Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial - Hardcover

Addison, Corban

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593320824 ISBN 13: 9780593320822

Verlag: Knopf, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

"Beautifully written, impeccably researched, and told with the air of suspense that few writers can handle, Wastelands is a story I wish I had written." —From the Foreword by John Grisham
 
The once idyllic coastal plain of North Carolina is home to a close-knit, rural community that for more than a generation has battled the polluting practices of large-scale farming taking place in its own backyard. After years of frustration and futility, an impassioned cadre of local residents, led by a team of intrepid and dedicated lawyers, filed a lawsuit against one of the world’s most powerful companies—and, miraculously, they won.

As vivid and fast-paced as a thriller, Wastelands takes us into the heart of a legal battle over the future of America’s farmland and into the lives of the people who found the courage to fight.

There is Elsie Herring, the most outspoken of the neighbors, who has endured racial slurs and the threat of a restraining order to tell the story of the waste raining down on her rooftop from the hog operation next door. There is Don Webb, a larger-than-life hog farmer turned grassroots crusader, and Rick Dove, a riverkeeper and erstwhile military judge who has pioneered the use of aerial photography to document the scale of the pollution. There is Woodell McGowan, a quiet man whose quest to redeem his family’s ancestral land encourages him to become a better neighbor, and Dr. Steve Wing, a groundbreaking epidemiologist whose work on the health effects of hog waste exposure translates the neighbors’ stories into the argot of science. And there is Tom Butler, an environmental savant and hog industry insider whose whistleblowing testimony electrifies the jury.

Fighting alongside them in the courtroom is Mona Lisa Wallace, who broke the gender barrier in her small southern town and built a storied legal career out of vanquishing corporate giants, and Mike Kaeske, whose trial skills are second to none.

With journalistic rigor and a novelist’s instinct for story, Corban Addison's Wastelands captures the inspiring struggle to bring a modern-day monopoly to its knees, to force a once-invincible corporation to change, and to preserve the rights—and restore the heritage—of a long-suffering community.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CORBAN ADDISON is the internationally best-selling author of four novels, A Walk Across the Sun, The Garden of Burning Sand, The Tears of Dark Water (winner of the inaugural Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize), and A Harvest of Thorns, all of which address some of today’s most pressing human rights issues. An attorney, activist, and world traveler, he lives with his wife and children in Virginia.

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Chapter 1

Homeplace

What is money when I have all the earth?

—­George Washington Carver

River Road, Wallace, North Carolina Summer 1958

On a five-­acre plot of sandy loam soil at the hem of a stand of pines lies a house built by hand a few years after the armistice that ended the First World War. The house is painted white, like a bridal veil, though in time the lady of the house, Beulah Stallings Herring, will paint it green and then pink, unlike any in the vicinity—­perhaps in all of Duplin County. Not the flamboyant pink of lipstick or roses, nor the translucent pink of skin, but the spring pink of a dogwood flower.

It is a modest dwelling, yet it was constructed to weather the years. Its siding is German Dutch and its bones are likely pine, though precise memory of the framing will soon perish with the builders. The focal point of the house is the porch. It encompasses the structure’s entire front face, including the door. To the visitor it signals a welcome, an invitation to sit and stay awhile, to breathe the sweet country air and trace the shape of the clouds.

Though it is solitary, the house is almost never alone. It is the birthplace of fifteen children, all born to Beulah Herring across a quarter of a century. Her first child was old enough to vote by the time the baby, Elsie, came along. Elsie is ten years old now, and though she is the youngest, she is a precocious child, strong-­willed and opinionated. One Sunday afternoon in July, she walks through the kitchen, the living room, and out the front door of the house as if she knows that one day it will be her own.

“Come on, Beef, let’s go,” she says, taking the hand of her brother Jesse and tugging him through the knot of adults sitting on the porch, enjoying the shade and the breeze.

Her father is in one of the rocking chairs, as is her Uncle Perl, and a neighbor from down the road. They are talking about the tobacco market and the harvest yet to come. They pay Elsie no mind. The afternoon meal is still a ways off, and they trust her to bring Jesse back in time.

Down the steps and out into the yard Elsie strolls, Jesse at her heels. While Jesse is older than Elsie by two years, he is smaller than most twelve-­year-­olds, his growth attenuated by Down syndrome. On account of their birth order and Jesse’s special needs, they have been close for as long as Elsie can remember. To her, he’s “Beef,” and to him, she’s “Elt.” Only one person in the world inspires greater affection in Jesse than Elsie does—­their mama.

At this moment, Beulah is straightening clothes on the line. Even at the age of fifty-­six, she is still a remarkably youthful woman, her gentle demeanor balanced by penetrating wisdom and unflappable resolve. She is Elsie’s favorite person, too. It is Beulah’s spirit more than any other that gives shape to their family. Her smile means Elsie is home.

“Where y’all headed?” she asks, as if already knowing the answer.

“Just going for a walk,” Elsie replies with a grin.

A couple of Elsie’s siblings are lounging on chairs in the yard beneath a sprawling tree whose canopy is wide enough to swallow the Carolina sun. Elsie catches the eye of her sixteen-­year-­old sister, Thelma, and tosses her a languid wave. Thelma’s twin brother, Delma, is beside her, sipping Coca-­Cola and chatting with a friend. After Thelma waves back, Elsie leads Jesse around to the side of the house and back toward the smokehouse and the gardens beyond it.

The land opens up before her in the hues of emerald and henna, as does the sky in celestial blue. It is her mother’s land, all eighty acres of it, just as it was her granddaddy’s until he passed on to his reward shortly before Beulah gave birth to her first baby. Elsie knows her granddaddy, Immanuel, through the stories her mother has told her. Those stories are Elsie’s inheritance, too, and Jesse’s and Thelma and Delma’s. Like the land itself, they are a memorial to their family’s place in the world.

Immanuel Stallings was born into slavery, though his father was always free. Marshall Stallings was not a Black man; he was white, a landowner of modest prominence in Duplin County. Immanuel had no memory of his real mother. When he was old enough to inquire of her, he heard that she had died. In his later years, however, he came to believe something darker—­that she had been sold by the Stallings family sometime before the Civil War upended the antebellum order and brought emancipation to the enslaved.

By virtue of the genetic lottery, Immanuel was pale enough to stand on the white side of the color line, but the laws of Jim Crow forbade him to claim any sort of standing. While Lincoln might have declared him free, his white neighbors would never consider him their equal. He was Black because his mother was Black. Such were the arbitrary diktats of apartheid.

He grew up in the care of his father’s sister, Emily Stallings Teachey. “Miss Emily,” as everyone in the family called her, was a kind and generous woman, who loved Immanuel like a son. It was Miss Emily who sold him the first fifteen-­acre tract of land in 1891—­the very land on which Beulah’s house now stands. And it was Miss Emily who, before she died six years later, sold him three more tracts of land, bringing his total acreage to eighty. She wanted to give him an anchor in the world, a piece of God’s dirt that no one could take away. She wanted that not only for Immanuel but for his children, and his children’s children.

For Beulah. For Elsie.

Elsie’s feet are bare and her eyes are bright as she skips across the long-­bladed grass, her skin prickling with sweat. She hears the squeak of hogs in the family’s pen some distance away, and the sound of Jesse huffing behind her as they pass the peach and apple trees and the chicken coop, with its clucking hens. Her brother doesn’t need to ask where they are going, for on a Sunday afternoon in July, with the house too warm for comfort and all the chairs on the porch and in the yard occupied by their elders, there is only one place they would rather be.

The grape arbor.

There are two vines in the garden plot, striking both in their similarity and difference: One produces white grapes and the other black. There are patches of shade beneath the vines, offering relief from the heat. Jesse plops himself down, his upper body rocking slightly on the hinge of his hips, like a metronome in motion. Elsie, meanwhile, examines the fruit. Some of the clusters are still ripening, but others are plump with juice.

She selects a large bunch of black grapes and scampers back to Jesse, holding it out to him. Then she picks a cluster of white grapes and sits down beside him. Her brother is already chewing, murmuring with pleasure, his round face illumined as if by an internal lamp. She removes a grape from its stem and places it between her teeth, smiling instinctively at the sudden burst of flavor. She looks at Jesse and sees his own smile blossom, even as droplets of juice dribble down his chin. She giggles at him and wipes away the excess before it drips onto his clothes. Then she gives him a grape from her own stem, and he returns the favor. The black grape isn’t quite as sweet to Elsie’s tongue, but its flavor is more complex.

As soon as Elsie polishes off her last grape, she begins to hunt for more, prizing apart the leaves to find the hidden gems. After picking several bunches, enough to share with the family, she returns to her brother’s side. She lies back against the grass and stares at the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593320824
• ISBN 13: 9780593320822
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 464
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland