The Team Player: Loyalty Above All
“You can tell I’m a Republican,” Janice Areno says as she invites me to sit down in her office. Elephants fill three shelves of a wall opposite her desk. One is blue-and-white porcelain, a second is gold, a third is red, white, and blue and stands near a young child’s drawing of a yellow one. One is shaped into a teapot. Another holds an American flag. There are large elephants and small, wooden and glass. There are elephants standing and elephants trotting. Next to her awards for outstanding service to her community and photos of relatives, the elephants had been gathered, over the years, from bake sales, luncheon raffles, and Republican conventions. “I see an elephant, I feel proud of this country.”
I am seated across from Janice (pronounced Jan-EECE) in her spacious office where she has long worked as an accountant for Lacassane, a land management company in Lake Charles. She is the daughter of Harold Areno’s oldest brother, and she herself grew up not far from Bayou d’Inde. She is a short woman with a purposeful handshake and a lively face who dresses in a no-nonsense gray pantsuit and practical shoes. She wears neither jewelry nor make-up; in this way, she “dresses Pentecostal,” as she puts it. But with her somewhat mannish outfit and close-cropped brown-gray hair, she explains, “In some ways, I don’t dress Pentecostal.” Her manner is direct, forceful, usually good-humored. Across the desk, during our first of many meetings, she punches out a series of well-articulated opinions on a wide range of issues, and then comments humorously, aside, “You get me talking about all the burrs under my saddle.” Then she quips, “Maybe I’ll visit you in Berkeley and you can introduce me to naked hippies.”
A blizzard of papers covers her large wooden desk. “Tax season,” she explains. “I do returns for the cleaning lady and the computer guy free, and I just finished taxes for the daughter of a co-worker.” She’s also been calling around to everyone she knows to donate food and furniture to a friend’s relative, a soldier who had just returned from a second tour in Iraq to discover that his wife had abandoned their three small children. The oldest was feeding the younger ones remnants of stale cereal. Janice had joined her church’s compassionate effort to rally around the man.
We joke. On a later visit to Lake Charles, I bring her a San Francisco 49ers cap; she is an ardent Dallas Cowboys fan. She tells me she’ll wear it deer hunting, but can’t promise to root for the 49ers. In truth, her home team is the right wing of the elephant, the Republican Party. Her loyalty to it defines her world.
Sixty-one and single, she is devoted to a large extended family and notes proudly, “I raised my sister’s kids like my own.” One nephew, now grown, lives in a trailer on her property and is helping her construct rooms in her large new home to accommodate one sister, maybe two, and anyone else it works out with. At Lacassane, Janice is usually the last to leave the office at night. She oversees the management of 21,000 acres of land, long ago part of a rice and soybean plantation. Throughout the years, the land has also been leased for hunting and oil and gas exploration. Lacassane also runs a large hunting lodge called Jed’s Cabin, licenses underground pipeline rights of way, and manages timber.
I ask Janice if we could visit her former school, church, and home in Sulphur, just west of Lake Charles. We leave her office, walk into the parking lot, and climb into her silver SUV. Fishing rods rattle in the back, along with a three-pound bag of pecans “crushed but not shelled” that she plans to give away to friends. Sulphur is an industrial town of 20,000 built in the 1870s. Out of the car window I see signs of many other lines of work in Louisiana: Richard’s Boudin and Seafood Market, Sulphur Pawn and Discount Center, Bebop’s Ice House, lumber yards, barber shops, Family Dollar stores, Walgreens, J.C. Penney, PayDay Loans of Sulphur, and EZ Cash.
As we head for her old school, she begins to describe her childhood. “I was born in the middle of the pack, fourth of six. My dad was the oldest of ten, and my mom was the youngest of seven, and everyone married and had kids. On Daddy’s side alone I have forty-six cousins, and on my mom’s side it’s about the same. One of my mother’s sisters had eleven.” Like many of those I talked to, Janice describes her childhood as “poor but happy.” “My mother was a homemaker, but, boy, she cooked up a storm morning and night and washed for eight in a washhouse.”
“I worked hard all my life. I started at age eight and never stopped,” Janice begins. In the course of her work life, she had learned to tough things out, to endure. Endurance wasn’t just a moral value; it was a practice. It was work of an emotional sort. Not claiming to be a victim, accommodating the downside of loose regulations out of a loyalty to free enterprise—this was a tacit form of heroism, hidden to incurious liberals. Sometimes you had to endure bad news, Janice felt, for a higher good, such as jobs in oil.
I was discovering three distinct expressions of this endurance self in different people around Lake Charles—the Team Loyalist, the Worshipper, and the Cowboy, as I came to see them. Each kind of person expresses the value of endurance and expresses a capacity for it. Each attaches an aspect of self to this heroism. The Team Loyalist accomplishes a team goal, supporting the Republican Party. The Worshipper sacrifices a strong wish. The Cowboy affirms a fearless self. Janice was a Team Loyalist.
Janice has not left her love of rural life behind. “I learned to handle a shotgun when I was six, picking off cottonmouth and copperhead snakes from a boat,” she tells me. “Now I hunt deer, duck, and boar in season, and I fish on weekends. My daddy used to say if you shoot ’em, you clean ’em and eat ’em. Until I was forty, all my brothers and sisters did that. Now I take the meat to be ground into sausage.”
We pass Janice’s elementary school, named after the German scientist Herman Frasch, who developed a method of mining sulfur. Her high school’s official emblem was a miner’s hardhat, crossed pick, and shovel; its school colors were red, white, and blue. Janice had been in the Honor Society and 4-H, and she was a leader on the debate team, following that up with a BA from nearby McNeese University and a career in accounting. Her father had not been so lucky, she told me. As the oldest of ten, he was forced to quit school early to help his father raise a garden to feed a family of twelve.
We stop in front of Janice’s church, get out, pop the trunk, and carry in boxes of cups, plates, and hand wipes. These are to be used at a church supper to raise money for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. “People have stopped giving money for our boys, but they’re still over there,” she said. “We still have to care.” We get back in her SUV and drive on.
Janice’s talk of family focuses mainly on her father. “He had a third-grade education and supported a family of eight. He could do a lot of things, like mend a hole in fishing net like no one you ever saw,” she says. At nineteen he learned pipefitting, joined the local union, and worked for more than thirty years at Cities Service (now Citgo). “He was never on disability or unemployment,” she says proudly. “He could never have supported us all without the opportunity to work at the refinery.” After he retired, her parents drove their camper truck to Utah and Colorado, working as fruit pickers, and “had lots of fruit, and I’m glad they got the chance to travel before he died.”
The SUV slows down, and we pass a modest building that hardly stands out from the homes across a hedge on each side. This was where, as a small girl, Janice belonged to a full gospel church (which refers to speaking in tongues, prophecy, and gifts of healing) and attended Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night—“no missing.” Her grandfather had been a founding board member of this now relocated church, her dad had been treasurer. Now Janice was chairman of its board.
Diligence, Industry, Party
It was in church that Janice first learned the honor of work, she says. “As an eight-year-old girl, I swept out the whole church by myself after Sunday and Wednesday services, and mowed the lawn. I cleaned out the bathrooms, the boys and the girls, in back of the church. My parents would drop me off and pick me up later.” She kept that job as she grew older, but added another job at a Tastee Freez stand. After high school, “I put myself through McNeese working forty hours a week as a telephone operator. I worked 1:30 to 10:00 P.M. and 3:00 to 11:00 P.M. and 4:00 P.M. to 12:00 A.M. It was hard to work long hours and get up to go to school the next morning, hurrying to get your studying in between. I only had one weekend a month off, no summers. It was rough.” After that, she got a job in the company she works for still.
Janice is stoutly proud that, like her dad, she never “took a dime from the government. . . . For five years at the telephone company and forty-three years here . . . I never one time ever drew an unemployment check or got any government assistance,” she says, adding, “I did get a small student loan when I was going to college—back then the government didn’t just give it to you—and I paid every nickel of it back.”
Getting little or nothing from the federal government was an oft-expressed source of honor. And taking money from it was—or should be, Janice felt—a source of shame. The sharpest “burr under my saddle,” Janice declares, is “people who take government money and don’t work.”
“I know guys who work construction who quit so they can draw unemployment to hunt in season.” It was the same with disability payments, she said: “A friend’s daughter has a husband who works long enough to get hurt and puts in for disability. My own cousins, uncles, and brothers have done it. Sometimes there weren’t jobs; then it’s great to have welfare,” she allows. “But when there are jobs, why couldn’t they mow a church yard, or fold clothes at a care center, or clean out the school bathrooms? We pay them to do nothing—first through TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] and now through SSI [Supplementary Security Income, for elderly or disabled]. That’s not right. They should do something to help.” (On this, see Appendix C.)
Work had been a passport out of fear, poverty, and humiliation for her father and others a generation back. But Janice doesn’t base her own sense of honor or that of others just on money. She doesn’t base it on how gifted she is in her work, or whether her job makes for a better world—at least, none of this comes up. If people work as hard as she does, it is a better world.
Her feeling about work is part of a larger moral code that shapes her feelings about those ahead and behind her in line for the American Dream. “Hard” is the important idea. More than aptitude, reward, or consequence, hard work confers honor. It comes with clean living and being churched. Those getting ahead of her in line don’t share these beliefs, she feels. Liberals—those associated with the social movements that brought in the line cutters—share a looser, less defined moral code, she feels. Liberals don’t give personal morality itself its full due, probably because they aren’t churched. Janice opposes abortion except under certain circumstances, but imagines there are “fifty million abortions a year, probably all Democrats.” (She pauses for a moment of dark humor: “Maybe I should rethink that position.”) With Supreme Court approval of gay marriage, with federal welfare for the idle, with fewer Americans “churched,” with the PC amnesia concerning the heroism of the young boys who died for the South (however misguided the Confederate cause), her piece of America seems like a small, brave holdout against a national tide. The American Dream itself has become strange, un-Bibled, hyper-materialized, and lacking in honor. Even as she stands patiently in line, she is being made to feel a stranger in her own land. The only holdout for the better aspects of the past is the Republican Party.
If you have a job, you should apply yourself to it, even if you face a little risk, Janice feels. “Two of my brothers are pipe welders, and the guys they work with would stop work for small stuff,” she complains. “On one job, the guys were welding aluminum. It helps to counteract the fumes you inhale if you drink milk, so the company brings them ten o’clock milk. It’s in the union contract. If the company didn’t bring them their milk at ten o’clock, thirty guys would wobble the job [stop working]. Now is that stupid or what? It wouldn’t have killed them, one day. They could have brought their own milk.” Janice’s was a company perspective. For a period, she worked for the Lake Area Industry Alliance, visiting schools to explain the benefits of industry to students who might be getting another story from home or from the liberal media.
Work has a disciplinary function. “If there aren’t jobs around, well, get people working on the highways, using wheelbarrows and shovels instead of all the dump trucks,” she says. “When people got home at night, they’d be tired and wouldn’t be out drinking or doing drugs.”
Janice had even cooked up an imaginative scheme to bring jobs back to America: “America needs to dig up every rock and every headstone” of American veterans of World War II buried in France—which “hasn’t been a good friend to us”—she declares, and “bring them back to American land, and let American workers mow the lawns around them with American lawnmowers.”
If we can’t substitute wheelbarrows for dump trucks, or import cemeteries to bring morality to the idle, her thoughts turn to war. “I’m not advocating war so people can work,” she adds hastily, “but there’s a positive side to the war—manufacturing missiles, Humvees, sewing uniforms—it’s work.”
Not everything in Sulphur concerns work, she tells me. We are coming up on an enormous fairgrounds, part of Sulphur’s newly built arena and events center, with a 14,000 square foot ballroom for Mardi Gras and a rodeo arena for the Silver Spurs Rodeo “barrel contests” (where riders steer horses around barrels) and steer-roping contests. “On rodeo days, parents don’t just drop their kids off and pick ’em up later,” Janice says. “These are family events.”
Janice understands the fix the idle are in; welfare gives them more than an available job would. “You can get an $8-an-hour job and maybe clear $250 a week,” she says. “With welfare what it is, it’s not worth it to get a real job.” However, she and others like her speak of seeing with “my own eyes” parents driving up in Lexus cars to drop their children at a governmentsupported Head Start program. The government is trying to get her to feel sorry for people like that, Janice feels. She’s not having it. Get a job.
Looking away from the wheel for a moment, Janice stares at me with eyes wide, preparing for my shock. “Some people think I’m too hard-nosed,” she declares, “but I think if people refuse to work, we should let them starve. Let them be homeless.” That 44 percent of the Louisiana budget that came from the federal government, much of it for welfare to the poor, she would just as soon give back. Giving money in return for nothing? That broke her moral rule: reward for work. So for her, there was no paradox in Louisiana coming in 49th in the human development index and 50th in overall health and right-wing resistance to the idea of federal government aid. They could have whatever rank they wanted, if they didn’t work.
We stop at a drive-through Burger King to buy two Whopper Juniors, sit down to eat them with some large sweet teas, then head to Janice’s dream house. Having grown up blocks away from Citgo, Janice has bought a plot of land in north Sulphur so as to be far away from the plants—a retirement “barn,” as she calls it. She is constructing it, room by room, with the help of her nephew, who is planning to live there too, with his family. As we drive along, a call comes in on Janice’s cell phone with a deafening clang; her nephew is checking in about a plumbing fixture.
With my questions about the Great Paradox, I am myself another burr under Janice’s saddle, but I ask her my ultimate question: what about children born poor? Is she so indignant about idle parents that she won’t reach out to the child? Does she oppose Head Start or subsidized lunch? “I would hope that the child would say, ‘I’m going to work hard and get me an education and good job and get myself out of this environment,’” Janice answers. Beyond that, her solution is to get children “churched” and to limit the fertility of poor women. “Some people say I’m too hard-nosed,” she says again, “but after one or two children, I’d have her tubes tied.” Wouldn’t that be the federal government acting as Big Brother? I prod. No, she answers. “She could decline to have her tubes tied and decline federal money.”
Underlying Janice’s reasoning is her idea about inequality itself. Some people may just be destined to remain at the end of the line for the American Dream. That’s why she opposes redistribution of tax money from rich to poor. The fix wouldn’t last. “Ten percent of the people have 90 percent of the money, okay?” she says. “But if you even it out, in a year—even in six months—10 percent of the people would still have 90 percent of the money. A lot of people who win the Power Ball $247 million jackpots are bankrupt a decade later. They can’t ward off beggars and cheats and don’t know how to invest. We each have to find our own niche and learn to be happy where we are.”
Not only does the federal government give too much, it does too much and owns too much, she feels. “We only need it to handle military and diplomatic matters and to build roads and dredge waterways,” she says. As for government ownership of public lands, “We should hold on to the Grand Canyon, part of Yellowstone, a few others, but sell the rest of the national parks for development and jobs.” The government also controls too much—guns, for example. Without imagining her view would surprise me, Janice argues that handing out guns is the best way to create democracy in the Middle East. “If everybody had a gun and ammunition, they could solve their own differences. There are dictators because the dictators have all the guns and people have none. So they can’t stand up for themselves. If the government takes our guns away, the same thing will happen here,” she predicts darkly. Others echoed her sentiment. When Obama first took office, rumors spread that he would take peoples’ guns away, and stores around DeRidder, Lee Sherman told me, sold out of ammunition. Another man told me that a minister even led his congregation to Walmart to stock up.
The number of federal workers also seems to her “plumb out of whack.” She doesn’t venture a guess, but many I interviewed estimated that a third to a half of all U.S. workers were employed by the federal government—a common estimate was 40 percent. (Not knowing the figures myself, I looked them up. In 2013, 1.9 percent of American workers were civilian federal employees, and that percentage has declined over the last ten years. For more, see Appendix C.)
Many government workers waste taxpayer money doing useless work, she feels. Here Fox News offered her a rich supply of “can’t top this” examples. First, there was Solyndra, a solar company that wasted a $535 million federal loan. Then an EPA worker was caught watching four hours of pornography films on a government computer, one called Sadism Is Beautiful. Then there was the National Endowment of the Arts–funded painting in which the artist Chris Ofili attached cow dung to the figure of the Virgin Mary. “That stuff disgusts me.”
We had returned to her SUV and were heading back, fishing gear still rattling in the back. “Okay, we’re a free country,” she says, “but not that free. Maybe you can make a picture of Christ out of cow manure if you want to. You can make one of Mohammed out of cow manure if you want to. Or you can make one of Buddha out of manure if you want to. But don’t let my tax dollars pay you the money to do it. You go out there and shovel that manure on your own.” To Janice, the “other team” was behind the failed Solyndra, the EPA’s Sadism Is Beautiful man, the manure artist. Not her team. No way.
Faces in Line
It is not just the moral laxity of the Democrats that galls Janice, but the imposition of such laxity on her. She is badgered for sympathy, she feels, and made to feel bad if she doesn’t grant it. Take sexual orientation and gender identity. “If you’re gay, go be gay. Just don’t impose it on me,” she says. When I suggest that gay people aren’t imposing a gay lifestyle on her or others, she counters: “Oh yes they are,” and cites the example of Chaz Bono, the child of pop singers Sonny and Cher, who was born a girl but later changed sex to become male. Janice had followed the story closely: “He was the cutest little girl on the show when I was growing up. When Cher’s son said it would have been easier to grow up, if she/he had not experienced prejudice, I think Chaz was forcing his way of living on me. He wants the whole world to change so it will be easier for him to grow up. So I say, ‘Go be a man if you want to. Go be gay if you want to.’ I don’t mind somebody being gay if they want to be gay. Just be a regular person, go to work, mow the lawn, fish. You don’t have to be shouting it from the mountaintops. Don’t make me change and don’t call me a bigot if I don’t. That’s how we’re portrayed. Cher Bono said on the Jay Leno program that the ‘Tea Party are fucking nuts,’ and that’s the consensus in liberal Hollywood.”
I return to an issue closer to her home: industrial pollution in Bayou d’Inde, where her uncle, Harold Areno, and his wife, Annette, live. “My grandfather homesteaded those forty acres before anybody even knew what a refinery was,” she muses. “It’s all killed now. It makes me not want to live in Bayou d’Inde and makes me sad.” Industry had brought four toxic waste landfills to Sulphur, one only a block from her present home. But “they make what we need—plastic soda bottles, rubber-soled shoes, toothpaste. We need toothpaste.”
Being a Team Player meant braving problems. To do so, Janice did a kind of work she didn’t even count as work: the emotional work of accommodating such things as nearby toxic waste landfills, which in her heart of hearts she never would choose to live with. Sometimes Team Players had to suck it up and just cope.
The Rubberized Horse
Janice and I stop off at a cousin’s house to meet her nephew Dicky. Janice’s sister is along too. Janice had earlier told me a shocking story about a relative with a horse, and I wanted to talk with him directly, to hear the story again from him. I sat with Dicky, Janice, Janice’s sister, and a cousin around a small kitchen table to hear a well-worn story that still evoked sadness and surprise.
Now a retired school teacher, Dicky had been a young boy in the 1950s. “I was riding my palomino horse, Ted,” he recalls. “Normally Ted cleared ditches five feet across just fine. But this time the horse fell back into the water and sank down. He tried to climb up but couldn’t. We tried to pull his reins, but couldn’t get him up. Finally my uncle hauled him out with a tractor. But when Ted finally scrambled back out, he was coated all over with a strange film. I hosed him off but that only hardened the film on him. It was like a terrible glued-on wet suit. It was like rubber. The vet tried but couldn’t save him, and Ted died two days later.” The ditch was downstream from a Firestone polymers plant.
Dicky was heartbroken at the time, and it still shows as he tells the story. But Janice recalls the episode slightly differently. It saddens her too, but she doesn’t allow her sadness to interfere with her loyalty to industry. She shakes her head as if to say, we sure did put up with a lot of things back then, but let’s not linger on too much bad news, the way environmentalists do. As a child, she recalled hearing a great roar and seeing the daytime sky turn black. It was an accidental explosion at Cities Service (now Citgo). “We all thought the world had come to an end,” she says. But that was then, she thought. Today “industry is in compliance with state-issued permits,” and she sees no problems.
We leave Dicky and Janice’s sister and drive on. After a while, Janice turns the SUV off the pavement onto a dirt road that winds between two large ponds. We are coming up to the “barn,” her dream retirement home, built on forty acres of former lumber company land, six miles from the Sasol expansion. “I’ve stocked my left pond with catfish, and I’m digging the pond on the right now. We love to fish,” she says proudly. She parks before an enormous building, covered by a long, flat, tin roof. The house isn’t finished yet, but a rock garden in the front is already surrounding a small water fountain, a tiny peacock figurine, and two elephant statues, black and white, one with trunk upheld. Two deck chairs overlook the scene. “My sisters put that together,” she remarks, chuckling.
Although single and childless, Janice has built a six-bedroom, four-bath estate with a large common family kitchen–living room where the whole clan can gather. The refrigerator is stocked with sodas. This “barn” can house her two sisters—Joyce, who is recovering from hip surgery and is ready to move in, and maybe Judy, who lives in Texas, should she become widowed. Her nephew Kelly, helping to build the place, has his trailer on the premises and has just brought in a basket of fresh eggs along with a report that one chicken has died. One day he, his girlfriend, and his daughter, Mattie—of whom he has half-time custody and whom everyone adores—might move from the trailer to the house. In back of the barn is an RV shed, a potting shed (“Joyce loves plants”), a chicken coop, a yard for two goats, and a paddock for twelve horses. “And we have dogs,” Janice adds. All along the back side of the barn is an enormous “rodeo arena” where Mattie, when she’s older, can practice ropes and barrels. “I wasn’t interested in a fancy place,” Janice explains, “just serviceable, where we could all come.” Weekends, you can see her atop her riding mower, cutting grass on eight of her forty acres.
As I walk around Janice’s American Dream house, I began to understand how the deep story makes sense to her. She had made it out of the structural squeeze—aiming high on one side, facing a flat wage, uncertainty, competitors, and government aid on the other. Maybe her salary hadn’t advanced in leaps and bounds, but she’d gotten to the head of the line. And man, oh man, that had been hard. You couldn’t be some wilting violet. Along the way, it hadn’t been so easy enduring surprise explosions, noisy machinery, and strange odors. To live with it, Janice managed anxiety nearly hidden to her, anxiety that now felt like second nature; it kept her steady and brave. It kept her focused on the good news of Citgo for her dad, Lacassane for herself, the “buckle in the energy belt,” the free market. She felt loyal to capitalism as it worked through the petrochemical plants of Sulphur, Louisiana, the system that produced the miracle of her father’s wage and her own. She wanted others to want to feel loyal to it. Wasn’t it obvious? What else, besides family and church, was there worth feeling loyal to?
Such devotion wasn’t respected, she felt. Indeed, she had to defend that devotion from a liberal perspective, which she associated with a morally lax, secular, coastal-based culture. It was one thing for certain categories of people to cut in line, but it was another to have false notions of the good and the true gain popularity and edge out her truer ones. Instead of the country agreeing with her community on the natural rightness of heterosexual marriage as the center of family life, she was now obliged to defend herself against the idea that these views were sexist, homophobic, old-fashioned, and backward. She also needed to defend her notion of the line itself. She didn’t want to appear to critics as hard-hearted regarding the poor, immigrants, Syrian refugees. They simply shouldn’t be ahead of her in line.
Not only her values, but even the kind of self she proudly exhibited—an endurance self—seemed to need defending, because it too seemed to be going out of fashion along with all the blue-collar jobs. “They used to brag on my dad at the plant that he was so reliable and steady.” Janice tells me proudly. But what did that count for anymore? Like her father and uncle, Harold Areno, Janice feels proud to have a rooted self, a self based in a busy, dense, stable community of relatives, co-parishioners, and friends. A newer cosmopolitan self, one that seemed uprooted, loosely attached to an immediate community, prepared to know a lot of people just a little bit, a mobile, even migratory self—this seemed to be coming into vogue. Such a self took pride in exposure to a diverse set of moral codes, but did a person with that kind of self end up thinking “anything goes”? It was frightening. It was wrong. And Janice was having none of it.
She was doing yet more emotional work disregarding the downside of life in the buckle of America’s energy belt. She was focused on the upside. Industry was a loyal friend to her, and she to it. As for pollution, “A company has a job to do; it’s making things people want and need. Just like people have to go to the bathroom, plants do too. You can’t just say, ‘don’t do it.’” But while she sided with Citgo, with Sasol, with Monsanto and other companies in the state, Janice felt obliged to set aside problems she knew existed but had decided to accept.
After I’d known her for several years, Janice told me that her sister, Joyce, a warm-hearted woman, was planning to move in with her in her new home. Joyce had worked for Olin Chemical as a shipping supervisor checking train cars that had been filled with phosgene (used in making pesticides and, at room temperature, a poisonous gas) without a facial mask. She began to suffer from a debilitating autoimmune disease, had to cut her hours, and struggled to get better with prednisone and naturopathy. Janice herself also suffered from an ailment that she says “is probably related to growing up near the plants.” She was thinking of getting her blood checked. But she wasn’t letting herself get “all anxious” about it.
Janice is already hosting monthly cookouts for the Areno clan. “We had sixty-seven people for a Good Friday cookout,” she says proudly. “We have big cookouts at least once a month, twenty-five if you barely mention it, more if you spread the word. If we’ve got enough food, you eat; if the pots are bare, you didn’t get here in time.”
Even as pine forests have given way to vast industrial compounds and voters of the South have shifted right, Janice Areno is carrying forward the best she can from her roots—a loving family, ropes and barrels, catfish fishing, deer hunting, and “y’all come” cookouts—with the fruits of a BA and forbearance. She credits her team—her party and the industry she feels it represents—with all her good fortune in life. She’s a Team Loyalist. She originally moved to north Sulphur to escape the plants. But construction soon began on Sasol’s new ethane cracker, only six miles away. “If Sasol has a major fire or explosion, we’d be subject to it,” she says philosophically. And with the fracking boom, other new plants might be creeping closer in the future too. “But hey, you’re subject to earthquakes in Berkeley, California. Things happen.” In the meantime, anyone can stretch out in a deck chair in front of Janice’s new home, by a small fountain, and see an object of great loyalty—pudgy, white foot midair, tusks and trunk aloft.