Over the Mississippi River

It was great to see the Mississippi again!  Last time was in Minnesota in 2012 and previously in 2006 we had driven down the river in Wisconsin.  It had been surprised how industrialised it was along the river up-country, but down this end, it is even worse of course.

  The water itself is quite muddy.  I spoke to a man fishing on the side at this point and he showed me a silver fish in his chillybin.  He said he was fishing for catfish and said he caught quite big ones at that spot.  I was surprised and don't know that I would enjoy eating fish out of this river.

Further down the river, we drove over the levee and through a quarry trail doing a bit of nature watching as we went.  We came across some stilts, and a blue heron. and egrets.  These are the stilts.

We headed to the LSU Rural Life Museum and experienced some very sobering thoughts about the slaves as we looked through the plantation huts and terrible accounts of slavery including one poster with a whole lot of information about slaves for sale - children of 7 and 13 "able to be separated from their mother if it suits the prospective buyer", as well as one "yellow slave good at housekeeping and some mulatto wenches" etc etc. Certainly an awesome place to visit, but although some of their signage was not good, it is hard to complain about anything of life in general after the reflections of those times.  

Here is the slave jail for any that played up, plus the slave collar with bells if they tried to escape.

These are the slaves quarters (miserable).

And here is the politically incorrect statue of Uncle Jack one of the "good darkies".  Ughh!

I only hope that no-one looks back at any aspect of our lifestyle with the same disgust that I had about the way people were brought and sold, how the rich could do anything that they wanted and looked upon themselves as superior in every way.