Sisters of the Good Death

     They were girls then.  Five pigtailed imps grinning at each other in a photograph while unseen hands turn the rope. Toi is front and center naturally, knees bent, tennis shoes nearly scraping her butt, hands balled into fists that graze her knees, a look of sheer defiance brightens her face. She is gazing toward her left at Margeaux, feet barely off the ground, plaits loosened, one hand on a bony hip, the other tapping Toi’s wrist as if to say, Ain’t we something? Margeaux’s eyes are locked on Tomorrow, frozen in a knock-kneed half-jump above the hopscotch pyramid, its seven square waiting for her to land. Tomorrow is laughing, mouth open wide, as she beams joy toward Margeaux, or maybe it’s Grace, partially visible, her body turned away from the jumping girls, toward the invisible hands; her four fingers grip Margeaux’s shoulder, while she turns a timid smile toward Toi, or maybe it’s Tomorrow.  I am the fifth girl, almost bent double in a fierce jump, name no longer spoken.  

      

                  

                                                                        2020

    "Something here is killing us," Shadrach Gaines said.  I scribbled while Vincent nodded.

    "It's terrible to watch people die and realize you could be next," he 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 orphan. I'd lost my only sibling to another manmade chemical shortly after the Great Recession.

    “Mr. Gaines, the cancer rate in your town is 700-800 times higher than the rest of the nation," Vincent said. "According to the government, the 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 here. 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—"

    "Yes, ma'am," I said. Here in the Fair Fight makeshift 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 is Vincent Scott? These pro bono situations are smack dab in his wheelhouse, not mine.

    She threw a sandwich bag of pill bottles on the 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. Low wealth. Modest means. Fancy ways 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 had to be some kind of mental to stay down here listening to these horror stories 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 knew I didn't have sense enough to leave, hence Fair Fight, our non-profit firm.

    "Come on, Toi," Vincent had said. "Let's use the twenty-plus years of skillsets we've built in litigation practice to protect the places we love down here—and we'll provide legal services at income-based rates so everyone can afford representation."

    "I don't want no parts of poor," I'd told him.

    "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."

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

    "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. 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.

    "Fair Fight is going to help you the best way we can." I said. "We might not win the first round, but we might win the fifth. Or the fiftieth."

    I don't know how Vincent can look these people in the eye and tell the lies he tells till we declare another victory in our madcap scramble to save the world. But I don't believe in false hope.

    "Ma'am, this battle gonna be like Davida versus two Goliaths. You ready for that?"