mapped many ‘‘chemical alleys’’ across the region, all of them, naturally,
along rivers. Southern workers feed the American (and the German and the
Japanese) addiction to monoculture and pest killing, and they and their
families and neighbors suffer consequences. There are, for instance, Buf-
falo Bayou in the neighborhood of Houston and Pasadena, Texas; a stretch
of the Mississippi around Memphis; sections of the James, in Virginia; and
the Kanawah in West Virginia, westward through Charleston past Institute
and the perfectly named town of Nitro.
Once I spent a scary night in Nitro. Exhausted from driving, I rashly de-
cided that it would be amusing to stop and see a place we had many times
sped past. About eleven that night, strolling outside our motel with the dog,
I was startled by flashing lights and alarm whistles across the river at the
Monsanto plant. Back inside the room, we were instructed by the motel
clerk to place dampened towels on the threshold beneath our door until
an all-clear were sounded. There may have been a leak, she said; alarms
occurred frequently. Earlier that same day we had driven past Hopewell,
heart of Virginia’s chemical alley and site of disaster in . In July that
year workers at the Life Science Products Company complained of alarm-
ing symptoms: unfocused vision, low sperm counts, tremors, and anxiety.
Tests found the company’s lethal product, a pesticide called Kepone (sold
exclusively by contract with the giant Allied Chemical Corporation), in their
blood. Then investigators discovered that not only had workers inadver-
tently inhaled or ingested Kepone, but there had been a large spill into
James River. Shellfish sixty-five miles downstream, almost to Hampton
Roads, were tainted with the pesticide, and the governor closed the east-
ern James to fishing. Kepone’s ‘‘afterlife’’ was estimated at a century, so it
endures yet and for some time more in the river’s mud.^25
The southern chemical alley ne plus ultra, though, is both banks of
the broad lower Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
From the late eighteenth through the nineteenth and into the twentieth
century, the banks blazed merrily each winter during holiday season, which
was also when sugar planters’ workers burned cane and fired their boilers.
Beginning about the time of World War I, however, old sugar plantations
became something else, and new fires something quite different. South-
eastern Louisiana is blessed with extraordinary natural resources: not only
lush alluvial land for farming but, farther down, petroleum and natural gas
and, much farther down, giant domes of salt where many millions of gal-
lons of oil may be stored and easily retrieved. Early in the twentieth century,