New Notes On An Old Poem

I gave myself a few months off after publishing Bright Wings to Fly last year, before I plunged into gathering material for my next book. I have been working on that book, titled Hearts in Zion, for some time now and we hope to publish later this year or early next year. It depends largely on when I can get (if I can get) information from the government on my grandfather’s service in the First World War. That may not happen; a catastrophic fire at the National Veterans’ Record Center in St. Louis in 1973 destroyed 80% of the World War I personnel records. I can still piece the story together, but it would be much easier if I had my grandfather’s service record, so I am keeping my fingers crossed.

Hearts is the second book of the trilogy I plan on the three great periods of history in the coalfields. Wings was the first and included the settlement of the region after the Revolution and continued up to the beginning of the Industrial Age, when railroads first penetrated the mountains of Southern West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, and Southwest Virginia. Of course, native people inhabited this region for eons before then, but my grandmother, who was the source of most of the material in my books, had no stories to tell me of that era.

The second period of coalfields history includes the rise of the coal towns, the First World War, the Great Spanish Influenza Epidemic, the decline of the coal towns, and the Depression. That book will end with Pearl Harbor, and the last one, which I do not know when I will write, encompasses the Second World War through today. But recently, as I was collating material for one of the chapters in Hearts, I read a news story that intrigued me and reminded me of a poem my grandmother once recited for me.

My grandmother’s stories form the basis for my books, but since my books are nonfiction, I am careful to corroborate the facts. Since one of the lasting unanswered questions about the Great Spanish Influenza Epidemic was why it killed mostly healthy people, my ears perked up when I heard that some Canadian scientists have found the answer.

My grandmother told me stories of what it was like to live through the Great Spanish Influenza Epidemic and the toll it took on family and friends. What was especially spooky about her stories was the fear people experienced during that time, which although brief, was especially devastating to the newly urbanized hollows where entire towns went up seemingly overnight. Some of the facts about the Epidemic (which was named erroneously for the Spanish, who simply first reported on it because Spain had a free press during the First World War) are startling. And the epidemic was not really an epidemic; it was a pandemic, which was much worse, but the corpses piled up so fast that the proper terminology was never considered.

In 1911, Kentucky first implemented a statewide system of vital statistics, which allowed me to compare death rates for periods before the Epidemic came calling. For instance, in 1917, Pike County reported six deaths from influenza during the entire year. In 1918, 293 died, mostly in October and November, when the virus made its way into the hills. In reality, many more were never reported. Local health departments in the coalfields mostly deferred to coal camp doctors to report deaths and some, on orders not to scare away prospective laborers, did not fully report the losses in their company towns. The fact that many of the nation’s doctors and nurses were serving with the armies in Europe severely weakened the local medical establishments across the country, and in the hills, which had never had enough doctors, medical care was even harder to supply. A inordinately large number of the death certificates used the same phrase: “Spanish Influenza, No Doctor Present.”

In many of the mountain hollows, family and friends merely buried the dead, and had no time or heart to make a formal report.

Across Kentucky, five people were reported to have died from influenza in August, which was about the normal rate for that time of year. In September, 42 people were reported dead from the disease. The state Board of Health heard that influenza was becoming a problem on the East Coast, and with this elevated number, began to worry. In October, 4,263 Kentuckians were reported dead from the newly named Spanish Influenza.

It had arrived.

In response, some Draconian measures were instituted: schools closed and did not reopen until 1920, weddings and funerals were ordered limited to the immediate family, and most public gatherings were outlawed. It may have had some success: only 2,974 Kentuckians died in November and another 1,553 in December. Other states reported similar mortality rates and various efforts to stem the deaths.

Across the nation, 195,000 Americans died of the Epidemic in October; before it was over 675,000 were dead. There was an unbelievable shortage of coffins and gravediggers. In Elkhorn City, KY, the gravedigger on the city cemetery kept a shed on the premises for his tools. During the Epidemic, he moved into the shed and his family brought him meals because he had no time to go home to rest.

Like the rest of the nation, Kentucky was unprepared for the sheer numbers that accumulated. The war in Europe ended by armistice on November 11, 1918, and the final tally of service deaths was about 125,000 troops. Fully half of those deaths came not from bullets or poison gas; they were attributed to the flu. Europe had suffered through four years of grinding warfare that killed millions and thought itself immune to horror, but the Spanish Influenza was even worse. Soldiers would be healthy in the morning and in the morgue by dark. Their skins would take on a bluish cast as their lungs filled up and they strangled on their own blood. The Kaiser fell ill, but survived. Allied leaders contracted the disease, including President Woodrow Wilson, who also survived. Too many others did not; and the military offensives in France ground to a halt because so many soldiers on both sides were incapacitated.

What made it more frightening was that the flu seemed to prefer the healthiest people, especially young adults who could usually avoid or survive the usual flu bouts that came through. The old and sick often managed to live. It defied all logic. At the height of the epidemic, the United States Surgeon General himself wondered not only if America would survive the epidemic, but also would civilization itself disappear from the earth. Almost macabre, a little poem that my grandmother recited for me made its rounds across the country:

I had a little bird.
Its name was Enza.
I opened up the window,
And in flew Enza.

Then the flu disappeared instead.

Scientists attribute the disappearance to a mutation of the virus that caused the flu, but until recently no one could understand why it attacked the healthiest people in the population. That was why I read the news story with such interest. According to the report, the virus provoked such a massive immune reaction from the body that the normal troops the body sends out, the white blood cells that attack foreigners in the blood stream, went literally amok and began attacking the body itself. The immune systems of sick people were already compromised and could not mount much of a defense. Oddly enough, that was what saved them.

Today, nearly ninety years after the Great Spanish Influenza Epidemic, much is forgotten about that period in the history of the coalfields and the nation. In fact, after the Epidemic ended, the Jazz Age came calling with its prosperity and glitter, even into the coalfields, where money began to flow like it never had before. The misery and sheer terror of just months before became distant history as new towns and new opportunities beckoned to the mountaineers, just as it did for the rest of the nation.

There are a few reminders left, however. We stumble across nearly forgotten graves in old family cemeteries with ominous dates: October, November, and December 1918. We find old news stories from that period while we are zipping through brittle microfilm, and they confirm the half-forgotten stories that our elders told us. And occasionally, new research appears that illuminates dark times in the history of our people and sometimes reminds us of childhood poems we learned and forgot:

I had a little bird.
Its name was Enza…