They finally passed the anti-lynching legislation. It took decades, but it's happened. I don't know if God's Long Bones will ever see the light of day and I had hoped it would help with this legislation.

A Seattle friend and neighbor was in the area visiting her sisters a couple of weeks ago and asked if I regretted the cancellation of the West Virginia University contract. I don't regret it but I do think that may have been my only chance.

Anywhooo, I finished the draft of Sisters of the Good Death yesterday and woke up remembering this safe place to put our writing. 

 

A writer, a man, said women writers don't write long sentences. That's always in the back of my mind when I write, so all really long sentences are intentional 😛

 

 

Do-Good, Louisiana

 

 

    I landed in Our City of Perpetual Disaster, inside this Garden District Creole townhouse, after escaping my former Pacific Northwest business partner’s shenanigans, during the do-gooder years after Katrina, but I was still an outsider in this seaport resting on both sides of the Mississippi, 107 miles from its mouth, this trade emporium for cotton, sugar, tobacco, wheat, and salt – all disastrous for Black folk – named after Orleans, a city on the Loire River in France, now a mixtape of cultures – African, French, Spanish, South American, Quechua and Caribbean Indian, the birthplace of jazz and marching to the cemetery ferrying your dead to the beat of a brass band.

    What a place to jump-start a life – this magnificent calamity of a city – crescent-shaped, beset with live oak and bayou, the high-stepping revelry of Vieux Carre, king cakes, beignets that leave traces of powdered sugar in your dreams, origin of poker, stomping ground for witchcraft and voodoo and towering ornate aboveground cemetery tombs, plus drive-through frozen daiquiris and bars open 24-hours, seven days a week.

    But the ultimate draw was the petrochemical industries peppering the Mississippi and the offshore rigs poisoning the Gulf of Mexico with Armageddon-like fire and marine-life exterminating oil slicks, leaving the taste of spoiled fish in our mouths.

 

 

     Cancer Alley snakes from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, rusty oil factory spouts belching even more catastrophe into the sultry air, dotting Highway-61 along the small, invisible-to-most, towns zoomed past with eyes cast anywhere but there.

    Peddler of petroleum aka crude aka black gold, like the enslaved; a fossil fuel fashioned from the remains of ancient marine organisms such as plants and bacteria, formed when dead organisms like zooplankton and algae are subjected to intense heat and pressure, like the enslaved; a complex mixture of substances like water, metals and salts; ranges in color from black to green-brown to colorless; can be liquid like water or thick like tar, and extracted from beneath the earth or the ocean floor; pumped from the ground and refined until drops of golden oil, shaped like teardrops, fall.

    Sometimes the city smells like heaven, but day-to-day the odor might be more like hell’s – horse shit, cigarettes, dead fish, vomit, fried chicken, Confederate jasmine, mown grass, diesel fumes.

    The poison enters our bodies, unseen, in the water, the ground, the moisture-filled air, a virus we gulp and huff like it’s life-giving, but deals death instead.

    I haven’t even trumpeted the body count. Those pesky erased dead. But that’s where the environmental law firm, Fair Fight, I created with Vincent Scott five years ago, comes in.

    “Welcome to the “new” New Orleans, Antoinette “Toi” Simmons.” I raised a glass, then moseyed into my home office. 

    A silver-framed photograph, positioned front and center inside the white built-in, glinted. Time began to stretch, then collapse. My feet planted on that rickety swamp bridge between then and now.

 

    The friends were in Luiza’s driveway. They were always at Luiza’s house – one-level. Sprawling. The sun wasn’t quite high but Luiza’s brow shimmered, the grease in our plaits and braids glistened. The top rope was at 12 o’clock. Who was turning? All five of us jumped in. Luiza first. Luiza eternally first. Mailman, mailman do your duty. Then me. Here comes a lady with an African booty. Margeaux skittered between the yellow ropes. She can do the pom-poms. Tomorrow next. She can do the splits. “Come on, Grace,” we urged. I bet you $5 she can’t do this.

    Breasts. Blood. Grace’s troubles. Our own. We were young, then not-so-young. Certainly not wise. Death a long sip of poisoned water stretching across the hours, decades, fiascos, and delights. I studied Grace’s eyes. The terror inside.

   

 

    Exhausted after studying even more depositions, I finally curled up on the great room sofa and exhaled, the Syrah once again working its magic. Twin overhead fans cooled, not chilled me. I studied my surroundings, well-pleased. This townhouse was small and grand and during the day, filled with light. 12-foot ceilings, coffered in the chef’s kitchen. Perfect for a downsized-life. I couldn't wait to sink into the slipper tub and wash the grime of today's sojourn from my weary body.

    My cell phone buzzed before I could ease off the sofa and head upstairs. As a rule, I turned the ringer off once I crossed the threshold into my sanctuary, the main way I practiced self-care.

    “Your hair always looks good,” Margeaux said via Facetime. “Is that a new color?”

    Our childhood friend group, dubbed the Rat Poison Girls, but only among ourselves, were all of that vintage of Black womanness where you couldn’t quite pinpoint our age by our faces and we liked it that way. Spreading hips and thighs and bellies might give a few of us away, but none of us was cracking yet. I, personally, didn’t believe in aging and refused to grant it dominion in my life.

    I patted my pixie-cut. “Icy blond. What are you doing up this late?”

    Margeaux’s satin bonnet framed her whiskey-colored, diamond-shaped face. She squinted at the screen.

    “Do you know I found more of that mess in my home?”

    I stopped practicing active listening skills once I stepped onto that hardwood floor, and since I knew this script, had heard this very complaint ten thousand times, didn’t feel guilty. I stared at my dear Seattle-based friend, poker-faced.

    Margeaux went full blast, ranting on speaker phone until she exhausted her complaints.

    “You don’t think I’m going to do anything, do you?” Margeaux said.

    “No,” I said. “I mean, not anything you don’t want to do.”

    “I’m tired, Toi,” Margeaux said. “None of them take me seriously.”

    Because you don’t mean what you say or say what you mean – to them – I longed to mutter, but didn’t. As the childless, never-married one, decades of experience had learned me how to keep the peace with Margeaux and Tomorrow. Most of the time.

    My mind wandered to the next morning’s meeting with yet another distraught plaintiff. Would I say anything that could relieve their suffering? Would they even believe any words I, a perpetual outsider, might say? Did they have a choice?

    “How are things going down there?” Margeaux finally asked.

    I shrugged.

    “Same old, same old,” I said.

    “Are you really going to help those people?”

    “I sure hope so,” I said. “We’re working on contingency and don’t get paid unless we win.”

    “It’s been going on for so long–“

    “Who you telling?” I said. “Well, I’ve got a few meetings in the morning with some folks who don’t believe I should even be living down here, so I better get some sleep.”

     “Talk to you soon,” Margeaux said. “Love you.”

     Surprised by the tears threatening to escape my dry eyes – nobody in my family ever said those words to me – I heard Margeaux for the first time during our weekly call.

    “You going to be all right?” I said.

    “Sure,” she said. “Get some rest.” 

 

 

 

Zion

 

           

    The next morning, I eased into the Fair Fight parking lot  and turned off the CD player, grateful to be out of morning traffic. Sometimes, I came to work before dawn just to watch the river change color as the sun rose.

 

    “You don’t think this place might be a disaster?” I asked Vincent Scott, the day we stood on the porch of the once-regal, dilapidated, sprawling former funeral home, fronting Jefferson Highway, and not far beyond, the bank of the Mississippi, an oversized barge floating eerily past.

    “A sign in a city of signs?”

    We were sitting in rusty abandoned chairs on the wraparound verandah. Although the sky was silvery blue, beads of sweat dotted my arms.

    Vincent chuckled, then paced the porch and waved his hands as if in front of a judge’s bench.

    “It’s more than enough space for what we need: high visibility, parking, raw space we can wall off however we want.”

    “Do we need two acres though?” I said and aimed my head at the river. “Across from Plantation Row?”

    “We won’t pay ‘em no nevermind. And this is an “Opportunity Zone,” so it’s dirt cheap.”

    Vincent tilted his head, beseeched me with those x-ray eyes. We’d become friends after I’d faced him in court defending my former employer, Exxon-Mobil.

    Back then, he had silvered locks and a full matching beard. A regal physique. Peachy lips.

     “The dead don’t scare me,” I said. “But what about prospective clients?”

    “Folk down here used to haints,” Vincent laughed. “Besides, it’s been years since this place was a funeral home, the ghosts done cleared out by now,” he clapped his hands.

    “We gonna abracadabra this place into the best damn environmental law firm in the country!”

   Would I ever forgive myself for saying yes to Vincent Scott?

    I opened the massive door into the Fair Fight reception area. Though we’d bought the property for a great price, the building looked anything but cheap the day renovation was complete.

    Every time I walked beneath the ceiling, awash in charcoal plaster, or past the pale butter accent wall with its slim letters spelling out Fair Fight in bronze, or the glass-walled conference room, I believed all struggle leading up to this moment had been worthwhile.

    "I don't want no parts of poor," I’d told Vincent that pivotal afternoon, fanning myself with the property’s marketing flyer. 

    I’d gone to the University of Washington Law School, taken a job as counsel for Exxon-Mobil, ended up in Louisiana, then left to establish a modest real estate empire back home. I’d wanted to build my American dream in the Pacific Northwest. Lisa Ainsworth, my former business partner and her shenanigans forced me to relocate to Louisiana.

    "Come on, Toi," Vincent had said. "We got skills. Almost 100 years-worth between us. You’ve worked for the “other side,” here’s your chance to get on the right side. Let's put our litigation chops to good use protecting the places we love down here. We can provide sliding-scale legal services so everybody can afford representation."

    “The right side?” I said.

    "Listen, when I was at Yale, every time I opened my mouth, they tried to make me feel dumb. To be honest, it just made me embrace my roots even more. Come do this with me, Toi. Let's show those damn Yankees and the whole world what the South can do."

    “I’m from the Pacific Northwest,” I said. “I don’t spend even a second of my life re-living the Civil War or giving a single thought to Yankees.”

    Even so, fool that I was, I fell for it. Not him. But another chance. To crush the opposition. Win.

 

    “Mr. Gaines is here to see you,” Corynthia Bontemps, our fire-haired receptionist, said later that morning via intercom.

    “Please send him to the conference room,” I said and tightened the feathery straps of my chunky block heels, then rose from my desk, grateful for air conditioning. This black leather skirt might be too tight.

     “You know those outfits don’t endear you to these folks,” Vincent muttered as we entered the conference room through its glass door.

    “Do you really believe I can dress my way into these people’s high regard?” I muttered in return.

    “Crazy,” Vincent chuckled.

    I had to be some kind of mental to stay down here listening to these horror stories proliferating along the serpentine eighty-five-mile stretch of the Mississippi between New Orleans and Baton Rouge in mostly Black towns spoiled with over 100 petrochemical plants. I should be somewhere making real money. But Vincent Scott knew I didn't have sense enough to leave, hence our non-profit firm.

    Shadrach Gaines stood to shake Vincent’s outstretched hand. He ignored mine.

    "Something here is killing us," Shadrach Gaines said, returning to his seat.

    Part of Mr. Gaines’ belly rested on the conference table even though he had pushed his chair far enough away from it to stretch his stubby legs. His hangdog expression was born of protruding eyes and bulging pockets beneath them. He’d worked umpteen years at a fertilizer plant. God only knows what he was endangered by as an employee there. Now his neighborhood was exposed to oil flares and poisonous fumes from a nearby gas plant.

    We sat opposite him, facing the courtyard. I scribbled notes as Vincent nodded.

    "It's terrible to watch people die and realize you could be next," Shadrach Gaines said. "My daddy died of cancer. My mother died of lung cancer. My brother. My sister's son. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. Next-door neighbors. People down the street. My daughter. My wife."

    Another soul without kinfolk. I glanced through the French windows that opened into the courtyard, let those rain trees and magnolias, camellias and pink geraniums soothe my soul, even if, for only a moment.  I'd lost my sole sibling to another manmade chemical shortly after the Great Recession.

    “Mr. Gaines, your town has a lifetime risk of cancer from air pollution that is 700-800 times higher than the rest of the nation," Vincent said. "According to the government, air pollutant measurements are 400 times higher than what is safe to breathe. Yours is the only community that has been exposed at these high rates."

    "On bad days, I feel my head tightening up," Shadrach Gaines said. "I remember when we used to have butterflies 'round the place. Crickets. Now nothing seems to grow. Blackberries and pecans hard to find. Oily sheen coating the water. Don’t that beat all? A world without butterflies?"

 

 

 

     "I ain't no whatchamacallit...no environ...mental—" said Florence Anthony, the second petitioner to show up this morning.

    "Yes, ma'am," I said and noted a flash of metal on a front tooth. Here in the Fair Fight office in this blue, Louisiana river town, my job is, at first glance, to listen. Then I worry a case like a dog with a bacon-filled bone.

    "But I got a problem."

    "I'm all ears," I said. Where was Vincent Scott? He is the lead when plaintiffs come into the office, these pro bono situations are smack dab in his wheelhouse, not mine.

    Florence Anthony threw a sandwich bag of pill bottles on the conference table.

    "My boy can barely breathe, air 'round The Plant so bad," she said.

    I studied this mother's fried hair, slumped shoulders, dead eyes. She had to be younger than my fifty-odd years, but looked so much older.

    "Got asthma so, funkiest air days, he can't go to school."

    I didn't need to ask why she didn't move. No wealth. Fancy way of prettying up, poor. As in, fucked.

    "It hurt my heart to watch him looking out the window, watching other chirrun play, watching 'em go to school, and he can't even go outside and stand in the yard without losing his life.

    "I tell him something one minute, five minutes later, he done forgot," the mother continued. "Thought he was messing with me. But he can't remember. Worse than my eighty-year-old mama when she was alive. And she had the Alzheimer. What my boy got?"

    Kids who can't sit still. Can't pay attention. Can't learn. And if not reading by third grade, charging down that pipeline straight to Angola penitentiary. The culprit to be found in the air, or the water, or the once beautiful pastureland. All I had to do to answer her question was search my Dictionary of Ugliest Words: Benzene. Chloroprene. Lead. For her boy, my guess would be: lead; either coming out of the plant's smokestack, or leaking into the water supply.

Walkabout

QUARANTINE JOURNAL 6/6/2020

WALKABOUT

Usually when you go to a demonstration you start at a gathering place, hear some speeches that energize you, go walking with your signs, chant, and end up back where you were - or at some other place where there are more speeches. You put your signs in piles, or the trunk of your car, and go home. Four hours max.
On Tuesday, I watched Katie Tur on MSNBC as she walked with demonstrators in New York. And I watched and watched and kept on watching. Every time the anchor touched base with her the crowd had swelled and they were in some new part of the city. They started at 1:00. She was still marching at 8:00. She walked eighteen miles with protestors that day.
“It’s a walkabout,” I thought as I strolled in my neighborhood. “The kids – they are searching for meaning.”
A walkabout is a rite of passage young men take at puberty in Australian Aboriginal society. It is a transition, from one way of being in the world to another. It is a time to connect to ancestors, to wander, to make your own way and survive.
Obviously walking in Manhattan and walking in the Australian Outback are different. But the quest for making meaning in your culture, and connecting to whatever wisdom has been passed down, is universal. We have no clearly recognized rites of passage for young people in America; various groups do, with the quinceaneras and the bar/bat mitzvah, but even the ritual of getting a driver’s license is less universal these days. Yet the hunger for belonging, for understanding where you are, who is credible, what paths have heart – this pulses for all people as they grow up.
And what have they been given? A lying, cheating leader. An economy that pits them against each other. A corrupt legal system. Schools that reproduce the inequities of the culture. Uncertain care from the health system. A planet in crisis. Meaningless work.
The last cuts across class lines. Poorer kids are faced with jobs in service industries that are dehumanizing. I don’t care how many plaques McDonald’s puts up about employee of the month: no kid says to themselves, “I want grow up and sit in a booth and pass fries to people in cars.” For the kids from the suburbs - who were pressured to do soccer and science club and take the obligatory trip to a needy country in Latin America or Africa instead of have any free time or figure out what they want to do – they see folks ahead of them graduating from good colleges and searching for any job, let alone one with meaning or satisfaction. What was all that pressure and sacrifice about?
So they are walking. And walking. And walking.

And sometimes they sit. That same night I watched as thousands of people sat on the ground in Minneapolis. They weren’t chanting; they were listening. “They’re sitting in council,” I thought. Over the blather of the TV talking heads you could hear occasional eruptions of applause. It wasn’t a concert. It wasn’t Coachella - nobody acted loaded ordrunk. And nobody sponsored this: there weren’t any corporate logos, only handmade cardboard signs. Up front was somebody with a bullhorn or a makeshift speaker system. So why were all these people out late listening hour after hour, sitting on bricks and blacktop? Because the speakers made sense. Which is more than their president does.
George Floyd’s death is the flashpoint. The media blah-blah is about reform, rioting, presidential powers. This is so much bigger than that. It encompasses those ideas and a universe of meanings emerging like grass through broken concrete. The bankruptcy of our coffers is nothing to the bankruptcy of our imagination, Space X being just the latest feeble effort to replay the hits of former generations. This generation is coming together to build their future, instead of following the one we older people dumped on them so unceremoniously from our lack of credible leadership. The one no-one-has-any-idea-what-it-will-be but it couldn’t be worse than the trajectory we are on. Between walking and sitting, between exploring and absorbing, this generation is shaping themselves to guide our planet into the future. I hope I live to see it.

The Death Historian

They found them slumped in their cars en route to the ER.

They found them in apartments od'd and self-harmed,

in the ICU with chests cracked open by machines,

tubes ferried down throats on fire.

Some lie in comas. Some lose a limb.

And the nurse clasps their hands so

they don't die alone.

There are sirens keening. The morgue is overflowing.

There are bodies stacked in refrigerated trucks,

that mirror facing us and the threat of silence,

too much to bear on our own.

We cower-in-place, too frightened to breathe

the less-polluted air.

And the bus driver gets spit upon.

And the store clerk risks her life,

so we can hoard paper

to wipe our behinds with.

There is a new protocol for touch.

There is a circle of suffocating light in the jail cell.

The corona atop an ICE skull glows in its cage.

And that dead ER doctor had seen enough so the hospital

corridors are hushed and there is a harp's Amazing Grace.

And this was meant for the old (like you, Grandma),

and the black and the brown, and they are beating Southeast Asians

in the street, calling them by Chinese names

and I buy Mr. Chen's fried rice weekly to atone

and resist the call to inhumanity.

Truth tellers lose their jobs. Only the lies of MBAs suffice.

The world is going blind to the hysteria of the grieving poor,

rent now months overdue and no grace, no grace for you.

And Navajo Nation is ravaged again. And Canada won't open

its border. And Mexico is shut down too. This is the shithole country.

You can't get a passport now to save your life.

And the bomber plane crashes into a neighbor's house.

Georgia cooks the books and sends the nonessential

essentials into orange virus death.

"Throw Grandma from the train" and into the flames

of Wall Street's oven. Work Will Set You Free

coming from the mouths of Bergen-Belsen

and soul-snatchers everywhere.

They clamor for opening not the heart, but the death box.

Open and re-open they bray, hollering for more death

as long as it is not their own.

And we rush into the hair salon. Crowd into the barbershop

and get infected 100 times more. And there's no parade for the dead

even though body bags lie in state at the White House gate.

And the number is always an undercount in this necropolis.

But the helpers rose to cancel the metallic haze hovering over our cities,

plasticized water, sleeping in the elements, charity drives for the cost

of wellness, the millennial nightmare of debt and never-ending catastrophe.

     "I don't like our chances," I said once Neely Porter left the office.

    "We knew what we were getting into," Vincent said.

    "I don't want to go bankrupt fighting losing battles for people questioning my integrity," I said.

    "Now that's a surprise," he said.

    "What?"

   "That you even care," he said. "That's not the tough-titty Teflon Toi, I know and love."

    He'd never used that word.

    "I don't trust her," I said.

    "You don't trust yourself."

    "She's too emotional, we have to be able to control the narrative if we're going to have any chance of winning. Do you think you can control Neely Porter?”

    "No more than I can control Toi Simmons, but maybe there's more than one way to win," he said.

    "Spending thousands of dollars on this case before we even see the inside of a courtroom and then have people cave before we get to trial, is really going to piss me off."

    "Neely Turner doesn't strike me as the caving type. Neither does Christopher Patterson. Most of these folk don't have anything left to lose."

    "And that's not good news either," I said.

    "Here," he dropped a form onto the table.  "You suggested a four-pronged attack and I agree.  We try to compel compliance by EPA."

    "But if they refuse to comply, administrative action can't be enforced in court," I said.

    "But the EPA can refer an action to the DOJ for civil prosecution seeking compliance and/or civil penalties."

    "Ca-ching," I said. "Now we're in my wheelhouse."

    I glanced at the form.

Notice of Intent to file Clean Air Act citizen enforcement suit against ExxonMobil Chemical Co. on behalf of Parish Citizens Alliance and Mr. Christopher Patterson (Supplementing a April 22, 2019, notice and alleging that ExxonMobil’s Baton Rouge chemical plant releases dangerous air pollutants in violation of its permits and the Clean Air Act) (101-055.1).

    "Well," I said. "He has standing: he's suffered an "injury in fact" that is concrete and particularized, and actual, not hypothetical. There's a causal connection between his injury and the release of dangerous air pollutants that can be traced to the plant and it's likely that his injury will be redressed by a favorable verdict. On paper, it looks like a win."

    Vincent smiled.

    "But what about when the plant slaps its own lawsuit on anybody trying to charge them with this pollution? When they start saying these people are defaming them or interfering with their contracts, ie, when the real intimidation starts? How fired-up will Neely Porter be then?"

    "You're two peas in a pod," Vincent said. "You don't have to worry about Neely Porter.”

    He massaged my shoulders.

    "These folk are going to surprise you," he said. "Show you what true southern patriots are all about."

    "Besides slavery?" I said and rolled my neck. "The Civil War?"

    His fingers felt so good on me.

    "Let me get something spicy to eat," he whispered.

    "Po-Boys?" I said.

    "That could work, but I was talking about you."

    "Sorry to interrupt."

    We swiveled toward the door. A barrel-chested, cigar-chomping man in an Army cap, navy blue blazer and leather boots scowled at us.

    “Sir!” Vincent rushed to shake the man’s hand. "Please—"

    "Don't get up on my account," he said.

    I flashed a devastating smile. His reputation preceded him, but I would not be cowed. And I refused to call him C in C like everybody else. He was not my commander-in-charge.

    “This is about as stupid as stupid gets!”

    "Excuse me?" I said.

    "America never should have let this happen to Louisiana. Hell, we went to war with a dictator for gassing his own people. Isn't that what we said Saddam did? Well, what about us? We're out here doing the same damn thing. What kind of government knowingly poisons its own people? We're in a goddamn apocalypse out here. Who's going to war for the people of Louisiana? I am, that's who! And I got my own damn army—and we're going to clean up this mess!"

    “Sir, consider us one of your battalions," Vincent said. "'And we're about to start our first skirmish."

    I glared at them both.

    "I can't stand with you if you're going after the Governor. Now, if you want to take on these plants, I'm your man. But y'all gonna haveta leave the Governor alone."

    "It was a governor, sir, who invited all this industry into Louisiana in the first place and let them do or not do whatever they want," I said.

     "That governor, not this governor," he said.

     "I don't see how—" I said.

     "Complicated, isn't it?" Vincent said.  

     I raised my eyebrows.

    "Listen," C in C said. "I know that look. But you gotta understand. We got a lot of incest going on 'round here. Industry in bed with the government and I mean lawmakers and regulators. Regulatory capture. The industry tells the regulators what to do and how to do it. Psy-ops. Psychological operations. Atypical information warfare. Industry funds our educational systems. They control what is taught in these schools."

     "Schools built on old waste dumps," I add.  

    "Children can't even learn about pollution and what-all is making everybody sick. Universities won't research. They get petrochemical dollars."

    "And you tell us to leave the Governor out of this mess," I said.

    "We got all the natural resources any somebody could want and we're the second largest energy producer in America and yet we're the second poorest state in the nation. How in the world does that make any kind of sense?"

    "It doesn't," I said. "Hence, my growing confusion as to why the Governor is exempt from criticism. Or accountability."

    "This isn't about him," the General said. "Something just don't compute—it ain't adding up. Where does all that energy money go? Not to our schools—we're still building schools on old waste dumps, with all the lead, mercury and arsenic still there. Not to our infrastructure—hell, folks all riled up about Flint? What about Louisiana? We got 400 public water systems with lead or other hazardous substances leaching into the drinking water. And these goddamn plants release carcinogens, endocrine disruptors and neurotoxins into the air and water, plus inject them deep into the earth. What the fuck is this? It's apocalypse now, goddamn it."

    "And the Governor is untouchable because—" I said.

    "It's bigger than him. Hell, this is one of the few places in America, where anybody would even allow an open-air burn of military explosives. Bring us all your toxic shit, our politicians say. And from every corner of America, it comes. We're the nation's fucking dumping ground. They burn those explosives out in the open and release arsenic, lead and radioactive strontium into the environment. The most advanced military in the world and we use the methods of the Roman army to get rid of old military and industrial explosives."

    I made a mental note to add strontium to the Dictionary.

    "A goddamn toxic mushroom cloud rose 7000 feet into the atmosphere after millions of pounds of old explosives blew and blew out windows four miles away. Sheriff had the goddamn balls to tell folks a meteor caused the blast.

    "We got plants that use creosote and pentachlorophenol to pressure-treat and preserve things like rail ties and telephone poles operating right next to communities where human beings live. They soak the wood in these chemicals then lay it outside where the compounds escape into the air and leak into the soil and groundwater.  One plant drained into a schoolyard. Exposure to that shit can cause the outer layers of your skin to flake off and peel away. And the powers-that-be continue to lie and say these plants don't pose a health hazard.

    "Another town they built a wood preservation plant right next to got folks with leukemia rates 40 times the national average. Folks grew up breathing in the fumes of that plant. One woman got four different kinds of cancer. Babies born with birth defects, women birthing stillborns.

    "Coal-burning power plant sprays our fine country air with neurotoxins, mutagens and teratogens—compounds that can alter DNA and disturb the development of a fetus. You wanna talk right to life? What about our goddamn right to life? And clean air? And clean water?"

    Mutagens and teratogens. Dictionary words.

    "What we look like out here fighting our own government for clean air?

    "We got an environmental service company shipping industrial waste across the nation and injecting it deep beneath the waters of the largest bottomland hardwood swamp in America. For decades.

    "We got a community 230 years old, established by freed slaves, now surrounded by 14 industrial facilities, including petroleum refineries, vinyl chloride manufacturers and a coal-fired power plant.  The folks dioxin levels are among the highest ever seen in the country. And they got no birds. Not one fucking bird to be found in the town.

    "And legislators call me a terrorist. For wanting air monitors installed.

    Say me and my Army are a threat to commerce and tourism.

    Say we over-speak and tourists will be scared to eat our seafood.

    Tourism — jazzy festivals brought to you by oil companies poisoning every last one of us."

**********

What to do

Quarantine Journal

Day 55, Monday, May 4, 2020

     When Trump won in 2016, a group of former Congressional staffers wrote a 23-page handbook and put it up online. It was called "Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda." In it they suggest ways people can peacefully but effectively resist the move toward authoritarianism that Trump's election signified. They suggest citizen activism like showing up at town halls, calling Congressmen, visiting their offices, and writing letters/sending emails. The essence was push-back; in the same way the Tea Party had acted as a culture jam to Obama's agenda, this road map by Indivisible gave a way forward for people like me who were in despair and needed something to do so I wasn't grinding my teeth all night. When my friend Ethan approached me to start an Indivisible group I said yes.

     Ethan's brainchild was to marry the ideas of Indivisible with the quiet activism of writing letters and postcards. He and I are both artists and have been active in artist driven movements coming from the '60's - among them, Mail Art. That was a movement that resisted the commercialization of the art market by creating global open calls for art to be sent through the mail and shown in easily accessible places. Ethan, my husband J and I started a chapter of Indivisible but we quickly morphed into "Pen Connection." We are guided by the Indivisible agenda but don't want  endless meetings. We keep it simple: every Sunday we write letters to politicians, voters, and media people - thanking them or nudging them. We helped Katy Porter and Harley Rouda win close elections, and, most recently, the challenger for the Supreme Court in Wisconsin, Jill Karofsky. (Next project: get voters to sign up for mail-in ballots AND save the post office.)  

     After the wins of the 2018 election, when such an exciting and diverse group was elected to the House of Representatives, Indivisible said, "Ok, you were telling people in government what you didn't want. Now it is time to tell them what you do want."

     It was a great question. Turns out it is much harder. You can kill a child in a second, but to nurture and grow one takes an infinite number of small decisions, made over decades. It is the aggregate of the decisions - plus serendipity - that makes a human out of a tiny baby.  Which is the same thing you can say about politics: it is always slow and meandering, messy and imperfect,made of a million million parts. Show me a system that isn't. Medicine? Teaching? Manufacturing? Science? Art? Business?

     My point here is that messy involvement is better than perfect detachment. Politics is messy, yes. Humans are messy, yes. Get on with it. This is our moment to try things. Coronavirus will continue to upend systems that looked impenetrable, like McConnell's Congress or oil based economies as our future. The virus is an accelerator of cracks in the foundation of globalism. 

     What can we create that is useful for everyone? What happened after the Great Depression? FDR developed a robust safety net: Social Security, minimum wage, non-discrimination in employment, and banking regulation among them. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez promotes the Green New Deal she is referencing the New Deal Roosevelt used to create jobs, like the Civilian Conservation Corps, which hired young people for conservation work, or the Public Works Administration that created 70% of the nation's new educational institutions. Artists, too, were given work that is unparalleled in our history.  I'm cherry picking from the projects, but we can do that with the gift of hindsight. What do we need now? Internet across the country, robust libraries, places for walking - streets, hiking trails, rails-to trails. We could have students work in America as they have in the Peace Corps. We can hire millions of workers to update infrastructure. We need public art and performances, restorative justice programs, gardens instead of lawns and community supported agriculture. How about public banks, urban gleaning, bikes routes that aren't in competition with cars, the de-fencing of cities so people gather together, older kids teaching younger ones, libraries of tools and supplies - I don't know, what do we need? 

     One vision that has sustained me is Richard Hawken's book "Blessed Unrest." He gives talks all over the world, and stays to schmooze with people who come up to him and press their business cards in his hand. After years of this he realized he had thousands of cards. They were for tiny groups and non-profits everywhere - people who wanted to save a language or a species or a kind of music/dance/craft. Folks who were organizing, connecting, speaking out. When he started to look more closely he realized there weren't thousands of these little groups, there were hundreds of thousands. He calls this unrecognized and unruly vanguard the immune system of the planet coming to save it.  

     For instance: City Repair in Portland, OR. They have been working for 30+ years to create spaces in cities where people can gather and talk, organize and speak out, come together for protest and celebration and creation. They recognize that gathering in small groups to converse and play is the bedrock of democracy. It breaks urban cycles of loneliness and despair, bringing people out of their houses/apartments to create community - with a garden, an intersection painting, a free library, a tea stand. They've gotten thousands of homeless people a place indoors to live and heal. They work on the meta - city planning - and the minute: tiny stands (like realtor's boxes) that have poetry you can take with you on your walk.  

     The weird thing is we need places to come together more than ever and this virus has jinxed that. Our new main streets are online. But maybe, like boredom is good for creativity, this time away from each other and our incessant busyness is actually a good time to see the whole. To do a life in review or a culture-in-review or both; to do a what-do-I-want-to-do/see/make. When, in moments of crisis, kids ask me what to do I say, "Pick something you love and do one small thing for it every day for fifty years." They hate that - it's so unsexy. But it works. My most radical friends from 60's social movements crashed and burned and died young. I'm still alive, still working. I do small things some days and more when I get fired up. It's so much easier to keep a drip going than let the pipes freeze and have to unearth them. I'm not the volcano, I'm the coral reef, built one tiny effort at a time. It adds up.

     The packed dirt parking lot of white clapboard, dollhouse-sized, Greater Consuming Holy Fire Tabernacle was dotted with a few cars. I parked beneath a canopy of moss-draped oaks.

     A spare cemetery relaxed inside a marshy copse behind the church.

     I scowled at the flame-slim steeple. This tiny backwater house of worship contained ten pews at best, and most likely, no air conditioning; we'd wave makeshift paper fans on Popsicle sticks in order to survive. Sweat would bead my skin before I even slammed the car door.

     Something stirred in the shadows. I stared into the darkness until I saw her: a naked woman crouched in the reddened earth; head bowed, as if in prayer. Hair matted and wild. She lifted her eyes toward mine.

    I startled. Vincent beckoned from the other side of the glass.

    When I turned back, the woman was gone.

     "Coming," I mouthed.

     Dank, impenetrable air trailed us once the plain-timbered double doors swung wide. Beyond the vestibule with its altar table offering guest book and bullion-colored pen, loomed the murmurs and inquietude of dark-clad folk scattered amongst two modest banks of seating. Tall, arched, opaline windows filtered early evening light through stained green-gold panes. A star-shaped porthole chiseled into the red roof filled the white-walled room with even more brightness. An ancient black piano rooted one side of a spare wooden pulpit and a crude choir stand anchored the other. A gargantuan wooden cross, draped in purple cloth, adorned with a crown of thorns, was nailed to the wall. A spray of white lilies with assorted greenery flanked the lectern.

     A sausage-fingered hand gripped my shoulder.

     "Ms. Simmons?"

     I turned from the portrait of ebon-skinned Jesus. A strapping, thick-bodied man leaned my way.

     "Reverend Veal."

     He had a large squarish clean-shaven head with round cheeks. Confessional eyes. Jug ears and a protruding upper lip rimmed with gray and white-specked hair. A gap between oversized ivory teeth. He clasped my hands.

     "So glad to see you."

     "Thank you, Reverend," Vincent said. "No one could do this thing justice but you."

He smiled. I studied the cloth gladdening the neck of his robe.

     "Well," he began, then extended his arm toward the sanctuary. "I guess one is never really ready—"

     The polished shoes beneath Reverend Veal's holy garment propelled him deeper into the sanctuary. He left a foresty scent in his wake.

     Vincent quick-stepped behind.

     I tried to shadow him, but my legs wobbled and I felt myself sinking into a mud

sucking dismal swamp. There was too much sweltering perfume and no air. I grabbed hold of Vincent. My lungs stalled. I held tight, tighter. He quivered beneath my grip.

     "You all right?" He patted my temples with a pristine white hanky.

     "Please God," I mumbled into his shoulder.

     The heat was a cord around my throat, tightening.

     "It's going to be all right," Vincent whispered.

     I slumped, but he lifted, then hoisted me until we were the two still standing, lurching down the red-carpeted aisle into the unbearable future.

    A lone white-gloved usher in an ankle-length dress led us to the front of the church. Christopher Patterson, perched in the corner of his pew, cut his eyes our way.

     I returned his fire.

     Reverend Veal gripped the lectern, a grave countenance on his dewy face. He

moistened his lips, scanned the congregants. A massive bible with gleaming gilt-edged pages, rested on the pulpit. He tugged a handkerchief from the folds of his robe and wiped his neck.

     I braced for the worst: a soliloquy about the unrepentant spinning on God's rotisserie, a spit of fire and brimstone.

     Reverend Veal dabbed his forehead, cleared his throat. He leaned in our direction then dropped his head back.

What a friend we have in Jesus

All our sins and griefs to bear

And what a privilege to carry

Everything to God in prayer

     Vincent gripped my hand. Behind us, sat many of the complainants who'd made their way to our office in search of hope—Autherine Devine and her husband, Matt, sporting lopsided brogans, both diagnosed with lung cancer; Lynette Williams, and her gangly adopted son, Lance, battling leukemia, and beyond them, Raymond Murdock, survivor of multiple strokes.

     "God bless you," the minister began in a booming, plummy voice. "For coming out

this evening. For sitting down, to stand up. And fight for what's right. God don't like ugly. And we got too much ugly going on around here."

     "Yes, Lord," Autherine said.

     "Like many of you," Reverend Veal continued. "My roots in this land go back

generations, over two hundred years, far back as the slave revolt. This place is home.

Before the chemical plants came in, you could grow beans and okra, melons and fruit trees. You could breathe without your lungs burning. Now the high school is a methanol plant and the post office, an oil testing lab. Sugarcane fields, a plastic plant. There's benzene and oil in the water and ammonia in the air."

     "Yes, yes," a voice called.

     "And cancer everywhere you look," he said.

     Lynette Williams moaned.

     "In your neck, throat, breast, lung, kidney," he raised an arm, thick as an oak limb, and pointed at Lance. "Even in your blood."

     Lynette sniffled.

     "I know this grief," he said. "Lord, I have heard from too many suffering this pain, how much harm is being done to your saints at Jerusalem."

     I leveled my shoulders. Forget Jerusalem; let's chronicle the harm here at home. A

reckoning that would take us deep into the new year: greed, paranoia, selfishness,

manipulation, sloth, pathological lying, short-fused brutish violence, family treachery, community betrayal, theft of clean water, theft of fertile soil, theft of the very air we breathe.

     Reverend Veal smiled beatifically in my direction.

     "The Bible teaches endurance, hanging on until the bitter end, being an overcomer, that's what I'm talking about. We gotta hang on till we overcome this pollution madness."

     I stared at the minister's wingtips. Watched Autherine hug herself. Begin to rock.

     "We have to throw off everything that hinders us, all the sin that so easily entangles, we have to cast off and do what we all have to do, like the bible teaches us—let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. And will you run that race?"

     "Yes," Christopher Patterson shouted.

     I half-turned to stare.

     "We must run with the hounds of this cancerish hell nipping our heels, trying to drag us down."

     "Yes," Raymond Murdock said.

     "But the bible says, 'Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light unto me. And are we sitting in

darkness?"

     "My my my—"

     "Now, we may have fallen, once or twice—"

     Or ten thousand times, I wanted to shout.

     "And you CRIED and you PRAYED. And you CRIED and PRAYED. And CRIED

and you PRAYED and CRIED..."

     Autherine spasmed into a soft guttural keening.

     Someone near the back said, "Amen."

     "But we got up."

     A woman with auburn ringlets; stood and fluttered her fingers.

     Reverend Veal paused, wiped the sweat from his neck and face, then began to pace.

     "The BIBLE reminds us that trials serve to strengthen our faith and bring us to

maturity."

     "Well," a gravelly-voiced, clean-shaven man said.

     I squirmed, smoothed the cotton dress over my thighs. Crossed my bare legs and

closed my eyes.

     "I have had trials," Reverend Veal's boom pulled me back inside the church.

     "Yes, sir," an elderly man exclaimed.

     "Have you had trials?"

     There was a chorus of concurring murmurs.

     "We all have trials," Reverend Veal said. He froze, then gazed at the star-shaped glass in the roof.

     "But we carry everything to God in prayer."

     "Amen," several voices uttered.

    "Let us now hear from Sharon Moore, the scientist connecting the dots between the chemical plants and our sickness."

     The speaker strode to the podium gripping a manila folder. Vincent glanced at me and nodded.

     "Thank you, Reverend," she said. "And thank you all for coming out tonight to learn the truth."

     An electrical current snaked through the room. Christopher Patterson scooted to the edge of his pew.

     "I am a chemist," she said. "I take samples from the air, land and water to see what's in them. I have done scientific analysis of the land here. And I came to tell you, you have been exposed to concentrations of chemicals like chloroprene at 700-800 times the rate of other people in the nation. Chloroprene causes cancer. There is no safe limit for it. And if you grew up here, you have been exposed for a very long time, over fifty years, since the plant first started making it. Now the powers-that-be will say, 'There they go, trying to shut the plants down again. You can't prove cancer is because of us.' And they'll call you fearmongers. And ask, 'what about the jobs? There are tax dollars at stake.' But I ask, is any job worth the silent slaughter of the people who live next door to the plants?"

     I heard angry buzzing in the pews. Vincent nodded at the speaker.

     Reverend Veal rose and patted Sharon Moore on the back.

     "And they told us, so many of us were dying 'cause we had bad luck. Told us, we didn't understand the science of what was going on in our natural world. Told us not to believe what our eyes could see. That we weren't feeling what we felt, which was sick as dogs."

     "'Cept they wouldn'ta let this happen to dogs," Christopher Patterson shouted.

    "I live between a chemical plant and a refinery," Autherine said. "Sometimes the fumes so strong, I can't even breathe."

    "And there's always explosions," Lynette said. "Especially on the weekend when the EPA is closed. Boom! And then the house is shaking. I go outside and smoke so thick it's like fog. I have to put towels around the door. And nobody can tell us nothing about it. Not the EPA. Not DEP. Not the oil company. Even folk that work there don't know what's going on and can't find out. But I got spots all over my body and breathing problems."  

     "My boy go outside and say, 'What that smell, daddy?' It hurt to breathe."

    "I live next to the fertilizer plant," another man said. "We get skin rash so bad only bleach can kill it."

    "At least before the plants moved in we had pecans and wallflowers, hummingbirds and fireflies. Now they gone and we got awful smells. And cancer. Skin peel off my face when it rain."

    "A lot of us don't have health insurance."  

    "The Fifth Ward school—" Sharon Moore began to weep.

    Reverend Veal swabbed his face and neck one last time, then stepped away from the podium, grasped Sharon Moore's hands.

    "With God's grace, we will fight this," he said. "And we will win."

    "Well, well," Autherine sing-says.

    His fierce glare rested on me.  

    A heavy-bosomed woman in a tight black sheath and white kitten heels, wearing a plumed hat, stood beside the piano. A waif-like young man pumped the pedals and raised his slender fingers over the black and white keys. Mrs. Amsterdam, according to the program I fanned myself with, began to hum.

    The grief-stricken began to warble, then drone the words, but Mrs. Amsterdam's chest-voice soon silenced the crowd.

"We fall down but we get up

For a saint is just a sinner who fell down

but we couldn't stay there and got up—"

     The heaped losses of my life, began to rise inside me now, stuffing my throat with dust. We will help them prove it. And we will win.

    The church bell sounded a solitary echoing knell.

    I stared at Vincent's watering eyes. There is nothing like the intimacy of tears, and I, still did not know how to handle another's grief. Autherine pressed a tissue into my hand.

     "I'm glad you came," Vincent said, eyes shining, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. He patted my hand. Words rushed and tumbled inside my brain, but sat still as mothers of the church on my tongue. I dipped my head, suddenly much more shy. Sometimes there is comfort in silence. Sometimes there is consolation in pain. I sat with my lover as grief’s precise ache filled our hearts.