Fever

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racist violence.

“Fever grows in the secret places of our hearts, planted there when one of us decided to sell one of us to another. The drum must pound ten thousand thousand years to drive that evil away.”

For Wideman, the fever is a metaphor for the sins of slavery, those social ills produced by the inhumane practices of colonialism and the slave trade. Here, he suggests that the fever, while a biological phenomenon, emerges from man’s decisions.

“Why did I not fly? Why was I not dancing in the streets, celebrating God’s judgment on this wicked city? Fever made me freer than I’d ever been. Municipal government had collapsed. Anarchy ruled. As long as fever did not strike me I could come and go anywhere I pleased. Fortunes could be amassed in the streets. I could sell myself to the highest bidder, as a nurse or undertaker, as surgeon trained by the famous Dr. Rush to apply his lifesaving cure. Anyone who would enter houses where fever was abroad could demand outrageous sums for negligible serves. To be spared the fever was a chance for anyone, black or white, to be a king.”

Here, Wideman’s protagonist, Allen, provides another interpretation of the fever. For him, the fever represents the productive breaking down of structures that failed to serve his humanity and a potential opportunity for Allen to finally capitalize on his knowledge, experience, and position in society. However, this moment reads ironically, as Matthew Carey’s account of the fever accused African American nurses of attempting to profit from the fever. Allen’s perspective gives some insight into why that may have happened, if at all, given the predicament that free African Americans found themselves in by being called to serve a city that scorned them.

“In the darkness he can’t see her, barely feels her light touch on his fevered skin. Sweat thick as oil but she doesn’t mind, straddles him, settles down to do her work. She enters him and draws his blood up into her belly. When she’s full, she pauses, dreamy, heavy. He could kill her then; she wouldn’t care. But he doesn’t. Listens to the whine of her wings lifting till the whimper is lost in the roar and crash of waves, creaking wood, prisoners groaning.”

Wideman personifies a mosquito, referring to the insect as “her,” but introduces her in such a way that it is ambiguous whether she is human or animal. In this scene, she is sucking the blood of an enslaved man in the hull of a ship, a person whose humanity has been questioned and jeopardized by white enslavers.