DERRY, La. — Rolanda Teal strode onto the old plantation at Cane River Creole National Historical Park, blowing past a map. The anthropology professor knows this park and its stories. As a student, she helped tell them.

Teal once sifted through dirt beside the Magnolia Plantation's slave quarters to find dice and coins. She interviewed former tenant farmers to trace the outlines of a typical day. She gave tours, once to a man who had lived there.

Over the years, the oral histories she collected made their way into archives and onto the dozens of historic signs and markers arranged across the national park's two sister plantations, set a few miles apart along the winding Cane River in Natchitoches Parish.

One sign near the entrance of Magnolia describes the scale of the plantation at its

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