|
|
|
Printer Friendly
Booktalking Colorado Full Record:
|
|
|
Title: |
Fever 1793 |
|
|
Author: |
Anderson, Laurie Halse |
|
|
Date Published: |
2000 |
|
|
Genre: |
Historical Fiction |
|
|
Grade Level: |
6 - 10 |
|
|
Booktalker: |
Susi Bonato |
|
|
Booktalk:
I wandered up one street and down the next. The printer’s words haunted me. Thousands dead. I saw grandfather‘s empty eyes. No food. I saw Mother order me to leave her. No hope. I passed people weeping in doorways and did not stop. I heard the death carts rattling in the street and did not look up.
A breeze picked up, pushing me eastward, toward the docks, east toward the water, away from the sun. I could see the tops of ships’ masts, peeking over the rooftops like trees in the dead of winter. The sodden wharf planks moaned as the tide pulled the river water toward the sea. My mind floated with dark thoughts.
What did it feel like to die? Was it a peaceful sleep? Some thought it was full of either trumpet-blowing angels or angry devils. Maybe I was already dead.
Was this the aftermath of a war? Yes, so to speak, but not the kind where men take up arms to fight their battles. This was the result of a disease called Yellow Fever.
My name is Matilda Cook, I’m nearly fifteen years of age, and my family ran a coffeehouse in the city of Philadelphia. In the late summer of 1793, we began to hear of deaths resulting from Yellow Fever. The first victim I knew was my friend and our servant, Polly. I remember one morning, asking my mother “Where’s Polly?” as I dropped a bucket down the well. “I spoke with her mother,” mother answered softly, looking at her neat rows of carrots. “And?” I waved a mosquito away from my face. “It happened quickly. Polly sewed by candlelight after dinner. Her mother repeated that over and over. ’she sewed by candlelight after dinner.’ And then she collapsed.”
I released the handle and the bucket splashed, a distant sound. “Matilda, Polly’s dead” my mother said. Within a few short weeks the death toll began to climb. As the hot sun blazed on, giving us no relief from the heat or mosquitoes that plagued us, people fled to the countryside in hopes of minimizing exposure. Yellow Fever claimed souls near and dear to me, and as the cemeteries filled with fever victims, the struggle to build a better life for me gave way to something more important – the fight to stay alive.
|
|
