During a recent trip to New Orleans, I was taken aback by the near absence of any meaningful marker that this city known for its festivals, food, and fun was once the home of the largest market of enslaved Africans. When the transatlantic slave trade was officially ended by the United States government in 1808, sales of the enslaved within the internal United States created a robust market based in New Orleans. According to historian Walter Johnson, for its duration, upwards of one hundred thousand men, women, and children were sold in the streets of New Orleans.

Though you would never know it today, the streets of the French Quarter and just beyond were lined with “slave pens” holding men, women, and children awaiting their eventual sale. These were not quiet events — these were bustling scenes charged with the anticipation of bidding and profit. The pens were filled with shouts and screams as the improvised relationships forged in the slave coffles that moved enslaved people from the mid-Atlantic to Louisiana and Mississippi were sundered. One-third of the human merchandise haggled over were children under the age of thirteen.

Today, at nearby Jackson Square in the French Quarter, you can enjoy hot yoga, a talkative Houdini artist who counsels how art can be the medium by which conservatives and liberals can reach other, or you can just buy arts and crafts. And when the weather begins to turn towards the swampy heat of the Louisiana summer, you can buy an ice-cold SpongeBob SquarePants popsicle to cool off. But what you won’t find is any mention that in the aftermath of a slave rebellion in 1811, the heads of three enslaved people were plunged upon the spikes of the gates of Jackson Park.