Fever

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

Rather than a traditional linear narrative, “Fever” uses a collage structure to include fragments of actual historical documents, fictionalized versions of significant historical figures, and an array of anonymous and communal voices that share their perspective on the devastating impact of the yellow fever on the Black community in Philadelphia. These narrative segments range back in time to the American Revolution and forward to the 1980s when Black Philadelphians were again subject to state-sponsored violence. There is no omniscient narrator and are no signposts that alert readers to these changes in narrative perspective; rather, the shifts are detectable only in the changes in language and form. It is up to readers to determine whose perspective they’re encountering and do the interpretive work to figure out the narrator’s role in telling the story, their relationship to this history, and how reliable they might be as a narrator. By creating this level of readerly responsibility and the potential for many different misreadings or miscommunications, Wideman reveals the practical difficulty that people face in their attempts to get to the truth of a matter. This story structure exposes The Dangerous Power of Authority Figures to Produce False Histories and questions how historical events are recorded and remembered, who has had the authority to claim to tell the “truth,” and how to rebalance these scales to bring justice into our present consciousness. 

The primary narrative perspective from which readers witness the fever is Wideman’s fictionalized version of Richard Allen, a famous African American minister and leader in the free Black community in Philadelphia. Allen famously attempted to set the record straight about the role of African Americans in the city’s survival, refuting the account written by Matthew Carey, which was considered authoritative by the white establishment. By presenting the fever through Allen’s eyes, Wideman continues in this revisionary tradition and sheds light on the forgotten leadership, sacrifice, and suffering of the Black community. Allen’s narrative perspective not only casts doubt on the authoritative history of the fever that persisted in history books through the 20th century; it also reveals The Hypocrisy of Racism in Public-Serving Institutions. It does this by exploring the Quaker values of egalitarianism and brotherly love on which the city was founded, the American medical knowledge and methods of Benjamin Rush, and the framing of the fever as a city-specific event, abstracting it from the broader context of the colonial slave trade. Underneath all of these, the story shows, is a current of anti-Black racism that distorts and muddies people’s ability to see the truth, connect with each other as humans, and care for each other in times of need.

Allen’s revelations about the hypocrisy of the city’s authorities occur as he journeys alongside Dr. Rush to aid the sick and tend to the dead. When they travel to the shore of the Delaware River, Allen reflects on the ways that the city’s founding ideals have been perverted by racial prejudice:

[T]he first settlers […] pushed inland, laying out a geometrical grid of streets […] Wave after wave of immigrants unloaded here, winnowed here, dying in these shanties, grieving in strange languages. But white faces move on, bury their dead, bear their children, negotiate the invisible reef between this broken place and the foursquare town. Learn enough of their new tongue to say to the blacks they’ve left behind, thou shalt not pass (139).

Allen’s perspective revises the typical story of the “City on the Hill” as a beacon of hope. When he looks at these gridlines, he sees the “invisible” barriers erected to enforce poverty and certain death for immigrants who cannot speak English and anyone who cannot claim “whiteness.” 

Wideman presents the medical practices of Rush and his assistants through Allen’s eyes, portraying the doctor’s dispassionate quest for the truth of the virus. Where Allen sees suffering, despair, and all kinds of grief in the depths of the city’s cellars and alleys, Rush sees objects for analysis and subjects for experiment, each potentially containing the possible hidden secret of the fever that is his to discover. Allen observes that “[t]he doctors […] cut, saw, extract, weigh, measure,” whereas he learns about the fever “from stories of the living that are ignored by the good doctors” (145-46). Here, Allen contrasts his way of knowing and learning about the fever with that of the doctors, and Wideman issues an ethical judgment. The doctors use gruesome modes of analysis, dehumanizing the dead as objects, in order to discover the truth. This authoritative mode of knowing is contrasted with Allen, who discovers the truth in the stories, voices, and prayers of the sick and dead. The passage elevates Allen’s as the more noble, and even more honest, method, undermining the doctors’ pursuit of truth, fame, and power. Rush’s treatment of the dead and suffering, from Allen’s perspective, is consistent with the racist ideology that assumes the inhumanity of the Black refugees, enslaved people, and citizens. Allen realizes the tragedy of his loyalty to a city and an authority figure that persist in treating him as less than.

Wideman calls into question the authoritative power of the historical record, medical science, and political ideals of Philadelphia, demonstrating how the ignorance produced by racial prejudice not only led to the exclusion of African Americans from history but also caused the fever. The fever is a metaphor for the underlying anti-Black racism that dehumanized the enslaved, circulated them across the Atlantic, and brought the fever to the shores of Philadelphia since “[f]ever grows in the secret places of our hearts, planted there when one of us decided to sell one of us to another” (133). The fever here is both a literal and deadly epidemic spread by the mosquitoes aboard slave ships as well as the sin of slavery. This social ill is rendered as the deeply internalized root cause of all the suffering that Allen experiences and witnesses, highlighting The Presence of Colonialism and Slavery in “Free” American Cities. This realization, however, provides a glimmer of liberatory hope for the minister who comes to see, “Fever made me freer than I’d ever been. Municipal government had collapsed. […] To be spared the fever was a chance for anyone, black or white, to be a king” (150-51). Wideman’s fever contains a paradox, portraying humans’ interconnectedness as both that which constrains and liberates the human condition. When seen through the right eyes, the fever lays bare the truth of humans’ intimacy, proximity, and shared humanity, revealing the truth—the sickness of racism and slavery—that they have collectively failed to see.