When white nurses started to quit, the city’s panicked commissioner of health turned to the only skilled caregivers he thought he could lure: Black nurses whose career opportunities were all but nonexistent in the Jim Crow South. Hundreds answered the call. Their tenacity in the face of harsh working conditions and pervasive racism is humbling and inspiring — as is their contribution to the development of a breakthrough TB treatment.
Such drugs were desperately needed. In the first half of the 20th century, physicians administered “therapies” like gold salts, and sawed out people’s ribs to collapse their afflicted lungs, in the hopes of slowing the infection’s progression. The patients’ suffering — their slow suffocation, mostly (although bones, brains, tongues, kidneys and genitals could also be invaded) — was agonizing. One young woman had spent nearly 10 years at Sea View by the time she died in 1952; she was only 20 years old. Hundreds of others languished, “turning tuberculosis into a dreadful job, a grotesque career.”
Into this scene of despair marched the Black Angels. We meet the tall, graceful preacher’s daughter Edna Sutton, who fled Savannah, Ga., only to encounter a segregated cafeteria, heckling orderlies and invasive “cleanliness” inspections during her training at Harlem Hospital (dubbed “the Morgue” for its shocking mortality rate). After arriving at Sea View in 1932, Sutton became a surgical nurse, working in an operating room where temperatures could reach 107 degrees. She would keep vigil with dying patients, later bringing herself solace by reciting favorite Bible verses on the Staten Island Ferry.
Sutton enlisted her easygoing 16-year-old niece, Virginia Allen, now one of the last living Black Angels, as an aide on the pediatric ward. Children with “faces and necks turning red and fingers clenched into small fists” wailed in pain. It was a harrowing experience “that no amount of singing and reading or playing with puppets or cars or paper dolls could eradicate.”
Then there was Missouria Meadows-Walker of Clinton, S.C., who arrived at Sea View at age 24 to work on a men’s ward where patients snarled at her as she shaved them, taking macabre bets among themselves on who would be the next to die. She would sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” to the dead as she bathed their corpses.
