Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [4]
Suspicion fell immediately upon one of the infected patients en route to North Brother Island, the black minstrel actor who had just arrived on All Nations Block. A member of the traveling Wright Troupe, the man (whose name is lost to the historical record) had come north only a short time before and had taken a room in one of the houses where the sick children were later discovered. The rumor quickly spread that “this negro” had carried the germs in his body from Pittsburgh and, living in a house filled with playful innocents, infected at least one of them. That child, the theory went, infected classmates in the swimming bath of the Riverside Kindergarten. The theory had an easy plausibility; the white doctors of the health department, no less than the residents of All Nations Block, lived in an American culture of race that scorned black bodies as vessels of moral and physical danger. But perhaps there was more to the theory than a reflexive racism. Smallpox had been epidemic for several years in the American South, where it had spread first and most widely among black laborers in the coal mines, railroad camps, tobacco plantations, and crowded cabin settlements of the rising New South. Given the long incubation period of the disease, it might have been expected that an African American traveler would eventually bring the southern smallpox to New York. On two separate occasions during the preceding three years, smallpox epidemics had struck upstate communities. Each time the New York State Health Department had attributed the outbreaks to a traveling negro minstrel show.13
As the city health department grew concerned about the seemingly connected center of contagion, in the neighborhoods of the West Forties near Eighth Avenue, rumors circulated about a second suspect. He, too, was black. Albert Sanders, twenty-two, had suffered through nearly the full course of smallpox without medical attention before he was discovered; no patient found so far had been infected longer than he was. During this time Sanders had managed to mingle with many people. Unlike the minstrel man, Sanders had been in town for a while, and his name had appeared in the papers before. In the brutal West Side race riot of August 15, 1900, as hundreds of whites taunted and beat blacks in the African American neighborhoods along Eighth Avenue, Sanders had been listed among the injured, suffering from scalp wounds and cuts. Evidently the experience had not inspired in him a trust of whites, doctors included.14
Once two dozen cases of smallpox had turned up on the West Side, the question of the outbreak’s precise origin became almost moot. Whoever had started it—the minstrel man of All Nations Block, the unnamed “negress,” Albert Sanders, or someone else—the outbreak would now be difficult to contain.
By December 6, one week after Thanksgiving, the New York papers were calling the outbreak a full-blown smallpox epidemic, the worst in Manhattan since 1892. Three of the patients on North Brother Island had already succumbed to the disease: the servant Mary Holmes; twenty-year-old Elizabeth Oliver; and the Crowley infant, whose mother, it seemed, had not had the heart to name her. The pesthouse now held forty-four smallpox patients, with more arriving almost every day. All hopes of keeping the outbreak quarantined in a small area of the city had vanished when five-year-old Sadie Hemple, until recently a resident of West Sixty-ninth Street and pupil at the Riverside Kindergarten, turned up across the river in Hoboken with a case of smallpox. The virus had incubated in her body while she and her parents moved to their new home, a five-story tenement house where some twenty other children lived. The Hoboken authorities removed Sadie to their own pesthouse, in a place