Contact Admin. According to the inventory of the community of Jean Jacques Haydel Sr. This group of Africans was percent male and counted eleven individuals aged between twenty and thirty five 58 percent and eight others who were fifty up to sixty-six years old. Two individuals originated from the Caribbean Islands, precisely Jamaica and St.
Domingue Haiti , and three came from the East coast of the United States. The Mande people brought very deep influences to the culture of Louisiana including masking, which contributed to the resilient tradition of the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans.
The inventory also indicates that twenty-one enslaved women 34 percent and their nine Children lived on the Haydel plantation. Marguerite, a sixty-six year old Creole woman, was the oldest on the plantation. She was listed with her husband Sam, of the Soso Susu nation, sixty years old and blind. Isidore, a twenty-year-old man of the Congo nation was affected by teigne tinea, a fungal infection of the skin. One individual was affected with hernia, and another one had recovered from it.
This sickness related to hard work was quite frequent among the labor force of the area. There are no indications of death rates in slave inventories but further documentation shows earliness of motherhood among the enslaved women and high mortality among their children. Thirty-nine children died on this plantation from to , only six reaching the age of five.
The level of this death toll can be better understood when one thinks of a house where a child dies every year. Some of the children, either on this site or elsewhere, died in tragic circumstances such as drowning, epidemics, being burned or hit by lightning. Attentive scrutiny would allow the visitors to the Whitney plantation to identify these children among the 2, names displayed in the Field of Angels.
