Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Author:Arlie Russell Hochschild
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620972267
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2016-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

13

The Rebel: A Team Loyalist with a New Cause

Handmade signs bob and lurch above the heads of the sparse crowd: “Clean Water for Baton Rouge,” “Friends of Lake Peigneur,” “Clean Water for Clean Seafood,” “Oil Companies: Fix What You Broke.” A rotund musician dressed in loose purple pants, a striped shirt, and a white fedora sits with his washboard, waiting to start his three-person Cajun band. A protestor walks about dressed as a large brown pelican. Organizers had tried to rouse interest, but in a city of 230,000, on this sunny Saturday, only about 150 have shown up.

It was at this rally on the front steps of the state house in Baton Rouge that I’d first met Mike Schaff. He was dressed in a bright yellow T-shirt with “Bayou Corne Sinkhole” printed on the front. With a protective arm, he had brought forward a victim to the microphone to speak before the gathering, but it was he who spoke with tears in his voice. “Five hundred and eighty-two days this woman has been out of her home,” he told the crowd, and there were over “three hundred victims just like her.” Since the disaster, Mike had been transformed into an activist. He didn’t want others to go through the same ordeal. How, I wondered, did his new activism alter his feelings about the market-loving, government-hating Tea Party he so strongly embraced?

Mike had described himself as a “water baby. When I was about three, back when we lived on the Armelise Plantation, my daddy used to take me with him crawfishing. He’s set the traps in a nearby swamp. Then he’d put me in a plastic tub and pull it along in the water as he waded through the water, emptying the traps. I loved it.” Now as a sixty-four-year-old man, Mike had a modest home facing a canal issuing onto this glorious bayou that was the paradise he had yearned to retire to—a home on the water. Sitting alone at the kitchen table of his empty house a year and a half after the disaster, and some time after the rally, with cardboard boxes packed, the crack in his living room floor a reminder of recent earthquakes, a gas monitor in his garage, and a wary eye on feral cats, Mike had begun to write letters concerning key bills to members of the Louisiana legislature:

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