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.