The Reckonings Read online

“IT’S TIME,” shouts the woman in the white skirt, and the crowd falls into line: youngish hippies, tribal elders, faith leaders, musicians, actors, artists, a group of Vietnamese fishermen, community organizers, my students and me. We’re gathered in a parking lot along Terry Hershey Park on Memorial Drive, in the Energy Corridor, less than a mile from the headquarters of BP America and about four miles from my house. We each have our duties. Those in the front hold signs with slogans like “The Gulf can’t wait any longer for restoration,” and “ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE STARTS @ THE SOURCE.” A couple of my students lift to their shoulders a model of a shrimp boat, in which there is a petition with more than a hundred thousand signatures demanding restoration for the Gulf Coast. I’m standing near the end of the line, holding a sign that says, simply, “JUSTICE.”

  “It’s time for BP to pay!” shouts the woman in the white skirt as we begin marching out of the parking lot. Another woman jogs toward our line, waving to a group of people she knows. I recognize her from somewhere. She’s wearing a white shirt, white pants, a loose blue cardigan buttoned at the waist. She doesn’t see me; she smiles and reaches out to embrace a woman who approaches her. They lock arms in the line. We march past mothers who stop pulling jogging strollers from their shiny Chevy Tahoes; past children who play on the playground while their nannies eye us suspiciously; past a line of police officers with their hands resting on their black belts. “Someone has to pay!” the woman in the white skirt shouts as SUVs pass us on the road. The passengers wave and smile as if this is a parade and we are passing out candy.

  “I’ve seen children who are sick,” one activist tells the crowd when we reach BP’s headquarters. “In the early days we had rashes and respiratory problems, but now it’s moved into cancers, very aggressive cancers. In parts of where I live in Louisiana, just south of us in Plaquemines Parish, they say they’re burying about a person a week.”

  We’re standing on the sidewalk, in the sun, because the cops won’t let us approach the building. The cops stand on the grass, in the shade, between us and the BP compound, which spans several buildings and sits on ten acres of land. Above the main building—I kid you not—actual vultures circle overhead.

  The translator for the Vietnamese fishermen raises her voice above the others: “They don’t have to answer to us?” she shouts with her hand raised, her finger pointing at the building. “They don’t have to follow our laws?” From windows in the floors above us, two white men in bright polo shirts and pleated khakis film our protest with their cell phones. They’re smiling and laughing, as if her accusations, her voice, her presence here, are a kind of joke. They wave and point and bend over laughing. The translator steps back into the crowd, shaking, spitting, too angry to cry, as we all now are.

  Several of our group try to approach the building to deliver the petition. The cops stop them, turn them around, point them back toward the crowd. One of the fishermen steps up and demands firmly, “Talk to us.” The cops look past him too. The tribal elders join in: “Talk to us. Please, talk to us.” The youngish hippies join in, and the faith leaders, and the musicians, and my students. I see the woman from the parking lot, the one I recognize, joining in as well, but I still can’t remember how I know her. “TALK TO US! TALK TO US!” She and the crowd shout at the cops, at the building, at the two men in bright polos and pleated khaki pants filming us from the windows above.

  I raise my voice too, though in truth, I know the executives aren’t in the building. They’re miles away in downtown Houston at the CERAWeek IHS Energy Conference, billed as “the premier annual international conference for energy industry leaders, experts, government officials and policymakers, leaders from the technology, financial, and industrial communities—and energy technology innovators.” This year’s theme is “Turning Point: Energy’s New World.” I imagine them schmoozing and congratulating one another and eating tiny croissants.

  A woman comes out of the building to film us on her pink iPad. She’s wearing a white pressed blouse tucked into a black pencil skirt, a pair of shiny black heels. She stays behind the row of cops. People drive by in black SUVs. The crowd continues shouting: “TALK TO US! TALK TO US!” The shouting grows louder and louder, though the cops continue standing with their hands on their belts. The musicians join our voices with their drumming; the drumming gives way to music, to singing, which is at once full of rage and something that leads us, inexplicably, to dance, to turn to shake our asses at the cops, at the woman with the pink iPad, who watches the protest unfolding right in front of her on the tiny screen.

  The vultures are still circling overhead when we finally dance away from BP headquarters, down the street, and back to the park where we’ve all left our cars. The woman in the white skirt passes out plastic bottles of water and snacks, hugs and high-fives, and invites us all to a crawfish boil at her nonprofit’s headquarters across town in the Second Ward, the neighborhood that runs adjacent to the Houston Ship Channel.

  My students and I drive away from the Energy Corridor in two cars, watching as sprawling subdivisions give way to townhouses packed six to a lot, to historically protected neighborhoods where all the houses have picture windows and wide porches, and then to taquerias and washaterias, leaning buildings where flowers sprout from planters on the stoop. Sidewalks buckle and crack, when there are sidewalks at all. One student in the car with me—the Latina, “first generation”—points out landmarks from her childhood. She grew up here, she tells us. She still lives just down the street.

  We enter the nonprofit headquarters—a maze of protest signs, brochures, books, staple guns, and hammers piled on every surface. An elder leans forward in her chair, a pile of sewing in her lap. She motions us to the back of the building without looking up. We walk through a door and out to the back patio, where we discover the entire crowd of protesters sitting cross-legged on the floor, midway through a Mayan prayer ceremony.

  My students look at one another, at me, as if to say, Really?

  I shrug my shoulders in response. Sure. Really.

  We sit on a table outside the circle and lean back against the cool brick of the building. The Mayan elder tends a small fire while speaking to the group through her interpreter. Those in the circle around her place small bundles of herbs and grass into the flames. “It is a trade,” the interpreter says. “You offer before you ask in return.” The musicians and artists are there, and each places a bundle into the fire. One says she offers art in exchange for healing. Another offers her voice in exchange for strength. The fire goes out very suddenly, and the Mayan elder shakes her head. Her interpreter says, “You give too little and ask for too much.”

  When the fire is burning again, the woman in the white skirt puts a bundle into it and begins to speak. She is tired, she says, her voice low and full of grief. It’s uncomfortable to see her like this, after all of her shouting, her finger pointing, her bluster and bravado. “So much effort,” she says, “and so little progress.” All these years and the Gulf is still devastated: the dead marsh grasses, the dead baby dolphins, the dead fish, and dead fishermen, the children who are dead or dying. One of the artists wraps an arm around her shoulder, whispers encouragement in her ear. The Mayan elder stirs the fire. She’s humming, her song and the smoke billowing upward together in a single plume. The woman in the white skirt leans her head back. “Someone has to pay,” she says, long and low—to the roof, to the smoke, maybe to us all.

  * * *

  I look around the circle: artists and organizers and youngish hippies all sit, heads bowed, cross-legged on the floor. My students watch carefully, their eyebrows furrowed, their faces so earnest and eager and intent. The student who reminds me of Jesus has tears in his eyes. The one with blue hair—the queer femme from New Orleans, my favorite student ever—has one hand to her mouth, the other hand clutches her elbow.

  And then it hits me: they are already paying for this, and maybe have been all along. At the end of the day, they’ll come home to this neighborhood. They
will settle into bed breathing air that may one day kill them. And the fishermen and tribal elders sitting around the circle with their heads against their knees will return to their homes along the Gulf Coast. Or maybe their homes are already gone. I’ll drive across town, to where I’ve bought a house in a suburban neighborhood—probably with money I didn’t even fairly earn—where I grow vegetables in my garden and my children play in the green manicured yard. At night I go to sleep dreaming the American Dream. My students are paying for every benefit I reap. And the injustice of that is staring me right in the face.

  * * *

  Just as I’m about to leave, I notice that the woman I recognize from the protest is here too. She sits cross-legged on the floor, like the others, a bundle in her lap. “I’d give it all back,” she begins. Suddenly I know her: a student of mine from years ago, from a community writing workshop I once taught. On the first day of class, she introduced herself as a geologist working in the oil industry. She submitted her writing to the group only once: three short little essays, one about yoga, one about childhood abuse, and one about despair. “We do so little,” she wrote. She had been watching the news and saw only disaster. She stood in the oil fields and felt the planet crumbling under her feet. She started riding her bike to work and eating healthy, but she knew it wasn’t enough. She ended her last essay: “Someone should do something.”

  By the end of that workshop, she had quit her job, talked of selling all of her possessions. She said she didn’t exactly have a plan but that she was thinking of walking across the country, maybe riding her bike. Whatever path she followed, it led her back here, years later: to this protest, to this fire, to the fishermen and the tribal elders, to the woman in the white skirt, sitting across from her. “I want nothing in return,” she says, tears streaming down her cheeks. When she was in my workshop all those years ago, I thought she was having a nervous breakdown, but now I see it clearly: more than anything else, she wants to be redeemed.

  * * *

  I motion to my students that it’s time to leave. We pick our way around the fire and walk toward the alley behind the building. The woman in the white dress follows us out, her eyes puffy and red, carrying an armload of foil-wrapped tacos. She puts one into my hands, hugs me, though I almost can’t take it. She smiles, holds it out, insists. “You can’t start a revolution on an empty stomach,” she says.

  My students and I leave the alleyway, the street, the neighborhood. We keep walking: now two miles, now three. We pass under the interstate. We pass buses with no passengers. We pass through a park where a hundred of Houston’s homeless veterans used to sleep. They’ve all been evacuated. A sign posted at the entrance reads: “NO TRESPASSING / PARK UNDER RENOVATION / UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.” There are no construction crews; the only evidence of renovation is that the park is now no longer safe for people to sleep. We pass the county jail, where prisoners play basketball in tiny outdoor pens, where mothers with their children wait outside the back door for their loved ones to be released. We pass under a highway, leaving the Second Ward, and enter a manicured park, the renovation of which was paid for by a large donation from the Kinder Foundation, the charitable arm of Kinder Morgan, that company whose pipelines wrap the world—and now we can’t even enjoy the park because we’ve seen how much it costs. A white couple pushes a jogging stroller while their white baby fiddles with the white blanket on her lap. The path before them is straight and safe and flat.

  At the end of the day, hours later, my students and I pile around a picnic table at an outdoor bar—“Ice Houses,” we call them in Houston. We eat tacos and drink cold beer. Some of the artists and the musicians from the protest meet us here, and my students tell them about their perspective on the day. The protest, the prayer ceremony, the walk from there to here. Such a simple activity, they say, placing one foot in front of the other. They plan the work they’ll undertake now: a photo essay, a performance, a guerrilla installation. I won’t lie: sending them on this path offers me some small measure of relief.

  * * *

  In July 2015, three months after the fifth anniversary of the spill, BP agreed to pay a record $18.7 billion in fines over eighteen years to settle its federal legal disputes, bringing BP’s portion of the cost of the spill up to $54 billion, including what it has paid so far in economic claims, its disaster response efforts, fines to various government entities, and cleanup and restoration programs. Of that, $4 billion will go to settle a federal criminal probe and effectively nullifies all criminal charges against them. “They ought to feel that,” says Keith Jones, father of one of the men killed in the explosion that night on the Deepwater Horizon. “They ought to feel something,” he says. “Sometimes somebody ought to feel something other than greed.”

  The question of whether it feels anything is a good one, because its actions show no remorse. BP, along with Shell and several of the super-major oil and gas companies, continues to purchase lease rights in ever more delicate ecosystems. For most people, it takes a traumatic event to change their behavior, but it seems the oil spill changed nothing. People still say it’s the worst ecological disaster in history, as if that means it was an isolated incident. Experts estimate that after eighty-seven days, roughly 210 million gallons of crude was spilled into the Gulf. Devastating as this was for delicate Gulf ecosystems, this crude would have been refined into enough gasoline to cover about a fourth of what we Americans consume in our automobiles in a single day. And gasoline doesn’t burn perfectly. For each gallon of gasoline we burn in our cars, we release five to six pounds of carbon into the air—as much as 2 billion pounds in a single year. If carbon were a solid, this would be like throwing a bag of flour out the window for every gallon of gas each of us consumes. But carbon isn’t a solid; it’s an invisible gas, and if we don’t see it, we can pretend it just isn’t there.

  Now we hear news that the polar ice caps are melting, that Exxon knew that climate change was coming and covered it up. Scientists tell us that carbon levels in the atmosphere have taken us beyond the point of no return.

  * * *

  “Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate,” Robin Wall Kimmerer writes. I cannot count all the gifts I have received from the Earth and from others, but I know that money would be a poor expression of all the things I owe in return. I want BP to pay for the oil they’ve spilled in the ocean. I want to punish the bonuses and profits, the laughing midlevel executives in their bright polo shirts, the woman in the pointy black heels filming us on her stupid pink iPad. I want them to see the consequences, large and small, of their apathy and greed. But the crime is not only theirs, the harm isn’t even only the damage we can see. There is no sum of money the rest of us could exchange for a clear conscience for our part in how we got to this moment. Guilt itself is useless and is worth nothing.

  But the relationships we have and make with one another, the obligation we might recognize that we have toward the Earth—that is a gift that could redeem us. To give at least as much as we take, to repair all that we’ve harmed.

  Even now, the present rushes across continents and stirs our future like a stone.

  AGAINST WHITENESS

  Years ago when I was in graduate school, I took a workshop led by a poet I admired. The class was all women, only three of whom, including the poet I admired, were women of color. One day a fellow student asked the group about a book of poems recently published by one of the tenured faculty members in the program, a white man. She wondered how the rest of us read the poems, some of which seemed to my classmate “a little racist.”

  The following week we discussed the poems, which seemed to all of us “yes, definitely racist,” and the week after that, the white tenured poet visited our class. He began with macho bravura: “Hey there, ladies—so I hear you have some questions about my book?” And my classmate began, “Yes, well, we were hoping you could clarify how race is working in these particul
ar poems . . .” And then the tenured poet began shouting and did not stop until he left the room.

  At one point he told one of my classmates to “SHUT UP,” and at another, he told the poet I admired, a woman who was his junior colleague, that it didn’t matter if the poems made her uncomfortable because the poems were not written for her. “They were written for white people,” he said.

  I watched the whole exchange and said nothing, though I was floored, flabbergasted—even though I knew what I was witnessing was deeply and profoundly wrong. I said nothing because I was afraid of being yelled at by the white tenured poet, and also because I had never known what to say when watching a man explode under the pressure of his own narcissism, not even when he is attacking the people I love.

  I said nothing. Eventually he left. In the silence that followed him out the door, my friend, one of the three women of color in the room, called me out. “Where the fuck were you?” she asked. I didn’t have an answer to that question, and none of the other white women in the room had an answer either. It was wrong to say nothing, and I knew it. We all knew it.

  * * *

  I have thought of that moment often over the years: the choice I made to say nothing, how it was a choice I had spent a whole lifetime not fully realizing I was making. A year earlier, I had sat in a different class with the poet I admired. We had all read Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” and were discussing it in class. Toward the end of the essay, Lorde asks, “If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color?”