Yellow Fever Epidemic, New Orleans, 1853
Work doesn't stop for blood
born to immunity—someone has to load
steamboats, boil sugar, stack wood.
So scientists race
their hypotheses, each virus
and microbe, pronounce whiteness
too frail to toil under a vertical sun
at swamp-clearing, cane-
cutting, cotton-picking, maintain
black men and women immune
only when enslaved: freedom weakens
the constitution.
Abolition
the infection, self-emancipation
the contagion
when whiteness is the quarantine,
where whatever doctors spin,
everybody knows the medicine.
In the city, a spike in fever,
breeds a spike in rumor,
insurrection in the Quarter,
the mosquitoes needling near
a deeper fear.
Late summer, every year,
the bodies pile in streets,
and any man you meet
in the morning could be dead at night;
which man it be determines remedy—
scourge and whip, or honey,
onion, charcoal, red oak tea;
which man, which death it be
decree
epidemic, or economy—
