Louisiana's Nottoway fire took us back to when Black Twitter was a time
Black folk had a big ol’ online party to celebrate the demise of the former sugar plantation where Americans were enslaved.
By Shalise Manza Young
In its heyday, before a certain South African immigrant bought it and destroyed everything that was good about it, Black Twitter was a time, hunny.
It was a community of strangers but also a community of family, a way for Black Americans to recognize that whether you grew up in the deep South or the Baltimore suburbs or Oakland, there was a commonality to how we were raised and things only we would understand.
To be sure, it was also a place where movements started and stories of police brutality spread quickly.
But the comedy—the comedy was often gold.
A recent fire at Nottoway Resort in Louisiana (in a town named White Castle, natch) offered a chance for that community to gather again on social media to celebrate its destruction, bringing us together in a way that hasn’t happened since the Alabama boat dock brawl of 2023.
It was Black joy and Black comedy, a needed release as we watched another fire, the second iteration of a Donald Trump presidency.
In the present day, Nottoway was used as a resort, offering lodging, hosting weddings, providing tours and boasting a restaurant, tennis courts, and gift shop.
But it used to be a slave plantation.
Imagine planning a wedding at Dachau. You would never, right? But that’s what was happening with regularity at Nottoway, a place where Black people endured unspeakable horrors, under constant threat of violence, to enrich a white man and the generations of his family that would follow. One travel site said visiting there was like “stepping into a fairytale.”
The massive main house, completed in 1859, was built by some of the dozens of humans John Randolph enslaved. Not satisfied with the money he made via his Mississippi cotton farmstead, Randolph moved his family to Louisiana to start a far more lucrative sugar plantation, among the most brutal crop to harvest.
A video that circulated on TikTok and Instagram after the fire showed a hoop skirt-wearing guide completely whitewashing the history of the home and grounds, explaining that Randolph treated the humans he enslaved “fairly well” because if a person he was purchasing had a family he’d buy the wife and children too and he built each family its own little shack so they didn’t have to be crowded in with other families and a doctor came weekly and even taught one of the enslaved women how to be a nurse! Yes, it is as insane as it reads.
So you’ll forgive Black folk for having a big ol’ online party to celebrate its demise. (No one was injured in the blaze.)
The memes, gifs, and videos were abundant. Texts were sent among friends, laughing emojis flying back and forth as friends scrolled timelines and found new ones to share.
One used the unofficial song of every Black cookout or family reunion—Frankie Beverly’s “Before I Let Go”—as the soundtrack to people filling plates with barbecued chicken and fixings with the fully engulfed house in the background. The same song was used in a different meme: two couples laughing as they played the card game spades, and, in a nod to the 2023 brawl, a friend standing nearby holding a folding chair over his head. A giant Juneteenth banner hangs over the group.
Another showed Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman with huge smiles in front of the fire, the classic “Disco Inferno” by The Trammps as the music.
Still another showed Serena Williams’ crip walk from Kendrick Lamar’s epic Super Bowl halftime show in front of Nottoway aflame.
A personal favorite is Angela Bassett as Bernie from “Waiting to Exhale” walking away from the burning mansion, cigarette in her right hand. The still comes from the scene in the movie when Bernie put her husband’s things in his luxury car and set it on fire after he announced he was leaving her.
But historian Mia Crawford-Johnson may have beaten them all. She and two others went to the Nottoway site and took a smiling ussie, fire trucks behind them still pouring water over the charred home, unapologetically happy to see another relic of American chattel slavery gone.
Black Twitter might not be what it once was, but for the Nottoway fire, we found ways to get together again. It was a time, hunny.
Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.
Well….one more visual blot in American history happily gone up in smoke.
Very surprising that the Apartheid Afrikaner is even letting black people still use XXXXXXXXXXX.