All over south Louisiana, and indeed across the country, people honor their dead. At historical sites, battlefields, military cemeteries and other hallowed grounds, Americans pay respects to those who sacrificed.
Enslaved people helped build this country, and we owe them a similar reverence and our collective respect.
We are lifelong residents of St. James Parish. Our families’ histories in Louisiana date back to before the Civil War. Yet, like so many others, our families’ stories have been lost, hidden, or swept aside.
One of Barbara’s ancestors, Harriet Jones, was born into slavery in this area. By 1874 – less than a decade after the end of the Civil War – she had already purchased 34 acres of land. That was really special for a woman who had been enslaved, and it has had a lasting impact on our family. In fact, that land has stayed in Barbara’s family, and some descendants still live there today.
Marie Richards, Gail’s great-great-grandmother, moved to the Monroe Plantation from a nearby reservation, her heritage being a mix of African, European, and Native American. She raised Gail’s grandmother, mother, and uncles on the plantation until it was decimated by the flood of 1912. The family then moved to Convent, where Gail’s great-great-grandmother worked as a midwife, providing urgent care and delivering babies of all races and backgrounds.
One of Barbara’s great-grandfathers, whose name has been lost to time, helped to found a Freetown in this area. At a time when Black Americans didn’t have the rights or security of full citizenship, this settlement was a home for free Blacks to raise families and build wealth. Even today, we still don’t know where this great-grandfather, who did so much for our community, was buried or laid to rest.
Time and again, we watch as the history of our people fades, leaving the memory of our ancestors forgotten in south Louisiana. The dead are left unmarked, their resting places lost to time.
But it’s something else entirely when our ancestors’ graves are deliberately destroyed, turned into sites for toxic oil, gas and chemical plants. These facilities wipe away our past and endanger our future generations, by poisoning the air and land, harming the living in ways that can’t be undone.
As a rural area, St. James Parish never had much in the way of planning. In fact, the parish council didn’t adopt a unified land use plan until 11 years ago. At that time, in 2014, two districts, Districts 4 and 5, were set aside for heavy industry. As even the most casual observer of American history could guess, a majority of the parish’s Black residents live in the two districts affected by the new designations. So, for decades — even before it became official policy — parish leaders steered heavy industry to these two areas.
In our neighborhoods, we face an inordinate and unforgivable concentration of toxic pollution. Stuck between a steel plant, fertilizer facilities, and pipelines, we confront polluted air, tainted water, and spoiled land every day. We have asthma and other respiratory illnesses, burning eyes, and skin conditions. Worst of all, we have astronomical rates of cancer: breast, brain, liver, pancreatic, and more. The rates are so high, our parish and the others up and down the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans have earned the macabre moniker of “Cancer Alley.”
But the sickness is not evenly spread across the region. Within Cancer Alley, wealth and land belong to one group of people, while the carcinogens for which we have become infamous are forced on another.
On this land where heavy industry is encroaching on Black neighborhoods and poisoning Black bodies, plantations once stood, up and down the river. And on these plantations, Black people were forced to toil without dignity or compensation, their bodies disposed of unceremoniously in unmarked graves.
One such graveyard is located in St. James Parish, on what was once the site of the Buena Vista Plantation, within a field that has since been purchased by Formosa Plastics. There, enslaved people were interred in the least productive scrap of land to minimize expenses for the family that exploited them as property.
Thanks to extensive genealogical research, the names of five of these people are, at long last, known.
Simon came to Winchester Plantation at the tender age of 10. Born into slavery, he was forced into a life of labor as a child, toiling in inhumane conditions. Not only did his work create wealth for his enslaver, but so too did his life itself. You see, he was used as collateral in one mortgage loan after another – like a car, a boat, or a piece of real estate – from the age of 11 to the time of his death at 25.
Betsy was only six when her enslavement began at the Buena Vista Plantation. She was also put to work for the Winchester family, and her body was used as collateral for loans starting at age 10. Even though she died when she was 18, her body continued to be used to acquire loans to keep the plantation afloat after her death.
As a four-year-old, Rachel was sold to the same plantation. She — along with her mother, Eve, then only 20 years old, her two-year-old brother James, and her one-year-old brother Manuel — were trafficked 1,000 miles from their first home in Virginia to this site.
In her short life, Rachel was mortgaged at least three times to support the plantation that held her family in bondage. Then, after she died at the age of nine, her lifeless body was used as collateral two more times.
Another child, Harry, was enslaved and mortgaged for the plantation, dying young like so many others at the age of 18.
A young man named Stanley was bought around the age of 26, dying just six years later in his prime at 32. He too was buried on this site. Even after his body was in the ground, it still appears on financial records as collateral for bank loans to the Buena Vista Plantation.
To this day, nothing marks the graves in which their remains were interred. There are no crosses, no headstones, no cemetery gates. Only old maps and the surveys of local archeologists recognize this sacred place.
Instead of remembering our history and honoring our dead, we’ve been forced to forget, because of industrial destruction.
Ever since oil was found here in the early 1950s, refineries and petrochemical plants have paved over the plantations that once dotted this landscape, and with them, the remains of our ancestors.
It’s time we stopped this injustice. Our homes are not dumping sites for toxic waste. And the graves of our ancestors are not construction sites for polluting industries.
We’re not asking for much. We’re asking simply that we stop being poisoned and that the lives and memories of our ancestors be honored. These are basic questions of human decency.
As for the ancestors buried at the former Buena Vista Plantation, our request is reasonable. We want what any family would want: to lay headstones and recognize the site for what it truly is: a cemetery.
We pray that the current owners of the site acknowledge what is right and, at long last, allow us to honor the five named people, and others unnamed, who lay at rest on those hallowed grounds.
Barbara Washington and Gail LeBoeuf are co-founders and co-directors of Inclusive Louisiana, a local organization dedicated to safeguarding the residents of St. James Parish and surrounding areas from the detrimental effects of industrial pollution.