Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

May 26, 2008 Monday

Late Edition - Final

Despite Much Adversity, Keeping the Music Alive
BYLINE: By STEVE SMITH
SECTION: Section E; Column 0; The Arts/Cultural Desk; MUSIC REVIEW BACHIANA CHAMBER ORCHESTRA; Pg. 6
LENGTH: 423 words
The Brazilian pianist and conductor Joao Carlos Martins has lived a life of renown, challenge, tenacity and triumph sufficient to fill a lively memoir. An acclaimed recitalist in the 1960s, he specialized in playing Bach with a Romantic subjectivity and intensity. When his concert career was derailed by injuries in the 1970s, Mr. Martins retreated to the studio for an extensive series of Bach recordings while reinventing himself as a successful entrepreneur and, briefly, a politician. A brutal 1995 mugging robbed him of his ability to play professionally.

The latest chapter of Mr. Martins's saga has involved the Bachiana Chamber Orchestra, an ensemble he founded in 2004. Mr. Martins has used the group to promote awareness of charitable causes and to bring music to underprivileged youth in Sao Paulo. Its chief function, though, is to provide an outlet for his undiminished musical drive. When he brought the ensemble to Carnegie Hall on Friday night, Brazilian pride and $2 tickets packed the house.

Mr. Martins maintains an allegiance to Bach, whose Orchestral Suite No. 3 opened the concert. The playing was proficient and spirited if frequently rough around the edges. The intimate murmur Mr. Martins drew from his musicians in the Air might have satisfied period-instrument puritans, but he molded lines and shaded dynamics with Romantic flair.

Newly composed for the occasion was Mateus Araujo's ''Suite Brasileira,'' a vibrantly scored mix of buoyant folk melodies and swirling dance rhythms. Strong contributions from the principal winds and trumpet stood out in an untidy but enthusiastic performance of this eager, appealing populist work.

Mr. Martins took to the piano for movements from two Mozart concertos, the Larghetto from No. 27 (K. 495) and the Andante from No. 23 (K. 488). Using one finger on his right hand and two on his left, he worked his way through the movements with considerable effort and ingenuity. The artistry of Mr. Martins's conception was clear in his phrasing and pedaling, and his musicians, conducted by the concertmaster Laercio Diniz, were at their best here.

The concert ended with Mr. Araujo's striking orchestrations of ''Luiza,'' a luminous ballad by the Brazilian singer-songwriter Antonio Carlos Jobim, and ''Adios Nonino,'' by the Argentine tango maverick Astor Piazzolla. There were three encores: a version of Bach's ''Air on the G String'' with Mr. Martins at the piano, both preceded and followed by a surprisingly saucy arrangement of the Brazilian national anthem.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: MUSIC (90%); KEYBOARD INSTRUMENTS (90%); PROFILES & BIOGRAPHIES (90%); MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS (89%); CLASSICAL MUSIC (89%); WIND INSTRUMENTS (77%); SONG WRITING (74%); ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (74%); CHARITIES (69%); SINGERS & MUSICIANS (90%)
COMPANY: CARNEGIE HALL CORP (58%)
GEOGRAPHIC: SAO PAULO, BRAZIL (58%) BRAZIL (91%)
LOAD-DATE: May 26, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Joao Carlos Martins at the piano, with Laercio Diniz conducting, during Friday's concert by the Bachiana Chamber Orchestra.(PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD TERMINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

731 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
May 25, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Balancing Art and Business
BYLINE: By BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO
SECTION: Section WE; Column 0; Westchester Weekly Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1917 words
PETER C. SUTTON looked a little weary as he presided over a senior staff meeting at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn. Dr. Sutton had just returned the night before from a business trip to Japan, where he had given a lecture on Vermeer and the Delft School, his specialty, and discussed loans of artworks for future shows at the Bruce. Now he was listening as Nancy Hall-Duncan, senior curator of art, reported on plans for a 2009 show devoted to the French Impressionist painter Alfred Sisley.

Ms. Hall-Duncan's summary, which included details of loan requests and a complementary costume exhibition, was as close as Mr. Sutton would get to working with art that day. Earlier that morning he had met with a board member, then attended a governance committee meeting. Immediately after the staff briefing came another meeting, one with visiting members of the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. By 6 p.m. he had left the museum, heading to what he called a ''donor cultivation event'' at the home of a local collector.

''I am lucky if I get an hour a day dealing with art,'' Dr. Sutton said, after a quick break between meetings to countersign a batch of checks, return phone calls and answer e-mail messages. ''It sounds glamorous, but running a museum is a whole lot of administration and organization. I sit on 12 different committees, and when I am not sitting in meetings, here I am raising money from patrons and donors.''

With an annual operating budget of $4.9 million and 40 employees, the Bruce does 14 shows a year, attracting about 100,000 visitors, including 12,000 schoolchildren.

''Directors are responsible not only for overall administration,'' Dr. Sutton said, ''but also the financial stability of the institution, which means both the expenditure and revenue.''

Dr. Sutton, who was director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford before coming to the Bruce in August 2001, is not alone in devoting a great deal of his time to administrative matters. Take Michael Botwinick, the director of the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, who spent a morning several weeks ago studying changes to the museum's insurance policies. ''It is pretty boring stuff, but incredibly important,'' he said. The same morning, Mary Sue Sweeney Price, director of the Newark Museum, had started her day attending a city-sponsored meeting on diversity in the workplace.

Mrs. Price, who has been the head of the museum for 15 years, is also a former president of the Association of Art Museum Directors.

''These days, to be a successful art museum director,'' she said, ''you have to get sustenance from knowing that you may not have the good fortune to be dealing with art and exhibitions all day, but that the broad range of responsibilities and duties which you are expected to perform make it possible for others on the staff to make it happen.''

As an older generation of museum directors begins to retire, there are an unprecedented number of vacancies in the field; in the last six months alone, there have been openings for directors at more than two dozen major American art museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Dia Art Foundation in Manhattan; the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; and the Phillips Collection in Washington.

Similarly, there are numerous current or imminent vacancies at museums outside of Manhattan. At the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz, Neil C. Trager is retiring next month after more than 26 years. At the Princeton University Art Museum, Susan Taylor, who has been on leave since mid-January, will officially depart at the end of June. There are also vacancies at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum on the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, N.J., where Greg Perry left on Dec. 31; and at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, which has had three directors in the last three years.

Vacancies were recently filled at two high-profile museums in the region. Terrie Sultan joined the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton on April 1, replacing Trudy C. Kramer, who had been director for 26 years. Susan Lubowsky Talbott is taking the top job this month at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, which had been vacant for more than a year.

Salaries paid to museum directors are ''disparate,'' Mrs. Price said, depending on the candidates' skills and ''where an institution is in its life cycle.''

Generally, however, ''in nonprofits there is still a huge difference in resources available in comparison to the corporate sector,'' she said.

The changing of the guard at museums often brings with it a renewed emphasis on financial stability, particularly at successful regional museums, which rarely have the large endowments bestowed on their urban counterparts.

''The director's job description has metamorphosed over the last decade as museums have grown in size and are increasingly expected to generate their own revenue,'' Mrs. Price said. ''Obviously, in addition to traditional attributes of connoisseurship and scholarship, candidates for director jobs these days also need to have skills in management, business and other areas like marketing, new technology and, of course, resource gathering, which is more popularly known as fund-raising. And I would probably put this last one top of the list.''

During Mrs. Price's 15-year tenure, the Newark Museum's operating budget has more than tripled, growing to $18 million from $5.6 million. When she joined the museum, 85 percent of the operating budget came from city and state funding, she said. These days it is closer to 60 percent, and Mrs. Price says she spends about 40 to 50 percent of her time working directly or indirectly on fund-raising activities.

Her experience is shared by directors of other museums in the New York region.

''One way or another it just eats into your day,'' said Erik H. Neil, director of the Heckscher Museum of Art on Long Island. Last month Dr. Neil completed a $1.5 million renovation of the museum's historic building with money raised from public and private sources. ''Even if you are not at an event or asking a patron for money to support a program, you are always on the lookout for new patrons and potential supporters.''

Fund-raising and the constant pressure to get more people through the door -- audience numbers are an important measure of success, especially for government funding bodies -- are responsibilities that directors of regional museums have in common with their counterparts in major cities. But there are significant differences, clustering around issues of scale, staffing levels and community involvement.

In general, regional art museums tend to be small to medium in size, with operating budgets of $1 million to $10 million. (As a point of comparison, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has an annual operating budget of $200 million.) They survive from one year to the next on very tight margins, raising money to put on shows with little endowment to fall back on in hard times. They also tend to give priority to programming rather than people, so they are frequently understaffed. Multitasking is common, even among directors. Dr. Neil said that at one recent fund-raiser he did everything from setting up tables to giving the welcoming speech.

But the most striking difference between metropolitan and regional art museums is their relationship to their community. ''It tends to be much more organic'' in the suburban museums, Mr. Botwinick said, referring to their focus on local audience andoutreach.

By contrast, tourists and casual visitors tend to form the core metropolitan museum audience.

''The people who come to a regional museum are usually from the local area and use it genuinely by choice,'' Mr. Botwinick said. ''They see it as part of the fabric of the community and often have a sense of ownership over it and certain expectations about what it provides.''

Mr. Botwinick believes this kind of relationship to a local community is the best -- and the most challenging -- aspect of running a regional art museum.

''It is about understanding what your place is, what your mission is, and being comfortable with that,'' he said. ''But it is also about understanding that this goal doesn't let you off the hook on the highest standards and scholarship. This is not some alternative, dumbed-down version of the real thing. You are part of a national conversation on matters of art and culture, and informed visitors expect the very highest standards.''

Ms. Sultan, 55, the new director of the Parrish Museum, who came from the Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, said she wants the Parrish ''to be known for strong local ties but also to have a more global outlook.''

''I want to be part of a national and global museum network,'' she said.

However, she said: ''To be successful the Parrish has to be a center for community engagement. What matters is how you define community. I'd also like to see us take a leadership role among Long Island museums.''

At the Bruce Museum, where the vast majority of visitors are from a 30-mile radius, ''we cater very much to the local community and do tailor our offerings,'' Dr. Sutton said.

''At the same time, we also try to mix things up, with shows ranging from old masters to contemporary art, with research catalogs and loans from collectors and museums,'' he said. ''It is all about striking the right balance between responsibilities to the community and maintaining a commitment to professional, quality programming.''

To meet those standards, many regional art museums have had to be entrepreneurial, partnering with other institutions to make shows happen or drawing on all the talents and connections of the staff and board. Some regional museum directors continue to curate shows, like Harry Philbrick, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn., who spent a recent day trying to organize the manufacture of 50,000 camouflage-colored tennis balls in China for an outdoor installation by Serge Spitzer. He eventually found a factory in Shanghai that could do it for him.

''As a noncollecting museum, the Aldrich is focused on exhibitions, so I probably have a bit more contact with art and artists than directors at other museums,'' Mr. Philbrick said. ''But it is true that a lot of your time is spent doing things that don't seem to have a lot to do with art.''

Despite his busy schedule, Dr. Sutton recently found the time to curate an exhibition at the Bruce devoted to old master works from the collection of Jacques Goudstikker, a Dutch-Jewish art dealer whose gallery was plundered by the Nazis. Given his expertise in Dutch and Baroque art, the show, which opened this month, was a natural fit for Dr. Sutton, who started as a curator of European art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But even for a show like the Goudstikker, which received $40,000 in a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, he said he spent more time fund-raising than anything else.

Ms. Sultan at the Parrish is determined to try to balance her business and art interests. ''I have a lot of energy and care very deeply about museum management,'' she said. ''But I am in this business because I love art, so I try to make sure that one part of every day at work has something to do with art. I am very directed about that.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: MUSEUMS & GALLERIES (90%); TALKS & MEETINGS (90%); ART & ARTISTS (89%); CULTURE DEPARTMENTS (78%); FUNDRAISING (78%); EXHIBITIONS (78%); PAINTING (78%); DESTINATIONS & ATTRACTIONS (78%); WORKPLACE DIVERSITY (77%); CHILDREN (77%); BUDGET (72%)
GEOGRAPHIC: HARTFORD, CT, USA (79%) CONNECTICUT, USA (90%) UNITED STATES (90%)
LOAD-DATE: May 25, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: IN CHARGE: Peter C. Sutton, above, director of the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., in his office, preparing for a meeting. Right, top: Mary Sue Sweeney Price, right, director of the Newark Museum, discussing preparations for an exhibition with Christa Clarke, a curator. Middle: Terrie Sultan, right, director of the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, with her assistant, Carol Powel Smith. Bottom: Michael Botwinick, the director of the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, called some of the job's business responsibilities ''pretty boring stuff, but incredibly important.'' (PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALEX DI SUVERO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

ROB BENNETT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

MAXINE HICKS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

SUSAN FARLEY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

(pg. WE10)

BUSY: Michael Botwinick, above left, director of the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, and Richard Halevy, its director of community development, after a City Hall meeting on a proposed expansion of the museum. Below: Peter C. Sutton of the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROB BENNETT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

SUSAN FARLEY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg. WE1)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

732 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
May 25, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Driving Back Into History
BYLINE: By RON STODGHILL.

RON STODGHILL, a former staff writer for The Times, wrote ''Redbone: Money, Malice and Murder in Atlanta.''

SECTION: Section TR; Column 0; Travel Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 2335 words
STRIDING across the rain-soaked field of an abandoned Louisiana plantation, Mitch Landrieu, the state's lieutenant governor, waved his hands impatiently. ''C'mon, you've got to see this,'' he called out, sounding more P. T. Barnum than politician. Marching beside him was the Whitney Plantation's owner, John Cummings, a wealthy Louisiana lawyer turned preservationist who, with Mr. Landrieu's help, hopes to prove that the old Southern plantation, or at least this one, is still very much in business.

Centuries past its prime, the Whitney Plantation sits grandly beneath a canopy of oak trees along a dusty road in St. John the Baptist Parish, a sleepy river community 35 miles northwest of New Orleans. The estate, promoted as the most complete plantation in the South, is an antebellum gem. It includes, among other things, a Creole and Greek Revival-style mansion, an overseer's house, a blacksmith shop and the oldest kitchen in Louisiana. Built in the late 1700s by Jean Jacques Haydel Jr., the grandson of a German immigrant with a penchant for fine art, the house walls are adorned with murals said to be painted by the Italian artist Domenico Canova, a relation of the neo-Classical sculptor Antonio Canova.

Yet Mr. Landrieu is far less interested in the Haydels than the legacy of the 254 slaves who once inhabited the nearly dozen shacks behind the big house during Whitney's reign among the largest sugar farms in Louisiana. His muddy shoes planted in front of a row of neatly situated sun-bleached shacks during a recent visit, Mr. Landrieu nudged a reporter toward what he likes to call a living museum:

''Go on in. You have to go inside. When you walk in that space, you can't deny what happened to these people. You can feel it, touch it, smell it.''

He compared the experience to visiting the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.

Personal politics aside, in an era of proliferating theme parks and ''Girls Gone Wild'' spring breaks, it is entirely possible that hanging out in former slave quarters -- or, for that matter, the adjacent so-called ''nigger pen'' lockup -- runs counter to most Americans' idea of a vacation. But in post-Katrina Louisiana, where an antidote to recent images of black disillusionment, despair and displacement has so far proven elusive, the recently started African-American Heritage Trail offers a disarmingly triumphant immersion into Louisiana's rich black history and culture through such powerful juxtapositions of freedom and bondage and the creativity that sprung out of both conditions.

Served up in heaping gumbo-style portions, the African-American Heritage Trail is not always easy to digest: it spans 26 sites, wending its way through museums, marketplaces and cemeteries from New Orleans to Shreveport.

To be sure, this is one wandering, race-obsessed road trip: not even those tasty Cracklin or Boudin balls at Highway 190 truck stops, or the reassuring baritone of the actor Louis Gossett Jr., who narrates a fact-filled audiotape of people and places, can always cut the lull of hundreds of miles of often barren, rural highway. And if you're toting kids as this trailee was, you might feel at points as if you're driving the African-American Headache Trail.

But if you can hang in, there's a realism to this traveling history lesson, with a richly tactile and authentic quality. You'll find it as you stand in front of the childhood home of Homer Plessy, whose refusal to move from the ''whites only'' section of a rail car would lead to the landmark Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson; as you take in the story of Madame C. J. Walker, the hair-care entrepreneur who bootstrapped her way out of poverty to become the nation's first black female millionaire; as you stroll through Armstrong Park in New Orleans, named to honor the jazz pioneering work of Louis Armstrong. And of course it's there in the Cajun and Creole cooking that puts an exclamation mark behind each stop.

In a state that relishes its contradictions, Louisiana's African-American trail is actually the brainchild of Mr. Landrieu, the white liberal scion of a famous Louisiana political family. In the 1970s, his father, Maurice Edwin Landrieu, known as Moon, made history, and his share of enemies, when as New Orleans mayor, he hired the first blacks into his administration. Mitch, a self-proclaimed champion of social justice, said he conceived the trail as a way of brokering dialogue between the races at a time when the nation sorely needed it, an idea that gained urgency in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

''We want to transform the discussion about race and poverty in America,'' said the 47-year-old Mr. Landrieu, who served 16 years in the State House of Representatives (his father and sister, Mary Landrieu, also a Democrat and currently a United States Senator, held the same seat). ''Many, many white people and black people of good will have been separated by ideological fights that have been powerful. But you can't transform the discussion if you can't remember what happened.''

Mr. Cummings puts it another way: ''Is black men not caring for their children today in any way connected to slavery? These are the kinds of questions we should be asking. I want to get beyond the moonlight and magnolia myths of the plantation.''

There is a more practical basis for the trail also. ''There's not enough money to build a museum in every parish in Louisiana,'' Mr. Landrieu said. So, over the past couple of years, he has spearheaded an effort to link private-sector cultural attractions into a network of state-sponsored tourism programs, from bird-watching to golf tours. The African-American Heritage Trail is but the latest example of fiscal creativity with Louisiana's tourism program.

''The whole state of Louisiana really is a museum,'' he said.

At the turn of the 19th century, Louisiana was a major player in the Deep South in international slave trade, thanks to its location on the Mississippi River and its rise as a sugar capital. Far more compelling than its robust slave population, though, was the culture that developed around it, as a blend of French governance, liberal manumission laws and tradition of racial mixing created an especially unique twist to an already peculiar institution.

A trail weighted with such historical crosscurrents could easily turn into a kind of four-wheel Rubik's Cube in the wrong guide's hands. That is why what appears at first blush a freewheeling journey that can begin and end virtually anywhere in Louisiana is best approached with a degree of conformity.

There are some obvious reasons to start the trail in New Orleans, including the fact that airfares to there will most likely be cheapest. But perhaps the most compelling reason to begin in New Orleans is that one of the oldest, richest strains of African-American culture flows directly from there, or more specifically, from Treme, which according to historians, is the nation's oldest surviving black community. On the northern fringe of the French Quarter, Treme, also known as Faubourg Treme, bears resemblance to a well-to-do Caribbean community, with pastel-colored Creole and shotgun-style cottages and Greek Revival-style homes lining narrow shaded streets.

Throughout the 19th century, Treme (named after Claude Treme, a Frenchman who split up the lots and sold them off) was populated by free people of color -- many of them fair-skinned French-speaking Creoles -- who identified more with their European than African ancestry as they dominated the trades as merchants, businessmen and real estate speculators.

In many cases, their ascension up the social ladder was orchestrated through Cordon Bleu or quadroon balls, private soirees in which wealthy Creole families presented their daughters to white suitors for long-term relationships.

So fascinating are the quadroon balls that you'll want to visit the African-American Museum, located in the heart of Treme, for more nitty gritty on these affairs, as well as the lowdown on Treme's most infamous Creole woman, Marie Laveau, known as the voodoo queen, who is believed to have resided, at one point, in the Passebon Cottage on the museum's property.

The centerpiece of Treme, though, is St. Augustine Catholic Church, which embodies much of the community's complex cultural narrative. Built in the mid 1800s at the request of people of color, St. Augustine remains the spiritual nerve center of the New Orleans black community.

The church also has the distinction of being one of the nation's first integrated churches thanks to a legendary ''War of the Pews'' in which free people of color and whites one-upped one another in purchasing family pews for Sunday Mass. Free blacks not only nabbed two pews for every white family pew, but also gave them as gifts to their enslaved black brethren. After church, and filled with the spirit, colored congregants would migrate to Congo Square (today within Louis Armstrong Park) where they would sing, dance and play music in their native African traditions.

With the French Quarter so nearby, dinner at the Praline Connection, a black-owned, child-friendly Creole soul food joint in neighboring Faubourg Marigny, is a good way to cap the evening -- and the New Orleans portion of the trail. While this unpretentious, affordable place, isn't exactly historic -- it was founded in 1990 -- its gumbo has earned praise from locals, as have the smothered pork chops and other specialties. And kids, exhausted by now, will squeal as straight-faced waiters serve up fried alligator as nonchalantly as a bowl of Cap'n Crunch.

A few sites on the heritage trail veer from Mr. Landrieu's ''living museum'' construct, though they are not necessarily any less satisfying. Among them is the River Road African-American Museum, in the town of Donaldsonville, about 65 miles north of New Orleans. The River Road area is brimming with historical significance: Donaldsonville elected the nation's first African-American mayor, Pierre Caliste Landry, in 1868, Others who hail from the area include King Oliver, Louis Armstrong's musical mentor, and a corps of enslaved African-American soldiers who fought with the Union at nearby Fort Butler.

The museum's founder, Kathe Hambrick, a native of Donaldsonville, enthuses over their tales to audiences as though reminiscing over her own family scrapbook. Ms. Hambrick started the museum in 1994 after living for several years in California.

''Everywhere I turned, there was this word 'plantation,' '' Ms. Hambrick said. ''And every time I heard it, I would get this knot in my stomach. One day I decided to take one of these plantation tours. It was all about antiques, furniture, architecture and the wealthy lifestyle. But I wanted to know how many lives of my ancestors did it take to produce one cup of sugar.''

Since then, Ms. Hambrick has assembled a collection that combines everything from shackles and plantation tools with antebellum maps and deeds from slave auctions. The production is heavy stuff, and its details, while fascinating to adults, may be less so to small children yearning to return to the open air.

But a couple of hours north, the Louisiana landscape opens wide, and as you travel along Highway 1 toward the town of Natchitoches (pronounced NACK-ah-tish), home of the Cane River Creoles, the hard stories in Donaldsonville fade under the great magnolias that shade the entrance of Melrose Plantation. This is where the love story of Marie-Therese, known as Coincoin, the grand matriarch of Melrose, took place.

Raised as a slave in the household of a Louisiana military commander, Marie-Therese was later sold to Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer, a French merchant. The two fell in love and she eventually bore him 10 children. Marie-Therese and her children eventually gained their freedom and became wealthy landowners in their own right. As the story goes, Marie-Therese Metoyer owned slaves but also bought many slaves their freedom along the way.

One of her sons, Nicholas Augustin Metoyer, financed the first Catholic church in the United States built for people of color. St. Augustine Catholic Church was founded in 1803 and is located in Natchitoches.

The story of the Metoyers seems to illustrate Mr. Landrieu's belief that the trail ''is about so much more than civil rights -- it's about hope.'' He paused, and rephrased his thought for wider appeal. ''This trail is really about how hope hits the streets.''

IF YOU GO

The Web site for the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail, louisianatravel.com/explore/cultural--history/african--american--heritage--trail, offers maps and detailed information on the trail's sites. You can also call [phone].

WHERE TO EAT

The Praline Connection (542 Frenchman Street; 504-943-3934; www.pralineconnection.com) in the New Orleans neighborhood of Faubourg Marigny offers affordable local dishes like gumbo and smothered pork chops. Entrees $12.95 to $19.95.

In a restored Art Deco building in historic Donaldsonville, the Grapevine Cafe and Gallery (211 Railroad Avenue; 225-473-8463; www.grapevinecafeandgallery.com) offers arty atmosphere and lauded South Louisiana cuisine, like crawfish etouffee ($13.95) and seafood gumbo ($5.25).

WHERE TO STAY

The major hotel chains might offer convenience for families, but Louisiana boasts a wide array of B & B alternatives. In New Orleans, the Hubbard Mansion Bed and Breakfast (3535 St. Charles Avenue, 504-897-3535; www.hubbardmansion.com), set behind oaks along St. Charles Avenue, blends modern amenities with classic charm for about $160 a night.

Farther north, near Melrose Plantation along the Cane River in historical Natchitoches, there's the cozy Creole Rose Estates Bed and Breakfast (318-357-0384; www.creoleroseestates.com), a three-bedroom waterfront getaway with scrumptious Creole meals cooked by the host, Janet LaCour. Rates range from $145 for two people to $250 for six people a night.