Memphis has many martyrs: In 1878, four nuns sacrificed their lives helping others during the yellow fever epidemic. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed trying to save this country from the triple scourge of racism, militarism, and materialism. On the banks of the Mississippi River, one daughter of Memphis writes about returning to — and choosing to love — a place she had wanted to leave behind.
By Elizabeth Apple
May 7, 2020
In the summer of 1878, four Episcopal nuns stayed in Memphis during the yellow fever epidemic. Constance, Thecla, Ruth, and Frances were New England transplants and faculty at St. Mary’s School for Girls (established 1847). In normal years, they taught music and grammar; in 1878 they burned pine tar and soaked their sheets in acid.
Yellow fever is a viral mosquito-borne infection. Its name comes from the jaundice. In severe cases, the virus attacks the liver and kidneys. The skin and eyes yellow. In 1878 there was no vaccine and no treatment. People thought the virus passed through breath, or through contact with infected clothing or linens. Half of Memphis fled — including most doctors and clergy. Anyone who could afford to. The ones who stayed coated the streets in powdered lime.
Sister Constance, 1878. Image courtesy of st. mary’s episcopal cathedral.
“Yesterday I found two young girls,” Sister Constance recorded in her diary that summer, “who had spent two days in a two-room cottage, with the unburied bodies of their parents.” The nuns took the “fever orphans” with them, bathed their clothes and their bodies in a carbolic acid solution, lit pine tar and showered them in smoke. “One grows perfectly hardened to these things,” Constance concluded.
I started at St. Mary’s in kindergarten, a tiny, strawberry blonde girl with bangs and a bob. I learned to read at St. Mary’s; I learned how to make friends and mistakes. I played soccer and practiced algebra problems and went to prom. When I graduated at 18 in 2014, I wore a long, white dress made entirely of lace and a crown of gardenias. I wasn’t theatrical, though — this was the unspoken, southern dress code at my private, all-girls school. 59 other girls looked the same. We walked down the aisle in the chapel like brides and took our diplomas from the headmaster under a giant tapestry of Jesus. The stigmata themselves were the size of my palms.
They didn’t tell us the story of Constance and her companions until middle school. The truth about the fever is too terrible — that it works like Ebola or dengue, eliciting bleeding from the nose, mouth, and eyes; that the urine goes dark; that the stomach bleeds. In Spanish the virus is vómito negro, black vomit.
When they told us about the fever and the sisters, they did it in the chapel, with a Eucharist. Once a year in September. I remember stale, powdery wafers and dry red wine. We attended these services begrudgingly. Sometimes we even laughed at the sisters’ names — Constance? Thecla?
The word Eucharist is a compound of the Greek words eu and charis — literally, good grace. It’s a meal of thanksgiving and a celebration of memory. In the Episcopalian tradition, whenever you eat of this bread and drink from this cup you remember the crucifixion and the love that led up to it.
Charis is the same root from which we get words like charisma and charm. In classical Greek mythology the Charites, literally Graces, were three minor goddesses who together represented beauty, life, favor, fertility, and creativity. The Greek poet Hesiod renders them as Aglaea, Euphrosyne, and Thalia — or, shining, joy, and blooming.
It’s probably obvious by now that the sisters died from the fever, all of them. They say Sister Constance’s last words were, “Alleluia! Hosanna!” To spare the linens and mattresses from contamination, she lay on the bare floor next to Thecla. She was yellow and searing with dehydration and probably experiencing multiorgan failure.
The Eucharist itself compels you to remember a sacrifice. This is my body broken (given) for you. It’s prepared in the imperative — remember me.
A sacrifice like Constance’s demands a paradoxically high and low theological anthropology. To give yourself like she did, you have to believe that the bread you can offer two “fever orphans” cowering in the corner before their dead parents is enough. You have to believe you can save them. But you also have to believe that the short-term care you will provide these orphans outweighs the beauty, grace, favor, fertility, and creativity of your future. In short, you have to believe you’re good enough to die. Constance was 33.
The problem with martyrs is that the finality of their sacrifice forecloses any discussion of its circumstances. Beyond the memory itself, there is no observable life after life. I could say: Was it worth it? What did it feel like? Are you proud? Could any god have asked this of you? But asking questions of Constance is like asking questions of the page itself — rhetorical. Or worse still — blasphemous. The witness herself is dissolved. To question her sacrifice is to discredit her death.
The word martyr comes from the Greek root martur, which means witness. One of my favorite English teachers at St. Mary’s used to say, “A crucifixion needs a witness.” As if a witness killed demanded a replacement. The year she was my teacher, we read William Faulkner’s Light in August. Set in the American South between the World Wars, the novel traces the life and death of Joe Christmas, a biracial wanderer who passes as white for most of the narrative. Christmas dies a witness to the South’s crushing racism — lynched and castrated by a white vigilante. My teacher told us we were Christmas’s witnesses.
The Martyrs of Memphis icon was painted (or "written") in 1999 by Br. Tobias Stanislas Haller, BSG. It depicts "Constance and her companions," four Episcopal nuns and two priests who died caring for Yellow Fever victims (the sick and orphaned) at St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral, Memphis, 1878. Image courtesy of the Cathedral.
Studying martyrs in Memphis — whether literary or historical — is unlike studying them anywhere else. The same year we read Light in August, I studied the Poor People’s Campaign and Rev. King’s assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis — nine miles from St. Mary’s. I wrote my advanced-placement term paper in U.S. history on the integration of St. Mary’s School. I tore through old yearbooks and frequented the newspaper archives at the public library. I interviewed retired faculty and administrators in nursing homes across Memphis. It turned out that St. Mary’s integrated in the fall of 1968 — four months after King became a martyr.
Candy Walker and Donna Osborne enrolled at St. Mary’s in the seventh grade. They were the first Black girls to attend the school since its opening in 1847. Walker’s senior yearbook quote came from Anne Frank’s diary: “In spite of everything, I still believe people really are good at heart.”
Donna Osborne’s name is now Donna Bradley. Today, she is an attorney and educator in St. Louis with a bouquet of advanced degrees. In 2017, Bradley was named St. Mary’s outstanding alumna and invited to speak during a chapel service at the school.
“To the class of ’74,” Bradley said, lowering her reading glasses, “when y’all reminisce about sleepovers and ski trips, you have to remember that I wasn’t there. I wasn’t included.” Bradley catalogued the racism she experienced as one of the first Black St. Mary’s students. Looking out at the assembly of middle and high school students in the chapel, she said, “I cried when I learned that St. Mary’s is 30% Black and Brown now. It used to be just me and Candy. Somehow, now, I feel like what I did was worth it.” She stood at the pulpit in the chapel, the Jesus tapestry swaying behind her to the rhythm of the air conditioning.
“What I urge you to do now,” she continued, “is to make a friend who doesn’t look like you, if you don’t already have one. Judge people by their character, not by the color of their skin.”
A little over 50 years ago, King died for saying just this, and for disputing the intersection of racism with the twin evils of capitalism and militarism. A crucifixion needs a witness.
I find myself in Memphis, again, writing this. I didn’t want to spend the spring remembering what it feels like to live here, but there’s a new epidemic and, this time, it’s everywhere. The rich can’t run away in wagons. The sisters are long gone. We don’t believe in pine tar or lime powder; we don’t bathe orphans in carbolic acid. This time we’re hidden in our homes. We hoard toilet paper and surgical masks. We wash our hands and watch 24-hour news and make-believe our lives on Zoom.
When the pandemic came, I was in the middle of my semester at Vanderbilt Divinity School, where I study a patchwork of history, literature, religion, and ancient languages. I hadn’t lived in Memphis since I was 18. I separated myself from this city when I graduated from St. Mary’s, moving as far away as I thought possible. I chose a college in Vermont, known for its modern language programs. I studied French and English. I wrote a thesis composed entirely of lyric essays, based on the formulation in the last pages of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets: “All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.” I went trail-running and practiced yoga and learned how to sleep outside. I pretended that I had never belonged to the South.
I’m on the verge of romanticism here, but I see now that I could not have loved Memphis, the city that mothered me, had I not left it. I’ve been back here a month now, spending long days at my laptop, finishing the semester at a distance. On Wednesdays, I volunteer for the Mid-South Food Bank. I wear gloves and a mask to package jalapeños or oranges or russet potatoes. I shove gallons of milk into trunks at the drive-through. Most of the time, though, I’m at home, waiting.
A couple weeks ago I saw a photo on social media of three St. Mary’s alumnae volunteering at a drive-through COVID-19 testing site in Memphis. In the photo, the alumnae stood six feet apart, smiling with their hands on their hips. I thought first of Constance, and then of my English teacher — her oldest daughter, Ramie Mansberg Glick, was one of the volunteers. A crucifixion needs a witness. I messaged Ramie and asked if she would talk to me about the testing site, St. Mary’s, and the legacy of Constance and her companions.
We spoke on the phone a few days later. It was a stormy Sunday afternoon. I sat in my grandmother’s front room, looking out across the street at a sea of wet magnolias.
Ramie is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Tennessee. She always knew she wanted to be a physician, but since getting her master’s degree in Public Health, Ramie’s approach to crafting care has shifted. She’s much more certain now that health is communal.
A pandemic shows that health is communal — that we are connected to one another. Ramie says she wishes those of us who don’t work in healthcare could understand this.
“It’s the importance of thinking about everybody else,” she stressed to me on the phone. “It’s going to have to be a community movement toward eradicating [the virus] and moving forward.”
Ramie didn’t have a specific memory of learning about Constance and her companions. She just said that the narrative of their service to the city was “pervasive” during the years she spent at St. Mary’s. Ramie and I probably sat through six Eucharists together in the chapel, six Septembers. She graduated when I was a sophomore.
When I asked if she remembered hearing her mother say, “a crucifixion needs a witness,” she laughed and said she didn’t. (Maybe it’s a little crazy that I remember something word for word from my sophomore English class.) But she offered that “bearing witness” is exactly what we’re doing right now as a city — whether we agree with the federal and local response to the pandemic or not.
“We’re all just bearing witness to this pandemic,” Ramie concluded, " and it’s going to change a lot of people forever.”
During the yellow fever epidemic of 1878, people believed the air itself was infected. Miasma, they called it. In Greek mythology miasma meant “stain of guilt.” It was a psychic contagion with a life of its own. It could infect an entire city overnight. Miasma came from the gods in the service of justice, usually in response to a murder. Almost like the guilt itself was the disease.
Germs did not exist in the minds of westerners until the late 19th century — just after the yellow fever epidemic — when the German microbiologist Robert Koch expanded on the work of Louis Pasteur. Outside western tradition, however, there are some exceptions to the centuries-long perseverance of miasma theory. The Persian physician and polymath Ibn Sina, for example, proposed an early form of germ theory in 1025.
It takes more than a scientific theory — even one advanced by two white European men — to shatter ancient practices of meaning-making. The objectification of sin as miasma has been at work for too long. The Greeks believed that human sacrifice was the only remedy for miasma. In Tennessee, and every other Southern state, capital punishment is a legal penalty. In Ancient Greece, as long as the guilty lived, all the rest remained at risk of infection. As if immorality were viral.
Today in Memphis, activists responding to COVID-19 call for sweeping criminal justice reform — including the suspension of cash bail and the release of incarcerated populations, especially people of color who face nonviolent marijuana charges.
The day after I talked to Ramie about the testing site, I drove downtown with my dog to walk by the river. The sun was violent. Heading west down Central Avenue I saw a few restaurants advertising takeout services. But mostly, Memphis felt like it wasn’t alive. Through shop windows, I could see chairs stacked and turned upside down on clean tables. Hardly any traffic. But then, stopped at a light at the corner of Central and Cooper, I saw a sign that read “Hot Boiled Crawfish N Beer” in red letters. A crush of hungry people waited six feet apart in line outside a light blue food truck. I remembered being in New Orleans for carnival a few years back, watching children with small, glowing fists crack crawfish open on sidewalks in the middle of riotous crowds. Maybe Memphis will look so alive soon.
The Mississippi River was high that morning — the trees up to their necks in silty, roiling water. I let my dog off-leash and we walked up and down the muddy floodplain in the sun. In bouts, she tore toward the river and away. The water, sloshing against the bank like a metronome, scared her each time like it was new. With driftwood and ragweed at my ankles, I watched the river silvering in the sunlight. It’s always terrifying to think this river that built Memphis also served its suffering. The epidemic of 1878 began in New Orleans and traveled like a fire up the river to Memphis. Infected mosquitoes swarmed the flat, washed land of the city.
But “one grows,” once again, “perfectly hardened to these things.” In the end, Constance and her companions loved Memphis so much that it eclipsed their lives. That summer, Constance and her companions worked under a metronome of death. They found, invented, or composed the language to stay day by day in the miasmic fury of the summer of 1878. And this changed many people forever. I would like to say that I love this city as much, and as truly, as they did. What I know now: I belong to the South whether or not I claim it. Its folklore and fiction, its martyrs and miasma, I will belong to all of them, always.
(Alleluia! Hosanna!)
Header image: Sisters of St. Mary Window, St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral in Memphis. Photo courtesy of Gary Bridgman
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