On Indexing “Waste” by Catherine Coleman Flowers
Catherine Coleman Flowers wrote Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret (The New Press) to call attention to how issues of sewage and wastewater are connected to rural poverty, infrastructural inequity, and systemic racism. Yet after reading the book, I thought a more accurate title might be a phrase Coleman uses on page sixty-three: My Education as an Activist. The issue of waste serves primarily as a vehicle for Flowers to talk about expansive structural inequities in America and how every moment of life is an opportunity for activism and problem-solving for change.
Flowers received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant for her work on bringing to light the plight of many rural and poor Americans who live without proper wastewater and sewage disposal. Her work has garnered national attention and has been covered by NPR and Grist among others. Flowers hails from Lowndes County, Alabama, an economically neglected portion of the Black Belt, which Flowers describes as “a broad swath of rich, dark soil worked and inhabited largely by poor Black people who, like me, are descendants of slaves” (3). Flowers’ work in this region focuses on the many residents who occupy substandard housing and whose waste often flows right from the house into the backyard, forming open cesspools where mosquitos and disease thrive. Flowers and her collaborators found that hookworm, long thought eradicated in the US, was alive and well in Lowndes County due to the many public health and infrastructural challenges the region faces. Thus, Waste is a book about both social and environmental justice—as well as climate change, which exacerbates both environmental conditions and widens socioeconomic inequities.
When I received Waste in the mail, I immediately noticed that it lacked an index. I am a professional indexer, and when I see a nonfiction book without an index, I am compelled to index it. An index adds utility to nonfiction, allowing readers to go back to certain ideas or parts of the book as needed. Indexing is also a way to know a book inside-out, to see its patterns, themes, and repetitions in a structural and concrete way. Since this is also one of the tasks of writing about books, what better way to approach writing this article than to index the book. So, after reading through the book once, I began rereading, writing up rough index entries as I went.
I often index on the computer, but I find cards more relaxing, and since this was a labor of love, rather than paid work, I wrote up each potential entry on a small card. I ended up with something like 3,000 cards, which I then sorted and organized to make the entries of the index, which is included with this essay.
I usually begin with proper nouns because they’re pretty clear-cut. How to handle “Stokely Carmichael” is much more obvious than how to handle “education,” for example. As I sift through names and places, they take on character, and I begin to see how they fit within the broader narrative. Waste is largely chronological. A person who appears early in the book is part of childhood or young adulthood. The people who appear later are more apt to be involved in Flowers’ professional life. The same is true with other topics. The most revealing is the Selma to Montgomery March entry. Waste is 206 pages long, but the march appears at points from page seven to page 157.
Only while indexing the march did I realize that it was a distinct marker of time in Flowers’ life. Many of the events in the book center around anniversaries of the march, a 1965 protest for Black voting rights, which passed through Lowndes County, Alabama, where Flowers grew up. The march touches Flowers’ years as a teacher in Washington, DC, when she took her students on trips to introduce them to history and activism. It touches her childhood and the soil she studies as a public health and economic development specialist who has returned to Lowndes County to try to lift it from poverty and disease—and injustice.
A large portion of the book has nothing at all to do with sewage, but everything to do with activism. Activism is the constant from first page to last in Waste. From her childhood with civil rights activists to organizing for change at her high school to fighting against racism and harassment in the military, Flowers has been fighting for equality, justice, fairness, and opportunity all her life. Waste is essentially a story about how a person can go from a childhood of poverty in rural Alabama to a life spent at UN conferences, enlisting the aid of Al Gore and Jane Fonda in a quest for environmental and social change.
Even during my first read of this book, what struck me was that word—opportunity. I kept thinking about the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. In Outliers, Gladwell posits that, more than ability, what creates success is dedication and opportunity. He uses the example of Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems, who basically created the foundation for me sitting here typing on a computer. Gladwell describes two things that led to Joy’s success. The first was that he happened to be in the right place at the right time, with access to certain kinds of computers when access was rare. This type of access occurred from childhood through college. The second was that Joy took advantage of every one of these rare opportunities to work on computers. Therefore, by the time he finished college, he had logged an amazing number of hours programming. Gladwell calls it the 10,000 hour rule. People who are really, really good at what they do have spent 10,000 hours doing that thing.
Catherine Coleman Flowers has almost certainly logged 10,000 hours as an activist. She had the opportunities, and she used every single one of them. She happened to have parents who were very active in civil rights. They supported their child as she took her high school to court. Then Flowers started to make her own opportunities. At every turn in this book, Flowers is driven not necessarily by achievement—though she aspires to go to college and graduate school—but by righting wrong and fighting injustice. She does it in every context and at every stage of her life. And when she’s a teacher, she tries to give her students (many of whom have grown up witnessing crime, poverty, and violence) a sense of achievement, pride, history, and opportunity for themselves.
One reviewer on Amazon complains that there is a lot of name-dropping in Waste. This isn’t necessarily an inaccurate statement. At times the book feels like a MacArthur acceptance speech, where Flowers thanks every single person who got her where she is. When I was indexing, I can confirm that the stack of cards featuring the names of people was large. I suggest, however, that all of these names serve to show how many people it takes to get something done and to enact change. Flowers is nothing if not a connector and a bridge-builder, a self-proclaimed seeker of common ground with those who have different points of view. One of my favorite moments in the book is when Flowers confronts Jeff Sessions and ropes him into supporting her cause. Despite his affirmative role in Waste, I was entertained to see that the “Sessions, Jeff” index entry falls between “septic” and “sewage.”
Often, sections of an index tell a story all on their own and without intention.
Marian Wright Edelman is an activist for children’s rights and the first Black woman to be admitted to the Mississippi Bar, Flowers writes. Edelman’s entry is followed by the entry for the bridge where John Lewis was beaten by police during the Selma to Montgomery march. And, after the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the education entry speaks for itself. At the same time as the book highlights the successes and opportunities Flowers has had in her life, it also highlights the many obstacles and inequities she experienced, many of them in education, many of them systemic in nature.
Most people think of indexes as purely mechanical compilations. Clients ask me: “How does it work? Is it just automated somehow?” To some extent, indexing is a cut and dried process—yes, this name appears on seven pages, etc.—but in many ways, it’s a creative endeavor. A human endeavor that requires judgement, conceptual thinking, and organizing. Something that doesn’t take up a lot of space in the book might, in fact, be incredibly important. The indexer gets to know the author in a way a casual reader might not, and that relationship affects the index.
If you were to mark out extended discussion of faith in this book, you would come up with only a couple of pages. But, as I indexed, I saw how many churches were mentioned, often in passing. I noticed how many people in the book were reverends or pastors (including Martin Luther King). I noticed many mentions of prayer. A human brain can add Union Theological Seminary into this category too. So, while discussion of faith takes up very little actual space, faith and religion permeate every part of this book and also shape the relationships and activist causes within (Flowers networks with churches, with faith-based organizations, and with religious leaders). Therefore, ignoring strict indexing rules, I created entries for “church,” “faith,” “religion,” and “prayer” in addition to the entries for specific churches and organizations and cross-references to lead readers to the various entries.
Flowers told me, in her way, that these things were important. On page 166, she recounts visiting Wheaton College, where she was interviewed for their newspaper. The title of the article was “Faith Activism,” which Flowers says, “felt just right to me.”
An indexer also brings themself to the index. Another indexer might have indexed
because that topic relates to septic issues. Rural Alabama happens to have soil that does not “perc,” which is one of the causes of its septic issues. But I added
because, when Flowers says, “something about that soil gets in your blood,” I identify so strongly. She says it three times in three different ways. But, more than that, the idea drives the course of the book and Flowers’ life. Therefore, though it is small in print, and seemingly not consequential, I included it. As I included Patti LaBelle and John Legend, though all indexing rules would have told me to ignore them. They were important to the author.
As an indexer, my job is to decide what’s important enough to index—what people might want to look up. And this is an example of bias. I sometimes don’t know what will be important to a particular community or audience. I do my best to get inside the author’s mind and heart and priorities, but I worry that I will dismiss a name that doesn’t seem important, but which is important in a world I know little about. My task reveals the small and simple ways that race and experience weave through all the things we do and consume, even something as seemingly inconsequential as an index. In some ways, as a person living in the South with my eyes open, I was better suited to creating this index than some, but certainly less suited than others.
And that is another idea that weaves throughout these pages: that the people who represent us, who make our laws, and who decide the policies that affect our lives...those people need to understand the issues that affect their constituents. Flowers repeatedly says that there is little rural representation in Washington. She points out that the Black community, long mistreated, ignored, enslaved, and legally oppressed, has little faith in institutions or government, yet many of the challenges we face as humans require science and government—and some faith that these pillars can take care of us. As I turned the last page of this book, as I did the final proofreading of the index, I felt the importance of the work Flowers does as a connector, as a representative, as a voice, and as an activist who feels, as she says on p. 165, that “faith propelled us to work for justice and requested us to be merciful to all.”