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

“Fever” explores colonialism and slavery as they relate to the emergence of yellow fever, racism, and ongoing inequalities experienced by free Black citizens and refugees. For Wideman, it is the institution of slavery that is to blame for the fever, and the story serves as a sharp critique of the historical record’s failure to recognize this. By interweaving references to the Haitian Revolution, slave ships that carry the infection through mosquitoes to Philadelphia, and the presence of West Indian refugees in the city, Wideman makes it clear that although Philadelphia is an ostensibly “free” city, Philadelphians are intimately connected with the structures of colonialism and slavery. Indeed, the city’s treatment of the free Black people as well as the San Domingan refugees illustrates the ways that the ideas that enable colonialism and slavery are well alive there. 

Allen reflects,

First, they blamed us, called the sickness Barbados fever, a contagion from those blood-soaked islands, brought to these shores by refugees from the fighting in Santo Domingo. We were not welcome anywhere. A dark skin was seen not only as a badge of shame for its wearer. Now we were evil incarnate, the mask of long agony and violent death (140).