Everywhere in Anniston, worried parents shoo children from parks and playgrounds. Vegetation has overtaken blocks of abandoned houses, with streetlights gone permanently dark, empty churches, and, always, the biohazard signs. Subdued children play, eerily quiet, against a backdrop of toxic lawns, oily creeks, tainted vegetation, and sere trees. Behind some doors, the unemployed fight cancer, paralysis, memory loss, and a bewildering array of poorly characterized diseases. These form a patchwork quilt of moribund communities and biological “dead zones” where nothing grows. Her city of 24,000 is 52 percent African American, but mostly it’s the city’s black residents who inhabit the neighborhoods that have fallen into decay wrought by widespread pollution. Baker lives in Anniston, Alabama, 63 miles from Birmingham. But she’s not striding into the operating room: she is about to mow her lawn, which is ringed by a high chain-link fence festooned with biohazard signs. Shirley Baker, a nurse, deftly ties on a surgical mask before opening the door.
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