Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation

Introduction: Disease Histories and Race Histories

An undertaker who within the last ten years has buried many of the ten thousand of our people who sleep in Southview cemetery recently made a remark to me that set me to thinking. I give it to you tonight with the hope that it may have the same effect upon you. ‘‘You have no idea,’’ he said, ‘‘how many people are dying from the lack of sympathy.’’ This is expert testimony, and we cannot reject it. —Rev. H. H. Proctor, ‘‘The Need of Friendly Visitation,’’ 1897 The chief interest in the South is social supremacy, therefore prejudice manifests itself most strongly against even an imaginary approach to social contact. —Fannie Barrier Williams, ‘‘A Northern Negro’s Autobiography,’’ 1904 i n t r o d u c t i o n Disease Histories and Race Histories In late September 1920, the case of Alice Barnes and her family was referred by the Baltimore Family Welfare Association to the Henry Watson Children ’s Aid Society (hwcas). Soon thereafter, the hwcas sent its agent, S. S. Lawrence, to Barnes’s residence, a rented room in a ‘‘two story, six room house on a broad, smoothly paved street, in a rather nice section of the city’’ in which Barnes and her two-year-old daughter, Eleanor, had lived for nearly two months.∞ Alice Barnes was aware that she was dying and wanted 2 Introduction to make provision through the society for the care of her toddler and her newborn infant. Although Barnes awaited the results of a sputum test from the City Health Department, Lawrence could quickly discern from pieces of evidence strewn about her room that the woman was in the final stages of pulmonary tuberculosis, or consumption. Two sputum cups, one containing a germicidal solution of chloride of lime (as precaution against infection of others), showed that a visiting nurse recently had been on the premises. They stood on the floor, next to the bed and near the foot of a small nightstand on which stood a glass of milk, Barnes’s usual fare until the woman from whom she rented the room returned home to prepare dinner. Other signs told the tale of disorder caused by disease. Having gained entrance from an unscreened window on one side of the room, a ‘‘great many’’ large and menacing flies danced through the stifling late summer air. Many of them alighted on Alice Barnes, who, sitting languidly on the edge of her bed and struggling for breath, barely had the energy to brush them away. In contrast to the room, Lawrence noted, Barnes was ‘‘a pretty, light skinned, colored woman with long silky hair,’’ no doubt leaving any visitor unused to the scene with the impression of witnessing a modern, twentieth-century comment on what only a generation before widely had been regarded as a ‘‘romantic’’ affliction. As Lawrence helped her into the bed, Barnes, ‘‘very slowly and in a whisper,’’ began the ritual part of every case in the era of modern charity and social work, the telling of her history. For reasons Barnes did not relate or Lawrence deemed not pertinent to the case, in July, Alice; her husband, LaSalle Barnes; and their infant daughter, Eleanor, had come to Baltimore, probably from Northumberland County, Virginia, where the couple had been married in 1915. Her current landlady, Laverne Settles, later reported that Barnes had told her that they had come to the city on vacation. Whom they were visiting, however, is not clear, since Alice’s Baltimore relatives, an aunt and two cousins, had had no idea that she was in town. Soon after the family’s arrival in Baltimore, however , LaSalle left Alice Barnes, nearly seven months pregnant with her sixth child, to go to Atlantic City, where he said he had found work at ‘‘an ice cream place.’’ He was to send for the family once he had begun work and found a place to live. She never heard from him again. Anxious and running out of money, on 1 August Alice Barnes moved to her current residence, where she paid $2.50 a week to Settles for room and board. It is not clear why she did not return home to Virginia to her other children.≤ Holding out hope that her husband would indeed send for her, she may have decided to stay in Baltimore until the birth of her baby. Whatever Introduction 3 her...