned by J. H. Morrison before the Civil War.  That is a pity.  Many of the blacks on the plantations moved off  after the Civil War, who would blame them.  Some stayed on until the end of WW-II when virtually all of them moved off to towns like New Roads where some still reside today.  The plantation society died off for good reason, but I suspect the introduction of fuel powered machines greatly accelerated their departure.  Fewer workers were now needed on the farms with the mules and mule drivers being replaced by tractors.

There was nothing good about that plantation society except the land owners did indeed respect the blacks.  In many ways they were extended family.  They lived with us, they worked in the houses as well as out on the  land.  So they knew us as we knew them. Some of us grew up with them.

There are no family quarters for servants and employees any more.  The cabins were salvaged for the cypress wood.  They gradually disappeared and there is nothing left to remind us of the people or where they lived.  The old plantation commissary disappeared, as did the old mule lot went away.  Chicken coops are gone, hog lots are gone, no more milk cows either. Nothing left of that era at all, just the old Morrison family house and some modern day structures remain.

We do have one remnant, a black church on land given to them by the Morrison family years ago.  The church is still there.  I do not know if it is still active.  The last person I knew associated with the plantation and the church was Pete Carter.  Pete used to do yard work for my mother and at times asked and was given permission to use the yard equipment to clean up the church grounds.  Pete was an elderly man when I knew him.  I must have been ten or twelve years old when Pete came around to our house in New Roads on the banks of False River.

Pete was always a welcomed visitor.  Our cook and house cleaner was Ernestine Scott and she was born on Brunswick.  Ernestine worked for my mother until she died.  And truth be told my mother died not to many years after Ernestine.  Ernestine's nick name from Brunswick Plantation was Boll Weevil.  Never did we ever use that name as we all knew it was a sign of disrespect to her.  She may have been a servant but she was just as human as anyone else and deserved to be properly addressed.

So it remains to us to be a bastion of responsibility to those that were born or otherwise lived on the farms.  I fear that with passing time, relationships have disappeared.  A few selected ones may know or have been told their history but generally none of that is recorded.  So their family trees are clouded; they often refer to where they were born or grew up as their family history.   Some may have a vestige here or there and that perhaps is what Karen Galloway had.  Some regard those times as "Jin Crow" and want nothing to do with it.  I can not blame them.

Times are still hard on the blacks in New Roads.  Part is poor education, part is no jobs and part is crime.  It is a hard fight for them but some have risen to high stature in our society today.  General Honree, the hero of New Orleans after Katrina, is from our area. Pointe Coupe.  There are Catholic Bishops that are black and  are from our local black society.  We have seen other children become doctors and nurses, graduates of Louisiana State University and other prominent schools.  Yet extreme poverty continues and that brings with it distrust and civil unrest.   And it sows seeds of crime.

I wish I could say things are better now than in the old plantation society era but I am not so sure about that.