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By Root 415 0

crepe and stopped all of the clocks. Strands of the deceased’s hair might be cut and woven into shapes like a cross to display in a glass case in the parlor. Even the children and babies would take part in the mourning, wearing a touch of black. The body would be packed in ice if it was summer and laid out in the parlor—a tradition that with time would dwindle, and the term parlor would be replaced by the living room. Finally, the women would stay behind in the home, while pallbearers in black gloves carried the coffin to its place of burial, where it would be draped with fresh flowers. Formal announcementsof death would be mailed. And the widow would forgo any gold or silver jewelry, wearing a dark veil during the following year and black garments for the next two and a half years.

During the epidemic, however, families prepared their own for burial, cleaning the bodies when there was time, placing the corpse in a pine box with a mixture of tar and acid before bolting the lid closed. They would listen. At some point during the day, in the suffocating silence, a team of six horses pulling a wagon would come up the block and announce, “Bring out your dead!”

The infected district started with the river. From there it spread through the lowland just underneath the bluffs and Front Street known as Happy Hollow. At Happy Hollow the Wolf River joined the muddy Mississippi, creating a rich stew of bog land and river brush. Happy Hollow had been the primary dump for downtown citizens who still relied on the bucket-and-cart system for emptying their privies. The mixture of refuse, rainwater and mud created a landfill where poor immigrants could build makeshift homes out of boat scraps and sheet metal perched on stilts above the fetid mud and froth. The accommodations were both rent free and tax free.

For two decades, railcars and steamboats had transported more than goods to Memphis, they delivered immigrants looking for work. Around New Orleans, yellow fever, the “stranger’s disease,” regularly fed off these newly arrived, nonimmune immigrants. In the 1870s, a large influx of immigrants moved into Memphis and settled around the river in Happy Hollow and the Pinch District. To a virus preying upon populations of nonimmunes, they provided ample supply.

From Happy Hollow and the river, the infected district spread across Front Street into the Pinch, then Second and Third streets.

It stretched south into Exchange, Poplar, Washington and Adams streets. Deep within these neighborhoods stood the Memphis Courthouse, Calvary Church, Grace Church, a synagogue, City Hall and an elaborately expensive prison. Of all the dwellings, the prison would report the fewest cases of yellow fever.

As Constance and Thecla made their way through the infected district, they crossed the Gayoso Bayou, and at last, reached Alabama Street where St. Mary’s Cathedral stood, a wooden, Gothic church with a large rose window over the entrance. Petals of purple, blue and gold shone light into the dark wood interior where a tall, arc-like nave gave the feel of a ship turned inside out. The church, now a bishop’s cathedral, had been built in the 1850s as a branch of Calvary Episcopal Church and St. Lazarus-Grace Church. It had been constructed on the very edge of town where Poplar intersected Alabama Street and Orleans with instructions for a steeple that could be seen from Main Street. At a time when other churches charged fees for their pews, St. Mary’s did not, hoping to be open to all people, those in the city and those in the country, the ones who could afford it and those who could not.

The conditions at St. Mary’s were not much better than those of the town. Already home to a girl’s school and church orphanage, the Citizen’s Relief Committee then appealed to the sisters of St. Mary’s to take care of the Canfield Asylum, a home for black children, as well. Hundreds of children orphaned by the epidemic took residence at Canfield, one of the last disease-free havens in the city—far from the Mississippi River unfurling the pestilence from its banks.

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