MOBILE — The fifth installment of a serialized family memoir, published locally in late March 2005, carried readers back to the closing years of the 19th century and to a moment that once defined life in every Gulf Coast port: the arrival of yellow fever.
The memoir, titled "The Rock Whence I Was Hewn," was written by Sister Marie Emilie, S.N.D., born Elizabeth Zoe Walsh in Mobile in 1892 and known to her family as Zoe. She died in 1979. Her recollections, set down late in life for the benefit of nieces, nephews and their children, were being republished in chapters for a wider local audience.
"There is yellow fever in the city"
The chapter opened in the years when the Walsh family, like many well-off Mobile households of the era, decamped each summer for Spring Hill to escape the heat and the diseases of the low-lying city. A ship had come into the harbor carrying a sailor with yellow fever. Sister Emilie’s mother and some of the family were away in Canada. The children left behind were in the care of a family friend, a maiden lady she remembered as "Aunt Bennett," a sister of Mr. Jim Druhan.
Then, one afternoon, her father drove up to the house and delivered the news without ceremony. "You are going to Canada," he said. "There is yellow fever in the city."
She was three or four years old and understood almost none of it. What stayed with her was the hurried packing of a big trunk and the rush to the railroad station, where she was placed in the custody of her older brothers, Joe and Will, for a journey that took two days and two nights. Of the trip itself she retained almost nothing: pressing her nose against a screen, being very dirty, and being fed bananas by her brothers.
The route ran through St. Louis and Windsor before reaching Park Hill, Ontario, where the Leonard family, close friends of her parents, kept a big brick and stone house with a lawn full of hammocks. It was autumn. She remembered the maples turning and a small girl playing among the fallen leaves. "It was like going to England," she wrote.
The fever that shaped a city
For readers today, the casualness of the episode is the striking part. Yellow fever was a recurring terror in Mobile and other Gulf ports throughout the 19th century, and the habit of removing families to higher ground for the summer was not a leisure custom so much as a survival strategy. Whole households simply left. The disease’s connection to mosquitoes was not widely accepted until around the turn of the century, and so the standard defense was distance, speed and, when a stricken ship tied up at the wharves, immediate flight.
What the memoir preserves is the child’s-eye version of that emergency: no panic, no epidemiology, just a father’s abrupt announcement, a trunk, a train and bananas.
Schooling, and a convenient headache
The chapter’s second half turned to the ordinary business of growing up in Mobile. The family was still living on Jackson Street when Sister Emilie reached school age. Her sister Bee had already taught her two essential accomplishments — how to eat olives, and her ABCs. She could not remember learning to read; she recalled sitting with a book called "Papa’s Little Daughter" while her mother, sewing, supplied the words she spelled out aloud.
Her first day at the Sisters of Charity school on Conti Street did not go well. A small boy began to cry, and a nun — probably the principal, she guessed — announced that she would fetch a switch, because "we don’t have crying children in school." That was enough. The child went home at noon with a headache, had another the next day, and another the day after that, and never went back.
Her family was lenient, she suspected, because a move was coming anyway. The Walshes relocated to State Street, and the rest of her early education took place at Mrs. Nannie Baker’s School, a block from the new house. She did not attend a Catholic school again until high school.
An ecumenical childhood
That school, she wrote, was a happy one, attended by Jewish, Catholic and Protestant children who visited one another’s churches without much fuss. She went to Episcopal, Methodist and Presbyterian services with the Roe family; they came to hers. "I grew up to be a very ecumenical young person," she wrote, "and I shall always be glad for that." It is a notable detail from a Deep South city at the turn of the last century, and one she plainly regarded as a gift.
The installment closed with what she called the greatest event of her life to that point: the marriage of her eldest sister, Julia — called June — to Roy Roe. Because one was Catholic and one was not, the ceremony was held in the big parlor of the State Street house. Zoe, then seven, was judged a year too old to serve as a flower girl, and the honor went instead to a younger cousin, Eula Walsh, who wore, atop her dark curls, a boy’s white cap.
Her father gave the newlyweds a brand-new house directly behind his own, separated by a small fence, and the two households grew up almost as one family. "Mine was a really wonderful and happy childhood," she wrote.
The next installment, the memoir’s conclusion, was promised for the following week.