“They put her out to die,” Aunt Goldie began as she told me about the death of her next older sister, Anna. In early 1928, the two women unknowingly crossed the color line in Ohio when Aunt Goldie took Aunt Anna to a sanatorium to be treated for tuberculosis. The sisters could have been stand-ins for Mary Pickford or Myrna Loy, so no one in “The San” gave them a second thought until Uncle Rodney, a tall, brown-skinned man, arrived soon after Anna’s admission and asked for his wife. They had no idea that the sanatorium cared for whites only. It was one of many opened by the state in the early 1900s after TB patients were barred by general hospitals.
The story was nearly fifty years old when I heard it during one of Auntie Goldie’s occasional visits to my parents’ home. I was about eighteen at the time and we were getting ready for bed. I steeled myself for her rather generous words about Richard Nixon who was beginning his second term. "Republicans are good," she reminded me. She was 76 and had spent most of her life watching Democrats support Jim Crow laws and shatter her hope for civil rights. Perhaps that is why she thought of Aunt Anna. Her words tumbled out of the blue: “They just put her out to die.” I was spellbound, but now I wish I had asked more questions—although nothing changes the history. Aunt Goldie sat straight up in the twin bed in the room we shared, sputtering words through clenched teeth in the Appalachian accent of my mother’s family. “They never said they wouldn’t take colored people.” She sounded heartsick as she relived the nightmare. “None of us had any idee about that,” she said. “No idee at all.”
Aunt Goldie was clearly overwrought. I remember wanting to hug her, but I shied away. With so little physical affection as a child, she once told me, she was embarrassed not knowing how to receive or give it. Even now, I regret that I didn’t try to break through her reserve at that moment because I later discovered that Aunt Anna contracted TB on a visit to Pittsburgh while visiting Aunt Goldie.
To prevent infecting Uncle Rodney and their seven-year-old daughter, Madelon, Aunt Anna went from the sanatorium to the home of another sister who lived near them in the same small town of Belpre, Ohio. The family hoped that, with complete rest, she would convalesce on the airy sleeping porch, much as she might have done at the sanatorium. Instead, Aunt Anna—a “sweet and gentle soul” in the words of her sisters—raged with fever, became frail and emaciated and coughed herself to death.
Dr. Edwin Crooks, a respected white doctor from across the Ohio River from Belpre, Ohio in Parkersburg, West Virginia humanely and compassionately attended her. Given the size of the community, Dr. Crooks would have been aware of her race. He first saw her on February 11, 1928, and, for the last time, four days later. She died of pulmonary tuberculosis on February 16, 1928, in Belpre, Washington County, Ohio, aged 32 years, 5 months, and 13 days. Aunt Goldie talked about the heartbreak of a family who gathered in the safe distance of the front yard to watch her die; her own anguish, standing outside in the cold holding Madelon’s hand until Aunt Anna could find the strength to lift her head and take one final look at her daughter; the devastation of Uncle Rodney, distraught beyond words, whose father had to step in and report details for the certificate of death.
Over the years, thinking about Aunt Anna and her tragedy of looking white and being Black, made me reevaluate race in my maternal grandmother’s family. They never questioned their Blackness. I hadn’t either, in spite of the fact that Aunt Anna, my grandmother, her other four sisters, and her five brothers looked like white families around the Ohio area. In my early 20s (pre-dating DNA analysis), I wanted evidence of Black lineage. I asked my grandmother, who was born in 1891, about slaves in the family, “Slaves? None of our people were slaves,” she insisted—incredulous that her Black ancestors born in Virginia prior to 1865 might have been slaves.
Theories abound about my ancestors—the “Chestnut Ridge People” (CRP) as they are called. B.V. Mayhle, who self-published a family history, denies Black heritage, possibly in deference to those who passed for white. More recently, genetic studies, such as one analyzed by Paul Heinegg, concluded that the CRP are descendants of mulatto men who married white women and moved westward, from eastern Virginia. As they settled into isolated communities away from slavery, they married into other (and sometimes their own) mixed-race families. Ironically, my grandmother’s family escaped slavery by the law that defined slavery in America. Partus sequitur ventrum required that children inherit their mothers’ status—free or slave. This law ensured that men, specifically slave owners, had no responsibility for children they fathered by female slaves. Aunt Anna’s grandmother—a white woman born in 1838 in Ohio—was Dutch and English. She married a mulatto, born in Virginia.
“Have you ever heard tell of such a thing? I reckon we should have knowed,” Aunt Goldie repeated several times. Ohio, part of the promised land of the North, was a fool’s paradise for Blacks. In this case, laws with unwritten provisos—the exclusion of Blacks from sanatoria established to care for tuberculosis patients. This explains, in part, why Blacks suffered nearly 22% of TB deaths in Ohio while representing less than 5% of the state’s population.
“You remember Anna? You remember Anna, don’t you?” Aunt Goldie asked me in desperation, ending her story. I timidly reminded her that I wasn’t alive in 1928. She and Aunt Anna were my grandmother’s sisters. But, after that, I could never forget Aunt Anna—or Aunt Goldie’s face as she shared her story.
In retrospect, perhaps Aunt Anna and her family “should have knowed.” Ohio, which abolished slavery in their original 1802 constitution, had few Blacks and a robust anti-Black culture, including aggressive “anti-immigration” policies after Emancipation—aimed at Blacks wanting to move away from bordering Kentucky. Orphanages, schools, and other institutions were explicitly segregated. There were more than 150 sundown towns. Discrimination at sanatoria, paid for by public funds—including, funds collected from Black residents—occurred sub rosa.
Aunt Anna’s discharge from the sanatorium was not random, but a natural result of policy informed by racist indoctrination. In public health, not-so-covert messages of “Black Lives Don’t Matter” were combined with thinly veiled denials of accepted science. Prominent physicians of the time wrote that “environment and ignorance are the true cause” for the high rate of TB among Blacks—rejecting discrimination and the established science of Germ Theory. And Blacks posed a “serious menace to the [white] community.” Some 50 years after slavery ended, a physician wrote that the real problem with Blacks was Emancipation. Without a master, Blacks were unclean, unbathed, commonly infected with syphilis, disposed to alcoholism, and possessed by inherent criminality. He harkened back to slavery, opining that Blacks only had value as healthy slaves. “A sickly negro was of very little value—a dead negro none.” The chief statistician of the Prudential Insurance Company of America forecast the demise of Blacks due to TB in 1896 in a self-fulfilling prophecy, suggesting that Blacks should not be treated for the disease, but left to die—a bizarre segregated herd immunity approach.
Had Aunt Anna lived in the South, she might still have died from TB, but her story would have been different. Segregated facilities there provided care to Blacks because Black labor mattered to them. Northern states, like Ohio, were invested in segregation, too, but it was largely clandestine, a contrivance that reinforces the illusion of equality under the law in white populations.
History matters. Aunt Anna’s story taught me how the present rhymes with the past—how lives nearly a century apart that begin differently, end with the same rhythms and sounds. Had she survived TB, she would have been in her 70s when the federal government used the financial leverage of Medicare funding—an important piece of civil rights legislation—as a means to end discrimination in health care. Yet, disparities in health care continue because segregation is not the fundamental problem. Racism is the underlying condition, poisoning opportunities for Blacks in jobs, housing, and education; stalking us where we live, eat, drive, or walk down the street; vilifying our color, features, hair, speech, and fashion. Ultimately, killing us. The racism that killed Aunt Anna in her TB battle is evident in COVID-19. Blacks are estimated to be denied testing or medical care at six times the rate of whites. The Black death rate from COVID-19 is twice that of whites.
Aunt Anna’s death speaks to the racist culture of the Midwest area around the Great Lakes region. What happened to her is no less venomous than the deaths of other Black women—the stabbing of Carol Jenkins in Martinsville, Indiana, in 1968; the strangulation of Frankie Ann Perkins in Chicago, in 1997; and the shooting of Tarika Wilson in Lima, Ohio, in 2008 (a case reminiscent of the 2020 shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville). Widespread violence in places like Tulsa in 1921 has a home and history in this part of the country too. Riots against Blacks occurred in East St. Louis, Illinois in 1917; Chicago in 1919; Springfield, Ohio in 1921; Detroit in 1943. It is not surprising, then, that two flash points in 2020 are George Floyd in Minneapolis and Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
My beloved Aunt Goldie died in 1992. Cared for, and then buried, by relatives who passed for white. I was too dark to be invited to say a final good-bye. Uncle Rodney eventually remarried and died in 1972. Aunt Anna’s daughter, Madelon, died in 2002. She has no biological descendants.
Before Grandmom died in 1978, I asked her about Aunt Anna’s death. She leaned back in the big recliner in my parents’ den, sounding just like Aunt Goldie. “Well, Li’l Annie,” she began as though she were about to tell me something. Then, she turned her head, stared out of the window, twiddling her thumbs, and either couldn’t or wouldn’t utter another word. And, so I will speak for her and say her beloved sister’s name. Clara Anna Dalton Pryor.
Sources
1928 Mortality Statistics, Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce.
“’Death by Racism’: Part of America’s DNA from the Start,” by Jerry Schwartz. APNews. May 2020. “Decoding Our Past Through DNA,” Finding Your Roots, Season 2, PBS 2014.
Founding Chestnut Ridge: The Origins of Central West Virginia’s Multiracial Community by
Alexandra Finley. Senior Honors Thesis, The Ohio State University. 2010.
Free African Americans in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware by
Paul Heinegg. 2019 (updated).
The Males of Barbour County, West Virginia by B.V. Mayhle. 1980.
“The Negro Health Problem” by L. C. Allen, M.D. The American Journal of Public Health. March 1915.
Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James W. Loewen. 2006.
“Tuberculosis among American Negroes: Medical Research on a Racial Disease, 1830-1950,” by
Marion Torchia. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. July 1977.
“Tuberculosis, and its Prevalence in Cincinnati: Paper II Race and Nation,” by B.F. Lyle, M.D. The
Lancet – Clinic. March 1910.
Contributor Notes
Anita Henderson’s interests in writing focus on the experiences of her family and the lives of Blacks in America, with a special interest in the early 1900s, before the Civil Rights period. “Intended Consequences” is about actions and policies designed to harm Blacks in a number of ways—not to be confused with the notion of “unintended consequences” in social science (particularly in economics) where a policy or action, once implemented, has unforeseen effects. She has studied dictionary treatments of racial slurs and how attitudes about Black English serve as a surrogate for negative attitudes toward Blacks. Anita holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania.
