You can feel it under the shadows of Windsor Ruins. Right here, between the crumbling, charred relics of Mississippi’s most grand plantation home, the legacy of the Old South comes together.

The Old South was grand. The Old South was flawed. The Old South crumbled.

The Old South was many things, but does anybody know what it is?

A new generation of Americans will soon take the reigns of the Old South’s legacy. What they will do with it is unknown.

For the past week, I’ve taken a journey as a 26 year old millennial, tracing a line from the pirate bayous below New Orleans up through the sugarcane and cotton plantations of Louisiana and Mississippi. Accompanying me are a pair of baby-boomer parents, whose definition of the Old South is a stark contrast to mine.

Their generation has passed on the history of the plantations, the culture and the war stories; but it is now my generation which will decide how to define that history to the next. For people born in the South, even in 2014, the Old South is still a part of who we are.

But throughout this trip, one question has been biting at my brain—in today’s America, is there still room for the Old South?

Culture Shock

Even for someone raised in rural Tennessee, touring an antebellum plantation can be shocking. It is at once awe-inspiring and uncomfortable.

To my parents, theses places represent a world “Gone with the Wind”—place of “cavaliers and cotton fields.” A place of knights and maidens that has regrettably been lost to time. To me, the plantations represent a dichotomy—I don’t really know how to feel about them.

On one hand, the majesty of these prewar mansions is immense. The shear wealth and scale of their compounds can leave you dumb-struck: monolithic colonnades, canopied alleys of oak trees, pigeonnieres flanking formal gardens and acres upon acres of land.

America doesn’t have European castles, but the plantation homes of the Deep South may be their closest cousins.

These estates have created a cultural identity that lives on today. That identity is admirably old school. It’s gentleman-ship. It’s mint juleps and home-cooked meals. It’s taking your hat off at the dinner table and opening the door for a lady.

And those are good things.

On the other hand, it’s difficult to feel proud of any of those things when they are engulfed by the ever-present shadow of slavery.

And what a dark shadow that is.

Unlike baby-boomers, millennials didn’t grow up seeing the Old South romanticized in Hollywood by Clark Gable and John Wayne. We grew up with Django. There were no Confederate cavaliers in shining armor. The plantations stood as symbols for injustice and czar-like opulence in the face of suffering. To many, they are the ghosts of a lingering evil.

At the beginning of their lives, the plantations generated vast wealth for the Southern economy—enough wealth to raise an army. Enough wealth to make homes in tiny Natchez, Mississippi rival the finest halls of New York City.

But for most of the 20th century, the plantations have watched. They’ve laid silent as sentinels of a by-gone era. Their hey-day lasted roughly six decades from 1800-1861, when the American Civil War put a halt to the Southern economy.

Many of them were burned down during the war. Most of the survivors didn’t make it either: they were abandoned once operating or restoring them became too expensive.

Only a few dozen of their former thousands remain, but we can learn a lot from them.

The Shadow of the Past

Evergreen Plantation in Edgard, Louisiana still hosts 22 of its original slave cabins. The cedar-planked, single room duplexes are only a short walk from an incredibly beautiful mansion along the Mississippi River. The real ones look just as they do in the movies: small, cold, uncomfortable. “It’s hard to imagine that this was accepted as okay,” I commented as we passed by.

To a modern, middle-class white kid it’s incomprehensible that hundreds of people once lived here.

But live they did.

Standing among them, staring down long rows of these cabins in living color brings into focus the flip-side of the big houses’ grandeur—the immense human tole it took to support the plantations.

Seeing that price makes you very uncomfortable.

The grande history of the Old South will never escape that feeling. As romanticized as it was, nearly all of its grandeur—nearly all of its wealth—was built on slave labor.

The plantations were built by master craftsmen and fed by master cooks. They were slaves.

At Oak Alley, one of the most iconic survivors, a master botanist named Antoine created a new kind of pecan; it grew well in the Louisiana soil and you could crack it using only your hand. Antoine was a slave.

At Laura, a Creole sugar plantation only a few miles from Evergreen, memoirs of the owner recount the story of an old slave named Pa Phillipe. When the owner was a child, she asked Pa Phillipe why he had marks on his face. His response, “This is where they branded me when I tried to run away.”

Until fairly recently, plantation tours often overlooked slave cabins, which offer little real architectural value. But their historical value is immeasurable.

The shadows are the tales which make a journey back to the Old South hard to swallow now, and they weren’t always told.