Enslaved Community at Shadows & Grand Cote
When the first European colonists arrived in the Teche region in the early 1700s, so too did enslaved women and men. Africans mainly from Senegambia, the Bight of Benin, West Central Africa, and the Bight of Biafra, were first brought to and enslaved in Louisiana in the 1710s. With the continued movement of French colonists into Native American territory on the Louisiana frontier, the institution of slavery and the slave trade expanded further into the American continent. That expansion continued and grew when the United States gained control of the region with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.
Bill of sale for Frank, an enslaved man sold to David Weeks. David Weeks and Family Papers, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La.
After the United States banned the importation of Africans in 1807, the Louisiana slave markets filled with thousands of people who had been born in the United States. Many of those individuals had been born and reared in the slave states of the upper South including Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and the District of Columbia. Torn away from their families, these individuals became entangled in the domestic slave trade—the brutal journey from the upper South to the deep South, also known as the Second Middle Passage.
Enslaved men, women, and children soon made up the vast majority of the population of Southern Louisiana. Their labor fueled the thriving sugar economy that built the region’s expansive wealth. In St. Mary Parish, enslaved individuals made up nearly 77% of the local population—making it the largest community in any Louisiana parish on the eve of the Civil War. More than 200 of those enslaved Africans and African Americans labored at the Weeks’ family home at the Shadows and at their Grand Côte sugar plantation throughout the Antebellum period. Even after Emancipation, many of those men and women remained to work on the plantations during Reconstruction.
In 1835, 24 enslaved individuals lived and labored at the Shadows while more than 160 resided at Grand Côte. Listed as “moveable property” in an inventory of David Weeks’ plantations, they were husbands and wives—like Amos and Patty or Isaac and Louisa—children and grandparents, neighbors and co-workers, all struggling, loving, fighting, dying, and surviving under the weight of a violent system that made them property specifically because of their race.
While the brutal labor of sugar production was concentrated on the isolated island of Grand Côte, known today as Weeks Island, the enduring labor at the Shadows included the planting and harvesting of foodstuff for the Weeks family and the enslaved population at both properties. Those who labored in the fields and gardens of the Shadows estate, and cared for the livestock, lived in one-room wooden dwellings that stood a few acres away from the main house. It was there that they cooked their meals, raised their children, and built community and kinship networks that helped some to resist the painful and harsh realities of enslavement.
Cabins located on the Weeks plantation at Grand Cote (present day Weeks Island).
Shadows-on-the-Teche Archive
Several individuals also worked in the Shadows home as cooks, servants, maids, and caregivers for the Weeks children. These men, women, and children likely either lived in the brick cabins that sat closest to the house or spent their nights sleeping on the floor of the kitchen, in hallways, or in the bedrooms of their owners. Living and sleeping so close to the Weeks family meant that they had very little autonomy or personal time, especially because the Weeks family found Grand Côte too remote and the climate too harsh to spend more than the harvest season on the Island. Nearly everything that Louisa, Sydney, Isaac, Charity, and other enslaved individuals did was under the surveillance of the Weeks family members who could legally treat them with kindness or sell them away from loved ones on a whim.
Most of what we know about the lives of the enslaved people at the Shadows and Grand Côte are gleaned from estate documents, such as the property “inventories” and letters. Those records, however, only offer the perspectives of the Weeks family. And yet, the voices of so many enslaved individuals can be heard in the spaces they lived and worked, the objects they left behind, and the clothes they wore. All this, along with the memories and stories of a descendant community in New Iberia, many of whom have great-great-grandparents or great aunts and uncles who passed on traditions, family ties, and legacies to future generations, help us to tell the stories of those who shaped this historic place.