The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our Nation (32 page)

Will urban outbreaks of yellow fever become more widespread and more deadly? If recent statistics are any indication, they will. Africa and South America are already moving in that direction. And unlike a virus such as smallpox, yellow fever is passed between insects and animals—it can never be eradicated because nature itself gives the virus sanctuary. Migration of humans closer to jungles and forests will place people and the virus at even closer range. But with education and routine vaccine use, the outbreaks could be contained and infect fewer people. Programs are already under way to include yellow fever in childhood vaccines in Africa.

Science is also looking for ways to understand the virus better. Recent studies have unraveled some of the mystery as to how a virus like yellow fever interacts with the human immune system. In one study, scientists identified the protein on the virus coating that interferes with the immune response. In another, scientists located part of the viral protein that human antibodies lock onto to defeat it. Isolating and reproducing that protein could lead to a safer vaccine against yellow fever.

The likelihood of the American plague returning to the United States is anyone’s guess. In a 1996 article in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
the author wrote: “Because
A aegypti
mosquitoes are once again established in urban areas . . . there is widespread concern that yellow fever could erupt in explosive outbreaks, which could also occur in the southeastern United States.” But we are certainly better off than people were 150 years ago. We have a vaccine. We have modern amenities like air-conditioning instead of open windows, cars instead of open-air wagons. We have insect repellent. And best of all, we have the knowledge that the virus is spread by mosquitoes.

Still, viruses have taught us one thing throughout history, and it is this: That their will and ability to survive may be stronger than ours.

Elmwood

Of course there are elms at Elmwood, though they were planted after the fact to complement the name. Their massive, gnarled trunks rise high above the earth, and their roots spread deep beneath the ground, branching out amid the bones. There are also oaks. And there are magnolias with hard-shell leaves curling along the limbs, raining the dead ones like petals. It is quiet in the way that only those vast, old cemeteries can be. The only sound is the wind gathering leaves and the train that runs along tracks that edge the property.

The term
burial
brings to mind something hidden and covered, but the word
cemetery
comes from Greek and means “sleeping chamber.” It’s a softer approach to death, and cemeteries historically came to be places of serene recreation. Trees, flowers and streams became the natural monuments to match the stone ones. Family members once bought tickets and rode streetcars to visit the resting places of loved ones. When cemeteries moved away from city churchyards, they sprouted in the surrounding countryside, and the idea of returning to the earth what once belonged to her became all the more fitting. Over time these towns of the dead came to reveal a city’s history, its stories etched in stone.

More than 125 years have passed, and still, wreaths of fresh flowers stand in Elmwood, browned and crisped by the September sun, on the tombstones of Charles Parsons, Louis Schuyler and the Martyrs of Memphis. It is a reminder—they have not been forgotten.

Old roads with names like Toof, Porter and Wellford wind through the grounds of Elmwood, where a soldier from the American Revolution and Civil War generals are buried. Tombstones, new and old, pockmark the grass like a garden of granite and marble. Some are grand, tall, ornate. Stone angels and monuments of all shapes and sizes stand in the geometry of sunlight and shade. Others are smaller, no more than two feet long, where small children have been buried.

In the middle of the cemetery is a grassy plane, strangely vacant. There are no granite tombs or crumbling concrete, just a sun-washed, treeless patch of green known as “No Man’s Land.” Here, 1,500 unidentified bodies are buried. At one time, their skin burned with yellow fever; now they lie in a cool, dark place where long ago their arms and legs, hands and feet, were intertwined for eternity.

Dr. William Armstrong is buried along Park Avenue in the ground beside his wife, who died on the same date as her husband, September 20, forty-six years later. Their children lay around them. A few feet away is the monument for Gideon Johnson Pillow, the general under whom Armstrong served as a surgeon during the Civil War.

Up the grassy incline from Armstrong is a flat pyramid of stone. On the four sides of the pyramid it reads
Constance, Thecla, Frances
and
Ruth.
The dates follow one another in quick succession— September 9, September 12, September 17, October 4. The point of the pyramid is the year 1878, and their bodies are buried in the shape of the cross, their tombstone standing at center.

Across the road from “No Man’s Land,” a tall cross atop a monument reaches heavenward. The cross has been mottled by time, streaked by years of rain. Two names and dates are carved into the stone, but the inscription that reads
priests
and
died of yellow fever
has grown shallow with age. Here, Charles Carroll Parsons and Louis Schuyler are buried together. One lived in Memphis for years surrounded by family and parishioners; the other lived in Memphis only ten days.

On November 1, 2005, the superintendent, Sunny Handback, retired from Elmwood. He had worked there since he was sixteen years old. He had scattered dirt across countless graves, occasionally meeting an old man or woman visiting the cemetery who would tell stories about yellow fever and the year 1878, when wagons full of bodies arrived, and citizens just walked into the cemetery, a corpse thrown over their shoulders and a shovel in their hands, to bury bodies anywhere they could find space. Even in recent years, groundskeepers have dug into a plot only to find the bones of an unmarked yellow fever victim buried there.

In 1878, another man held the same position as Handback. He worked as the superintendent of Elmwood during the yellow fever epidemic, and he lived on the grounds with his daughter, Grace, the “Graveyard Girl.” In the cemetery’s red leather logbook, the handwritten names begin in August. At first, the cause of death is listed as yellow fever, but by September of 1878, ditto marks are used, page after page. In many cases, a whole family—husband, wife and all of their children—are listed in a long row. It was Grace’s hand that wrote the names, dates and cause of death, and it was Grace who rang the bell each time a body was buried. The bell tolled continuously until Grace too was stricken by yellow fever.

A burgeoning river city once stood at one of the widest points of the Mississippi River. Andrew Jackson, James Winchester and John Overton named it Memphis after the ancient, wealthy city along the Nile. Memphis, Tennessee, was a city rich in land and promise, where trains linked it to the East and West and paddleboats tied it to the North and South. It was visited by presidents and royalty, and it held the most extravagant Mardi Gras parades ever seen. White marble buildings stood on the bluff above cotton-laden steamers, and a population of white and black, northern and southern, immigrant and native saw their future. It seemed bright and certain. That city no longer exists.

The heavy German and Irish immigrant populations are gone for the most part, and the city’s character has instead been shaped by the rural influence of freed slaves and farmers. Where mansions once stood along Beale Street, there is now a rough-edged, gospel-laced music known as blues. Barbecue, the food that originated in the fire pits outside slave quarters, is a culinary favorite. Many old buildings surrounding Court Square and downtown are today hollowed out with broken glass or restored as condominiums. The Gayoso Bayou now runs beneath the paved city streets.

And yet someone from 1878 would be surprised to find that many of the same contrasts remain: There is still racial strife, which reached its peak with the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. There is still a great divide between the wealthy and poor. There are undercurrents of political corruption. There is a strong religious influence, primarily Protestant. Paddleboats still bob at the edge of the Mississippi River, and Cotton Row stands along Front Street. The Pinch District is thriving, and the Peabody Hotel is still in operation. Court Square has been restored. The city is still a major hub with boats, trains and now, planes. And the defining characteristic of the city is still a steadfast, stubborn will to survive—one that started with the devastation of the 1878 yellow fever epidemic.

Memphis was one town, one place, where yellow fever took its greatest toll, nearly destroying the city and forever changing its future, but there were hundreds more over two centuries that suffered from the American plague. Shades of those epidemics changed populations, commerce, cities, politics, wars and ultimately history. Federal laws were born in its wake. It spawned racism and prejudice, but it also inspired sacrifice and martyrdom. It created a national hero in Walter Reed and a Nobel Prize winner in Max Theiler. It touched the lives of politicians like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Rutherford B. Hayes, William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. It influenced literature through the likes of Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, Stephen Crane and Mark Twain. And it took the lives of countless doctors, nurses, priests, nuns and ordinary civilians—most of their names have been forgotten. The American plague has been forgotten.

But in Memphis it still lives, quietly, in the bones beneath the branches of elms and in a lissome, lyre-marked mosquito that waits for the virus to find it once again.

Acknowledgments

Though I never had the honor of meeting any of the people in this story, I admire them above and beyond what could be expressed in the pages of this book. Whether the martyrs of Memphis or the martyrs of science, their courage, suffering and sacrifice are almost unmatched in today’s world.

As long as I live in Memphis, I will see the ghosts of this story in the doorways of churches, on the street corners of the Pinch, along Adams and Main and in the gravestones of Elmwood. Likewise, my admiration knows no bounds for the scientists who sacrificed so much in the fight against yellow fever: Jesse Lazear, Walter Reed, James Carroll, Aristides Agramonte, Carlos Finlay, Max Theiler, among others. In an age where heroism can be so hard to come by, the fourteen human volunteers in Walter Reed’s experiments amaze and inspire me.

In writing about history, a book is only as good as its research.

For their help, time and support, I thank those in the Memphis and Shelby County History Room at the Memphis Library, particularly Patrica LaPointe. Not only did she help me make some of the connections vital to this story, but she granted me access to so many irreplaceable, original documents. I also want to thank Joan Echtenkamp Klein and Claudia Sueyras with the Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Collection at the University of Virginia’s Claude S. Moore Health Sciences Library. Their Walter Reed Collection is beautifully maintained; I rarely needed their assistance and that is a tribute to such an organized and accessible historical collection.

Also deserving of recognition are the curators of the Mississippi Valley Collection at the University of Memphis, the Health Sciences Library at the University of Tennessee in Memphis, the New York Academy of Medicine, the Library of Congress and the National Library of Medicine, as well as Georgia Fraser at Elmwood Cemetery, Elizabeth Wirls at the St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Memphis, Professor Gary Lindquester in the Rhodes College Department of Biology and Ron Brister at the Memphis Pink Palace Museum.

One of the most valuable lessons I have learned as a writer is to be a reader of great writing. I have had the privilege to know and learn from some truly great writers: Candice Millard Uhlig, a gifted author and cherished friend; Hampton Sides, who was kind enough to give a first-time author and fellow-Memphian his help and encouragement; and Robert M. Poole, whose talent as an editor is exceeded only by his talent as a writer. A former executive editor at
National Geographic
, Bob Poole saw enough potential in me as a writer to give me a chance. I thank him for that.

I would also like to thank Mary Collins, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Zanvyl Kreiger School of Arts and Sciences, who has pushed me, challenged me and taught me. She was involved in the proposal for this book as well as in editing early drafts. I would also like to thank David Everett, my thesis advisor in the Hopkins writing program who first introduced me to the genre of narrative nonfiction.

So many friends offered their encouragement and support during this project. I would like to thank personally Allison Cates, Claire Davis, Jennifer Fox, Tessa Hambleton, Davida Kales, Lauren Kindler and Margaret McLean. Special thanks to Andy Cates, a long-suffering champion of my writing.

I am eternally grateful to my parents, Tom and Betsy Caldwell, and my in-laws Glenn and Nancy Ann Crosby, for their unceasing support, time, encouragement and commitment. I am indebted to them for allowing me to have a career in writing as well as a family without giving up one for the other. My parents have taught me to follow my passion and never once questioned where it might take me. I thank them for instilling in me such a valuable lesson—that life is too short to spend it doing anything other than what you love. As Memphians, Nancy Ann and Glenn Crosby took an active interest in this story; as a doctor, Glenn Crosby allowed me to sit in his study and riffle through medical texts; and as my in-laws, they offered their steadfast encouragement.

I would also like to thank other family members who have been sounding boards and sources of strength. My sister Lindsey has been an ever-present and perpetual believer in me, and I thank her for her unconditional love and support. Scott Crosby, an avid reader of nonfiction, always seemed sure that I would write this book. I thank him for his optimism and belief in me. Likewise, other family members have been stalwart sources of support and encouragement: Glenn Crosby, Liz Crosby, Meg Crosby and Elizabeth Crosby.