Anyone who thinks this discussion has been worrying should spend a few
days visiting Lower Mississippi Plantation Houses open to visitors but run
by private owners or foundations as my (historic house curator) wife did
just a few years ago.

The source of the estates' wealth and even the purpose of house slave
quarters were routinely ingnored and questions were either denied or at
least brushed off with at best a quarter-truth.

In perhaps a dozen visits we only once found a guide or costumed
interpreter who actually raised and presented the issue openly without
prompting.  Perhaps significantly(?) despite her (entirely natural)
upper class Louisiana speech she turned out to be British by birth,
(though brought up on New Orleans from childhood).

Perhaps also significant she had been born in the notorious 18th -
early 19th century Atlantic slave trade port of Bristol in the west of
England (where - incidentally - there is currently a campaign for the
removal of a 19th century public statue to one of the City's greatest
benefactors, Edward Colson (1636 - 1721) because of Colson's role in
setting up the London and Bristol slave trade).

Patrick Boylan