Blues, Beignets and Bayous: A Southern Odyssey
By Vladimir Klimenko, Upper School history teacher
“Are you excited to be finally going on your Southern Odyssey trip?” The question from colleagues and students echoes repeatedly in the days leading up to spring break. I manage to rouse up a nominal “yes” without elaboration.
I save a more honest response for Wil Lobko, Allstrom Chair in Foreign Affairs and Director of Global Education. Hackley wizard of all things travel-related, Wil is my direct trip supervisor.
“To tell the truth, Wil, I never allow myself the luxury of feeling ‘excited’ about any trip until the plane actually lifts off. My mind is all about planning and ticking off checklists until the plane gets airborne. And even when I finally feel the landing gear lose contact with the tarmac, my initial response is not so much excitement as the simpler feeling of relief when I know that the trip has literally and metaphorically taken off.”
Of course, my excitement does kick in when my Visual Arts Department colleague Sarah Coble, six students, and I reach Louisiana and Mississippi during that first Sunday of spring break. But this feeling is less about my own response to a region I have visited multiple times than it is the thrill of witnessing a small coterie of teenagers see new places with fresh eyes. It is the vicarious enjoyment of watching students, some of whom have never traveled this far without parents, make new discoveries for themselves. It is the joy of sharing in the privilege of experiential travel education.
The excitement has a twofold dimension, for this trip has been long in coming. Originally conceived in the spring of 2020 as an integral part of the Southern Odyssey elective seminar, the course enjoyed enthusiastic support from the Hackley administration, which was eager to see us fulfill our three-year mission as a pilot Global Context course. Unfortunately, the larger global context—the worldwide COVID pandemic—scuttled travel plans during the first two years. Now, after much delay, we are using the last available year to finally bring to life the initial vision of supplementing our classroom investigation of the South with a weeklong travel-study experience in the region itself.
Michael Abbey ’23 is reflected against a marble plaque listing the roster of enslaved people of the Whitney Plantation and their origins. Photo by Vladimir Klimenko.
We start our first full day on the ground with a visit to the Whitney Plantation, some 45 miles upriver from New Orleans. In the antebellum years, this was one of several hundred sugar-growing plantations along the banks of the Mississippi. Today, Whitney is an outlier among Southern museum-plantations. Popular among tourists, the vast majority of these antebellum estates lavish attention on the quasi-aristocratic lifestyle of the owners: their luxurious parlor rooms, imported European pianos, exquisite flower gardens, and so on.
Whitney Plantation, by contrast, places its focus on the enslaved—the laborers whose toil enabled the planters’ opulence in the first place. Here, instead of hearing about upper-class soirees, debutantes, and Latin tutors, we learn the stories of the enslaved, who otherwise may have been forgotten.
The students take this in quietly in a manner appropriate to the site’s somber tenor, the beautiful sunny weather notwithstanding. Outside the main building, senior Michael Abbey pauses in front of an elongated gray wall. He studies a black marble plaque whose surface is inscribed with a roster of the enslaved. It lists first names only, along with their approximate year of birth, presumed country of origin, and ethnic ancestry in West Africa.
We walk along the edge of a field, past a smithery that forged enormous iron pots for stirring harvested sugar cane. We stop to peek our heads into a residential shack and a kitchen. On this gorgeous, sunny day with blossoms in bloom, we are surrounded by the ghosts of people who performed arduous tasks, endured brutal punishments, and, in many cases, met premature deaths.
I notice sophomore Arri Posey examining a circular bas-relief sculpture depicting the Middle Passage—the agonizing ordeal endured by the 12 million West Africans who were shipped in chains and unbearably tight quarters across the Atlantic. She gazes without commentary and then says, “I think I need some more time to absorb this.”
The group wraps up its visit at an indoor exhibit adjacent to the bookstore.
Arjan Sandhu, a senior enamored of geography, gravitates toward a wall map showing how all large Mississippi River plantations were laid out in long rectangular strips. Each property had a thin riverbank boundary that assured the planters access not only to nearby New Orleans, but also to distant markets, often in Europe.
Guided by relentless curiosity, junior Aiden Wasserman, pauses to study the contents of a large glass display featuring the wording of an 1825 state law. He is stunned to discover that pre-Civil War Louisiana forbade enslavers from emancipating any enslaved individuals until they had reached the age of 30.
“Touring the Whitney Plantation showed a new perspective of plantations that is not present anywhere else,” says senior Gabriella Parasnis. “It allows us to connect back to our conversations within Southern Odyssey and our other courses.”
We clamber aboard our Ford Transit rental van and head north to Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
At Bellue’s from left to right— Michael Abbey ’23, Arjan Sandhu ’23, Aiden Wasserman ’24, Walter Hoffman ’23, Vladimir Klimenko, Gabriella Parasnis ’23, and Arri Posey ’25. Photo by Sarah Coble.
Yelp has whetted our appetites with a promise of down-home Southern cooking. Google obligingly directs us to Bellue’s Fine Cajun Cuisine, which, when we see it, resembles a slightly oversized trailer. A roadside joint that appears barely three times the size of our van, Bellue’s looks so improbably small and manifests so suddenly that I overshoot it and have to make a U-turn to park in front of the unlikely structure. But then again, we are seeking out local flavor.
Piling out of our vehicle, we find ourselves inside of a small wood-paneled dive. The walls in the main room are festooned with wrought iron hand tools. Directly in front of us is a freezer stocked with local delicacies, including vacuum-packed rabbit.
We retreat to a back room where, under the gaze of a poster extolling law enforcement, we crowd around a table and run our menu options past senior Walter Hoffman. In addition to other vital trip functions like Google navigator and in-van DJ, Walter shines as our little group’s recognized gourmet. That, plus his legacy of bona fide Southern family credentials, impels us to defer to him on all cuisine-related matters, particularly if the dishes in question originate below the Mason-Dixon line.
Walter attempts to enlighten our motley crew about the distinctions between the menu’s Crawfish Etouffe (which comes with two side orders, and, for only one additional dollar, can be served with cornbread dressing) and the Crawfish Etouffe Supreme, which presumably comes loaded with an even heftier dose of cholesterol.
The owner, a middle-aged woman with a pronounced sing-song voice, walks over to answer questions. After taking our orders, she quickly returns and floods our table with a tidal wave of Southern hospitality in the form of appetizer samples.
Our group briefly ponders the exact nature and identity of the ingredients, which consist of small solid chunks suspended in sauces ranging from the gooey to the translucent. But any lingering doubts about the food in front of us are quickly subordinated to teenage hunger pangs. By the time the main dishes arrive a few minutes later, a lively discussion is underway regarding the difference between red beans and tasso versus white beans and tasso, or whether you can actually taste the venison in the deer and chicken sauce picante.
Walter utters the final verdict: “Bellue’s is an excellent restaurant with homey vibes and great Creole food.”
Two hours later, and dozens of miles across the state line, we make a spontaneous decision to walk off our lunch-induced stupor with an afternoon hike. At least one-third of the students doze off in the back seats. Rolling along the verdant, occasionally hilly terrain of backwoods Mississippi, we navigate our way toward the entrance to Homochitto National Forest. We hope to get there before the waning signal from Google Maps also decides to take a nap.
Homochitto offers everything that spring-starved New Yorkers might want: ample foliage adorning the oak and hickory, bird calls accompanying our walk along a ravine, a muddy streambed for the boys to get their sneakers wet. The footpath reaches an overlook above a waterfall, behind which lurks a shallow cave. Sarah Coble and the girls take some photos. The boys head straight down to the waterfall to test out the cave’s sheltering qualities. The girls mostly prefer to stay on the high ground. I give the lads a few minutes of Tom Sawyering before summoning them back. The lazy afternoon sun, after all, is preparing for bedtime.
Throughout our drive to Vicksburg, Mississippi, we see farms, small towns, and the white plumes from refineries, fertilizer plants, or chemical producers. The ubiquity of various forms of fuel and chemical processing derives from more than regional geography. It also reflects a low-regulation political culture conducive to industries whose environmental footprint might earn them greater scrutiny in the Northeast or Pacific Northwest.
As a New Yorker having a first encounter with the Deep South, Aiden initially feels perplexed by what he sees as a paradoxical juxtaposition of people in poor living conditions having conservative political preferences. At first glance, Aiden thinks that the rural South is extremely poor and extremely conservative. Yet more travel time gives rise to more reflection. Driving, biking, and walking past people’s homes, Aiden begins to notice additional details that temper his initial impressions. These, in turn, help him imagine why some people might oppose the kind of active government role that others might welcome. “I neglected the fact that Southerners are proud and seem happy in their situation. They have flower pots and signs of love visible all around their houses.”
As the sky turns to night, Walter shifts the playlist from Outlaw Country to Delta Blues. A voice from a back seat recalls Aiden’s presentation on Mississippi blues legend Robert Johnson. As the students snooze or retreat into their own thoughts, the haunting tunes from Walter’s phone remind us of stories, tall tales, nostalgia, and broken dreams traversing the nighttime space around us.
And I went to the crossroad, mama, I looked East and West
I went to the crossroad, baby, I looked East and West
Lord, I didn’t have no sweet woman, ooh well, babe,
In my distress.
In planning the trip, I operated according to several principles. One of these: teenagers need to stay active. Every day, we build in something: walks, bike rides, time on the water. The days and hours begin to fly.
We rent bikes and pedal uphill on a self-guided tour of the Vicksburg battlefield. In 1863, General Ulysses S. Grant’s strategy had been to seize the fortress overlooking the Mississippi in order to solidify the Union’s control over the continent’s most important river artery. We reach a high point on the ridge line and dismount. The blue and red markers that delineate each side’s positions converge at a perilously close distance.
Arjan decides to scout around on foot. He half-jogs his way up and down a short segment of hillside. He returns with more labored breath.
“Charging uphill must have been hard work,” he says. “Now imagine doing that in July,” I say, “while wearing a wool uniform and carrying a rucksack.”
We get back on the bikes and glide past dozens of statues and marble pedestals, many paid for by states, South and North, whose units had fought at Vicksburg. Other memorials, at times more imposing, were put up by the Daughters of the Confederacy, hagiographers of the so-called “Lost Cause.” This is a major Civil War battlefield park in Mississippi, yet I can’t help but notice the conspicuous absence of the Stars and Bars. I wonder when Confederate battle flags began to disappear from the park. What comes to mind is Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The battle over past memory comes vividly alive for us later that afternoon in Jackson as we visit the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Located in the heart of the city, the museum is jam-packed with displays, photographs, and mini-theaters screening mini-docs. We hear recorded train whistles and blues songs, watch clips of famous speeches and infamous police brutality, peer at an enormous panel of blown-up mugshots of arrested civil rights activists from the early sixties, a time when the civil rights struggle, much of it in Mississippi, topped the news cycle.
The living legacy of those issues becomes apparent after we return to our van. We take a spin around the neighborhood to glance at the state house. As we drive a few blocks further, we see another reality: one after another, every retail shop appears to be a local, more downscale version of the Dollar Store. It’s only 5:20 p.m. or so, but every shop appears to be closed.
Another day, another breakfast. By sheer luck, our New Orleans hotel happens to adjoin The Ruby Slipper, a delightfully decadent breakfast joint whose menu celebrates the idea that you can’t possibly overdo the amount of eggs, avocado, cream, chicken, bacon, or beignets at 7:30 a.m. when doors open. (In true New Orleans fashion, the same principle evidently holds true for morning spirits, which occupy the entire reverse side of the menu.)
“The restaurant employees treat us like guests in their home,” says Arjan, marveling at the service. He’s right, of course, and he is describing several eateries, not simply The Ruby Slipper. But here, in particular, there is scarcely a table hostess or waitress who doesn’t greet us with a warm smile and a disarming, “How ya doin’ today, baby?”
Walter and Aiden have publicly made a bet to see who can gain the most weight during this trip. Neither one is willing to forfeit. Aiden condenses his philosophy into fewer words than a haiku: “Vegetables are just wasted calories.”
At some point, Sarah Coble and I make an executive decision to take a short break from feasting. Things are escalating to a danger point; it’s only a matter of time before someone nods off and plants their face into a bowl of leftover cream and berries on the table. Besides, I don’t know if our travel insurance covers these types of contingencies.
A motorized swamp boat beckons us from the bayou country south of the city. Everyone faces forward as the vessel slowly grinds its way forward underneath a leafy canopy. The waterway looks unusually straight. Our skipper/tour guide, who has made it clear that he revels in cheesy humor, interrupts his own banter with a public service announcement of sorts by informing us that the channel is, in fact, artificial, having initially been dredged by oil and gas drillers. This, like most things pertaining to water safety and petrochemicals in Louisiana, is not a joke.
We observe long strands of Spanish moss, majestic cyprus trees, thick patches of swamp grass, and the occasional turtle or egret, but the star attraction is undeniably the alligator. Quite a few, in fact. Senior Gabriella Parasnis is particularly quick on the trigger with her camera. It is awe-inspiring to realize that there are bigger, wilder, and more dangerous things to see than some out-of-towner stumbling down Bourbon Street.
As for the city itself, we postpone any serious post-bayou exploration until nightfall. My reasoning is that it would be more culturally and environmentally appropriate to go on a “Ghosts, Voodoo, and Vampires” walking tour of the French Quarter after sunset. At the very least, we might get more of our money’s worth.
The tour turns out to be more factually grounded than supernatural, albeit in a grisly manner—the way history tends to spin when it wants to grab some headlines for itself.
This tour stokes Arri’s visual curiosity. Sure, she is fascinated by the eccentric and the gothic, but she is also struck by the more ordinary details of the city’s facades. “The history behind New Orleans architecture and some of the buildings themselves is fascinating,” she notes. “The differences between galleries and balconies, the ornate designs of each of those, as well as the beauty and intention behind each of the building design features is beautiful.”
Hackley bikers look down a street in the French Quarter. Photo by Sarah Coble.
We see more of this the next morning as we tour a wider swath of the city on bikes. Our guide, a feisty elderly lady who alternates between no-nonsense street safety instructions and fast-paced entertainment narration, leads us from the embankment through French Quarter street traffic, then up spacious, tree-lined Esplanade all the way to the city’s majestic central park.
Having seen more of the city, we regroup and head out into another section of the bayou for a late afternoon kayaking expedition. We get into our kayaks and follow our guide Smitty, a witty, knowledgeable local who grew up and lives in the swampland. Smitty is undeniably charming and, what’s better, is himself under the spell of his chosen subject, vocation, and environment: the southern Louisiana swamplands.
We climb into open-cockpit kayaks and follow Smitty into a space where primeval-looking trees draped in vines and moss make a home for eagles, owls, and many other creatures that lurk in the grass and shadows. The alligators, incidentally, understand their place in the food chain and therefore don’t bother lurking. They bask on rocks and tree trunks. So confident are they in their neighborhood supremacy that they don’t even bother to acknowledge our little human flotilla as it paddles past them.
A kayak rendezvous in the bayou. Photo by Sarah Coble.
Smitty has us pause by a bend in the river while he uses bird calls to usher an owl out of hiding. “I really shouldn’t be doing this because I’m probably disturbing its sleep,” he says, but his curiosity and desire to share his enthusiasm with his visitors gets the better of his ecological sensibilities.
The owl is indeed a sight to behold, but not as much as the bald eagle perched some 50 feet or more above the water. We sit silently in our boats, our eyes marveling at the signs of life in the stillness of early evening.
The following and final full day of our trip takes us to the World War II Museum. It’s a bit of a misnomer because the exhibits are almost exclusively focused on the U.S. role in that global conflict. That aside, the storytelling is accessible and the exhibits of planes, landing craft, communications gear, and other equipment highlight that rich history a bit more vividly in our imaginations.
Our imaginations and memories are saturated in less than a week of travel. In their variety and by virtue of their direct, immersive nature, the trip experiences leave powerful impressions. “I loved that we kept dipping in and out of the city of New Orleans, into the bayou, off to Mississippi, around the edges of the city on bikes,” says Sarah Coble.
Every student takes home something particular to their interest. For some it is the enduring memory of a joking camaraderie in the van or on a trail. For others it might be a particular sight or piece of history.
Michael felt moved by interpersonal connections. “We heard a lot of stories about people’s lives.” Some of these, he recognizes, might be exaggerations. “I’m not sure how much of it is fact, but it did help us learn about people.”
And in learning about other people, we also learn about ourselves. We realize what it is in the world that excites or repels us, what draws us in, what makes us feel inspired, confounded, comforted, or sad.
“Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased,” wrote John Steinbeck in Travels With Charley.
As long as that adage remains true for those of us who wander far from the Hilltop, then we have every reason to hope that, by extension, our own community, and the world at large, will be better places upon our return.
This story first appeared in the Hackley Review Summer 2023 edition. For more trip details and student reflections, and to see the accompanying photo spread, click here. For the full digital issue, click here.