The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [23]
CHAPTER 4
A City of Corpses
Dust from the lime blew in the air, bone colored and sifted fine as flour. There was no traffic to stir it up. No horses to kick dirt beneath their hooves. It rose and fell of its own energy, occasionally accompanied by the pitch of a mosquito’s wings.
Only six months after the lavish Mardi Gras celebration, Memphis was a city of corpses. Streets, white with disinfectant, were deserted. Once lined with cotton bales and parade bleachers, Main Street now held piles of coffins, stacked one on top of another, so that walking the thoroughfare felt like entering a tomb. Instead of pageant masks, the occasional pedestrian would hurry by with a sponge tied across his nose to cover the smell. Where 3,000 horsemen had paraded, only death wagons now clattered by in pairs: One wagon of empty coffins, the other of full ones. The smell of cologne and rosewater, sprinkled on the bedclothes of the dying, seeped from doorways disguising the peculiar, pungent odor of illness. The sweet scent of blossoms had been replaced by the saccharine stench of death.
Wilkerson Drugs had closed, as had most other apothecaries, their colorful show globes void of light. Prescriptions could not be filled. McLaughlin’s grocery and Barnaby’s shop were boarded shut. Vegetable carts had long since closed, and the milk wagon had ceased its rounds weeks ago. Banks opened for only one hour a day. Memphis, having been quarantined from the rest of the country, became a colony left to burn. One journalist wrote: “A stranger in Memphis might believe he was in hell.”
City officials wired President Rutherford B. Hayes for help; little was given. Hayes wrote in a personal letter on August 19, “I suspect the Memphis sorrow (yellow fever epidemic) is greatly exaggerated by the panic-stricken people. We do all we can for their relief.” On September 2, Mayor Flippin again telegraphed the president for assistance, but it was the last of such correspondence. Four days later, the mayor was down with the fever.
Even the lime could not cover the smell of death as Constance stepped off the train platform on August 20, 1878. The wind carried the odor for three miles outside of the city. Sister Constance and Sister Thecla returned from a vacation on the Hudson as soon as they heard the news of the fever; the sisters were the only ones traveling into Memphis.
As they made their way through the town, signs of plague were everywhere. Across the street from the marble fountain of Court Square stood a white, clapboard building flanked by two staircases. It was the headquarters for the Memphis Board of Health. In front of it, wagons filled with disinfectant held shovels protruding out of the flatbed like broken limbs. On a trip through the city the shovels would empty the chalky chemical as downy as falling snow; on the return trip, the shovels picked up badly decomposed bodies.
The carriage pulled away from the downtown train station, up Poplar Street past the empty courthouse on Main. It moved slowly through the streets, navigating the huge sinkholes and corroded paving. The smell of the Gayoso Bayou and all its decay was heavy in the air. A hot breeze lifted the treetops and, already, the leaves began to burn at the edges. In spite of temperatures that hovered around 100 degrees, residents had been advised to keep fires burning within their homes to cleanse the air, and windows were boarded shut against the pestilence.
As the sisters entered the infected district, yellow pieces of cardboard marked the doorways of the ill. On many porch fronts, black replaced the yellow cardboard with white chalk scrawled across it—Coffin Needed—and the dimensions for a man, woman or child.
It was a pitiful parting in a time of extravagant mourning. Under normal circumstances, the dying family member would have had the opportunity to say good-bye to all loved ones as they gathered bedside to hear the last words. The family would then have drawn the blinds, covered mirrors in black