But while Memphis was progressive in many ways, its sanitary system was medieval. Six thousand privies drained into the Bayou Gayoso, a meandering stream in the city’s business section composed of foul-smelling pools separated by dams of human excrement. The streets were unpaved, sloughs of manure and mud roamed by hogs and goats. An unappreciated danger was the superfluity of water—in wells, bayous, and rain-filled holes in the rotting wooden sidewalks. Standing water is an ideal breeding ground for the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which, scientists discovered in 1900, is the carrier of yellow fever.
Yellow fever, which appeared in the United States before the Revolution, was imported from the rain forests of West Africa through the West Indies and the busy port of New Orleans. Infected mosquitoes carried in the bilge water of ships bit seamen, who when they reached port infected any resident mosquitoes that bit the sailors. The newly infected resident mosquitoes then infected human Memphis residents, setting in motion a vicious cycle that stopped only when frost killed the insects. Memphis had suffered five serious outbreaks of yellow fever between 1850 and 1870, but dry summers or unusually early frosts kept the annual death toll under a thousand. During the torrid summer of 1873, however, eight thousand Memphians contracted yellow fever, and twenty-five hundred died.
The city recovered from this catastrophe, largely because its most prominent residents, having left Memphis for the duration of the epidemic, remained healthy. For the next several years the city was spared the disease, and on July 4, 1878, grateful city fathers set off a brilliant display of fireworks.
But by the time they celebrated, the aedes aegypti mosquito, its ranks swelled by unusually heavy rains in West Africa, had traveled by ship across the Atlantic. On July 15 the New Orleans mayor sent a terse cable, “Yellow Fever here—virulent—36 cases.” Memphis officials established quarantines and cleansed streets and basements with lime and carbolic acid. Barrels of supposedly purifying burning tar were set on street corners; cannons were fired regularly to clear the air. Desperate citizens invoked ancient talismans, sprinkling chopped garlic and mustard powder in their shoes, breathing through rags soaked in turpentine. They strung bags of the evil-smelling plant, asafetida, around their necks, and waited.
On July 29 occurred the death from yellow fever of a woman in nearby Grenada, Mississippi, who four days earlier had received a package from New Orleans containing a new dress and, apparently, an infected mosquito. Memphians fumigated all mail and strengthened their blockades. But they couldn’t prevent fleeing New Orleans residents from entering Memphis on skiffs or through the woods.
In late July a refugee from the South who was too weak to stand docked at Memphis and crawled into a shed, where he was discovered the next day, wracked by yellow fever.
On August 13 a local woman succumbed to the disease. She was thirty-four-year-old Kate Bionda, mother of two; her death throes, suffered in her stiflingly hot room above a snack house by the river, were excruciating.
Her first symptom, suffered six days earlier, had been a mild headache. But it soon became agonizing, and was accompanied by joint pain so severe she cried out. Her temperature soared to 106 degrees, and she grew delirious. From her body emanated a peculiar, terrifying smell, as of old rats’ nests, or rotting flesh.
On the third day her temperature broke; she sat up and asked for tea, and her loved ones rejoiced. They didn’t understand the insidiousness of her disease.
The symptoms of yellow fever often briefly receded, only to return with a vengeance. The whites of Kate’s eyes were soon speckled with red spots. The virus was dissolving her blood vessels: fluids, leaking out, coagulated and congealed. Purple welts appeared on her skin, which was the yellow of jaundice. Her tongue and lips grew cracked, and blood oozed from her nose.
By the fifth day, blood seeped from all of her orifices, even her tear ducts; she felt blinded. She was wracked by vomiting both forceful and terrifying; what issued forth was copious, black, the consistency of coffee grounds, a mix of stomach acids and hemorrhaged blood.
From the inside out Kate capitulated. Her liver liquefied; her heart softened to mush. The rate of decomposition increased after death, reducing her to little but bones in a bloody pool.
Not even the most eminent contemporary physicians understood how she had contracted the illness. Some thought it was caused by a “miasma” emanating from the garbage-strewn Bayou Gayoso. Others believed the disease was carried by particles of dust or an airborne toxin.
Today doctors vaccinate people traveling to countries like Africa against yellow fever, and provide intravenous fluids to patients to prevent dehydration. Physicians of Kate’s time prescribed peppermint, camphor, and calomel, and applied leeches to patients’ stomachs. A doctor from New York who volunteered his services called these “cures that killed.”
Memphians understood that the Fever would disappear with the first frost but no one knew why, or how it was spread. They assumed incorrectly that it was contracted through contact with patients, their vomit or bedding.
Each day the radius of the city affected by the Fever increased by several blocks: the flight range of the Aedes aegypti mosquito. A local reporter wrote of the “many bloodthirsty mosquitoes, a million or more to every man, woman and child here.” But no one made the necessary connection, and the mosquitoes remained unchecked; insect repellants were unknown. Few homes had screens.
Escape seemed the only prevention. Within two days of Kate Bionda’s death twenty-five thousand of the city’s forty thousand residents fled to places as distant as New York City. Businesses were abandoned; dinners were left uneaten as families escaped in wagons, carriages, goat carts, on mules or horses and on foot. Men shoved aside women and children to board crowded trains. “The ordinary courtesies of life were ignored,” wrote Colonel Keating, editor of the Memphis Appeal. “There was one emotion: an inexpressible terror.”
Terror was also felt by people at stops along the railroad line, who feared infection. Armed men prevented Memphians from disembarking and local citizens from even offering them supplies. This resulted in sounds and sights that must have been hard to observe: the moans of passengers begging for water, their blackened tongues protruding from cracked lips.
And yet the illness spread. Yellow fever plagued two hundred cities and towns across the South that year, and killed more than twenty thousand people. But Memphis, with a daily toll often higher than that of all other towns combined, was the worst afflicted, and soon garnered charitable contributions from all over the country.
But as Sister Ruth, a twenty-six-year-old Episcopal nun who had traveled from New York City to nurse the ill, wrote, “Money is quite useless. There is plenty of money here, but it buys no head to plan, no hands to wash. . . .” All but two hundred of the six thousand white citizens who remained in the city fell ill; 75 percent of them died. Black residents had previously been immune to the Fever, but they too contracted it in 1878, and suffered a 7 percent mortality rate. Between deaths and desertions of political leaders, city government collapsed. Illness cut the police force from forty-one to seven; the staff of the Memphis Appeal was reduced to one printer and Colonel Keating, who published one-page daily newspapers consisting of roll calls of the dead.
The sounds of the city were hellish. For a while funeral bells were rung at burials, but the constant tolling became too frightening. When the bells stopped, Memphis keened with a silence broken by the footsteps of residents looking for doctors, the rumble of death wagons, and the call of the drivers: “Bring out your dead.” The screams of patients also rent the air. Head pain accompanying the disease was so severe sufferers drew blood with their fingernails, trying to ease it. Others remained composed until overtaken by delirium, then wandered the city naked, seeking lost loved ones.
The city seemed a harbinger of hell. The inevitable sweltering summer heat was intensified by the fires, which, considered sanitizing, burned in every fireplace. Smoke from the outdoor fever pyres, smoldering tar, and booming cannons
coalesced into a dispiriting yet merciful haze.
But not even the sound of cannons obscured the ever-present lamentations. These and sounds even more terrible—as those of stomach muscles ripping as a patient, bracing himself at a window, shot forth his black vomit—pierced the hearts of even the most formerly callous observers.
Of course some citizens looted the homes of the sick. But many more residents, pulled out of themselves by horrors they could never have imagined, united to help. Protestant and Catholic nuns tended the babies found coated in black vomit, futilely nursing at the breasts of their dead mothers. A madam named Annie Cook converted her bordello into a clinic and cared for the dying. Relief efforts were coordinated by a young businessman named Charles Fisher, who tirelessly treated the ill, a lit cigar clenched between his teeth, to camouflage the stench. On September 20, he sent a telegram to be read in New York City’s Booth Theater, which hosted a benefit for Fever victims.
“Deaths to date—2,250. . . . Our city is a hospital. . . . We are praying for frost; it is our only hope.”
Frost was expected by October 11. But that morning’s temperature was a balmy 67 degrees. By then almost all of the local Catholic priests were dead, as was Sister Ruth, whose nickname among the poor had been “Sunbeam.” Annie Cook had also succumbed. Charles Fisher died six days after his message was read in New York. Colonel Keating, who survived, wrote, “There were hours . . . as if the Day of Judgment was about to dawn.”
Finally on October 18 came a black frost, and by October 29 new cases had fallen to almost zero. According to the Board of Health, the epidemic was over, but in the strictest sense it would never end.
Memphis had lost over five thousand of its citizens to death. Most of the thousands who had fled to cities such as St. Louis never returned. Among these were many of the city’s professionals, and businessmen whose concerns, flourishing in their new locations, were constant reminders that Memphians had lost more than the loved ones in their graves. They had lost the Memphis that would have been.
Among those who had abandoned the city were the Germans who had brought to Memphis music, theater, and industry. Almost all of the Irish had died of the plague. The proportion of foreign-born citizens, which had been 30 percent in 1860, dropped to 5 percent by 1900. Instead of reaching the expected count of eighty thousand by 1880, the population dropped from forty thousand to thirty-three thousand, plunging the city from thirty-second to fifty-fifth in national rank.
The population began to rebuild, but its composition was different from before, for the replacements for the lost Memphians were poor, often illiterate newcomers from the most rural areas of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee. They couldn’t afford to pay taxes, and civic leaders were forced to declare the city bankrupt.
Added to this humiliation was the stigma of disease. Across the country health experts urged that Memphis be burned to the ground. Desperate to improve their city’s image, Memphians began replacing the wood block sidewalks with pavement, and wells and cisterns with a modern waterworks. But yellow fever returned in 1879. Half of the population fled. Five hundred eighty-three people died, as did any remaining faith in Memphis.
Formerly a town inhabited by concerned citizens, Memphis became a city of transients who seldom indulged in civic-minded or even legal pursuits. So although Memphis regained its city charter in 1893, the chance of it becoming a modern metropolis, once deemed inevitable, seemed hopelessly remote. Then yellow fever struck again, in 1897.
The few remaining citizens of means withdrew to newer, safer areas. The gap between them and the newcomers living in the tenements bordering the business district widened. Criminals and gangsters flourished in the void, and the city’s homicide rate soared to the highest in the country. Memphis was ripe for exploitation.
Georgia Tann would become the most enduringly harmful of the city’s manipulators, and the plague eased her way. Children were less likely than adults to die of yellow fever, and hundreds of Memphis children were orphaned by the plague of 1878. Gratitude toward the sisters who cared for them inspired Memphians with an unquestioning respect for women who worked in adoption. This admiration persisted into the 1920s, when Georgia would take full advantage of citizens’ gullibility. Georgia would also exploit the nuns themselves in the most terrible way, by trying to seize and sell the children the sisters frantically hid from her in attics.
The altered demographics caused by the plague also helped Georgia. Descendants of the sixty thousand rural émigrés who filled the vacuum left by the dead and departed provided her with women she considered “breeders”—single mothers whose babies she would steal.
But the epidemic helped Georgia most by breaking citizens’ spirit. Formerly, Memphians had been self-assured and scornful of fools. Now they were desperate, vulnerable to the charlatan who would protect her.
He was Edward Hull Crump, and he was born in 1874, seventeen years before Georgia, into a respected Mississippi family. When he was four years old the plague spread from Memphis, killing his father and plunging Crump into poverty so extreme he was reduced to exploding inflated pigs’ bladders instead of the customary firecrackers at Christmas. A natural leader, Crump developed a bullying confidence and craving for power. At eighteen he moved to Memphis.
He was drawn there for the same reason as were the other rural emigrants who surged in after the plague: impoverished as it was, Memphis offered excitement. Accustomed to a state listless with eroded red hills and swamps, Crump savored the briskness: the pungent odor of fried catfish, Mississippi mud, and raw whiskey; the incongruity of sweetly scented lilacs sold by beggars and exotic spices stored in troughs. He noted the opium dens, bagnio girls, giant wharf rats. He noted the city’s aimlessness, and what it portended. Memphis needed a manager, and he loved to boss.
Crump had only a grammar school education, but he possessed an egotism and aggression that post-plague Memphians admired. Shortly after his arrival he assaulted several men, including his employer, whose business he acquired and built into a highly profitable insurance company. His fortune assured, he tackled his real goal: ruling Memphis.
His political tactics were as crude as those he had applied to business. Elected to the city commission in 1907, he monopolized municipal meetings by standing on tables and shouting, shaking his fist. By 1910 Crump was mayor, and was readying Memphis for the woman who would corrupt adoption.
5.
Mollie
While Crump began ruling Memphis, many of Georgia Tann’s direct victims were born. These weren’t her child victims, but their parents. While I initially knew few of these parents I spoke frequently with their children, most often with Billy Hale. Through him I learned of Mollie.
Billy’s voice was flat. “I feel like I’ve been hit by a sledgehammer,” he said. Since watching the 60 Minutes episode he had been deluged by wonderful memories of walking down a country road hand-in-hand with his mother, intermixed with flashes of being kidnapped from her and subjected to brutal sexual abuse. He was desperate to find her.
A colleague of Denny Glad had advised Billy to run ads in Tennessee newspapers. Billy had published notices in the 1970s reading “Seeking mother who gave up a baby boy born February 10, 1939. . . .” They had drawn no response.
But during the intervening years he had learned his mother’s name. His new notice, which read, “Anyone with knowledge of Mollie Mae Moore, born around 1920, call . . . ,” was seen by Mollie’s brother Harrison, who lived in Pattonsville, Virginia, near Tennessee’s eastern border. He called Billy and asked, “Are you Mollie’s baby?”
“Yes,” Billy answered tremulously.
Harrison drew a deep breath. “She looked for you all her life, Bill.”
Mollie was dead. Billy had found her and lost her in the same minute. His sorrow was compounded by what he learned of her life after his abduction: of the several days she’d spent in jail for protesting his kidnapping, and of how, when she married a man who treated her as badly as she believe
d she deserved—for she never forgave herself for losing Billy—she was afraid to risk bearing another child.
“She kept a scrapbook for me,” Billy said, “and a birthday card she never got a chance to send. My picture was on her bedstead and in her wallet, and anyone who spoke to her for five minutes heard about me. She believed I’d come back. She called out for me when she was dying.”
She died of cancer in Kingsport, Tennessee, on October 1, 1984, eight years before Billy spoke with Harrison. Billy had been on a business trip near Kingsport the week of her death. “If only I’d known,” he told me hoarsely.
Billy had recently spent nine days with his Uncle Harrison and five cousins in Virginia and Kingsport, where he had been born. He memorized every sight: the farmhouse where he and Mollie had lived when he was a toddler, the pond on which they’d skipped stones, the face of the now-middle-aged neighbor with whom he’d played.
He also visited Mollie’s grave, and sent me a photograph of the simple tombstone and family pictures of her at different stages of her life. There was a snapshot of her kneeling in the grass, holding Billy, on a sunny day. Billy is ten months old, plump, and looks impossibly happy; her face holds so much hope.
Billy was haunted by her face, and guilt for not trying harder to find her. He couldn’t eat or sleep or concentrate; he was in trouble at work. “I’ve got to get my life together, get it together,” he told me. And in tones offering no foreshadowing of the price he would pay, he said he would no longer bury his memories. He would, in fact, write the story of Mollie’s life.
Over the next months Billy wrote hundreds of pages of information gleaned from his memory and that of his mother’s surviving siblings. He called his book Lost Love. Like most authors he had difficulty finding a publisher, and eventually he gave up. But, hopeful of memorializing Mollie, he sent me his manuscript and the scrapbook she’d kept throughout the years of their separation.
The Baby Thief Page 3