The World From Below

Place

United States · Louisiana (Kilpatrick place) / later Texas

Black River

A Louisiana plantation landscape on the Black River where WPA interviewee Mary Reynolds located her childhood enslavement before wartime upheaval and later years in Texas.

Illustrative photograph of a cotton field (Pexels). Editorial place card for Black River / Louisiana — not Mary Reynolds.

Illustrative — cotton field (Pexels). Used to identify the Louisiana place of WPA testimony, not a subject’s plantation. · Credit: Pexels · Source: Pexels

Related forces

Bondage & Memory

Stories

What Freedom Looked Like After Louisiana

In a 1937 WPA interview in Dallas, Mary Reynolds — once enslaved on a Louisiana plantation — told in her own words the field labor, the scars, the Yankee boat, and what she believed about slavery ending.