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Powerful and important, My City Was Gone is the cautionary tale of how a hardworking small town was destroyed by the very forces that created it. Anniston, Alabama, was once a thriving industrial hub, home to a Monsanto chemical plant as well as a federal depot for chemical weapons. Now its notoriety comes from its exceptionally high cancer rate-some 25 percent above the state norm-and the town's determined citizens who joined together and struck back at the corporation. As provocative and timely as Erin Brockovich or A Civil Action, My City Was Gone is a magnificently told true story of ordinary citizens in a small Southern town who led a legendary fight against corporate pollution and wrongdoing.

Prologue	p. 1
Ground Zero	p. 7
Undercurrent	p. 17
A Test-Tube Town	p. 49
The Trail Left Behind	p. 71
Confronting the Hydra	p. 95
Warts and All	p. 113
Organization Man	p. 139
West Side Mysteries	p. 153
The Anniston Theater of Operations	p. 171
Proselytizing	p. 197
The Run-Up	p. 219
What-Ifs	p. 239
Be It Therefore Resolved	p. 259
The Courthouse Steps	p. 279
Epilogue	p. 309
Acknowledgments	p. 325
Index	p. 331
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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My City Was Gone
One American Town’s Toxic Secret, Its Angry Band of Locals, and a $700 Million Day in Court

Chapter One

Ground Zero

David Baker had fled Anniston all those years ago with a wad of ill-gotten cash in his pocket and the police on his tail, although at the time the cops didn't exactly know it was David they were looking for. There had been trouble in Anniston, real honest-to-God trouble, with black-against-white melees in broad daylight and, on both sides of town, the vengeful yellow flash of shotgun fire into houses from passing cars under the gauze of darkness. Things were crazy-tense, live-wire electric, black folks on the West Side guarding their homes with guns locked and loaded, venal good old boys joyriding through once-forbidden parts of town leaving an arrogant trail of spent beer cans and shotgun shells, carloads of young, angry, and bad-intentioned black men making their own incursions through parts of the city likewise once forbidden to them. Boundaries had been ruptured—not only the invisible yet universally agreed-upon geographic boundaries that had maintained Anniston's racial pecking order for as long as anyone could remember, but the boundaries of civil restraint as well. Everything had been brought to a great agitated boil, and David had not been uninvolved.

Then, as if by heavenly decree, David found money in his hand not rightfully his but intended for him all the same. It was a fateful sign in big block letters that the day had come to make tracks and waste no time in doing so. The tracks led to New York City, where David would spend the middle chunk of his life as a union organizer in the thick of chaos that demanded every molecule of skill and gumption he possessed; where he would fall in and out of love and back again; where he would shoot a man in self-defense; where he would come of age and become a fully realized piece of work. It was a dazzling, swashbuckling, all-consuming ride, one that after twenty-five years left him crisp at his core and thinking of home. New York had burned through tougher men than David Baker, and there was no shame in admitting it. He was done.

Or so he believed.

No, he was done, and sure of it, so he retreated back to Anniston with his union pension and time on his side, still a relatively young man, not yet fifty. The town razed by turmoil and animosity in his rearview mirror so long ago now appeared at peace with itself. He lazed around the West Side, enjoyed lunch at his mother's table, had a few every now and then with his running buddies from the old days. The guys were still around; fatter, uglier, but still there, mostly. A few—maybe more than a few—had already gone on to their rewards, long before their time, but wasn't that the way of the world? It made you appreciate what you had in the here and now. Here, now, away from New York, back in Anniston, David could breathe deeply, clear his head, look around, and give thanks for the simple pleasure of walking the ground upon which he was born and raised, among people he remembered and loved and who remembered and loved him. Sometimes he thought of New York and felt an emptiness, but nobody said the transition would be seamless. David figured it was the same for the retired ballplayer, his body broken and unable to continue but still haunted by the game-day thrill of competing, of kicking the other guy's can into oblivion, of mattering. It would take a while for the cheers to stop ringing in your ears, for the adrenaline to stop pumping. But it did, soon enough.

Then David took a job.

The cosmos holds many mysteries. One of the more intriguing ones, in retrospect, is why fate would conspire to see to it that David Baker, of all people, would be hired to help remove contaminated soil from property owned by the Monsanto Corporation on the West Side of Anniston, Alabama. Most men, especially struggling, poorly educated ones grateful just to have a job, are content to collect their paychecks and keep any questions to themselves. Go-along-to-get-along still carries a powerful resonance, particularly for a black man in the Deep South. But while David Baker may have been educated on the margins and was struggling in his own way, he had devoted a career a quarter of a century long to asking questions, to challenging authority, to twirling the dials on his bullshit detector until it reached peak operating efficiency. And the more time he spent on the Monsanto job, the more his bullshit detector screamed bloody damned murder.

David began to ask questions. Quietly at first, because that's the way you start. What is this soil contaminated with? PCBs? What are those? The questions led to other questions, and some very revealing answers. David began to look around at his hometown with new eyes, and what he saw disturbed him greatly. People young and old had been dying on this side of town of cruel and ghastly illnesses for as long as David could recall. His own brother had passed away at seventeen from a combination of maladies so hideously lethal that his doctors could barely describe them. People had always shaken their heads on the West Side and said, Must be something in the water around here.

What if there really was?

David's old instincts roared back at him. He began to call meetings. The first humble gathering consisted of himself and three others in a church basement. But David knew how to build momentum: you created it yourself, by the sheer dint of doing. He talked and hustled and politicked and browbeat and backslapped, and the meetings got bigger, and soon it seemed that "Monsanto" was on everyone's lips. Suddenly the puzzle pieces seemed to fly together. There were rumblings about a lawsuit filed against Monsanto by a black church situated across the road from the venerable fenced-off plant . . .

My City Was Gone
One American Town’s Toxic Secret, Its Angry Band of Locals, and a $700 Million Day in Court. Copyright © by Dennis Love. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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