Fever

Fever Summary | Detailed Summary

"Fever" opens with a man staring out the window of a ship at the naked trees. In his mind, he compares them to "barren women starved for love"—and to himself. It is winter, the days are shorter, and he is alone. In the hold of a ship, another man—a slave—wonders why the gods have chosen to put him here, chained to other captives, bumping and shaking in puddles of waste. A mosquito squats on him, drinks his blood, but he does not kill her. He thinks of her as a woman straddling and entering him; if she returns day after day, eventually she will drain all of his blood and he will disappear. The mosquito is an ominous sign of the spread of the fever.

Between these two points of view, an omniscient narrator and a first-person plural narrator, in the form of a collective ("we"), alternately describe the effects of yellow fever and Dengue, two diseases transmitted by mosquitoes and producing chills, headache, sick stomach, pains in the limbs, and yellowed eyes. Some of the sick languish a week or more, others only a few days. Some go mad, while others simply go to sleep.

The story takes place primarily in low-lying Philadelphia in the summer of 1793. The city, ravaged by an epidemic, has been abandoned to the dead and dying, slowly deteriorating like the people succumbing to the fever. An old man who has seen the fever before compares the city to a slave—held captive—with poisons circulating through it. He says it is cyclical like the seasons and that most will survive and with the frost, it will disappear, as surely as it will come again. Some believe the fever has been brought by slaves on the ships from Santo Domingo, but the old man says, "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 years to drive that evil away."

Tending to the sick is Allen, a free black minister who emerges as the central character. Allen sees himself as a kind of Moses to his people, dreaming of leading them out of this land, where they escaped slavery only to fall victim to dissolute living. Philadelphia, though a Quaker refuge, is still a city divided, where every immigrant had come from the water dreaming of a holy city, but only whites had managed to find their way out of the riverfront shanties. Even in church, the blacks cannot kneel at the front of the gallery, and so Allen built his own church, where blacks and whites came together briefly before the epidemic to celebrate what might be the dawn of a new day. When the sinners among his people—the weak and the outcast—spurned him, Allen took his preaching to them, enduring their jeering and spitting with an unfathomable love.

With the outbreak of fever, the tentative fiction of equality has been exposed. Blacks are accused of having brought and spread the contagion, and then are said to be immune. At first, they are unwelcome, discharged, called evil. Then they are commanded to tend to and bury the dead, being blessed by an immunity that is as much a lie as their equality. Ordered to save the city, their constant exposure spreads the disease among the black population, which is too poor to seek help.

Allen is one of those who have been commandeered to treat the afflicted. He works for Dr. Rush, who believes only draining the poisons from the blood will save the victims, and who autopsies the dead in an attempt to find the cause of the disease. Allen, torn between his duty and his desire to help the sick among his own population, watches Dr. Rush dip his hands into the black and corrupted blood of the victims, noting that on the inside all the afflicted look the same.

As Allen moves from house to house, patient to patient, he thinks about the river, filled with waste, rising and threatening to drag him down. He watches carts move past filled with bodies, parentless children wandering the streets. The thought of spoil obsesses him. At the same time, it strikes him that fever has made him freer than he's ever been: the government has collapsed, he can come and go as he pleases, amass a fortune, sell himself to the highest bidder as a nurse or a surgeon trained by the famous Dr. Rush.

Voices in his head accuse him of hypocrisy, working to save the white people instead of his own. In one house, he finds a white family dead, their black servant ill and exhausted, having chosen to stay. As he wonders why she, finally free, hadn't chosen to run away, a voice in his head calls him names, demands to know why he stays. This voice tells Allen his fatal flaw is narrowness of vision; if he would only be a Moses to his people and lead them out of the city, he would find a better place.

Another voice, an old Jewish merchant, perhaps a patient, remembers his own experiences with prejudice and tells Allen that in leaving his wife and children to build his wealth, he lost them, implying the same will happen to Allen. He tells Allen to abandon the city and Dr. Rush and go to his wife and daughters. Another patient asks Allen why he really stays, what "sacred destiny, what nigger errand" keeps him. He says perhaps Allen cannot imagine being other than he is—a free man with no one to blame, "the weight of your life in your hands." Like the others, he tells Allen to run away, rescue his family.

Far in the future, an old man has lived to see the slaves freed. Having shed the city, he still does not know if he is free or has only "crawled deeper into the sinuous pit." He searches a child's face, looking for himself, and thinks of parents, children, himself, all of them orphans, poorer than they were before. "Pray for me, child," he says. "For my unborn parents I carry in this orphan's potbelly." Elsewhere, a young orderly is tending to white people, barely scraping by. However, since he has no family, it is enough, and, he declares, he is free.

Allen finds two Santo Domingan refugees dead, husband and wife with their backs turned to each other, as if they could not stand the horror. Just before uncovering their faces, Allen has a vision of the faces of his wife and daughter. He longs to rearrange the dead couple, hide the vision from the undertakers, though no one knows anything of the recent immigrants, no one has dared ask any questions. The couple has left two screaming brown babies behind. Before word reaches Allen, his wife and daughters are dead.

As the fever ends, the population is determined to put it behind them. A new century will soon dawn and the horrors must be forgotten. Only, the mayor of the same city two hundred years later kills half a dozen children when he bombs the residence of an outspoken African-American organization. Proclaiming a new day, he thanks city officials and volunteers for returning the city to its destined glory.