32 pages • 1 hour read
Fever
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Themes
The Presence of Colonialism and Slavery in “Free” American Cities
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racist violence.
“Fever” explores colonialism and slavery as they relate to the emergence of yellow fever, racism, and ongoing inequalities experienced by free Black citizens and refugees. For Wideman, it is the institution of slavery that is to blame for the fever, and the story serves as a sharp critique of the historical record’s failure to recognize this. By interweaving references to the Haitian Revolution, slave ships that carry the infection through mosquitoes to Philadelphia, and the presence of West Indian refugees in the city, Wideman makes it clear that although Philadelphia is an ostensibly “free” city, Philadelphians are intimately connected with the structures of colonialism and slavery. Indeed, the city’s treatment of the free Black people as well as the San Domingan refugees illustrates the ways that the ideas that enable colonialism and slavery are well alive there.
Allen reflects,
First, they blamed us, called the sickness Barbados fever, a contagion from those blood-soaked islands, brought to these shores by refugees from the fighting in Santo Domingo. We were not welcome anywhere. A dark skin was seen not only as a badge of shame for its wearer. Now we were evil incarnate, the mask of long agony and violent death (140).
The panic of the fever leads the white, powerful citizens of Philadelphia to baldly collapse any distinction between African Americans and Black Caribbean refugees, admitting finally that they see them all the same because of how their skin appears. For someone like Allen, who bought his freedom and was a leader among the free African Americans in Philadelphia, this is an insult that confirms for him the city’s failure to recognize his humanity, despite all of the suffering he’s endured by following the procedures in place to liberate himself from enslavement. While this exposes Allen’s own classism and xenophobia—wrought by his own experiences of oppression—Wideman shows the ways that Philadelphia’s people are deeply a part of the slave trade and colonial expropriation of people, land, and resources.
By concluding the story with a reference to the 1985 bombing of Osage Avenue, Wideman suggests the less obvious ways that the legacy of slavery and colonialism lives on. In response to the political resistance of the Black leaders of MOVE in West Philadelphia, the municipal government condemned them to death and the neighborhood to ruin. Wideman draws a parallel between the city’s lack of care for Black life with that of the 18th century, when the city’s officials at once neglected the parts of the city where Black people lived and demanded their loyalty in the time of crisis.
The Hypocrisy of Racism in Public-Serving Institutions
“Fever” explores how medical science, public health policy, and the distribution of resources all reflected and exacerbated the institutional oppression of the Black population. The story chronicles the ways that the institutions meant to serve all Philadelphians abandoned its Black citizens and cast blame on them for causing the fever while also demanding their loyalty and service.
Philadelphia was the center of American medicine at this time, led largely by Dr. Benjamin Rush, who was a pioneering force in anatomical research. Rush was among the people who theorized that people of color were immune to the fever based on observational evidence that was later disproved. The “fiction,” as Allen describes it, exacerbated white people’s internalized hatred of African Americans, who were suffering at equal rates of disease but receiving far less expedient care. This exposes the hypocrisy of those who claimed to want to stem the suffering in Philadelphia.
Allen observes, “We were proclaimed carriers of the fever and treated as pariahs, but when it became expedient to command our services to nurse the sick and bury the dead, the previous allegations were no longer mentioned” (140-41). The city’s leadership is shown to both denigrate the African American community and demand their loyalty. The hypocrisy of the institution—its deep ties with racism and prejudice—fill Allen with despair as he fulfills his obligations with a heavy heart.
Allen’s perspective also presents the hypocrisies of the Church, where he recalls going to find peace, salvation, and empathetic company. He recalls a vision of liberation, “hordes of sable bondsmen throwing off their chains” (137), that was interrupted by a white parishioner who insisted that Allen move to the back of the church: “There ye may fall down on your knees and give praise” (138). The failure of the church to allow him to realize his dreams of liberation—and its insistence on perpetuating the racism and prejudice that kept people in chains—leads Allen to found his own church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Like the medical establishment and the city’s leadership, the leaders of the church ultimately advance the prejudicial and racist attitudes that their avowed beliefs claim to reject.
The Dangerous Power of Authority Figures to Produce False Histories
Beginning with a dedication to Matthew Carey, official chronicler of the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, Wideman’s “Fever” refutes the authoritative history of the crisis. The relationship between history and authority is explored through the narrative structure, blending of nonfiction and fiction, and movement across space and time.
The story’s narrative structure is experimental and non-chronological. The story does not follow the conventional plot structure of a short story, nor does it use a consistent narrator. Instead, Wideman creates a collage of voices from across time and space to contribute to his retelling of the yellow fever epidemic. By displacing these conventions—those that typically imply to readers that the narrator is “reliable”—Wideman challenges readers to consider how authority is produced and question whether history’s authors can be trusted. In fact, the content of the story suggests that the fever’s main chroniclers—among them Carey, Rush, and the city—were deeply unreliable, preoccupied as they were with their own racial prejudices and ignorance.
The text also includes fragments of historical documents among fictional segments in which Wideman imagines the perspective of a variety of figures, including an enslaved person aboard a ship, a mosquito, and a Black orderly in contemporary Philadelphia. By blending real excerpts from Richard Allen’s 1794 pamphlet about the fever with his own invented internal monologue for Allen, Wideman asks readers to consider the absences of the historical record. He provides what can only be imagined and inferred: the voices of those historically not granted authority to tell the truth of history.
Lastly, Wideman’s select voices describe experiences that range as far back as the American Revolution and forward into the 1980s in Philadelphia, when the story was first published. By juxtaposing present knowledge about the fever with Dr. Rush’s frenzied attempt to solve the crisis through bloodletting, Wideman highlights the ignorance that shaped the initial authority’s claim to the fever. Rush never did discover the truth: that the fever was transmitted through mosquitoes and could not be resolved through a medieval practice like bloodletting. This challenge to the historical authorities—those in charge of handling and memorializing the fever—attempts to unsettle the reader’s relationship to authority and portrays present institutions with suspicion. Ending the piece with a passage that blends together the voice of the mayor that oversaw the yellow fever in 1793 and the mayor that ordered the 1985 bombing of Osage Avenue, Wideman again suggests that the authority of those in power allows them to write false narratives, something that can have fatal outcomes.
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By John Edgar Wideman
