Chemical Necromancy: Plantations and Petrochemical Refining in Cancer Alley

Abstract

A tangle of weeds and a dilapidated fence spans a dirt road outside of Baton Rouge, Louisiana—a weather-beaten cotton plantation, fallen to ruin (fig. 1). The 1909 photograph was printed in a 1919 edition of The Lamp: A Magazine Published in the Interest of the Employees of the Standard Oil Company, the corporate publication of Standard Oil of New Jersey. Below it, a photograph from a decade later shows the derelict agricultural site transformed. An oil refinery towers over the fields, symbolizing industrial modernity. The paired images visualize a larger historical transformation. At the turn of the twentieth century, oil, gas, and petrochemical companies consolidated along the lower Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, acquiring cotton and sugar plantations and converting the land into refineries. Standard Oil built the first refinery in the region in 1907, and over 150 factories and refineries opened in the ensuing century. The highly efficient industrial facilities embodied progress, a transition narrated in Standard Oil's paired photographs from 1909 and 1918. The article, titled “The Transformation of the ‘New South’ under the Magic Wand of Industry,” positions the refinery as the heir of the now obsolete cotton empire. The authors explicate the historical-racial dimensions of the plantation-to-refinery trajectory by framing the refinery as an agent of modernization and reconciliation, uniting southern natural resources with northern industrial power and expertise.¹

Standard Oil draws a historical-spatial connection between cotton, oil, and petrochemicals, highlighting how these extractive histories layer upon this particular landscape. The visual and narrative framing by Standard Oil prompts two questions: What were the circumstances leading to this transition, and what motivated it? Furthermore, why did corporate communication accentuate the connections between petrochemical refining and cotton plantations? On the one hand, this continuity narrated by Standard Oil sets up a linear cotton-to-chemical trajectory that revivifies the social relations of the antebellum period while positioning the chemicals sector as the heir to the plantation economy. On the other hand, the entanglement of these two modes of production also introduces a set of contradictions and ambivalences that undermine a teleological progress narrative. Accordingly, this article takes an elliptical historical view that centers the spatial and material entanglements between antebellum plantation agriculture and free-market oil and gas industries.

As cotton's dominance as a commodity crop faded, US oil and gas exploration consolidated below the Mason-Dixon Line. Today, half of the US's oil refineries are located along the Gulf Coast, supplying 30 percent of the country's oil and gas supply.² The South also became a fulcrum for petrochemical refining, chemical compounds produced through the fractional distillation of crude oil or natural gas that serve as the building blocks for myriad products, such as fertilizers and plastics. In part, the motivation to move South stemmed from environmental factors. Louisiana supplied the raw materials needed for large-scale production: oil, gas, brine, sulfur, and salt domes sat alongside fresh water while access to waterways facilitated shipping. Additionally, historical factors also made Louisiana a logical place to refine oil and gas: the already entrenched racial logic of spatial exclusions made it an ideal site for large-scale refining. Oil fields and shipping routes attracted oil and gas companies, but cheap land, a nonunion labor force, and a permissive regulatory environment were added benefits. Oil and gas industries capitalized on historical disparities in the South, reinforcing the geographies of environmental racism. Today, the region between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is known as Cancer Alley due to high rates of industrial pollution. The ongoing catastrophes of toxicity intertwine past and present histories of extracting natural resources and labor under racial capitalism.

To bring into view the intersecting histories and spatial convergence of cotton and petrochemicals, I turn to corporate communications between World War I and World War II, which frequently emphasized how cotton became enfolded into the burgeoning chemicals industry—spatially and as a raw material—narrating the chemicals sector as the successor to the plantation economy. I argue that corporations used cotton to domesticate petrochemicals within preexisting frameworks of racial capitalism and legible histories of resource extraction.

In the interwar period, corporations faced challenges creating a consumer market for petrochemical products. Accused of influencing the United States to enter World War I to create a market for their explosives products, chemical companies came under fire as “merchants of death.”³ The artificial nature of their products compounded distrust toward the industry. Petrochemical refining opened up the world of synthetics, untethering commodity production from organic materials. As Roland Barthes summarized, plastic, the synthetic par excellence, “embodies none of the genuine produce of the mineral world.”⁴ Fundamentally—and unapologetically—artificial, plastics and other synthetic products were profoundly ambivalent, offering the utopian possibilities of pure artificiality and the dystopian nightmare of the same. Reflecting the uneasy magic that refining oil and gas unlocked, Fortune celebrated the petrochemical industry as “chemical necromancy.”⁵ Necromancy, the occult practice of conjuring or reanimating the dead, is, in a sense, descriptive in this context. Extracting and refining hydrocarbons—reviving ancient life—provided energy and enabled a magical new world of synthetics, transcending nature's limits. Should this sound familiar, recall that Karl Marx used necromancy as a metaphor for the commodity, alluding to the reanimation of dead labor in production—though Fortune's oleaginous twist is slightly more elemental.⁶ Marx also deployed necromancy in the context of history: as both symbolic weight and material residue, the past intermingles with the present. Reading the plantation-to-refinery narrative through Marx's dual evocation of necromancy, this article first turns to history, considering the spatial layering of the cotton plantation and refinery through a case study of Standard Oil, before turning to the commodity, examining the material ties between cotton and petrochemicals narrated by the chemicals giant Monsanto. The resuscitation of the racial capitalism of the antebellum plantation system echoes into the present through the racial and class exclusions that shape environmental sacrifice zones.⁷

■

Another set of paired images from The Lamp takes us to the inception of the refinery. In “The Party Surveying the Cotton Plantation Afterwards Purchased as a Site for the Baton Rouge Refinery,” a parked car sits in front of neat rows of cotton stretching to the horizon. It was printed alongside “Breaking Ground for the Baton Rouge Refinery” (fig. 2). Here the ground is torn up, and the cotton plants are gone. An aesthetics of surveying characterizes both images. In the second image, three white men stand upright, supervising two Black men who are literally breaking the ground. The photograph is shot low from the ground, and the surveyors, positioned above the horizon line, become spectral traces who fade into the sky. The bent backs of the manual laborers align with the horizon line, and they merge into the earth, subsumed by the very land they are working.

We can read these images through what Katherine McKittrick calls “plantation futures”: a conceptual framework that integrates geography and time through an emphasis on spatial continuity that tracks the afterlives of the social relations of the plantation—in this instance, to the toxic geographies of industrial refining. ⁸ The region's development into an environmental sacrifice zone is rooted in land-use patterns that emerged in the eighteenth century. Max Liboiron (Red River Métis/Michif and settler) shows that the environmental damage of industrial pollution is a problem of settler-colonial land relations, situating toxicity within histories of land use, including plantation capitalism and industrialization.⁹ In Louisiana, a series of court decisions in the first decades of the eighteenth century limited the sovereignty of the people Indigenous to the region, the Houma and Chahta Yakni (Choctaw), culminating in The Treaty of Choctaw Removal of 1828. Simultaneously, planters consolidated land along the Mississippi River for sugar and cotton plantations, ensuring that plantations had access to the river and flatter agricultural land. Declining soil fertility was a major driver of territorial expansion in the lower Mississippi. Monoculture farming rapidly depleted soil quality, prompting slavers to violently seize land to meet the needs of plantation agriculture, locking in a continuous process of expropriating, expanding, depleting, and abandoning land.¹⁰ Here, we see the intertwined histories of Indigenous displacement and the plantation, showing how settler colonialism works in concert with systems of racial capitalism to create environmental sacrifice zones.¹¹

After the Civil War, the Freedmen's Bureau awarded small land grants to formerly enslaved workers. Larger plots of land remained in the hands of white planters. As planters struggled financially to adapt to a paid workforce, many of them sold the land to northern and western industries who moved South during Reconstruction and the early years of Jim Crow. Land apportionment during Reconstruction thus resulted in the close coexistence of majority-Black communities with petrochemical plants.¹² This unintended consequence of land redistribution was then deliberately reinforced. The Jim Crow–era state legislature facilitated the siting of petrochemical corporations in Black neighborhoods to avoid political backlash for the legislators’ greenlighting development, as the constitution of 1898 disenfranchised most Black voters due to property and literacy qualifications. The districts were also impoverished: in 1950, St. John's Parish had an average annual income of less than one-fifth of the cutoff for the poverty line.¹³ As Walter Willard shows, “Put In Black's Back Yard” (PIBBY) became a political solution to the “Not In My Back Yard” (NIMBY) backlash to industry.¹⁴ The petrochemical revolution rested on state and corporate collusion in siting refining operations in economically disadvantaged, majority-Black neighborhoods. Communities exposed to pollution are primarily Black, Hispanic, or Indigenous, and low-income—the historical forces of exclusion structure environmental catastrophe.¹⁵

At this point, returning to the initial paired photographs (fig. 1) is helpful to consider how they narrate the spatial continuity between the plantation and the refinery.¹⁶ The visual formula of before and after embodies a historical imagination that enacts history as progress: the old gives way to the new. Yet the images do not visualize steady advancement. Instead, the interstice between the images erases the processes of historical change, eliding the violence that accompanies such transformations.¹⁷ The author notes that the speed at which the refinery grew is more remarkable because it was “without the wreckage of previous construction.”¹⁸ Standard Oil promises growth without growing pains: (economic) progress that moves so quickly that its social disruptions are contained. Historical change appears seamless, even magical.

Standard Oil makes this explicit, crediting progress in the region to industry's “magic wand,” which saw the oil and gas industry breathing new life into the “unprofitable cotton fields.”¹⁹ Here, we can recall Marx's description of commodity fetishism as “magic and necromancy.” Indeed, Marx used necromancy as a metaphor for the commodity and history. For Marx, a “world-historical necromancy” premised on the symbolic resurrection of the dead was central to the construction of history, for “it is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterparts of older, and even defunct, forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness.”²⁰ New systems carry traces of the past. The crumbling edifices of past social figurations are transfigured into new historical forms. These hauntings complicate notions of linear progress. History is, of course, not merely symbolic. As Marx wrote elsewhere, “Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry.”²¹ Symbolically and materially, the past echoes into the present.

The before-and-after setup shows that the oil and gas industry has spatially supplanted the plantation. Yet Standard Oil softens this progress trajectory by playing with tropes of revivification. For instance, in another article in the same issue of The Lamp, director of Standard Oil Company of Louisiana C. K. Clarke, draws out the romantic notions of the old South to celebrate a freshly laid pipeline. Clarke situates the pipeline's progress within prominent locations in literature about the South: the pipeline cuts through the bayou's dense foliage along the Atchafalaya River, where Henry Longfellow's Evangeline journeys, and passes the “tumbled ruins of the plantation” that inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).²² Clarke reflects that Uncle Tom would have been able to see the pipeline from his cabin had the march of progress not overtaken the old ways of the South. This evocation of the past thus cuts two ways. On the one hand, we see industry reworking the symbols of past epochs to justify development in the present, glorifying new modes of production by resurrecting the dead. On the other hand, there is a quiet suggestion that industry is a force for betterment. Tempering this message is another photograph of Black workers cementing the pipeline (fig. 3). Although the majority of workers in both refinery and infrastructure projects were white, during the pipeline construction, the company imported skilled laborers, only hiring unskilled local workers.²³ The illustration reassures viewers that Black manual labor remains central to southern industry: that economic progress would retrench rather than revolutionize the South's racial hierarchy. Improvement is implicit but equivocal—industry modernizing the South's backward ways by turning to the past.

The ambivalent messaging reveals that rather than forward-looking, the chemicals industry is merely profit-seeking, a temporal orientation that has no particular allegiance to anything but economic growth. Industry is grounded in a labor system divided along racial lines, a system validated by, and reinforcing, the same white supremacist narratives that naturalized the plantation. Vestiges of the antebellum system continued to structure labor in the region. For instance, when the Mexican Petroleum Company bought the Destrehan Plantation in 1914, they turned the manor house into offices and accommodations for management. The travel writer Harnett T. Kane reflected on the transformations to Destrehan, writing, “Destrehan has been saved, though all about it is changed. Petroleum has supplanted sugar as the source of its upkeep; the land belongs to an oil company, and tankers spot the fields on which cane once sprouted. The slave quarters have been replaced by trim buildings for the workmen; the main residence is converted into a clubhouse for their use.”²⁴ The slave quarters are torn down, but the main house was kept, albeit now seemingly democratized as a “clubhouse” for the workers. However, as noted above, refinery workers were majority white and male. Racialized workers worked as laborers: in 1939, 4 percent identified as African American and 2 percent as Mexican or Hispanic.²⁵ The democratization is thus limited to the white laborers who are symbolically brought into the master class, denying their solidarity with the Black worker. The plantation and the histories of racial extraction it symbolizes iterate into an increasingly synthetic world. Such framing unsettles a teleological history latent in Standard Oil's narrative that charts a progression from the plantation economy to the industrial modernity of the chemicals industry. Instead of history as progress, we are left with history as necromancy—a history of revived forms characterized by processes that are at once old and new, eluding neat periodization. In Cancer Alley, the historical sedimentation that shapes the ongoing catastrophes of environmental racism comes into view.

■

Standard Oil's evocation of the plantation quietly suggests that industrial development would modernize the region while reinforcing the existing racial hierarchy in the South. Other corporations adopted a similar communication strategy. Into the 1950s, American companies selling chemical products cited a visual lineage of racialized agricultural labor featuring cheerful Black laborers toiling in the fields.²⁶ To further explicate this corporate communication trope, we can turn to Monsanto. Consider a 1939 ad illustrated with a family picking cotton. Three Black children play amid the cotton (fig. 4). Bracketing this tableau are, presumably, the children's parents: the mother, her grip steady on a sack, and the father bearing a brimming basket of cotton bolls. The bucolic scene reframes a site of labor-intensive, multigenerational work as a carefree interlude of leisure. The illustration by Felix Schmidt draws from an imaginary stretching back to the antebellum South that tied racialized labor to cotton.²⁷

While Standard Oil showcased how land used for cotton cultivation became the grounds for petrochemical industries, Monsanto underscored another crucial link: cotton was feedstock for the chemicals industry. The ad is titled “It's Plastics Picking Time Down South.”²⁸ The jarring construction of “plastic picking” is explained in the ad copy, which asks rhetorically, “Plastics from cotton?” Indeed, industry will transform the snow-white cotton into cloth or paper, or, crucially, “put it to a thousand uses as plastics.” In industrial furnaces, pulped cotton nitrated in acid and mixed with camphor became celluloid, formed into blocks using heat and pressure, and then sliced into thin strips. Once softened by heat, celluloid was molded into cheap consumer goods. Like oil, cotton was an essential raw material for the chemicals industry.

By situating plastics within the material and extractive histories of cotton, the ad anticipates anxieties about the artificiality of plastics. While the plastics industry grew tenfold between 1921 and 1939, plastics were not widely integrated into consumer culture.²⁹ As we have seen, corporations positioned petrochemicals both as reassuringly continuous with earlier forms of social relations and as a great leap forward. Similarly, industry toggled between presenting plastics as legible products rooted in natural materials like oil and cotton, and as intoxicatingly new.³⁰ The transformation of organic materials into something startlingly new and, perhaps, unsettling evokes the dark magic of necromancy. To defuse the trepidation this transgressive novelty might create in consumers, Monsanto situates plastics as emerging from “Nature's Crops,” rooting their pitch in legible histories of resource extraction.³¹ If the synthetic nature of plastic symbolizes threatening modernity, the ad carefully contains synthetics within a “traditional” framework of agricultural labor and white supremacy.

Monsanto's “drift of white below the Mason-Dixon Line” reframes plastics as a legible, even nostalgic story of the American South, amplified by the family adorned in red, white, and blue. The smallest child raises her hand aloft, an exuberant gesture that evokes the Statue of Liberty, elevating cotton as a symbol of freedom. The advertisement promises continuity rather than a rupture: cotton, an environmentally destructive and labor-intensive commodity marked by racial exclusion, remains central to the futuristic world of the chemicals industry. The evocation of sharecropping in the Jim Crow South domesticates the chemicals industry within earlier histories of American racial capitalism and resource extraction. Most workers on post-emancipation plantations were the formerly enslaved and their descendants who were tied to the land through exploitative contracts, debt peonage, and sharecropping.

The ad anchors the cotton plantation as “past” while suggesting that this history haunts the present. The workers’ clothing reinforces the pastness of the scene. The overalls and straw hats signify the rural, agrarian South, rooting the image in a lineage of rural poverty and inchoate development. The woman wears a patterned kerchief with gold earrings, a standard mode of depicting Black women since the early nineteenth century. The clothing suggests the plantation is somehow anachronistic yet indispensable: a necessity seemingly outside of time and history. Cotton farming is incompatible with, and yet essential to, a new synthetic modernity. A blank blue sky devoid of any sense of weather and time of day reinforces the out-of-timeliness of the scene. Spatially, the field stretches to the horizon, reinforcing a sense of intensification and repetition. In the background, six additional laborers toil, their forms bent in concerted effort and their faces obscured. The visual rhythm of the scene is one of reiteration. The piles of picked cotton give way to seemingly endless lines of crops. The cyclical nature of plant growth suggests an ongoing and endlessly high-yielding commodity. There is a further implication of propagation in the inclusion of children who, as the ad insinuates, will continue to labor in future generations.

The children playing in the fields signify this future and intimate to the viewer that this environment is safely pastoral, an agricultural playground. In reality, however, cotton is the most pesticide-intensive commodity crop. In this period, cotton fields were doused in arsenic and other chemicals.³² The children are being exposed to toxic chemicals as they work and play. Sharecroppers spread highly toxic arsenical insecticides by hand, a practice that by the 1930s was supplemented with aerial crop dusting. Although corporations claimed insecticides poisonous for insects and wildlife were safe for people, as early as the 1890s there was considerable public concern about arsenic: sharecroppers suffered high levels of exposure to toxic chemicals that coated the surface of their bodies and entered their lungs, causing acute side effects including vomiting, gastrointestinal pain, and toxic psychosis, while long-term exposure caused cancers.³³ Ultimately, cotton became one of the most chemical-reliant plants in history.³⁴

As historians Brian Williams and Jayson Maurice Porter argue, the chemicalization of cotton was “enabled, animated, and sustained by anti-Blackness.”³⁵ Maintaining the plantation economy after the abolition of slavery hinged on maximizing land productivity while minimizing the need for labor.³⁶ In the South, pesticides and chemical fertilizers were promoted as a substitute for labor while shoring up the planters’ political and economic power. Consider, for instance, the pro-pesticide polemic That We May Live (1966), written by US representative from Mississippi Jamie L. Whitten, which celebrated “labor-saving chemicals.”³⁷ The benefits of chemical fertilizers accrued to planters, who became less reliant on wage labor while workers and communities surrounding plantations were exposed to toxicity.

Concerns about synthetic materials’ toxicity proliferated in the industry's early years, but the environmental and health impacts took decades to link with firm causality. In the present, there is a growing awareness that the long temporalities of synthetic materials make futures uncertain, for, as Heather Davis notes, plastics are an intergenerational inheritance.³⁸ This legacy is seen in global plastic accumulation—synthetic chemicals do not naturally break down in the environment—and on a molecular level within the body. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson's framework of plasticity provides further insight into how plastics intersect with anti-Blackness. Jackson shows that “plasticity is a mode of transmogrification whereby the fleshy being of Blackness is experimented with as if it were infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter, such that Blackness is produced as sub/super/human at once.”³⁹ Anti-Blackness is thus a mode of experimentation that renders Blackness an “empty vessel” that is “infinitely mutable.”⁴⁰ Returning to the ad through Jackson's framework, the scene presented by Monsanto is a mode of domination that renders the Black body malleable, manipulable, and, by extension, forever harmable. Here, chemical necromancy is revealed to be a question of sacrifice: to raise the dead, these corporations sacrifice the living. Following Jackson, however, we might conclude that Monsanto's framing of these communities as being out of time denies them full consideration as living: these industries would not see this as a sacrifice.

■

The corporate rhetoric of Standard Oil and Monsanto explicitly draws a throughline between the monocropping of cotton on plantations and the chemicals industry. In the interwar period, corporations summoned cotton to naturalize the profoundly artificial chemicals industry and the proliferation of synthetic products they produced. To do so, they invoked a pastoral view of agricultural labor—glossing over the violent realities of sharecropping in the Jim Crow South—rooting the chemicals industry in an agrestic past. The material and historical connection between the plantation and the petrochemical industry is written on the land and bodies, intricately woven through cotton fibers.

By way of conclusion, I want to briefly return to Fortune's description of the petrochemical industry as a form of chemical necromancy. As we have seen, evocations of magic were common in industry framing. Necromancy, however, is a practice of black magic or death magic; it implies an implicit perversion as it violates the laws of nature by transgressing the line between the living and the dead. Here we can return to Marx and Engels, who compared the means of production and exchange in bourgeois society to a “sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”⁴¹ In the context of climate change, the “powers of the nether world” can be read as the energy unleashed by burning fossil fuels, transforming the remains of ancient life into energy and commodities. Underlying the celebration of the chemicals industry's alchemical transfigurations that ushered in a synthetic age is a darker inflection. Indeed, burning fossil fuels is a form of revivification that cannibalizes and “weaponises” hydrocarbons.⁴² In petrochemical refineries, hydrocarbons are refined into numerous synthetic products, including fertilizers and plastics. Therefore, many synthetic materials do not break down and return to the earth. Chemical fertilizers that nourish plants—and contaminate and deplete soil—often include forever chemicals like PFAS that will continue accumulating.⁴³ Plastics will continue to exist in geological time. The reawakening is suspended, forever ongoing. The catastrophe persists.

Notes

Works Cited