Cancer Alley

COLLAGE INCLUDES: USGS map from 1939 Baton Rouge; Henry Mitchell, State Arms of the Union, 1876; M. Le Page du Pratz, Bringing the Pipe of Peace, illustration in The History of Louisiana, or Of the Western Parts of Virginia and Carolina (New Orleans: J. S. W. Harmanson, n.d.), 351; Chandler Seaver Jr., Gordon, a Runaway Mississippi Slave, or “The Scourged Back,” 1863, attributed to McPherson and Oliver, reproduced and sold as a carte-de-visite by Chandler Seaver Jr., International Center of Photography.

PLAQUEMINE ISLAND

The legacy of extraction has always been tied to the ability to move product to market, making the river the most valuable collaborator of enterprise. In the early years of colonialism, from the late seventeenth century through the 1920s, the fur trade fueled such a get-rich-quick furor that beavers, minks, muskrats, and other furry creatures nearly went extinct. Our modern era has no need for fur anymore, however the quest for comfort remains and is now inextricably tied to petrochemical products brought to us by multinational corporations.

Plaquemine is one of three Mississippi River islands, including Bayougoula and Bonnet Carré, all found between Istrouma and Bvlbancha. Bvlbancha (“place of many languages” in Choctaw) is the original name of the lower Mississippi River that was successfully rebranded “Nouvelle Orleans” by French colonizers. Plaquemine means persimmon in Mobilian, a pantribal pidgin language and the predominant trade jargon spoken in the territory when the colonizers arrived. Downstream from Baton Rouge, the river turns sharply at Manchac Point, beginning a series of tight twists as it curves south to find its mouth and the Gulf of Mexico. Archeologists believe the two mounds and causeway found on this point near Bayou Bourbeaux were inhabited by Indigenous people of the Plaquemine culture between 1300 and 1600. This sacred site was a strategic place of convergence, connecting communities to the watershed and its resources.³

Commercial industries disrespected and disconnected Native settlements and ceremonial grounds, corrupting historical and cultural ties to ancestral lands. In 1957, Dow Chemical purchased former plantation land along the west bank of the river, just south of Manchac Point, across the main channel from Plaquemine Island. It has since grown to become one of the largest petrochemical facilities in Louisiana. Over time, families were forced to leave Manchac Point, first for the Army Corps of Engineers levee infrastructure after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, and later, in the late 1990s, for Dow Chemical to create a natural buffer or “green zone” around its facility. Dow’s Plaquemine plant produces chlorine and polyethylene, which are found in “cosmetics, detergents, solvents, pharmaceuticals, adhesives, plastics for a variety of packaging, automotive parts, electronics components, and more.” Dow Chemical’s Louisiana Operations site is just one of more than two hundred chemical plants located between Istrouma and Bvlbancha.⁴

COLLAGE INCLUDES: USGS maps from 2018 Plaquemine and 1908 Baton Rouge; George Shaw, Common Beaver, 1809; Du Pratz, Indian Buffalo Hunt on Foot, illustration in History of Louisiana, 296.

DONALDSONVILLE: POINT HOUMAS

The historic distributary La Fourche des Chitimatchas (the fork of the Chitimatcha), also called the River of the Chitimatcha, is known today as Bayou Lafourche. It has been disconnected from the Mississippi River by the federal levee system and mechanically reconnected by pumps in order to allow freshwater to nourish wetlands at the southern end, while also providing over three hundred thousand people in coastal communities with potable water. “The Fork,” or Lafourche, provided many First Nations, including the Chitimatcha and Houma, a gateway to the Yakni Chitto, the “big country,” where a web of bayous connects scattered Indigenous settlements to a sense of sovereignty—a place where people fleeing enslavement and, in later years, removals to western territories, found food security as American planters moved in to claim the high grounds to grow sugarcane after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.⁵

Bayou Lafourche has been and remains a life force for the Houma Nation, although it is crisscrossed by pipelines and pulls its water supply from a polluted source due to upstream runoff and industrial outfalls along the Mississippi. Its headwaters connect to the river at Donaldsonville in the heart of St. James Parish, a community saturated by the petrochemical industry. Just downriver from Donaldsonville, Formosa Plastics is planning to build a $9.4 billion chemical manufacturing facility along a 2,400-acre site they’ve dubbed “the Sunshine Project.” The operation threatens to double toxic air levels in the community to produce “nurdles,” plastic pellets used for single-use consumption. Formosa may be the largest, but even more plants are under construction or expansion along those riverbanks. St. James Parish is also where the tail of the Dakota Access Pipeline ends, linking up to the Bayou Bridge Pipeline, which runs 163 miles through the Atchafalaya Basin—North America’s largest river swamp— transporting Bakken crude across the United States, destined for international export.⁶

COLLAGE INCLUDES: USGS map from 2018 Donaldsonville; unknown artist, An Indian Inhabiting the Country Northwest of Louisiana, 1741, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Art and Architecture Collection, New York Public Library; Monique Verdin, photograph of Mississippi River water foam and supertanker, 2019.

ST. JAMES: CANE AND CANCER ALLEY

Jacques Santiago Cantrelle, the namesake of Louisiana’s St. James Parish, came into the territory from Picardy, France, in 1720. He worked for the Company of the West Indies, operated by John Law, a Scotsman responsible for the radical public French finance reconstruction that contributed to the Mississippi Bubble. After the Spanish took control of the colony, Cantrelle was granted land between Bvlbancha and Istrouma at a place called Cabanocey, meaning “duck’s roost.” Cantrelle became commandant of that part of the territory, as did his sons-in-law and his son Michel, who was appointed first judge of St. James by Governor William C. C. Claiborne after the Americans “purchased” Louisiana. The Cantrelles first grew indigo, then sugarcane, on the fertile banks of the Mississippi, and colonial archives provide a unique record of their relationships with Houma ancestors, including my own, who lived along the back swamps of the Cantrelle family’s plantations. I have only recently learned that Cantrelle is my sixth great-grandfather on my mother’s side, illuminating the complexities of Indigenous histories and settler occupation, and the assimilation and cultural transformation brought on by these collisions, as reflected in my existence.

Near Cabanocey, the federal government has invested in an old salt dome site to bank petroleum as part of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve initiative. The old plantation grounds are now fallow, some cattle graze fields, but the land is covered by white oil tanks and access roads with names like the Department of Energy Road across from the old St. James Cemetery.

COLLAGE INCLUDES: USGS map from 2018 Lutcher; J. F. Jarvis, Away Down ’Among de Cotton and de Coons, Louisiana, U.S.A., 1892, photographic print, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Du Pratz, Indian Woman and Daughter, illustration in History of Louisiana, 37.

BONNET CARRÉ CEMETERY

There are two unmarked cemeteries in the Bonnet Carré Spillway just north of a census-designated place that is more refinery than town: Norco (derived from New Orleans Refining Company) in Louisiana’s St. Charles Parish. The historic 1811 slave revolt passed by the Bonnet Carré’s forgotten Roseland (Kenner) and L’Hermitage (Kugler) plantations as freedom seekers marched south toward Bvlbancha. Three hundred or more African Americans are buried in Roseland and L’Hermitage cemeteries. Many were enslaved at nearby plantations, but the cemeteries were also used as a final resting place for the bodies of their descendants and others tied to the plantations until 1928, just before the flood protection infrastructure was created after the Great Flood of 1927. Norco is celebrating ninety years as Shell Oil’s company town, proudly highlighting its corporate contributions from jet fuel to jazz and heritage festivals. Shell’s Norco Manufacturing Complex website boasts that the Norco facility is recognized as “one of the largest and foremost petrochemical facilities in the United States.” The refinery’s neighboring Army Corps of Engineers spillway, which had only been opened fourteen times in eighty years, was opened twice in 2019 and once in spring 2020 due to unprecedented high river levels, the side effect of a changing climate.

COLLAGE INCLUDES: USGS map from 2018 LaPlace; Lewis Jesse Bridgman, “On to Orleans”: The Negro Insurrection, 1888, engraving in Maurice Thompson, The Story of Louisiana (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1888), 193; Monique Verdin, photograph of Mississippi River water foam and Bonnet Carré Spillway, 2019.

BVLBANCHA

The Choctaw called the high ground one hundred river miles from the Gulf of Mexico Bvlbancha (a place of many tongues or languages) because it had been a site of trade for years before colonizers sailed into the territory. The Ishak called it Nun Ush (the big village). The sinking Crescent City is sandwiched between petrochemical facilities up- and downriver, and known more for Bourbon Street and plastic Mardi Gras beads than as the vulnerable Isle de Orleans, with a history of immigration, slavery, and white supremacy linked to the commodification of natural resources and international trade. At one time, one third of United States cotton passed through Bvlbancha. At present, crude oil, natural gas, coal, steel, soybeans, maize, chemical fertilizers, animal feed, wheat, and sugar are a few of the major products traded along the river.⁷

COLLAGE INCLUDES: USGS map from 1950 New Orleans; Du Pratz, Cotton on the Stalk and Alligator, illustrations in History of Louisiana, 175, 256; Monique Verdin, photograph of fishing boats in Bvlbancha’s Industrial Canal, 2009.

BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS

During the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson led a ragtag army of soldiers, black and white Creoles, enslaved men, Indigenous peoples, Kentucky militiamen, and others, with logistical support and supplies provided by the pirate Jean Lafitte, against the British in the Battle of New Orleans. After the Civil War, freedpeople founded Fazendeville, which became home to generations of African Americans until the National Park Service dismantled “the Village” in the 1960s to make way for the tourist attraction that New Orleans is today. The Chalmette Battlefield, which saw action during the War of 1812, is sandwiched between one of the largest sugar refineries in the Western Hemisphere and a petrochemical refinery, where a sweet-and-sour mix provides the community with few jobs and some of the worst air quality in the nation.

COLLAGE INCLUDES: USGS maps from 1951 Chalmette and 1967 Chalmette; Du Pratz, Cypress, illustration in History of Louisiana, 216; Monique Verdin, photograph of St. Bernard Parish Government Building oil refinery mural, 2006.

BAYOU TERRE AUX BOEUFS

South Louisiana is losing land at one of the fastest rates on the planet. The Bayou Terre aux Boeufs was once a distributary of the Mississippi, helping to build the St. Bernard lobe of the Delta as a channel providing freshwater and sediment to the wetlands. When colonizers came into the territory, they renamed the waterway after the bison (boeuf sauvage) found roaming the bayou banks and trembling prairies. Shortly after their arrival, the bison disappeared and levees were erected to control the river, cutting off the river’s natural tributaries, like the Bayou Terre aux Boeufs, and starving estuaries of the Mississippi’s life force. Coastal master planners will attempt to engineer restoration by reconnecting the river to the wetlands with new sediment diversion technology, but fishers fear what river waters saturated by nitrogen (responsible for coastal dead zones) and other upstream toxins will do to an already fragile ecosystem seeking a balance of fresh- and saltwaters as sea levels rise.

COLLAGE INCLUDES: USGS map from 2018 Lake Laurier; Du Pratz, Deer Hunt, illustration in History of Louisiana, 216; Monique Verdin, photograph of Plaquemines Parish coal terminal, 2009.

This essay appears in the Art & Vision Issue (vol. 26, no. 2: Summer 2020).

Monique Michelle Verdin is an interdisciplinary storyteller who documents the complex relationship between environment, culture, and climate in Southeast Louisiana. She is cowriter and producer of the documentary My Louisiana Love and her work is featured in a variety of environmentally inspired projects, including the multiplatform performance piece Cry You One, the essay collection Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, and the collaborative book project Return to Yakni Chitto: Houma Migrations. She is director of the Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange and a member of Another Gulf Is Possible Collaborative, working to envision just economies, vibrant communities, and sustainable ecologies.