Then, to everyone's astonishment, uninvited, Lee Sherman—long since fired by Pittsburgh Plate Glass—climbed on stage. With his back to the officials, he faced the angry fishermen, lifted a large cardboard sign, and slowly walked from one side of the stage to the other, so all could read it: "I'M THE ONE WHO DUMPED IT IN THE BAYOU."
The entire coliseum went silent.
Officials tried to get Lee to leave the stage. But a fisherman called out, "We want to hear him."
"I talked for thirty-six minutes," Lee recalls. "Someone said, 'Sherman, you gotta sit down, it's so-and-so's turn to talk!' But another guy said, 'No, I want to hear him!' I told them I had followed my boss's orders. I told them the chemicals had made me sick. I told them I'd been fired for absenteeism. The only thing I didn't tell them was that sitting behind the front table on stage was a member of the PPG Termination Committee that had fired me. He had even once placed bets on my weekend NASCAR races. That was the best part—the PPG guys had both hands over the backs of their heads."
Now the fishermen knew the fish were truly contaminated. Soon after the meeting, the fishermen filed a civil lawsuit against PPG and won an out-of-court settlement that gave a mere $12,000 to each.
Another Realm, Another Vindication
Lee had worked at hard, unpleasant, dangerous jobs. He had loyally followed company orders to contaminate an estuary. He'd done his company's moral dirty work, taken its guilt as his own, and then been betrayed and discarded himself, as a form of waste. The most heroic act of Lee's life had been to reveal to the world a company's dirty secret, and to tell a thousand fishermen furious at the government that companies like PPG were to blame.
Yet over the course of his lifetime, Lee Sherman had moved from the left to the right. When he lived as a young man in Washington State, he said proudly, "I ran the campaign of the first woman to run for Congress in the state." But when Lee moved from Seattle to Dallas for work in the 1950s, he shifted from conservative Democrat to Republican, and after 2009, to the Tea Party. So while his central life experience had been betrayal at the hands of industry, he now felt—as his politics reflected—most betrayed by the federal government. He believed that PPG and many other local petrochemical companies at the time had done wrong, and that cleaning the mess up was right. He thought industry wouldn't "do the right thing" by itself. But in the role of counterweight, he rejected the federal government. Indeed, Lee embraced candidates who wanted to remove nearly all the guardrails on industry and cut the EPA. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration had vastly improved life for workmen such as Lee Sherman—and he appreciated those reforms—but he felt the job was largely done.
In the life of one man, Lee Sherman, I saw reflected both sides of the Great Paradox—the need for help and a principled refusal of it. As a victim of toxic exposure himself, a participant in polluting public waters, hating pollution, now proudly declaring himself as an environmentalist, why was he throwing in his lot with the anti-environmental Tea Party? Not because the Koch brothers were paying him to, at least directly. Lee was putting up Tea Party lawn signs for free. Still, his source of news was limited to Fox News and videos and blogs exchanged by right-wing friends, which placed him in an echo chamber of doubt about the EPA, the federal government, the president, and taxes.
Indeed, Tea Party adherents seemed to arrive at their dislike of the federal government via three routes—through their religious faith (the government curtailed the church, they felt), through hatred of taxes (which they saw as too high and too progressive), and through its impact on their loss of honor, as we shall see. Lee's biggest beef was taxes. They went to the wrong people—especially welfare beneficiaries who "lazed around days and partied at night" and government workers in cushy jobs. He knew liberal Democrats wanted him to care more about welfare recipients, but he didn't want their PC rules telling him who to feel sorry for. He had his own more local—and personal—way of showing sympathy for the poor. Every Christmas, through Beau-Care, a Beauregard Parish nonprofit community agency, he and his wife, "Miss Bobby," chose seven envelopes off a Christmas tree and provided a present for the child named on the enclosed card. ("The card tells you a child's shoe size. If the size is too big, we know the shoe is actually going to an adult and we don't give. But my wife spends money we don't have on the kids.")
Indeed, Lee and Miss Bobby were living on Social Security and finding it a very tight squeeze. Two events further soured him on the IRS. In one, he got a part-time job to earn a little extra money, but worked more hours than federal rules allowed, got caught, and had to wait a year to get back on Social Security. Only help from their Mormon church and from Mike Tritico, himself poor, saw Lee through that year. More enraging was a second event. "I made a date with a clerk in the local IRS office to collect a tax refund of a certain amount, and nothing about that meeting did I like," Lee explains. "The gal wore a see-through blouse, to distract me. Then she asked me for every possible receipt, tallied the amount up wrong, and gave me less than I had coming. She cheated me. I needed that money, but I never cashed that check."
"I'm a stubborn man," Lee explains, "and if you cross me, I don't ever forget it." He wanted to feel vindicated, just as he'd felt against PPG's accusations of absenteeism when a member of the Termination Committee appeared at the seafood advisory meeting in the Burton Coliseum. He'd also found vindication, he felt, against that government clerk, all IRS clerks, and indeed the source of all taxes—the government. He'd gotten even. He'd done another Burton Coliseum. He'd joined the Tea Party.
Lee had been mad when PPG fired him, two guards marching him out to the parking lot. "I have a gun," he tells me, "and I didn't think of hurting people, certainly not my co-workers, but the place, yes. I was that mad." But at the same time, the workplace had been where he'd experienced his finest hour, had shown his great skill, his bravery, his endurance, his manhood. And when he added it all up, he was more mad at the government. PPG gave him money. The government was taking it away.
Three and a half hours after sitting down with Lee at his dining room table, the cookies are gone. As I take my leave, Lee gets back up on his walker and slowly sees me to his front porch, which stands adjacent to a four-door garage (the garage is bigger than the house) in which sit three race cars in various stages of repair. Leaning along one wall is a stack of thirty plastic lawn signs Lee plans to plant in local lawns for John Fleming, Tea Party candidate for the U.S. Congress.
As we part, Lee flashes me a bright smile, invites me back—we haven't yet looked at his photo album—and waves a cheery good-bye. After those secret sessions at dusk emptying the tar buggy into the public waters of the estuary, the toxic waste had moved downstream into Bayou d'Inde where I'd heard a couple had long lived. Were they part of the paradox too? I thought I should meet them.
3
The Rememberers
I am seated on a soft living room couch in the home of Harold Areno, a gentle Cajun pipefitter who is carefully holding before me, from his adjacent chair, a large photo album. He draws his hand back and forth over the plastic covers on the black and white photos. He turns the pages slowly, searching for one. Seventy-seven and a former deacon in the Lighthouse Tabernacle Pentecostal Church, he's dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans. He speaks in a slow baritone, his eyes on the page, often concluding a line of thought with a light chuckle as if to say, "It's all right."
He points. There it is. His mother, father, himself, and nine siblings standing in two rows, squinting into the sun on the bank of Bayou d'Inde. It is 1950. Harold names his brothers and sisters. He tells how his mother used to catch gar by coaxing the fish to the side of the boat with bait, patting their sides, then lifting them by the gills into the boat. He turns to the next page of his album slowly. Now a photo of his father and his siblings, all born and raised just across Bayou d'Inde, a term meaning "bayou of the Indians." Now, in different constellations, the family is picnicking, now clowning, now swimming, now dropping a watermelon off a boat to play
with in the water and later eat.
But it's not just his family he wants me to see. As if introducing friendly neighbors, he points behind the family to something else. Standing proud in the water, behind the faces in the photograph, are commanding bald cypress trees, large triangular trunks rising from the water, once the glorious queens of the forested wetlands of southern Louisiana and still the official state tree. Green moss hangs from outstretched lower branches, tree after tree, like lace shawls in a dance hall. "They were so tall the sun hardly hit the marsh," Harold says in a quiet voice. Reaching 150 feet high, these trees can live 600 years, and some have been known to live 1,700 years. Harold's father built fishing boats out of cypress, some flat-bottomed dugout pirogues traditional to Cajun culture. He would bring logs to a nearby mill, saw them in his shop, and build them into boats, which he rented to fishermen. For $30 a month, he also tended a humpback bridge, which could be swung sideways by turning a wheel to make way for boat traffic, and otherwise he fished and farmed.
"Throw a Cajun in a swamp," Harold chuckles, his eyebrows lifting for emphasis, "and he can make a livin'."
But that was before.
From the edge of his yard, Harold points to the bayou's brackish water. Piercing its surface here and there are lifeless gray trunks, some bent over like defeated soldiers, as far as the eye can see. It's a tree graveyard. Harold's arm falls to his side, limp.
Bayou d'Inde winds a few miles from the spot where Lee Sherman had leaned over the tar buggy, opened the valve, and let the toxic waste spew out into public waters. From that spot, the waterway led in one direction toward the Arenos, and in the other it narrowed into the Calcasieu Ship Channel, widened into intertidal mudflats dotted with salt meadow cord grass, and poured ponderously south, thirty miles into the Gulf of Mexico, from which comes nearly half the seafood on the American dinner table. From the tar buggy dumpings in the PPG marsh, there was a very large "downstream." By following Lee's deeds to the Arenos, I hoped to discover a different vantage point on the Great Paradox.
Going on three generations, the Arenos have fished, caught game, and raised gardens on land around and beneath their immaculate tan wooden home with green shutters, neatly trimmed lawn, and driveway edged in lilies and hibiscus, a white truck in the driveway. Facing the water is a porch, along one side of which hangs an enormous American flag. The Arenos' home is one of only two on Bayou d'Inde Pass Road for about a mile. The house next door, once Harold's sister's, had long lain vacant. Other families, too, have moved out, leaving a long stretch of scrub pine between the narrow tar road and the bayou.
"We didn't know what we had until it was gone," Harold says. He had grown up on one side of the bayou and raised a family on the other, "within hollerin' distance" of his birthplace. But in addition to losing his youth, his trees, and many in his family, Harold has lost a way of life. "We had forty acres," he tells me, the photo album now resting closed in his lap. "On two of them we grew butter beans, corn, and vegetables. We could catch frogs at night and fish in the daytime—gar, bass." There were other fish too, he says: crocker, menhaden, stripped mullet, and red fish, which all had once fed the great snowy egrets, white and brown pelicans, gulls, herons, spoonbills, terns, and killdeer—birds that had once thrived in the bayou. "The frogs would sing and carry on all night long. You could drink the water then."
Harold and his nine siblings settled across the family's forty acres of land along the bayou. "We didn't go to the store but once a month to get sugar, vanilla, and such. We had chickens, hogs, cows, and a garden. We lived off the bayou. We ate bullfrogs for Sunday dinner, and catfish chowder any time. We'd add the sugar and vanilla to the cream from our cows to make our own ice cream."
"My mama was a French lady," Harold declares. "She spoke French, played The Watermelon Man on her accordion, and cooked three meals a day for twelve on a wooden stove. She was big woman, about 220 pounds," Harold says. "She'd kill the chicken, put the meat in a pot of gumbo, and use the guts for bait on a line to catch catfish. We didn't waste nothing."
Like many in southwest Louisiana, the Arenos were descended from French Catholic Acadians—or Cajuns, as they came to be called. The British harshly expelled the Cajuns from New Brunswick, Canada, in 1765, in the wake of a victorious war against France. British ships deposited them in various coastal states. Eventually seven boatloads of Cajuns arrived in New Orleans Harbor, many of whom then migrated to the swamplands of southwest Louisiana, mingling with and partly displacing the Atakapa Indians.
His parents had little schooling, as Harold recounts, because French was banned from schools, and French speakers were discouraged from attending. Harold himself only got through the eighth grade.
Like Harold, Annette Areno remembers the bayou from before. A beautiful woman in her seventies, she has golden-gray ringlets drawn high on her head. She wears glasses, a pink blouse, and long floral-patterned skirt. A warm, spirited woman, she speaks in a soft, deliberate way. She listens to Harold's stories, supplementing and amending them, carrying the seriousness of them in her tone of voice, but freely offering her own observations and thoughts about the bayou, comparing it to her grandfather's farm where she grew up in Kinder, Louisiana. She has recently won a lifetime achievement award as custodian at nearby Sulphur High School. "I clean up after teenagers," she says with a playful roll of her eyes.
"I remember sitting under the cypress for shade in the heat of the summer. The moss hanging on it was green then. Frogs could breathe and they could find all kinds of minnows. Then industry came in. It began to stink so bad you had to leave the windows down on hot nights. It killed the cypress and grass from here clear out to the Gulf. And you still can't eat the fish or drink the water."
Harold adds, "Floating bits of rubber would clog the water pump on your motorboat. We were downstream from Firestone."
The Arenos' forty-six-year-old son, Derwin, arrives at the door. A lively, brown-haired pipefitter—like his dad—who works at a nearby petrochemical plant, he is dropping by on his day off with takeout from Popeye's—chicken, rice and beans, coleslaw, sweet rolls. Annette makes coffee and puts out lunch for all of us, apologizing for not cooking herself.
After prayer, Derwin joins in on what seems like a well-worn family conversation. "I was born in 1962, and growing up here, all I ever remember seeing was dead cypress trees and a stinky, nasty smell from the water. Now wherever I go, I can smell whether the water and air are good or bad. It's like a special instinct. The water here is clearer today on the surface, but you don't want to stir the mud on the bottom. And these days, at night, the winds from the east smell of something burning, always at night."
"I haven't heard a bullfrog in this bayou for years," Harold adds, "I heard one holler about three years ago, from inside one of them drains, but he didn't holler long. I don't know if someone caught him or if he died." Harold describes how during a "fish kill" the fish flopped about on the surface of the water and on the banks "trying to breathe."
Then he turns to turtles, and I gradually realize we are going through a terrible inventory. "We noticed the eyes of the turtles had turned white. They would sit still on a log and never jump off to catch and eat something. They'd gone blind and starved to death." Harold and Annette alternate speaking of various marine creatures with intimacy and resolute calm, as if to lay each to its proper rest.
"My dad found his cows, tipped over, lying down," Harold continues. "They had drunk the water. And the chickens. First, they'd walk around, their wings hung down. Then they'd lie down dead. And his herd of goats and sheep, all dead." He gives a mirthless baritone chuckle that seems to say, "What can you do?"
I feel as if I've come upon the scene of a slow-motion crime. Lee Sherman's tar buggy was only one part of it. Other companies and the state government were another. Continuing with a flash of indignation, Harold says, "My nephew used to raise hogs. And you know a hog can stand almost anything. Because of the bad water, my nephew had to cook the slop he fed them. But the hogs
got out of the pen and went to drink the bayou water and died. The health unit came down on my nephew for not keeping his hogs away from the bad water, but they didn't do nothing about the had water."
In their braided tale—Harold's, Annette's, and Derwin's—I feel both resignation and defiance. As they talk they glance toward the window at the bayou beyond, downward toward their plates, and occasionally to me to see how I am absorbing their words. There is no insisting on response, only a shaking of heads as if to say, "All this should never have happened." They have been kept waiting for years for word on a lawsuit, a wait that has nearly worn them down and spent their anger.
But there is more. Animals and fish are not all they have lost. I brace myself.
Shifting in his chair and coughing slightly, Harold continues, "My brother-in-law J.D. was the first. He came down with a brain tumor and died at forty-seven. Then my sister next door, Lily May, had breast cancer that went into her bones. My mom died of lung and bladder cancer. And others up the bayou: Edward May and Lambert both died with cancer. Julia and Wendell, live two miles from here, they got it. My sister grew up here but moved over to Houston River and she's fighting cancer. And my other brother-in-law, he had prostate cancer that went in the bone. (Both Annette and Harold are cancer survivors.)
"The only one that didn't get cancer was my daddy," Harold says, "and he never worked in the plants. Everybody else—all us kids and our spouses that lived on these forty acres—come down with cancer."
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right Page 5