We are about halfway through the meeting when Shamell Lavigne calls out: “Do you have burning of the nose? The lungs? Does your nose bleed?” There are several responses in the affirmative from residents in the audience. Shamell continues: “Any other conditions you’d like reported?” An attendee responds, “Skin rash, itching.”

Shamell is the daughter of Ms. Sharon Lavigne, a retired schoolteacher who founded RISE St. James after retiring in 2019. Taking place at the Welcome Senior Center, in St. James Parish’s majority-Black fifth district,^[i] the meetings come as surely as the sun sets in the evening, or as surely as sickness, cancer, and death consume the lives of many of the innocent residents who commit to making a difference at these meetings.

In this particular meeting, which took place in 2024, Shamell asks these questions because RISE St. James is developing an app that residents can use to report their ailments in real time—ailments that, we know, are caused by the toxic pollution that residents are exposed to from simply existing in Cancer Alley. When a smell wafts over me, write it down, we can imagine residents reminding themselves. And when a bout of dizziness consumes me, write it down.

And like residents of Diamond, a majority-Black neighborhood stuck between two Shell Oil plants,^[ii] the goal is to document life in Cancer Alley to those in power that living in Cancer Alley eats at the body the same as a pack of hungry hyenas devour a doe by slowly ripping it apart. The goal is to document life in Cancer Alley as an unwilling battle between life and death, between industry and existing as a working-class Black person who wants to make a living without the lash of the petrochemical industry’s version of a cat o’ nine tails.

Cancer Alley, which was once comprised of sugar cane fields that the parents of some residents grew up laboring in, and to which generations before them grew up manacled as enslaved people, tells us both that this is a generational fight and that space reinscribes unequal power dynamics, consisting of racism, heart break, longing, sadness, fortitude, and resilience.

Cancer Alley, and the generational fight, also tells us, however, that Black people belong here. That Black people have called this region home and continue to call it home. Many residents, if they could leave, would choose not to. That’s what they have told me. They call it home. They are buried here. In contrast to plumes of smoke, putrid smells of petrochemical processing, untold miscarriages, 

explosions, discharge, fires, skin peeling, and the grinding, generational hurt that stings more than a tsunami of salt on an open wound, they remember opportunity. They remember a beautiful, symbiotic relationship with nature: when trees bloomed and bore fruit; when fish, meat, and vegetables were sprinkled across the dinner table by the hard work of mothers’ hands; when communities were thriving with banks, markets, and local Black businesses; and when maternal health meant the flowering, rather than the wilting, of little ones.

To some, petrochemical plants merely make things, whether neoprene for wetsuits or bulk chemical processing^[iii] for the countless plastics we all use on a daily basis. At the same time, these petrochemical plants have also become a living embodiment of the erasure of Black people across time and space in Cancer Alley and, more generally, across the United States.

The Fifth Ward elementary school, in the majority-Black town of Reserve,^[iv] has for decades hugged the Denka/DuPont plant like a shirt that clings to a sweater. To some, it might be just an elementary school. Yet when we put on the glasses of humanity, we can see the school as a concentration camp of collateral damage that is wallowing in decaying opportunity. Cars, like schools, have also become markers that alert us to the presence of cancer, sickness, and death. Like a peanut M&M coated in a chocolate candy shell, many cars in the region are routinely encased by an outer layer of toxic dust from local petrochemical plants. Rather than engines of opportunity, cars have become signposts that petrochemical plants lie in wait just around the corner.

Whether by sickening Black residents, or killing them, petrochemical plants in Cancer Alley represent a river of misery that flows into a never-ending cavern of hurt and pain, like engine oil that flows into a drip pan whose reservoir is the size of the Grand Canyon. Sheets of pain that flow into a well as deep as Mount Everest. And while the pain sinks deeper into residents’ being than the anchors that were attached to the ships on which their ancestors were chained as they rocked back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, a pain whose incision plumbs the depths of the human psyche much deeper than the fissures from which the industry’s oil is slurped from deep inside the earth, it pales in comparison to the rock of resilience that Black people have built over time in response to repeated attacks on their humanity.

Residents are dying to live in Cancer Alley …

^[i] https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/b/3/b32c2ee3-11a0-44d6-a117-7d1621dae3d1/E3081C416EE9DCED7BBF03E346315417.06-15-2023-lavigne-testimony.pdf

^[ii] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262622042/diamond/

^[iii] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262511346/uneasy-alchemy/

^[iv] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/reservecdplouisiana/PST045223

Collection of images:

Slide One: RISE St. James. Courtesy: http://www.risestjames.org/

Slide Two: Cancer Alley after Hurricane Ida in 2021. Courtesy of: https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/photo-essay/2024/01/17/cancer-alley-1