We stared at one another. Our heads were on a level.
Whether there is some transmission of knowledge through the ether, or whether physiognomy and expression have some linguistic virtue so subtle that we do not remark its operation, the eyes may indeed speak.
And so, for a while, for perhaps some ten minutes, I was not looking at my mother, but at a woman who knew me, and I was a man who knew her; she was a girl of thirteen, newly arrived in a frigid, alien country; a woman who had been that girl; who had given birth in bondage, while men with devices and pencils had observed. She had played the harpsichord and painted. She was a woman who had known desire, and who had danced upon the knolls by Lake Champlain. She had flirted with the New World’s great virtuosi. We stared at one another, and in that moment, we knew each other for the first and last time.
And then, this she offered to me, my one truth: “Our language,” she said, “is not spoken, but sung. . . . Not simply words . . . and grammar . . . but melody. It was hard . . . thus . . . to learn English . . . this language of wood. For the people of your nation, Octavian, all speech is song.”
We watched each other’s eyes. We were as strangers, in that moment — as intimate as strangers — for strangers know more of us, and can judge of us more without reproach than ever those we love.
Refugees streamed out of Boston; we saw them on the roads, carrying everything they owned. Many had no place to go. The plague banners still hung from the windows of our house.
Up and down the coast, we were to learn, there were preparations for war. Men-of-war patrolled the harbors. Soldiers dug ditches; they threw up redoubts and ravelins.
In the Colony of Virginia, as in Massachusetts, the Governor sent out forces to seize Patriot gunpowder, and so disarm revolution. As General Gage’s, his maneuver occurred in the night, in darkest secrecy. The militia guards stationed at the Williamsburg armory having retired home to bed, a detachment of Royal Marines entered the powderhouse and removed fifteen barrels of powder, lifting them onto carts and disappearing with them before dawn. The Governor, Lord Dunmore, avowed that he had ordered the powder removed to deprive the slaves of possible armaments, should they rise; but the Virginia rebels, hearing that their stores had been confiscated, feared the opposite: that their Governor sought to deprive them of weaponry so that they should not be able to defend themselves against a Negro uprising of his own dire engineering. They feared that he had already called for the slaves to form into legions against their masters, so raising an African army to secure the British hold over the Colonies; they feared that slaves, enflamed with overheard talk of liberty, would assume that such freedom applied to them and take up arms, instituting murder in bedrooms and on balconies, sinking the region into impossible chaos and bloodshed.
Within our house, the only chaos was that of a dismal joy: the pleasure of girls at new-found health, the jubilation of children at the restoration of outdoor play; the relief of full convalescence after the long night of fever; the excitation of nerves amongst men eager to fight for a cause; the delight of the young in the spring’s heartless arrival.
My mother’s wounds were begun to smell. The reek was so great that the other servants slept on the floor in the house rather than endure the miasma near their pallets.
Mr. Gitney had begun to take a greater interest in the extremity of my mother’s condition. He prepared several cures which he hoped should combat the disease, far-progressed as it was.
My mother did not move; the encrustation was complete. She could not speak any longer; nor could she swallow without pain. Her sheets were fastened to her with her exudations.
In the extremity of the disease, her features could not be recognized as hers. Her visage was an assemblage of holes, the nostrils flaring with each breath. There was no kindness, no gentleness to this departure; nothing human, but rather a degeneration into some demonic substratum of the body that had waited to lay waste to all the lineaments of grace.
[Excerpted from THE PHILOSOPHICAL EPHEMERA OF THE NOVANGLIAN COLLEGE OF LUCIDITY, vol. v (1775), circulated in manuscript form]
OBSERVATIONS UPON THE PROGRESSION OF THE SMALLPOX IN HOMO AFRI.
BY MR. JOSIAH GITNEY, M. PHIL. CANTAB., AND MR. RICHARD SHARPE
THE PLAGUE of Smallpox being so great among us and so rapacious in its appetites, it is a most desirable article of knowledge, to establish how its hungers might best be combated, for the great comfort of Mankind. The question has arisen frequently among the planters of the South, whether the Negro suffer the affliction with the same degree of hardship as the European, with a practical view, on this head, of establishing whether inoculation of slaves will prove both effective and efficient.
TO THIS END, taking advantage of the current unrest, we arranged for the inoculation and sequestration of a number of subjects, both white and black; and, combining the data from this quarantined sample with mortality figures from two Virginia plantations, we have made certain physiological and forensic observations which may shed some practical light on the question of whether inoculation of bonded Africans should be undertaken by individuals fearful that such a course will hamper productivity and adversely affect profit.
THE MASSACHUSETTS SEQUESTRATION involved 49 individuals; of whom 11 had previously had the pox, and were thus immune. Of the remaining 38, 20 were of African and 18 of European blood. The inoculation was administered on the arm of each subject.1 Of those variolated, only three developed symptoms of any magnitude: a white male of seven years, the first to show pustules, died of internal rupture; a white male of sixteen years was enflamed in his entirety with the excrudescencies, and yet survived, though disfigured significantly; and a black female of twenty-nine years demonstrated a severe cutaneous infection which eventually traveled inwards; of which she died.
1. Did we repeat the experiment, we should instead inoculate in the leg, which, being further removed from the pneumatic, electrico-ætherial, and hydraulico-vascular machinery, is less likely to lead to internal corrosion and fatality, viz. Dr. Adam Thomson’s Discourse for the Preparation of the Body, &c.
SEVERAL HEROICAL ATTEMPTS at palliative intervention were attempted, especially to the last-mentioned subject. Initially desirous of maintaining the circulation of animal spirits and humoral percolation, we administered (a) venesection by fleam, and, having let her blood to no little degree, we instantly turned the subject over and (b) inserted a glyster of quinine. This occasioned the subject discomfort only; and we feared that the vital juices would cease circulation. Accordingly, we alternated draughts of (c) laudanum and (d) volatiles, trusting that where the former would soothe, the latter would excite; the first quelling the patient’s disposition to dramatic phrenzy (such as was demonstrated at the application of the enema), the second restoring the patient to consciousness; but both relaxant and stimulant met with similar indifference, given the exhaustion attendant upon the disease. The subject’s papules at this time — the third day since their first appearance — consolidated and gave rise to pustular vesicles, which no amount of cauterization with poker or rupture with lancet could stem. We administered (e) an oral infusion of quinine; (f) a saline bath suggested by a celebrated balneologist; and (g) several cathartics (jalap, senna, sublimate of mercury, crab’s claw); the extreme dose of which may have been what occasioned the loss of her hair and most of her teeth two days before her death.
These measures failing, we resorted to an Indian method of which we had heard no little report: We placed the subject in a small underground chamber which we had infused with a great quantity of steam; and after she had come to a prodigious sweat, removed her to the frigid, icy bath; alternating back and forth between them for some time. The results of this were inconclusive, beyond the extraordinary discomfort it apparently occasioned the subject, who protested weakly as we placed her in the steam chamber the first several times; eventually falling silent. She did not speak again before her death.
It would appear that, a day before the moment of d
emise, the subject was blind, and sufficiently fevered as to be insensate. It is unclear whether the blindness proceeded from the invasion of the disease in the ocular area or from an internal nervous disorganization attendant upon her distemper.
It was to scrutinize such questions as these that we undertook a dissection.
WE REMOVED the corpse to a chamber separate from the other subjects and prepared the body for disassembly. Of particular interest in our investigation was the disruption of the skin and its humoral balance by the sores; it being established that, in the African, the median layer of the skin, or secondary lemulla, is suffused with black bile released in the relaxation of the nervous system. It would be of particular interest to determine whether the torment of this tissue in any way interfered with the augmentation of bilious fluxion.
THUS, we began our investigation. A vertical incision was made along the abdomena of the subject from just below the breasts down almost as far as the pubis, terminating at the upper expression of the pelvic cavity. We prepared to make lateral incisions at the termini of this first; these being of no great depth, our interest in the first stage of the dissection being wholly cutaneous; which was to be followed by an inquiry into the progress of the corruption in the alimentary and pneumatic apparati.
WE SHOULD MARK an interruption in our proceedings at this point, which we would omit, were it not of behavioral interest. The son of the subject, an African male of sixteen years, demanded entrance to the experimental chamber; this being denied, he forced the door. Once within, he spied the body. He had not for some three days seen the subject, and had not been at liberty to be present at the subject’s expiration; it being determined that her much-disfigured, impetiginous state and her insensibility would cause unnecessary anguish in a son and could potentially lead to the disordering of his reason.
He stood for some time unmoving, as did we; we, observing, he, oblivious.
Mr. Sharpe noted to the others that the boy was deprived of speech and reason, returned by the sight of the familial dead to his originary savage superstition and stupefaction.
At this, the youth turned to gaze upon Mr. Sharpe. Mr. Sharpe addressed him directly, asking if the boy were capable yet of ratiocination, or was become dumb.
At this, the child produced a scream of startling savagery and attempted to do violence to Mr. Sharpe. He was intercepted in his design by one of the young men who assisted with the procedure; they wrestled.
As their melee progressed, Mr. Sharpe, standing to the side, observed to the African youth that the boy fought for no good end, as no goal could be accomplished by him defeating his opponent; this being excellent proof of the boy’s degeneration back into his natural state, the trappings of civilization having fallen from him.
At this, the boy ceased struggle. The young man who wrestled with him released him, and they both rose.
The African youth stood before us, a gawky and immobile spectacle.
He said, “I cannot fight — nor can I refrain — without imputations of savagery.” And he finished, in a voice not of defiance, but suffused with realization: “I am no one. I am not a man. I am nothing.”
He turned and absented himself from the chamber, his body betraying signs of considerable inward turmoil of spirits in his irregularity of movement.
We called for one of our number who had refrained from the dissection — Dr. John Trefusis — to attend the youth and ensure that he did not lay a hand of violence upon himself or any other. Dr. Trefusis sat with him for some hours; at which point the elder man unfortunately fell asleep, and the youth made his escape, having through some low guile procured a set of keys which he had kept about his person.
By the time we had been roused to his flight, he could not be found in the neighborhood, in spite of the best efforts of many to hunt him down through the night; his sable skin providing cover in the dusk.
We cite this vignette as an example of possible recidivism; it demonstrates not only the confusion but also the fractious and insubordinate natural inclination of the African subject.
WE RETURN to the dissection, as went on apace. Mr. Gitney excused himself from the procedure at this point, so all further notes were taken by Mr. Sharpe.
Making the lateral incisions on the abdomena, we were able to disclose to view both (a) the viscera and (b) the obverse leaf of the skin, which appeared much ravaged by . . .
[A letter from Dr. John Trefusis to his friend Dr. Matthias Fruhling, of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia]
Canaan — August 12th, 1775
Sir, dear friend —
Some two weeks ago, you received a manuscript copy of The Philosophical Ephemera of the Novanglian College of Lucidity which contained an article on the dissection of a subject afflicted with smallpox.
You have, I cannot doubt, read this excellent article and admired its formidable merits of proof and argumentation. Transparent in its prose; yet dense with the opacity of flesh; unflagging, even fleet, in its inquiries; yet never scrupling to linger sagely over the most minute of incisions; this most excellent of articles hath been purged of all speculation unacquainted with fact; and, a triumph of philosophy, hath been cleansed entirely of all the cloudings of passion, the confusions of humanity, the irritations of pity, the sorties of affection, indeed, anything which might mark the beating, breathing, humane breast.
However, I note that in a few regards its observations are incomplete, for which reason, I send this addendum to you, my ancient friend, so tender in your sensibilities, that you might circulate it as necessary at the American Philosophical Society and gratify them with further enlargement upon this interesting subject.
Of what does fact consist? This article — cacata charta1 — omitted, so far as I can tell, in both text and footnote, to mention that one of its authors, Mr. Josiah Gitney of the Novanglian College of etc. spent the day previous to the said dissection bowed by the insensate corpse of the woman he would soon dissect, holding its hands, touching its face, weeping and whispering, “I love you. I loved you. I love you.”
1. “shitty paper.” Dr. Trefusis draws the quotation from Catullus, Poems, XXXVI. — ed.
This, my colleague, is fact, true and empirical; yet Mr. Gitney saw fit to obscure it in his account. Why conceal it? In what way does it not merit scientific attention as well? When a man falls upon his knees and grieves, doth not his musculature contract and his ligaments distend? Doth the heart not dilate, the humors circulate? Do the animal liquors in the nerves not suffer agitation? Do the cortices not enter into lamentatory conversation, taking the impress of exteriorities?
Hath not his tears salinity, which might be measured, were they burnt away with flame?
Your humble & affectionate,
Dr. John Trefusis
Not to have been born at all,
Never to have seen the light of the sun:
This is the best thing for mortals.
Or, if begotten, to have fallen from the womb
Straight into the grave,
And to be smothered, unknowing,
In the dirt of Hades.
— Theognis
[From a diary in Acton, Massachusetts]
May 3rd, 1775. Clouds all day and it was cold for the month. Got the stumps and the brackin out of the new field. There was a negroe boy presented himself for work and sd he wd work for food. Ast him had he halled out stumps before and he sd yes he could. After some time with us struggling with the lever and the ox was skittish I ast him had he realy ever halled stumps and he sd no sir. It hd begin to rain. We was all mud. He was shivering so bad he cdnt barely move and he just kept staring. I sd can you cut wood. He sd yes. I sd you cut wood before? He dnt answer, so I sd it agin, You cut wood before? He sd nothing, then sd Yes, lyeing. I give him the ax and sd so cut and he jus stood and helt the ax and the rain fell on him. I sd Tilly-vally!, you hant cut wood befor boy. what can you do? have you ever done any thing? and he dint anser. I sd I ast you what can you do can you do anythin
g, can you cut wood, can you carry? and he sd nothing.
Get off of here I sd. I cd of whipt him, shoud of. I yellt at his worthless hide and told him did he stand around Id take the whip to him and then he dropt the ax and walked away. He dint run just walked, shivering, across the chopt down trees. I sd run but he walked, and good riddance.
John and I pullt out the rest of the stumps. Rain got harder in the afternoon. The Jerseys baby it is sick, and we could here it wailing thro the day. It wailed in their cottage, and the rain fell, but it loosened the mud and it was easier to pull out the stumps then. We got it all done before night.
[From a letter dated May 4th by a woman residing in Stow, Massachusetts]
. . . and Clarice spent the morning with the chickens.
Round about noon there was a Negro boy begging for work, slow-moving and most likely stupefied. I inquired after his papers to see if he was free, but he lied and said that he had lost them. “Then there is no work for you here,” I said, but he was so gaping and simple-looking that my heart went out to him, and I gave him some Indian pudding to eat before sending him on his way.
There are many such vagrants now who have fled the city. Gen. Gage issues passes for those who wish to leave, but many more are fleeing without, as we all predict bombardment and flame. There is a constant expectation of some fatal event. . . .
Lincoln
May 6th, 1775
To Mr. Josiah Gitney —
This morning it was feed time and we was providing the fowls with their repast when my boy comes out to me and says that there is a beast in the smokehouse. I asked him, What manner of beast, and he said he had not seen it but heard it breathing and crying, as did one of the carcasses hanging there stir from the toils of death and make plaint.