Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [59]
A truism holds that in the Jim Crow South, whites and blacks lived side by side, while in the “promised land” of the urban North de facto racial segregation prevailed in the housing market. But the history of the southern smallpox epidemics suggests just how much social distance actually existed between the races in southern places. Jim Crow laws, which proliferated in the 1890s, stripped most African Americans of the suffrage, forced them into separate compartments on trains and streetcars, and relegated black children to the most poorly funded schools. For all of their flaws, the public health reports reveal some of the collective impact of this emerging regime of white supremacy, even as they attest to the vitality of black social institutions. Reports traced smallpox clusters to African American boardinghouses, schools, churches, restaurants, opera houses, and a few houses of ill fame—including one in Richmond, Kentucky, whose keeper served well-attended court-day dinners to the community.59
Booker T. Washington had it right. Infectious disease drew no color line. People did—with their customs, practices, institutions, and laws. The color line, in any event, rarely held. Even when local authorities tried to keep smallpox at bay by ordering quarantines of African American sections—as officials did in 1900 in Wertenbaker’s native Albemarle County—smallpox crossed that line. When whites did catch smallpox, a disease that had in some places gone unnoticed for months suddenly attracted public attention. The formerly invisible disease became visible.60
Which is not to say it became intelligible. For at that point, as Wertenbaker observed time and again, another problem presented itself. The public refused to believe mild type smallpox was the real thing.
The smallpox came to Stithton, Kentucky, on a winter’s day in 1899, when the Barker boy rode home from Louisville on a bicycle. A peculiar rash speckled the young cyclist’s face, and the town physician who examined him feared the worst. He instructed the boy to ride home and stay there, and then rang the Hardin County health officer. Accompanied by several excited physicians, Dr. C. Z. Aud took a ride out to the Barker place. Aud looked the boy over, ran his fingers over the papules, and in the presence of his attentive colleagues and the boy’s father, diagnosed smallpox. Mr. Barker did not gasp with alarm, he did not plead for a second opinion, he did not ask what could be done to save the boy. He just let the Hardin County health officer know that his opinion wasn’t worth all that much at the Barker place. “I was not very politely told by the old man,” Aud recalled, “that he had had small-pox himself, and knew a great deal more about it than I did, and he would not submit to vaccination.” Barker’s two daughters refused to bare their arms, either. Mrs. Barker said she had already been vaccinated. So Aud and his entourage left. When he got back to his office, Aud learned that Mr. Barker had already called a lawyer to see if he could “get damages from a doctor for saying his son had small-pox when it was a lie.” To Barker, Aud’s diagnosis amounted to libel. Time would tell that Barker did not know so much about smallpox. Two weeks later, he and his daughters broke out in pox.61
Though most rural Southerners had never come near a case of small-pox, they expected to know it when they saw it. And when their expectations were not met, they did not, as a rule, defer to the professional expertise of public health officers. Dr. J. R. Burchell of Clay County, Kentucky, found himself