Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [58]
Even in an era of such systemic neglect, the realization that smallpox was spreading among African Americans across the South was bound to cause alarm among white public health officials. White officials understood from their own observations in the field that smallpox spread like wildfire through unvaccinated populations, regardless of their color. Since the majority of Southerners, white and black, had never been vaccinated, officials made some effort to explain the early prevalence of the disease among blacks.
White medical commentators marveled at African Americans’ sociability: their “gregarious habits,” their fondness for going on “excursions” and mingling “promiscuously,” their “close association and intermixing.” And the commentators were not just talking about sex. Many fretted about “religious negroes,” who seemed ever to be gathering in one meeting or another. During an outbreak, African American churches were usually among the first places quarantined—right after the black schools. Even the playfulness of African American children was deemed a threat to the public health. In the autumn of 1899, as sharecroppers in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, brought in the harvest, piling the seed cotton high in their cabins, one white official worried that children would pollute the cotton with smallpox: “On this inviting heap the darky children romp by day and sleep by night with that habitual disregard of cleanliness characteristic of the race.” The writer knew he could count on his readers’ imagination to complete the scenario. With the infected cotton bound for market, and from there to the mills, and from the mills to the homes of unsuspecting white consumers, who could say how far smallpox would travel from those sharecroppers’ shacks?56
Racial anxieties permeate the official record of the southern epidemics. But the record also contains clues about the deeper causes of the prevalence of smallpox among African Americans. While poor nutrition and overcrowded living conditions made black people especially susceptible to smallpox, institutionalized racism fostered African Americans’ long-standing distrust of white doctors. Neglected and mistreated by the medical profession, the vast majority of southern blacks had never been examined by a physician, let alone been vaccinated, and would just as soon keep it that way. African Americans were understandably reluctant to report cases of smallpox in their homes or neighborhoods to white authorities. As the Atlanta Constitution noted during the Birmingham epidemic, “[T]he negroes there have a great dread of the pesthouse and use every effort to avoid having their friends and relatives taken there.” In other places, the physical or cultural distance from white medical authority was so great that such subterfuge was unnecessary. Traveling through Georgia in 1899, Wertenbaker kept stumbling upon African American settlements or sections of towns with names like “Hell’s Half Acre,” where smallpox had spread for four or five months, sometimes longer, without attracting the least notice from whites. “The disease became epidemic before it was known,” he said.57
The close living conditions of African American laborers, even in the most rural of settings, aided the spread of smallpox. Especially efficient carriers, it seemed, were itinerant laborers in the fast-growing rural nonagricultural sector, including men who worked at turpentine stills, in phosphate and coal mines, and on the railroads. Unvaccinated African Americans who slept in crowded cabins, shared tents in mining camps, or huddled for warmth in railroad boxcars were extraordinarily vulnerable to airborne germs. Transient black workers, forbidden by law, custom, and their own poverty from sleeping in a white-owned tavern or inn, frequently stayed overnight in the home of a black family, where they shared rooms and often beds with children and other family members. In February 1899, a white Carrollton, Kentucky,