At some houses a pall of black smoke hangs in the air, as the owners pile their contaminated belongings onto enormous, fiery pyres, sending contaminants into the air. The empty houses, without their window dressings or drywall, doors and windows open wide, appear skeletal, like gaping skulls.

The floodwaters in Duplin County were so contaminated by drowned hogs, spilled and overflowing hog lagoons, drowned poultry, human sewage and other contaminants as to render anything soaked by them unsalvageable. Most area residents are picking up bottled water, afraid that the groundwater and rivers from which the people of Chinquapin draw their water are so thoroughly contaminated that it will be years before it’s safe to drink again.

They’re probably right. Leon Chesnin, professor emeritus of waste management and utilization at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, said that it takes 20 years for the waste from a hog lagoon overflow or spill to filter down through the groundwater and another 20 years to clean itself. That means the water will be contaminated for another 40 years, two generations.

In addition to animal wastes from an estimated 100 flooded or spilled hog lagoons and a large number of poultry operations, 24 human wastewater treatment plants flooded and hundreds, possibly thousands of tanks containing petroleum products, pesticides and other chemicals spilled into the waters. Thousands of flooded homes, businesses, automobiles and junkyards released toxic chemicals into the floodwaters.

A hurricane may be an act of God, but the magnitude of the environmental disaster in North Carolina was strictly man-made. Much of the flooding and the groundwater contamination can be attributed to the state’s furious drainage and development of wetlands areas, and its resistance to vigilant environmental regulation of agribusiness.

Since North Carolina began draining its 11 million acres of wetlands in the 1700s, more than half of them have been lost. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, North Carolina led the nation in lost wetlands acreage, says Derb Carter of the Southern Environmental Center. The state still issues permits to drain around 1,000 acres of wetlands every year, he says, and others estimate that the illegal loss of wetlands runs more than twice that.

Although Gov. James B. Hunt is calling Floyd a “500-year flood” and assuring residents that it will not happen again during their lifetimes, that’s not strictly accurate. In fact, heavy rains began again Monday night and were expected to continue at least through Wednesday.

“It wouldn’t take much rain to bring the floods back up to the same levels as a week ago, or higher,” says Stanley Riggs, a marine geologist at East Carolina University who specializes in the study of North Carolina’s estuaries and coastal systems. “This whole [river] system is just waiting to go again.”

It’s true that the extent of this month’s flooding was unprecedented, but the heavy rainfall is not without comparison. Two hurricanes, Floyd and Dennis, hit North Carolina just weeks apart, both dropping heavy rains. Yet there have been other cases of multiple hurricanes battering the state.

In 1955, for instance, three major hurricanes, Connie, Diane and Ione, hit North Carolina, just weeks apart. All of them dropped extraordinarily heavy rains, in a year that had already featured massive storms. The result was major flooding, but the casualties and physical damage were not nearly as extensive as this year. Ione killed five people; the death toll from Floyd is 47 and expected to rise.

And Ione’s flooding did not reach lands that are considered within the “500-year flood plain.” Floyd’s did. “The magnitude of this flood is an entirely human-created event,” says Riggs. “Dennis and Floyd were relatively small hurricanes, not whomper storms.”

Most scientists believe the reason for Floyd’s massive damage the massive drainage of the state’s wetlands. The loss of wetlands exponentially increases the amount of damage caused by flooding from storms like Hurricane Floyd.

Doug Rader, a biologist with the Environmental Defense Fund who’s conferred with a number of other experts about the flood, said, “We, as scientists, believe that a significant part of the flooding and the severity of its impact is a result of poor management decisions [regarding wetlands] made over the last 30 years. It is our opinion that intensive land use in marginal areas has directly contributed to the seriousness of the flooding from expectedly and predictably large amounts of rainfall.”

Wetlands provide a natural escape valve for flooding, by distributing and absorbing excess water. Swamps and marshes absorb and disperse floodwaters, and areas called “dry wetlands,” found around the headwaters of streams and in the 100-year flood plain, complete the job. Wetlands serve another function as well: They’re a natural filtration system, like human kidneys, removing from the waters all sorts of toxins and pollutants, especially nitrates from animal waste, which remove oxygen and can kill fish. All of North Carolina’s shellfishing beds are closed now and experts expect major fish kills in the future.

While the dry wetlands are one of the most important natural resources for controlling and containing floods, they are also the most vulnerable to being lost, because they’re not picturesque like marshes and swamps, with their cattails and swamp grasses. It’s more difficult to make a case for the preservation of dry wetlands, and much easier to engineer their draining than wet ones. Consequently, housing developments, factories, junkyards, hog farms, hog lagoons, agricultural operations and other businesses have cropped up in the 100-year flood plain, legally.

But the consequences of building in the flood plain have been two-fold: Not only did it deprive the area of a natural barrier against flooding, but the structures located there, once submerged in water, released what one state official called “a witch’s brew” of toxic substances — household chemicals, chemicals and petroleum products from automobiles, both operational and in junkyards, pesticides and fuel oil into the water.

The 24 human wastewater facilities that flooded don’t begin to tell the story of human-waste contamination of the waters. The EDF’s Rader said that most municipal sewage lines in eastern North Carolina ran through the flood plain to take advantage of the natural drainage properties, and save money cities might have spent building pumping stations and elevated sewer lines.

There’s no way to tell how much sewage leaked into the flooded waters through manholes and other outlets on sewer lines built where they shouldn’t have been. Kinston, for example, a small city with a population of around 25,000 people, is built on the Neuse River. Rick Dove, the Neuse River keeper, said that Kinston’s sewage treatment plant, built in the Neuse flood plain, was totally submerged by the floods.

“That means,” he said, “every toilet that flushes in Kinston during the flood discharges directly into the Neuse.” Dove, a pilot, said that the Neuse is now a maroon color from waste and chemical spills.

The legislature has repeatedly refused to approve legislation restricting or regulating building in flood plains, or to provide funding to enforce enacted regulations. Don Reuter, spokesman for the state’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources, said that in the 1988 and 1989 sessions of the General Assembly, the legislature refused to provide funding for a wetlands protection bill the department supported that could have mitigated the extent of the flooding had it passed.

Likewise, the state has balked at regulating the agriculture industry, whose lax treatment of animal waste has contributed to the pollution problems. North Carolina has more hogs than people, around 7 million people to 9 million hogs, and a hog produces between two and five times as much waste on a daily basis as a human. Yet hog farmers haven’t been required to treat the waste, or dispose of it in an environmentally sound manner. Most store the waste in open-air hog lagoons, essentially ponds filled with hog waste. When the lagoons filled, they were allowed to reduce the level by spraying the untreated waste on fields, where it ran off into the watersheds.

From the 1970s until 1995, the hog industry was virtually unregulated. Indeed, any attempts at regulation were blocked by the legislature. Because of lavish campaign contributions from the hog industry, the legislature passed bill after bill allowing special tax exemptions for the hog industry and to avoid environmental regulation.

In 1991 the legislature passed a bill that enabled the state to levy strong fines against polluters for discharging animal wastes into streams, but an amendment tacked onto it by Sen. Wendell Murphy, then the state’s largest hog farmer with a billion-dollar operation, exempted poultry and hog farms. That same year, a bill allowed the North Carolina Pork Producers Association to collect a 1 cent per hog levy, in order to lobby legislators and pay for defense against lawsuits brought against the hog industry.

In 1993 legislation passed to deny the state Department of Environmental Management — the agency charged with regulating hog wastes — access to information, kept by the state Department of Agriculture, about the number of hog farms and their locations.

But 1995 saw two big events: The Raleigh News and Observer ran a multi-part Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé of the hog industry, and an eight-acre hog waste lagoon at Ocean View Farms in Onslow County spilled more than 20 million gallons of waste into the New River. Both led to calls for stricter regulation of the industry.

After 1995 some momentum began to shift away from hog farmers. EDF lobbyist Dan Whittle says that most proposed environmental regulation of hog farms has passed since 1995 — but almost always in a significantly weaker form.

The legislature, for instance, put a moratorium on establishing new hog farms or expanding existing ones, unless they implement new, environmentally safe measures to deal with hog wastes. But existing hog farms were not required to do away with hog lagoons or convert to new waste management technologies, and many farms have been able to expand dramatically, without imposing new systems, thanks to loopholes in the law. The legislature also has refused to mandate new waste-management methods for existing farms all three sessions since the moratorium went into effect.

The worst is not necessarily over for North Carolina. The Atlantic Ocean is in the beginning years of a 10- to 15-year cyclone cycle, and hurricane activity is picking up, says marine geologist Stanley Riggs. “If a severe storm hits North Carolina and drops a lot of rain in the next two weeks things will be worse than they’ve been. It doesn’t have to be a hurricane, but if a Category 5 hurricane hits anytime, then look out, this flood will seem like nothing,” Riggs said.

A Federal Emergency Management Agency official working at the State Emergency Response Team command center said that some parts of eastern North Carolina got up to nine inches of rain Tuesday, and another four inches were expected Wednesday. Most rivers won’t crest for another three to five days.

“I’m afraid things are going to get worse before they get better,” the FEMA official said.

In fact, state officials may be minimizing the extent of the problem. The state has estimated that 100,000 hogs are dead, for instance, though a spokesman for Bill Holman, secretary of the North Carolina Department of the Environment and Natural Resources, calls that “a very conservative estimate.”

The Environmental Defense Fund has estimated that a half-million hogs are dead. “It could
be lower, but more likely higher,” said Dan Whittle of the Raleigh EDF office. EDF is worried about massive groundwater contamination due to decomposing farm animals and flooded animal-waste sites.

A reliable source in the state’s agricultural community believes that the dead hog total will be at least 200,000 — twice the official estimate. “All I know is that we’ve got a shit load of dead hogs and a shit load of live hogs that will soon be dead if we can’t get feed in to them,” he said. “The crisis is not over, it’s ongoing and will be for at least another five days to a week. In some areas the rivers have not crested, yet.” According to the source, the Cargill Company is ferrying in feed free of charge to stranded hogs on boats provided by the state forestry service.

Asked about the disparity between his own estimate and other, higher estimates of dead hogs, he answered, “There’s no cover-up, if that’s what you’re trying to say. Everybody’s doing their honest best but no one really knows anything and we won’t until the waters recede.”

Andrea Ashby, a spokeswoman for the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, said, “We only have 10,000 hogs confirmed dead, but the estimate is 100,000; 200,000 is wrong. I don’t know where you got that figure.”

It’s true that no one can be really certain how many hogs have died until the waters recede. But North Carolina is home to 7.5 million hogs, and the vast majority live in the eastern counties hardest hit by the record flooding. So why the insistence by the state Department of Agriculture on the low estimate, qualified as “conservative” even by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, which provided the estimate?

Some of it is no doubt due to the economic and political clout wielded by the state’s hog farmers. During the 1990s, hog farming surpassed tobacco and poultry farming as North Carolina’s largest industry. And there’s plenty of politics/hog industry “synergy.” Some of the most powerful politicians in the state are also big hog farmers, including former U.S. Sen. Lauch Faircloth and former state Sen. Wendell Murphy (the world’s largest hog farmer, with holdings all over the country). The industry contributes hugely to North Carolina’s politicians. Murphy, for instance, is a big campaign contributor to Gov. Jim Hunt and others.

For years those ties helped the pork industry resist attempts at environmental regulation. But a 1996 Pulitzer Prize-winning series by Raleigh’s News and Observer laid out the connections between pork producers and state politicians, and helped spur more grass-roots demands for reform.

So did environmental problems at hog farms. During the 1990s, spills from open-air hog lagoons — basically, big open pools filled with hog waste — have killed fish and contaminated groundwater. In response to pressure by environmentalists, the state imposed a three-year moratorium on hog farm expansion, with the caveat that individual farms could expand only if they implemented new environmentally sound technologies for disposing of hog wastes.

Few did. And now, decomposing hogs and overflowing hog lagoons could threaten the water supply of the eastern part of the state.

But the problems caused by Hurricane Floyd’s flooding are bigger than dead hogs and hog waste. “It’s not just contamination from the hog and poultry industry,” said Don Reuter, a spokesman for the Department of the Environment and Natural Resources. “Human waste water facilities have flooded, warehouses storing chemicals have been flooded and are leaking.

“It’s a witches brew that’s out there in those flood waters. We have so many different sources of contamination. There are 50 or 60 hog lagoon spills that we know of and there are probably more we’ll discover once the waters recede and we can get in there.”

On Tuesday afternoon, rains from Hurricane Harvey, since downgraded to a tropical storm, dumped more rain on eastern North Carolina. “Right now, things are not looking better,” said Reuter.

He writes, “The truth is there are over thirty-six million ways to be black, from the curious guy who raises pigeons on the roof across the street from me, who wears the same jacket 365 days of the year, to the Tennessee mountain minister who teaches Greek and Latin to high school students, to the NBA player from Lake Charles, Louisiana, who loves his mother to death, to the matriarch of an apple orchard in Washington State who hates to see her children go off to school, to the crack addict in some Philadelphia alley, with a hard-on and thirty-seven cents to his name, just wanting to stay up and UP, to the congresswoman, to the cowgirl, to the fisherman to the dogcatcher, to the young lovers, at this very moment, engaged in that ancient act that will undoubtedly bring, nine months hence, yet another brown-skinned girl or brown-skinned boy into this world, into this country, into this city, into this block, into this building, into this room where they shall learn their own uniqueness, and, one fine morning, say softly, I am.”

“Walking On Water” is written with a journalist’s eye, a novelist’s flair for language and a rare candor. Salon spoke with Kenan about the state of black America in his top-floor apartment overlooking the Mississippi River in downtown Memphis.

“Walking On Water” is not just a minor diversion from fiction. You spent seven years of your life on it. What inspired you to undertake such a massive project?

I don’t like fiction that is polemical, that tries to prove or solve something in a political arena. These questions I felt could only be dealt with through nonfiction. This is something I’ve been interested in all my life. I’ve seen books written about certain regions or cities or a particular element of African-American life, but I’ve never seen anything done on this scale before. It’s something I’ve wanted to read and something I think should exist. But when I set out to do it I had no idea it would take almost eight years to complete.

Researching this book you went into a whole lot of very different black communities. You were in the Northeast on Martha’s Vineyard, in Vermont and Maine; in Creole country down in Louisiana; on the West Coast in San Francisco and Seattle; up in Alaska; the Midwest. These are all very different areas, culturally, geographically. You also interviewed blacks from all walks of life, from Dorothy West on Martha’s Vineyard to a black prostitute in Salt Lake City. Within this large variety of black communities, what did you find people had in common and what were their differences?

One of the things that got me on the road was this habit that most of my black friends and teachers and students and employers have, when we’re speaking amongst ourselves, of saying “we.” And at some point I began to ask myself, “Who is this ‘we’? Is there such a thing as ‘we’?” Especially in the era after the civil rights gains of the ’70s, there were a lot of changes in the material lives of black folk. But I didn’t see the rhetoric, the language, the terminology catching up with it. By going to the places where black people had lived for a long time and talking to them, I wanted to see if such a community still existed, if there was still such a thing as “we” or if that was an anachronistic term.

Did you find an answer to that?

What I found ultimately was that black folk in this country, as political beings, still find a need for a “we” to exist. Because I don’t care if
you’re a multimillionaire basketball player, a fisherman in Louisiana or the matriarch of a New England family, there still comes a time when your existence as a black person in this country can be threatened. Organizations like the NAACP, the Urban League, PUSH, anything like that, exist for a reason. And that is a very strong element of African-American identity. At the same time, but a little murkier, are all the cultural elements. Now, I think those things have changed, in the ’70s in particular. Television and mass media helped to disseminate cultural icons that were often very market-driven, from hip-hop music to hairstyles, clothing styles. Which is not the way it was before segregation ended. For instance, in Salt Lake City there are black Mormons. You have black kids growing up who are descendants of the men and women who came west with Brigham Young. So, they have a real black culture in Salt Lake City. At the same time there’s someone back in Washington, D.C., or New York City telling them who they are. It’s a very odd cultural dynamic we’re going through.

You hear a lot about white flight in urban areas from the city to the suburbs, but there’s starting to be an exodus of middle-class blacks as well. In poor rural areas most young blacks who get an education go off to college and never return to the community. Do you see the upper socioeconomic and educational group of blacks still maintaining their ties to the lower income and working poor segment of the black community? Or is there a widening gulf between rich and poor?

I think the black middle class gets a bad rap for that because in truth it’s an American phenomenon. You don’t see many whites who go off to college returning to impoverished rural areas either, or if they grew up in a white slum, returning to the slum they came from. It’s just not the way things happen. Maybe they should in some ideal world. But the black middle class is behaving now the way the American middle class has always behaved. As to whether that has changed their connection to the community — well, there are two separate questions here as I see it. One is how they see themselves in terms of their political identity and the other is how they see themselves in terms of their spiritual identity. Spiritually, you see this burgeoning market of middle-class black people doing things like Kwanzaa, buying black books for their kids, going to all these seminars and that sort of thing. So there is recognition of this desire to belong to something, whether it’s a church — and the black middle class is one of the things that’s holding the black church together, always has. And the black middle class is still largely Democratic and there isn’t a big rush toward conservatism.

I think black folk get saddled with this idea. Ideally you’d want people to live up to that. You want people to do more volunteerism, to be more active and participatory in the things that are going on around them, to care, to be good human beings. But it’s not happening all over. I don’t think the black middle class is particularly callous. I think Americans have a particular difficulty in dealing with the class system. Fifty percent of African-Americans are “middle class,” which means they earn more than $25,000 a year. It doesn’t mean they have any savings or property. They’re making a living now, supposedly. We’re talking over 50 million people who are in that situation. If all America did what people are asking black middle class America to do, this would be a wonderful country for everyone.

You said that on a recent visit back to Chinquapin, where you grew up, that you were horrified to find that the black community treated the Mexican immigrants the same way they’d been treated by the white community — like they didn’t exist. Did you find similar situations elsewhere in your travels?

In the Midwest you’ll find it between blacks and Native Americans — in Alaska, too. In Louisiana it’s the Cajuns vs. the black folk. Who is the lowest man on the totem pole? In Los Angeles there’s a strong tension between blacks and Chicanos, but there’s not the open warfare I’d been led to expect. Out there, black people talked about Asians, and the same is true in New York. It’s a cauldron all over with people fighting not to be the lowest man on the totem pole. Last year for the first time Hispanic-Americans outnumbered blacks as the largest minority in the country, sort of a dubious honor. I think that’s going to mean more tension. At the same time I hope the two groups will get to know one another and ally themselves and avoid some of the things we’ve seen in the past.

You’re a gay black man. Do you see the black community being more homophobic than or about the same as the rest of America?

I’d like to say it depends on where you go. But I think the truth is a lot of it has to do with the strength of the African-American church. Whether or not people are going to church doesn’t matter. The church and its teachings ruled their early thinking. With a lot of African-American men, and this is true all over the country, machismo is very important in terms of identity. Homophobia is a direct result of that. We’re talking about the military, we’re talking about the labor force, and in most blue-collar situations in this country you have this problem. And I don’t think it is more marked with blacks than with white folk. But black communities are a bit more vocal (in their homophobia), I would say, and guilty of a lack of support. A case in point is the black church’s response to AIDS, which was to ignore it. As an institution, for all the wonderful things black Christendom has done in this country, for it to totally ignore such a large segment of the population is one of the most unchristian things I’ve ever seen.

In your travels have you found any major differences between blacks and black communities in the South and in the North and other parts of North America?

Most African-Americans in this country can’t trace their roots back to Africa, but they can certainly trace them back to Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, the Southern states. There’s an interview I really enjoyed with a judge in Brunswick, Ga., who had lived in the North and come back, had gone to school in both the South and the North. His perspective spoke most eloquently to how a lot of blacks who left the South and went to the North are returning to the South. Before the end of institutional segregation you had some really vibrant black communities all over the South: Nashville, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Fla., Savannah, Durham, N.C. The list is enormous. We have not yet dealt with how desegregation destroyed these communities, these physical communities. You have to ask the question, “Does this mean we did something wrong with integration, with desegregation?”

And the answer is it was a necessary evil. These places had to be sacrificed. Black people had to move out, into a larger culture. It seems to be, now, that the tide is turning back. People are recognizing bit by bit how important these places were. In their time we hated them but we also idealize them because you had black doctors living next door to black postal workers and institutions like the church were very active and very powerful. Now, you have people coming back and recognizing that these communities served a purpose. And I think black Southerners can glom onto that reality much swifter than someone who never knew about black theaters and black banks and black insurance companies and black hospitals and all of those things that made these black communities great. I think that is the primary difference between black Southerners and someone who never knew these institutions and communities. There is a certain pride in these communities, and now that Jim Crow has been stabbed in the heart, there’s a great potential for these institutions to be reborn. They’re not going to be the same.

What’s your take on the differences in race relations in the North and South, and how do you think race relations are faring overall since the demise of Jim Crow?

Despite the traditional fears of things like miscegenation, socially black folk and white folk in the South know how to interact. Because white people and black folk have been seeing one another all their lives. We’re not these exotic, bizarre creatures that they get around and don’t know how to respond to. At the same time, and it’s a clichi by now, but Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in this country, as Martin Luther King said. That to me is indicative that there is not a lot of real interaction outside of work, outside of professional relationships. So, in the South people get along, but they still largely don’t know each other. I have black friends that have one or two white friends and white friends that have one or two black friends. Things are getting better all over but it’s remarkable to me that things haven’t progressed further.

There’s a lot of anger in black America. An undercurrent of anger runs through much of the fiction and nonfiction about the black experience by black writers. Yet, you and your work seem to be remarkably free of anger.

Well, let me say I’ve figured out that what it means to me to be black at the end of the 20th century is a combination of politics, culture and emotion. There is a huge psychological component, too, which has not been given a lot of attention. For a long time, beginning in the ’70s, anger became a part of the notion of black identity. When I was living in New York in the 1980s a lot of black men I knew would flippantly describe themselves as, “I’m an angry black man.” They melded emotion to this political and cultural identity. Faulkner, a Mississippian, said, “Being a white Southerner is an emotional condition.” I think the same holds true for black folk, too. Which is not to say it’s a bad thing. There are a lot of positive elements in it. I think if we address what we’re angry at in constructive ways, that in the end the emotion is beneficial. To recognize that there’s a lot of ignorance that young Southern white men — or for that matter Mormons in Utah or some frontiersmen that I encountered in Alaska — are bringing to the table or to this fight, and no knowledge of me, really. They see me as this exotic creature, this black invader. They don’t know if I have any education. They don’t know if I’m a good person or a bad person. A lot of people are ginned up from the very beginning to confront that ignorance. They see all of these small injustices day to day that contribute to their emotional state of being. At times it can be a very unhealthy outlook.

The leaders I’ve mentioned earlier are I think excellent examples of people who use their passion not in negative ways but funnel it into creating institutions, working for just laws, better education. I think the more you think about the situation of black folk in this country that anger is one of the most dangerous aspects. Passion, I think, is different. It’s equally emotional but it doesn’t produce a riot.