This Taiwan-based Chemical Company Must Hate African Americans

“Oh, here he comes,” Sharon C. Lavigne, the founder of the nonprofit anti-toxic group Rise St. James, said.

I saw the reflection of the white Chevy patrol truck in the rear-view mirror. The closer it came, the more ominous it seemed.

We were on a dirt road that ran parallel to the sugarcane fields. There was just this one road. Beside it, a sandy white lane could have been used as a road, I supposed.

But it had no gravel. I could see it wasn’t really meant as a road. I wanted to be respectful of the property.

Somewhere, off in the distance, amid the fields, were one or more ancestral graveyards. Sharon wanted to show me them.

“I didn’t see any no-trespass signs,” I told Sharon. “Are we doing something wrong?”

The cane stalks were only about two foot and short for the time of year due to the heavy frost.

Formosa Plastics Group, based in Taiwan, a little ways away, is an ancient old-time polluter that specializes in plastics and pollution. They purchased three thousand acres in all to build a twelve billion dollar plant that would provide the chemicals for making plastic bottles, bags, and synthetic turf. “It’ s just what America needs, huh, dear?” I said in the little car.

There are already eighty-five chemical plants in this stretch of the river. The Taiwan-based company chose to put the plant here in St. James Parish, where Black people, who are poor and indigenous to the region live and have been relatively voiceless, instead of downriver near New Orleans or upriver closer to the white suburbs of Baton Rouge.

Much of the land was once part of the antebellum Acadia and Buena Vista plantations with histories of graveyards that archaeologists have only begun seriously documenting since the chemical company took over.

These are the killing fields in the beautiful, spacious neighborhoods where big flat grass lawns once, for a short while, offered a sense of country living. Persons in the community have traced their family history to enslaved descendants who toiled in these fields on antebellum Creole and American plantations, building the wealth of the region; but, for altogether too many others, because of the lack of preservation, their roots are largely lost.

“They want to make it like we never existed and fill this whole region in with industry,” Sharon said. “They’re doing it to us because we’re poor and Black.”

“It’s happening in Pennsylvania near Beaver Falls where my family hails from, you, know?” I said softly. “They just put in a big ethane cracking plant for more plastic. Oh my God. Can you believe it? It’s happening everywhere, Sharon, and we’ve got to fight these battles along a three thousand mile front, darling.”

In Louisiana, everyone is either is “sugar” or “darling.” Using it was as natural to her as it was to me. We also got it. Each of knew we were part of the poisoned but had survived, and we didn’t need to speak of it or go through all that formality. We connected well and both of us just wanted to get things done, you know?

It’s why my group sent me. They sent me to find out ways to help her and her community. One idea we had to help improve the health of the community through simple inexpensive measures like supplying folks with air and water filters to start, and maybe that might empower them, too.

The three of us sat in a tiny, white Korean KIA rental with Michigan license plates in a Louisiana sugarcane field. Sharon and I were, for some silly reason, exceedingly happy together. I’m not sure her intern was quite as sanguine about the situation.

We were some sixty or seventy miles outside of New Orleans on the west side of the river and off the interstate and in the real land. We weren’t out there to cause trouble. I love history and especially Black history because I play Blues music, and most of my heroes in life are Black musicians like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker (a friend) who hailed from the Delta region of the nation. I wanted to see the graves that were at the center of a the controversy to pay homage to them. I like graves, don’t you? They remind me of something.

I was from California. I was acting on behalf of the nonprofit group Healthy Living Foundation (HLF) and delivering a small preliminary shipment of water filters to Sharon’s group because otherwise without decent water all of the activists in this area were going to undergo slow death by chemical and heavy metal poisoning.

Sharon wanted to show me their graves. But since a federal court ruling that stopped the Sunshine project cold (for now), the company had put up a fence and large sign demanding notification before entering. All right. Fair enough.

But we weren’t on their land. Since Sharon’s family has been there for a hundred years or more (I figured), it wasn’t like she was a stranger or suspicious person.

“This isn’t their land,” Sharon said.

“See that sign down there, down that road, by the trees? That’s their property.”

She pointed.

“Their property starts where the no-trespass sign is posted. But here, where we are, isn’t their land. They already told me they are gonna arrest me if they ever see me on their land again. But I’m not on their land. This isn’t their land.”

I didn’t want to cause problems for Sharon and her folks. There was enough tension already in the area. People were dying. But folks were afraid to speak out. The companies that poisoned the community the most dropped the most crumbs by privately funding even the local schools!

Sharon kept talking about needing folks in public office with backbones. “We’ve got a lot of squirming salamanders around here,” she said.

Sharon suggested we turn around and go see another of the plants that was already built and killing off the people. There was a lot to see.

But as I began to turn around, the guard stopped his pickup truck in the middle of the road, in effect, blocking our exit.

There was really only one road.

“Well, maybe we can get him to backup,” I said, pushing open the driver side door.

I got out of our car and walked up towards him. A brown-skinned man who wore a blue baseball cap with sunglasses on the brim rolled down his window. (I later learned his name was Ellis.) He was most interesting, a most fascinating character indeed, not local, but a Black man, nonetheless. It just shows you how easy it is buy racism. Or, at least, that was how it seemed, and I’m not saying anything good or bad about him. Because I don’t know him really. People say it’s just political or money. Because who’s right and wrong on this one is absolutely as clear as the drinking water in New Orleans.

“Hi,” I greeted him in an unseemly high and embarrassing whine that I wished I could take back.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“What are you doing?” I replied being a little smart.

“What you doing?” he said again.

I didn’t understand why he had any interest in us. It wasn’t his property. So I asked, “Is this your property?”

“So, I’m working on this property.”

“On this property?” I said, incredulously.

“I’m making my rounds,” he assured me.

“Who do you work for?” I asked (the journalist in me suddenly emerging. I didn’t feel like telling him I was delivering water pitchers. But come to think of it I should have offered him one).

“Who do you work for?” he said. “What’s your name?”

“I don’t have to give you my name.”

“Yeah, I’m just asking a simple question, buddy.”

“I’m here as a journalist,” I said.

“You aren’t supposed to be on this property.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t your property.”

“I’m calling my boss.” He got on his phone and said, “Give me Ty.”

“What’s your name?”

I told him it.

He didn’t hear me, and he said, “Give me your card.”

“I don’t have one. Give me your card,” I said.

“What’s your name again?”

I told him.

“I’m gonna call the sheriff on you.”

Someone on the phone called him Ellis.

Ellis shut the window.

He opened it.

“I’m calling the sheriff on you.”

I kept video taping him.

“They don’t want you on their property neither,” Ellis said.

“So you work for them too?”

“Ah protect this land.”

I walked back to our car and got in. Our butt was to his grill.

“I don’t think he’s from around here,” Sharon said, watching the video. “Texas, Alabama. Not here. They bring them in from all over.”

“He said he’s going to call the sheriff.”

“Listen,” Sharon said. “I got a lot more to show you, and I’ve got my daughter coming to pick me up so we can go dress shopping for her wedding. I got to be back at 1:15.”

I turned the car so we could leave. But now we could see that Ellis pulled up a few hundred yards. He positioned his vehicle to once again to make us hostage.

“Well, dear, it looks like the darn road is being blocked.”

“Yes,” Sharon.

Her intern was quiet.

I stopped.

Our little KIA faced off against Ellis’ Chevy.

A few minutes passed.

He wasn’t going to let us pass.

I looked at that road.

“Unbelievable,” I said. “Okay, Ellis, you soulless bastard, we’re going to leave you behind. Let’s go.”

I pulled around him and used that white portion of the field and then got back on the main road.

There were so many American killing fields we visited. There were so many packed into this stretch, it was difficult to keep up with each plant, the neighbors impacted, and Sharon’s cancer count. She knew every house. Like every toxic community, there were parents, sons, and daughters. Anybody who tries to do a count finds out quickly the sick and disabled are never out there to be counted and so they’re almost always missing from what we notice. No one talks about them either, like that’s a hex. But, certainly, Sharon assured me, she knew and showed me each house where someone was dying from cancer. Three of the dead included persons who worked with her: Geraldine Mayho, Keith Hunter, and Lynn Nicholas. That was the plan, she said.

“Plan?”

“It’s why where we live is called Cancer Alley,” she told me.

It’s a global tragedy, and we need the world to take note. It isn’t that the company is not only tone deaf to what’s going down in our nation, it lacks vision; they’re ancient, racist killers. Leave these good folks alone, man.. You’re killing us.

That trope of industrial science of a little poison is okay was assassinated by epidemiologists. decades ago. The people here are dropping like flies

Kill them. Kill the all… but slowly … over time while the river flows… and take over the whole banks of the Mississippi to manufacture more plastic.

Later we were at her home, still in a tussle from Hurricane Ida, and because of her activism.

“People here don’t have bottled water. They can’t afford it. They certainly can’t afford water filters or even know about them.”

“This will empower folks. It shows them someone cares, right?”

But the first shipment of pitcher filters had arrived, and it was so important because the water here contains formaldehyde, phthalates, herbicides, and heavy metals. It’s slowly poisoning the folks.

We did pitcher filters because they’re so simple. Everyone can use one. They do a terrific job of filtering water too. We got them Zerowater pitcher filters because they eliminate per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) forever chemicals that could be in their water, too. Sitting in her kitchen, I wished we had more time. I had only begun to learn about Sharon’s family, her own six children, twelve grand kids, family roots, and all of that. She’s different. She’s the light. I wanted so much to help. I knew things they didn’t know.

But outside her daughter honked her horn.

“It’s my daughter. She’s getting married,” Sharon told me.

I met her daughter briefly.

I congratulated her.

They were going into New Orleans to look at wedding dresses.

— 30 —

David Steinman is the author of Diet for a Poisoned Planet, Safe Trip to Eden, The Safe Shoppers Bible (with Samuel S. Epstein, M.D.), and the forthcoming Raising Healthy Kids: How to Protect Your Children from the Hidden Chemical Toxins in Our Everyday Lives from Skyhorse Publishing. David served as a representative of the public interest at the National Academy of Sciences and is chief officer of the nonprofit Healthy Living Foundation.Follow him at @davidsteinman_author on Instagram and @bydavidsteinman on twitter.