One Must Wait

by Penny Mickelbury

"Yes, Ma'am, he is," the young woman responded with polite efficiency, and directed her up the stairs and left, to the end of the hall. Carole Ann's thanks went unheeded as the young woman returned her attention immediately to the computer screen and the ringing phone.

  Whatever Carole Ann had expected, Warren Forchette wasn't it. He was about six feet tall and possessed the physique and attire of a weightlifter. He wore a navy blue XAVIER UNIVERSITY tee shirt, one designed to display the massive muscle structure that bulged and rippled beneath it. Tight, faded blue jeans suggested an equally impressive lower body development. He was completely bald, and wore rimless wire spectacles, the silver of which glinted against his dark brown skin. He stood and extended his hand when Carole Ann entered, but remained behind his desk and offered her a choice of seats—the arm chair adjacent to his desk, or the sofa against the wall. His voice was as warm and gentle as on the telephone, but there was no warmth or gentleness in his eyes or in his manner. He was polite but not gracious; accommodating but not effusive. He was a reflection of the Center itself; or, more likely, the Center was his reflection: A pleasing and impressive exterior; a cooly functional interior.

  Carole Ann took the chair nearest the desk. "Is the crowd in your reception area par for the course?" she asked without preamble, guessing, correctly she noted, that he was not the kind of man who appreciated ceremonial chatter.

  "Day in and day out, though not all of them are clients. About half are witnesses, and as you might imagine, they are not at ease with the workings of the criminal justice system. We prep them for trial."

  "Then you must be very well respected in this community, Mr. Forchette," Carole Ann observed with true admiration.

  He leaned back in his desk chair and calmly scrutinized her without embarrassment for a long moment. "We are, Miss Gibson. Thank you for understanding that. Now. What do you need from me?"

  "Help finding an outfit called Parish Petroleum. Help finding Eldon Warmsley from New Iberia. Help finding the Chicken Shit River, which is not on my map. Help finding someone who will go with me to talk to an old conjure woman who lives near the Chicken Shit River. And a crash course in how to do all this without angering or insulting anybody's feelings or customs." Now she leaned back in her chair and watched him watch her. She was certain that something happened in his eyes when she mentioned Eldon Warmsley, and again when she mentioned respect for customs. But he gave nothing away; indeed, he solidified his control over the situation by his response, which caught her completely off guard.

  "You ever heard of Lillian Gailliard and the United Parish Tenants' Organization?" he asked, and continued when she shook her head. "Lil blows the horn and carries the flag and generally leads the charge in the local fight against polluters. She knew your husband. Here's her address," he said, writing on a yellow legal pad but keeping his eyes welded to hers. "She's expecting you."

  If Warren Forchette looked like he could bench press the Grand Canyon, Lil Gailliard looked like she could bench press Warren Forchette. She was a very large woman. Not fat, but bulky; and not the kind of bulk that suggested softness or weakness or laziness. She was as tall as Warren—taller than Carole Ann herself—and firm and solid and mighty. A fortress of a woman. When Carole Ann entered her office, Lil got up, crossed the room to greet her, and enveloped her in a powerful hug.

  "I'm so sorry 'bout your husband, Dahlin,' and I'm so glad you came to see me. Sit down, Cher. Rest yourself." Lil released Carole Ann and waved her in the direction of an arm chair that held a cardboard box stuffed with papers. Lil waved her arm again and Carole Ann lifted the box and put it on the floor, grateful to have something to do; some way to cover the sensation that her name was Dorothy and she was all of a sudden living in the middle of a tornado. In that moment, she understood fully the concept of an out of body experience. Al would be proud, she thought.

  "How long did you know Al? How well did you know him?" Carole Ann heard herself ask as she sank into the chair.

  "Long enough and well enough to like him. Long enough and well enough to trust him," Lil replied with a smile that conveyed the comfort of the hug she'd bestowed moments earlier.

  "This all comes as such a surprise to me," Carole Ann said, unable to harness her out of control thoughts and feelings. "I'm not sure what to say to you, what to ask you"

  "I know, Cher," Lil answered soothingly. "How 'bout I talk for a while and you listen?" Lil Gailliard was a hell of a talker.

  The twenty-five-year old United Parish Tenants' Organization originally was founded to be a voice for the rights of public housing and other poor and ill-educated tenants, of which there were many thousands in New Orleans and surrounding parishes. In the early days, the focus was on the basics: Demanding indoor toilets and sinks, electricity, screen doors and windows in public housing projects. Demanding regular trash pick-ups and street cleanings. Demanding street lights and police protection. In short, the UPTO fought to put forth the notice that poor people were regular people, and that fight kept the group busy, for the resistance was formidable in a place that not only wore well the Southern mantle of racism, but which also carried the added burden of intra-racial racism. Skin color among Blacks in Louisiana was a crucial and defining factor; more important, even, that money or education. That people in need would accept assistance only from people of a certain skin color make the work daunting at times.

  Lillian Gailliard had come to the UPTO for help in the winter of 1976. She was then a twenty-six year old mother of two whose husband and children were dying of cancers the doctors could not explain. Lil was convinced that where her family lived—which was in a compound owned by the company where her husband worked—caused their illnesses, and she set about working to convince the UPTO that she was right. She began by documenting the fact that most of her neighbors and practically all of the men who worked with her husband were dying of the same inexplicable cancers. The first year of her fight, Lil's youngest child, a two year old boy, died. The second year, her husband died, and the UPTO created the Anti-Pollution Task Force and hired Lillian Gailliard to run it. It was the first paying job she'd ever held. The third year of her fight, in the month of July, Lil began to hemorrhage while sitting at her desk talking to a UPTO caseworker. She almost bled to death before the ambulance could transport her to the hospital where, during seven hours of emergency surgery, it was discovered that her uterus was overgrown with massive and strange tumors. The tumors were not cancerous but they were poisonous: They emitted a foul odor and an ugly bile that was eating away at Lil's internal organs and had they not been removed, Lil would have been. From the earth. The doctors could not explain the nature or the origin of the tumors but Lil knew exactly what they were and what caused them: The emissions from the plant where her husband worked and where they had lived for eight years. During the six months she was in bed recovering, the UPTO hired an attorney to handle the legal work of the Anti-Pollution Task Force that Lil, unschooled and untrained, had handled up until that point.

  The fourth year, Lil's eldest child died on what would have been her seventh birthday. The following week, the UPTO filed a class action lawsuit against Parish Petroleum on behalf of Lillian Gailliard et al. Better than half of the et al by that time were deceased, a fact that pricked the attention of the legal reporter at the newspaper, but only because he found it amusing that a law suit could be filed by a bunch of dead Colored people. That story, in turn, pricked the attention of a wire service reporter, who included the story in a regional news wrap. And that story pricked the attention of a reporter in Chicago who called Lil Gailliard. Seems that the Chicago reporter was working on a story about a similar lawsuit there, and he'd heard about another case in Houston, Texas. All of the plaintiffs in both cities, said the reporter, were Black, and a good number of them were dead. That's when Lil Gailliard realized that what she'd taken on was bigger than her neighborhood. So, while she was waiting for the lawsuit that bore her name to wind its way through the legal system, Lil began poking about
in other New Orleans neighborhoods, looking for people dying from strange cancers and poisonous tumors. Twenty years later, she was still finding them.

  It was beginning to be too much. First here were these people who'd known her husband, and who were so casual about that knowledge. Then this woman—this stranger—lets drop from her lips the words "Parish Petroleum" without the slightest understanding of the impact on Carole Ann. Or perhaps she did understand. Who the hell is Lillian Gailliard anyway?!

  Several times during Lil's recitation, she had stopped to answer telephone calls or to wave someone into the office who had a matter to discuss that couldn't wait, always begging Carole Ann's forgiveness for the interruption. Carole Ann learned during these digressions that Lil called everyone "Dahlin'" or "Cher." She learned that Lil was the driving force behind the UPTO's Anti-Pollution Project, which had its own staff and budget and life force, in the person of Lillian Gailliard. She learned to read the gentle cadences of Lil's sweet voice: The softer the voice, the more dangerous the message. It was unwise to trifle with Lil Gailliard, Carole Ann learned by overhearing one side of many conversations; and what she heard convinced her that Lil probably knew enough law to pass the bar in several states and the District of Columbia. Carole Ann also concluded that Lil was personally and intimately acquainted with every neighborhood within a hundred mile radius of New Orleans, and that she possessed the same level of knowledge about every factory, plant, landfill, dump, oil well, and natural gas pit.

  And now she knew also that this woman was connected to her murdered husband and to Parish Petroleum. What did he tell you! Carole Ann wanted to scream. Instead, she asked what she hoped sounded like a simple question:

  "So, Al came to see you because of your work with the UPTO?"

  Lil's hesitation before answering was so slight as to defy notice but Carole Ann was an astute student of nuance and she noticed and girded herself for what she intuited would be a hard-to-handle response.

  "Al contacted me because I'm an expert witness on environmental pollution. I've testified in dozens of trials all over the country, as well as before Congressional hearings and committees. In fact, I first met Al in Washington when I challenged his testimony before a hearing on somebody's environmental impact statement. Told him he was woefully ignorant on the subject, as I recall." Lil chuckled at her private memory of that moment, then grew serious again. "He called me about a month later to prove that he'd smartened himself up. By the time he called me about this Parish Petroleum mess last year, he knew almost as much as I did and was ready to switch sides."

  The tears that Carole Ann had been holding back spilled out and she sat quietly weeping for a moment. Lil offered a box of tissues across the desk and Carole Ann wiped and blew and took a few deep breaths.

  "I didn't know anything about that part of his life and I don't know why he didn't tell me. Do you know, Lil, why he didn't tell me?"

  "I think, Cher, because somebody stole his time away from him."

  "I hope that's the reason," Carole Ann said softly, and then she talked for a while, telling Lil everything about the events that led her to be in New Orleans. Carole Ann opened herself and let everything out because she had not yet done that and she needed to. No other person knew everything that had transpired within and to her since the Tommy Griffin trial. Her mother and brother and Al's father and Cleo and Jake Graham and Tommy knew parts and pieces. Al had known the most but Al was dead. Lillian Gailliard, on the other hand, was the most alive person Carole Ann had ever encountered and therefore the perfect repository for her released self.

  Lil received everything Carole Ann gave. She nodded and smiled. She grimaced and shook her head. Her eyes narrowed and her lips tightened and she muttered curses in French. Or, more precisely, Carole Ann thought, Creole. Once, she wrote very rapidly on a small note pad of pale pink paper, quickly filling up three of the small pages, and when Carole Ann hesitated, Lil waved on her on with her other hand, signaling that she should continue talking. When she finally ran out of words, Lil heaved herself up and walked around the desk to stand beside Carole Ann. She stood there for a moment, patting her shoulder. Then she left the office, left Carole Ann sitting there, free to sit and think and feel, or to roam and browse about the office which reflected the woman who called it home.

  It was a large space, perhaps thirty feet square, and it clearly doubled as office and home-away-from-home, as witnessed by the blanket and pillow on the floor beside the sofa, and the pink satin slippers peeking from beneath the sofa. There were two distinct work areas in the office: The formal desk area, which was relatively neat and orderly, and a long work table surrounded by chairs on either side and piled high with documents that a brief perusal informed Carole Ann were depositions, pleadings, filings, motions. More of the same overflowing boxes were lined up and stacked against one wall. Two floor-to-ceiling bookcases occupied one wall, and the adjacent wall was covered with photographs. Not like the photographic art that adorned the walls in Warren Forchette's Legal Center. These images were of the point-the-camera-and-shoot variety. These were photographs of poisoned land and poisoned people and yet, within them was captured a sad beauty: Land and rivers made barren by buried toxins still receive setting and rising suns; men and women made barren by the same evils still displaying spirits and wills battered but unbroken.

  Carole Ann walked along the wall and the images changed. Now she saw meetings and protest demonstrations, most of them featuring Lil prominently: Waving a picket sign; being arrested and resisting arrest; speaking at a podium, fist raised defiantly; shaking hands and hugging and kissing. And then, in one photograph, there was Al and he was talking to Warren Forchette. Both were seated in folding chairs at a meeting of some kind, and they were leaning toward each other, heads bent forward and angled toward each other, faces grim, arms folded across their chests, legs crossed, right knee over left. Mirror images of each other, the corporate lawyer and the activist lawyer. They who should have been on opposite sides of some fence—of some toxic waste dump or landfill—were seated side by side, together, sharing something grave and serious. And Warren Forchette had never indicated that he'd known Al Crandall.

  Lil re-entered the office to find Carole Ann still holding, still staring at the photograph that she hadn't realized she'd lifted from its hook on the wall. Whatever Lil was about to say when she entered the room was quickly forgotten as she registered understanding of the look on Carole Ann's face and the object in her hands.

  "Good Lord! I forgot I had that picture of Al. I'm so sorry, Carole Ann. I hope it wasn't too much of a shock." Lil's face now was puckered with concern.

  "I continue to be shocked, Lil, by how little I knew about an obviously important part of my husband's life. Every time I think I can't be shocked further, I'm proved wrong." Carole Ann was not able to disguise the bitterness and disgust that crept in to those last few words.

  Lil opened her mouth to speak then closed it, biting off whatever she was about to say. She patted Carole Ann on the shoulder again and crossed to her chair behind the desk and sank down with a grunt, confirming Carole Ann's earlier suspicion that the woman was in physical pain, and causing her to wonder whether it was related to the mysterious tumors of twenty years ago.

  "Warren wants you to meet him tomorrow at the Center at two o'clock. Y'all been invited to dinner out to Eldon Warmsley's place. Eldon, bless his bones, is a Swamp Baby, and he believes in two things: Cookin' and eatin,' so take your biggest appetite with you. And wear some clothes you don't mind gettin' dirty."

  Carole Ann was about reply that Warren Forchette could go skinny dipping in an alligator bayou. Who the hell was he to tell her where to go and when! But the words were choked off by the change taking place in Lil: Her eyes and mouth and body took on a glinting hardness that was totally transforming. Here was the Lillian Gailliard who'd created a civil rights movement by sheer force of her will, the Lillian Gailliard determined to make good on her promise to take better care of Al Cranda
ll's wife than had been taken of Al Crandall. She raised her right hand and pointed at beautifully manicured, tangerine-colored fingernail at Carole Ann.

  "Learn your way around. Learn one good route to and from every place you go, and stick to that route. Don't get lost. And don't go explorin' or sight seein' unless you go with one of those tour groups. And don't go nowhere or do nothin' at night alone. You understand what I'm tellin' you?" No more dahlin's and cher's, no more gentle Bayou humor.

  "You're telling me I'm in danger." Again, Carole Ann experienced the sensation of mind and body separating and lost the struggle control it.

  "Everything your police friends told you is the truth. And if you didn't believe them, then believe me. Three people are dead 'cause they talked to your husband, and another one is missing."

  "Al said...Al's notes said five people were dead or missing.."

  "Eldon Warmsley is number five. And he is still missing for all you know." Lil pronounced these words hard and slow and Carole Ann had to work to keep her spine straight.

  "I thought I wanted to die after Al was killed. But I've since changed my mind." Carole Ann didn't attempt to conceal the confusion created by the awareness that there existed an intricate facet of her husband's life unknown to her until today."I promise not to do anything to jeopardize myself or anyone else. Enough people are dead."

  Lil nodded her head once. "You're lucky to have friends like your two cops. There ain't in a cop in this town I'd trust as far as I can spit. Let your friends help you. Let 'em help us. We need the help. That's why we were so glad to see your Al ready to work for our side, and then we made the mistake of not warnin' him, of not takin' right care of him. We'll do better by you. And while I'm thinkin' about it, you better give me the number of that cellular phone."

  Carole Ann left the UPTO surprised that it was late enough that the sun was well into its westward journey, and grateful that it was still light enough to see clearly. She'd never have been able to retrace her route to the Legal Center at night, and at the same time pay close enough attention to her surroundings to ensure that she wasn't being followed. Warren Forchette had given her "the quickest route, not the most direct route," to Lil Gailliard, and that meant a series of turns at landmarks instead of at street signs in areas that Carole Ann could see did not have street lights. At least the streets were paved in this neighborhood.