Mississippi: Magic, Mystery and Environmental Racism
For any writer, Mississippi is magic. Starting with William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams and moving forward to Richard Wright, Donna Tartt and Richard Ford, among so many others, Mississippi has produced an exceptional number of exceptional writers. The British travel writer Richard Grant, who has written two books about the state, calls Mississippians “great tellers and admirers of colorful stories, with a rich supply of material” to work with, along with the “intangible, mysterious quality to life here.”
Jesmyn Ward is a distinguished member of the current generation of Mississippi writers who is particularly good at evoking that mysterious quality Grant describes. Ward’s fiction focuses on the experiences of Blacks in the rural Deep South, where they are marginalized by racism, poverty and even natural catastrophes like hurricanes Camille and Katrina.
Ward also has written a memoir, Men We Reaped, about losing her brother, a cousin and three childhood friends, far too young, to violent deaths from 2000 to 2004. In this book, she brings to life DeLisle, a close-knit Creole bayou town where she and those she lost grew up. According to “Mississippi: The WPA Guide to the Magnolia State,” DeLisle, north of Pass Christian, was one of the earliest settlements on the Gulf Coast, whose founders “tradition says were Arcadian exiles.” Until the 1930s, DeLisle residents spoke French exclusively.
“Most of the people (in DeLisle) are kin,” Ward writes. Going back several generations, “as far back as they can remember,” Ward’s family members all came from Pass Christian and DeLisle. In DeLisle in the1980s and 1990s, she, her brother and two sisters, and many cousins spent time in a house built by her grandfather, surrounded by a large extended family, and ran barefoot in the woods.
After Ward’s father left her family, he moved to Turkey Creek, the Black community that has fought environmental injustice that I wrote about last week. When Ward visited him there, she writes that “in some ways, it felt like DeLisle, except it was encircled by Gulfport’s sprawling development.” Like Turkey Creek, DeLisle lost homes on the bayou to Hurricane Katrina.
Unfortunately, starting in 1979, the woods around DeLisle, where Ward and her young relatives and friends played and explored, shielded a Dupont (now Chemours) plant that makes one chemical, titanium oxide. It’s used to whiten food, toothpaste, plastics and paints. Although titanium oxide has no food value, it’s in the white “m’s” on M&Ms and in the middle layer of Oreos. In a Sierra Club documentary, the plant manager says the plant’s product “lifts the world because of its ability to brighten.”
But the Chemours DeLisle Plant has darkened its surroundings and the lives of many who have worked there or live nearby because it has released more than 3 billion pounds of toxic pollutants into the air, water and soil around DeLisle, according to Homefacts, which provides neighborhood information about U.S. cities and zip codes.
Some of those poisons have traveled around the world in seafood caught in the bayou and Bay St. Louis. More than two thousand workers and residents have sued Dupont, alleging it has caused the mysterious, often rare illnesses they have suffered.
Besides racism and poverty, Ward’s neighbors in DeLisle have been up against environmental injustice for more than 40 years. She hasn’t written about the invisible darkness behind the blooming, immensely fertile green land and huge skies of Mississippi, the environmental cost paid by poor rural Blacks in the Deep South – at least not yet. Perhaps a future novel by Ward will talk about a rural family whose members are victims of corporate pollution.
Ann Marie Cunningham is a Columbia University Lipman Fellow for 2020 who will be working with the Mississippi Center for investigative Reporting. She is a veteran journalist/producer and author of a best-seller. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Technology Review, The Nation and The New Republic. Contact her at amclissf@gmail.com.