Fever

“Why did I not fly? Why was I not dancing in the streets, celebrating God’s judgment on this wicked city? Fever made me freer than I’d ever been. Municipal government had collapsed. Anarchy ruled. As long as fever did not strike me I could come and go anywhere I pleased. Fortunes could be amassed in the streets. I could sell myself to the highest bidder, as a nurse or undertaker, as surgeon trained by the famous Dr. Rush to apply his lifesaving cure. Anyone who would enter houses where fever was abroad could demand outrageous sums for negligible serves. To be spared the fever was a chance for anyone, black or white, to be a king.”

Here, Wideman’s protagonist, Allen, provides another interpretation of the fever. For him, the fever represents the productive breaking down of structures that failed to serve his humanity and a potential opportunity for Allen to finally capitalize on his knowledge, experience, and position in society. However, this moment reads ironically, as Matthew Carey’s account of the fever accused African American nurses of attempting to profit from the fever. Allen’s perspective gives some insight into why that may have happened, if at all, given the predicament that free African Americans found themselves in by being called to serve a city that scorned them.

“In the darkness he can’t see her, barely feels her light touch on his fevered skin. Sweat thick as oil but she doesn’t mind, straddles him, settles down to do her work. She enters him and draws his blood up into her belly. When she’s full, she pauses, dreamy, heavy. He could kill her then; she wouldn’t care. But he doesn’t. Listens to the whine of her wings lifting till the whimper is lost in the roar and crash of waves, creaking wood, prisoners groaning.”

Wideman personifies a mosquito, referring to the insect as “her,” but introduces her in such a way that it is ambiguous whether she is human or animal. In this scene, she is sucking the blood of an enslaved man in the hull of a ship, a person whose humanity has been questioned and jeopardized by white enslavers. This is a metaphor for the extractivist, violent mentality that white enslavers exercised by enslaving Black people. The mosquito is ultimately an agent of the fever that brings a city to its knees.

“All things arrive in the waters and waters carry all things away. So there is no beginning or end, only the waters’ flow, ebb, flood, trickle, tides emptying and returning, salt seas and rivers and rain and mist and blood, the sun drowning in an ocean of night, wet sheen of dawn washing darkness from our eyes. The city is held in the water’s palm.”

This passage connects to the motif of water within the story. Wideman portrays water from the perspective of an anonymous enslaved person in Philadelphia who has seen the fever in the West Indies before. He sees the city as much more fragile than it might otherwise imagine itself, subject to the indifferent and ongoing movement of tides, which here symbolize fate or even cosmic justice.

“He’d been waiting in Dr. Rush’s entrance hall. An English mirror, oval framed in scalloped brass, drew him. He watched himself glide closer, a shadow, a blur, then the shape of his face materialized from silken depths. A mask he did not recognize. He took the thing we saw and murmured to it. Had he once been in control? Could he tame it again? Like a garden ruined overnight, pillaged, overgrown, trampled by marauding beasts. He stares at the chaos until he can recall familiar contours of earth, seasons of planting, harvesting, green shoots, nodding blossoms, scraping, digging, watering. Once upon a time he’d cultivated this thing, this plot of flesh and blood and bone, but what had it become? Who owned it now?”

This passage appears when Allen first meets Dr. Rush and begins to fulfill his obligation to serve the city in the time of the crisis. Wideman portrays here the beginnings of Allen’s existential crisis, which is later exacerbated by the shocking sights of the city’s dead and dying. In his face, he describes a figurative relationship between his appearance and his work as an enslaved person, which ironically recalls the racist logic of the white establishment that presumed to know his worth based on his appearance. When Allen asks, “Who owned it now?” he draws an uneasy parallel between enslavement and the obligatory work he’s doing now to serve a city that has only injured him and his “brethren.”

“When the first settlers arrived here they’d scratched caves into the soft earth of the riverbank. Like ants. Rats. Gradually they’d pushed inland, laying out a geometrical grid of streets, perpendicular, true angled and straight edged, the mirror of their rectitude. Black Quakers coats and dour visages were remembrances of mud, darkness, the place of their lying in, cocooned like worms, propagating the dream of a holy city. The latest comers must always start here, on this dotted line, in this riot of alleys, lanes, tunnels. Wave after wave of immigrants unloaded here, winnowed here, dying in these shanties, grieving in strange languages. But white faces move on, bury their dead, bear their children, negotiate the invisible reef between this broken place and the foursquare town. Learn enough of their new tongue to say to the blacks they’ve left behind, thou shalt not pass.”

Here, Allen describes the setting of Philadelphia from the perspective of a free African American. Wideman uses grotesque language to revise the romantic history of the “City on the Hill” that was meant to be a welcoming, egalitarian utopia. Instead, Allen remembers the idealized Quaker forefathers as “rats,” “ants,” and “cocooned like worms.” In this ironic reversal, Allen makes the Quakers into pests and beasts that infected the land. The gridlines of the city, once meant to signify brotherly love, have become barriers to equality—uncrossable boundaries for Black people.

“The dead are legion, the living a froth on dark, layered depths. But you are neither, and less than both.”

This phrase repeats in the story, spoken first by an inmate on a prison ship and later by Master Abraham on his deathbed. The haunting image articulates the experience of exclusion felt by the oppressed, criminalized, and outcast by white society. From the prisoner’s perspective, his existence has him suspended between life and death, a miserable existence that gives him fewer rights and less worth than either the living or the dead.

“I wondered for the thousandth time why some were stricken, some not. Dr. Rush and this Deveze dipped their hands into the entrails of corpses, stirred the black, corrupted blood, breathed infected vapors exhaled from mortified remains. I’d observed both men steeped in noxious fluids expelled by their patients, yet neither had fallen prey to the fever.”

Wideman uses grotesque imagery to render the doctors’ examination of bodies. Allen’s perspective registers disgust at their excessive contact with the dead. As he describes it, the men are tempting fate and yet remain healthy. There is an implied injustice in the doctors’ gluttonous exposure to the illness when so many more innocent and pious people lost their lives.

“The doctors believe they can find the secret of the fever in the victims’ dead bodies. They cut, saw, extract, weigh, measure. The dead are carved into smaller and smaller bits and butchered parts studied but they do not speak. What I know of the fever I’ve learned from the words of those I’ve treated, from stories of the living that are ignored by the good doctors. When lancet and fleam bleed the victims, they offer up stories like prayers.”

The doctors’ cold, detached relationship to the dead is contrasted with Allen’s compassionate attempt to listen to the dying. The list of verbs used to describe the doctors’ procedure, “cut, extract, weight, measure,” emphasizes the mechanical, indifferent attitude that they maintain through the procedure. The last sentence makes this most clear, as it contrasts the doctors’ tools and actions, “lancet and fleam,” with Allen’s “stories like prayers.” While the first is analytical and violent, the other is gentle and humane.

“When you open the dead, black or white, you find: the dura mater covering the brain is white and fibrous in appearance. The leptomeninges covering the brain are clear and without opacifications. The brain weighs 1450 grams and is formed symmetrically. Cut sections of the cerebral hemisphere reveal normal-appearing gray matter throughout.”

The passage describes the good doctors’ perception of bodies, whether “black or white.” By elaborating the similarities between the organs, tissues, and other anatomical features of bodies, the doctors claim a neutral regard, suggesting that they do not observe race. Nor do they see the humanity of the victims that they study. Due to this irony, Wideman suggests that reducing bodies to their organs does not render them as equal subjects in the eyes of the doctor but as equally dead objects.

“Allen, Allen.”

This phrase is repeated throughout the story, first when a preacher interrupts Allen praying to instruct him to move to the back of the church and later when Allen is called to the side of Dr. Rush. It is a nagging interruption of Allen’s thoughts and a moment when he must again resign himself to serving a doctor who treats him with patronizing disrespect. By repeatedly inserting the call for Allen, Wideman creates a refrain that is simultaneously a call to duty, a nagging reminder of what Allen has sacrificed, and a call to awaken to the reality of the situation.

“She’d simply shut the door on her dead mistress. No breath, no heartbeat, Sir. I could not rouse her, Sir. I intended to return, Sir, but I was too weak to move her, too exhausted by my labors, Sir. Tears rolled down her creased black face and I wondered in my heart how this abused and despised old creature in her filthy apron and turban, this frail, worn woman, had survived the general calamity while the strong and pampered toppled around her.”

Allen listens to and observes a loyal Black maid who has remained at her mistress’s side, even in death. Wideman inserts her report to the doctors, punctuated by the word “Sir.” Even in this state of crisis, describing as she does the traumatic event of witnessing death, she is abiding by racial, gendered, and class hierarchies that she has deeply internalized. The scene leads Allen to experience awe and despair at the absurdity of her survival and predicament.

“You’ve told me tales of citizens paralyzed by fear, of slaves on shipboard who turn to stone in their chains, their eyes boiled in the sun. Is it not possible that you suffer the converse of this immobility? You, sir, unable to stop an endless round of duty and obligation. Turning pages as if the next one or the next will let you finish the story and return to your life. Your life, man.”

Master Abraham encourages Allen to give up on his crusade to help the city that has scorned him and return to his family. He uses the metaphor of the story to describe the hastened passage of one’s life when one moves through it as Allen does, turning pages too quickly to get to the end. The final sentences’ repetition of “your life” emphasizes the heavy “weight of your life in your hands” (155).

“They ain’t paying me nothing so that’s what I do. Nothing. Least I don’t punch em or tease em or steal they shit like some the staff. And I don’t pretend I’d God like these so-called professionals and doctors flittin round here drawing down that long bread. Naw. I just mind my own business, do my time. Cop a little TV, sneak me a joint when nobody’s around. It ain’t all that bad, really. Long as I ain’t got no ole lady and crumb crushers. Don’t know how the married cats make it on the little bit of chump change they pay us. But me, I’m free. It ain’t that bad, really.”

Wideman’s language imitates contemporary African American Vernacular English, signaling to readers a jump forward in time to a new scene of caretaking in Philadelphia as a Black orderly describes his work at a nursing home. Although the changes are explicit, Wideman also emphasizes what’s unchanged: the constraints of the orderly’s freedom imposed by the socioeconomic structure that does not value his work or his life. He prides himself on being more grounded in this reality than the “so-called professionals” that recall Dr. Rush—those who pretend they’re God.