Forbidden
On the corner of Zion and Hanley Roads in a village called Market Shop in Saint George Gingerland Parish on the Caribbean island of Nevis lies the Gingerland Public Cemetery. It’s a small spread of above-ground horizontal crypts, with many of the deceased’s names written in sparkly, handwritten script. With heaps of dirt and gravel lying in the corridors between graves and random gifts and fake flowers left for the dead, it is a haphazard and colorful place, like a school project under construction. Farther down Hanley Road rests the cemetery of St. George’s Anglican Church, a well-kept, organized little graveyard. Somewhere nearby, our road map of Nevis indicates, is an “Abandoned Cholera Cemetery.” This is what we have come to find.
I’m walking around the public cemetery, which has not been weeded or mowed for some time, with ankle-breaking, uneven ground. It’s treeless. Tall, sharp grasses scratch my thighs as I wind my way between graves, pushing through vines and weeds, looking for the severely weathered, old marble tombstones I’d expect from the oldest burials or the hastily carved epitaphs I’d expect when people were buried quickly, people who had succumbed to disease.
My husband Neil sees a few young, male workers taking a break on some gravestones and decides to go talk to them. I’m the one who’s supposed to be the journalist, asking questions and getting the story, but I’m not willing to talk to strangers so readily because I don’t yet have the vibe of this island. We’ve only been here a few days, at a resort a thousand feet up the Nevis Peak volcano in the forest, and when we’ve driven on the ring road, I’ve only seen desolate, rundown-looking areas—abandoned small shops, broken concrete structures, weedy lots.
Neil notices one person wearing an orange Syracuse ball cap and tries making conversation. “Do you know where that hat is from?” No. “It’s a city and university in New York State!” Oh. “That’s where I’m from!” Silence. Neil thinks this is an amazing coincidence since we are about two thousand miles from his hometown, across an ocean, on an island that’s about the same square-mile size as the town we live in, but the guy seems nonplussed. Then Neil asks if they know where we can find the abandoned cholera cemetery.
They point to the far end of the public cemetery, into the dark woods. “It’s down there,” one of them says. “But you cannot go in there because of the disease.”
“Cholera?” Neil prompts.
“Yes, the disease.”
The men, who are Black, seem surprised and maybe slightly alarmed that this strange, grey-haired, white tourist is conjuring that fast-killing, milky-diarrheal and vomiting disease of yore.
Neil looks where the man had pointed, into the trees, the thick forest tangled with unmanaged, thorny underbrush. “I’m not allowed to walk in there?” he asks. Neil and I are experienced bushwhackers, off-trail hikers. We spend our winters pushing through the untamed backcountry of national parks and other public land in Virginia, looking for abandoned homes, farms, cars, wells, gardens, and cemeteries in the woods from when people used to live there. It’s one of the ways we take the measure of a place and its past. We are not easily dissuaded from our odd hobby. “Not allowed?” Neil asks again.
“No,” the man says. “It is forbidden.”
Neil chews on this answer for a moment. “Illegal, huh?” Neil asks.
“Forbidden,” the man repeats solemnly.
Neil and I walk out of the public cemetery a bit befuddled, onto the sidewalk, down the road to the edge of the abandoned cholera cemetery and peer in. But it is not peer-in-able. It’s impenetrable, unwelcoming, too thick to walk through—even if it were not forbidden and the whole of Gingerland might be talking about two nutty Americans on their first big trip since the COVID pandemic, trying to find the old pandemic graves.
Eventually we shrug and make our way back to the car. Two days later, after we drop off our temporary rental car, we ask a taxi driver we’ve come to know, Vernal, if he knows anything about the abandoned cholera cemetery. He’s a 51-year-old Nevisian native and yet he’s never heard of one in Gingerland, only one in Charlestown, the capital. Vernal takes us to our reservation at a restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner—a British ex-pat’s tiki-torched, multi-verandaed old house called Bananas—and says he’ll do some research while we eat. When we come back out, he tells us what happened as we drive back up the mountain in the dark.
“1853,” he says. “The disease swept the island.” The deaths began on December 4, with a child in Charlestown, and ultimately mowed down between 1,400 and 1,500 people in that city. It took the life of another 900 or so elsewhere on the island, in total about 9% of the population, most of which was Black. They were all free people, as slavery had been abolished in the British islands in 1834, and forced apprenticeships concluded by 1838, but many were still living in harsh conditions due to their previous bondage, depleted soil, and fire, hurricane, and earthquake destruction. “No part of the island was exempt from the malady,” an 1854 medical report noted. While most of the diseased dead, according to Vernal, were buried in Charlestown near the hospital, some were buried in Gingerland Parish in this plot, which once had been lush with mango trees.
Indeed, the 1854 medical report explains that because so many people were dying, the Board of Health began “providing graves and the means of interment for the diseased poor, at the public expense.” As cholera lashed the entire island until March 1854, causing “dreadful havoc,” the government established “depots of medicine” in Gingerland, an area once considered “the most salubrious parish in this island.”
The first cholera pandemic of the Western Hemisphere and the second in the world, it slaughtered more than two hundred thousand people in the Caribbean, starting in Cuba, where cemeteries overflowed and criminals were pardoned for their crimes if they could drive the “dead carts.” Then it moved to Jamaica, where the number of dead was so alarming that “husbands refused to lift dead wives into their coffins and mothers deserted their children” when they showed symptoms. In Tortola, not enough people were living to bury the dead. Next, it came to Nevis, where it arrived in time for Christmas and where “nearest relatives fled away panic-stricken from the presence of the disease, and abandoned the unhappy sick in the hour of their utmost need.” In 1854, it spread to St. Kitts, Nevis’s partner in the two-island country, where the government recruited prisoners to dig the trenches for the cholera ground. Also: Barbados, where two or three carts carried bodies away on every street. From there, St. Lucia, where it was said to have a “fantastically high” level of mortality, and then Trinidad, where it even killed monkeys, and then St. Thomas and Puerto Rico in 1855.
“Contagionists” on Nevis, as elsewhere, believed that cholera came with immigrants, from a ship that arrived from Liverpool on November 23, 1853, the day before the United States’ Thanksgiving. Even though within the year, scientists knew that the disease was not contagious through the air or from person to person—it was transmitted by bacteria in feces-contaminated food or water, Nevisians so feared the spread of disease that they burned down the houses of two men who each lay dead inside because no one was willing to enter those diseased properties and carry the bodies out for burial.
A fearsome history, but science has advanced since then. So why was the lush, quiet cemetery still abandoned and untouchable after 168 years? Why were the young men still afraid to enter? Though scientists have never recovered cholera DNA from any grave anywhere in the world, “No one wanted to eat from those mango trees again,” Vernal tells us. Neither did the people of Jamaica in 2016 want a developer’s plan to build a supermarket, restaurant, and pharmacy on a long-undisturbed cholera cemetery that had been “quarantined” for 160 years.
Even in the United States, an 1849 mass-grave cholera cemetery in Arba, Indiana, that was separated from other burials by 75 yards conjured the same suspicion. “Once the linen-wrapped bodies were under a blanket of dirt, the town forbid [sic] anyone from setting foot near the grave for months afterwards,” one researcher explains. “An invisible plague circle surrounded the site and would remain long after King Cholera moved elsewhere.”
The fear of a bacterium that could no longer be alive in the dirt after so long seems misplaced to me, and I ponder it for the rest of our week in Nevis, even as we imbibe fruity drinks, visit the remnants of sugar plantations, and take in the local culture and attractions of the island in safe, open-air, well-ventilated spaces, free from the isolation, quarantine, testing, and masking that had engulfed our lives for three years.
Finally, it hit me (the fog of my privilege subsiding for a moment): Just as COVID hit the most vulnerable people worst in 2020—those living in crowded conditions, those with existing health problems or susceptibility to disease, those working in certain occupations and work environments, often Black and brown and disadvantaged and poor people—cholera too targeted the weakest. And who were the weakest of their time on Britain’s tiny island hosting the empire’s most productive and brutal sugar plantations, and elsewhere?
The enslaved and the formerly enslaved.
These ancestors of most of today’s Nevisian population were the people most likely to drink from contaminated cisterns and wells or stagnant pools. They were more likely to eat rancid foods. They often lived in poor, cramped conditions where shared water supplies helped spread the disease easily. They were the workers handling food and unloading ships from which some of the disease entered the population. And once they got the disease, they were more likely to die from it than whites. Ultimately, because enslaved and formerly enslaved people generally were malnourished, and the malnourished have reduced stomach acid, and stomach acid is what kills cholera in healthy people who ingest it, the Black people on these islands—like the poor anywhere in the world during the time of cholera—were defenseless against the scourge. The conditions of their lives were killing them.
In Cuba, where Blacks died at a rate three and a half times greater than whites, coffee and sugar plantations were “desolate.” In Puerto Rico, agricultural activity was “paralyzed.” In Nevis, in the Gingerland area, “the malady raged with the most fatal effects.”
Meanwhile, Haiti, whose enslaved population rose up in insurrection in 1791 and defeated the French colonialists to create an independent nation by 1804, was one of the very few islands that saw no cases of cholera—due to many years of better living conditions and strict quarantining of ships.
The memory of the disease on Nevis isn’t just a memory of the disease; it is a reminder of marginalization, stigmatization, subordination—and the sharp pang of abandonment. Victims in cholera cemeteries or cholera pits around the world generally were considered the “unworthy ignorant poor,” “the common dead, the destitute, the workhouse inmates,” “a class of persons…carrying the disease wherever they go.” I never got to see whether there are gravestones hidden in the Gingerland woods and whether they bear any names, whether people were buried in a mass grave, or if the dead had been abandoned by their own families—perhaps the source of the greatest shame. While many native Nevisians—93 percent of whom are Black of African descent—celebrate the stone ruins of the island’s brutal slavery-based sugar plantations as monuments to their beloved ancestors who built structures, the island seems to have written off the cholera dead in its collective memory and forbidden anyone to remember.
On the last day of our trip, on the taxi ride to the ferry to take us to the airport on St. Kitts and away from this gorgeous island nation, Vernal takes us on a detour to Charlestown to the corner of Low Street and Old Hospital Road. It’s a public park that doesn’t seem to get much use, near where the old hospital once stood before it was destroyed in a hurricane in 1899. Iron fencing surrounds unreadable horizontal white-marble tombstones amid empty park gazebos and a wide expanse of mowed grass. A website indicates that the land is owned by the Crown, but there are no signs describing its past as a public cemetery, nothing to explain the incongruity of gravestones in the middle of a park, nothing telling the stories of the communities that suffered, of the people who died.
On our ferry journey across The Narrows, I feel the emptiness of the erasure I witnessed. I have been unable to pay proper respects to the cholera dead, even as I have been celebrating the gift of being alive. On St. Kitts, where cholera killed 17 percent of the population, I learn that at least one of the two cholera cemeteries is mowed, has a name, and is promoted on the government’s website. Planters used to cultivate sugarcane there, and it was once considered as a site for a botanical station—a perfect place for grass and shade trees, planners said, though they admitted that people might feel a “sentimental objection” to associating a botanical station with a “so-called cholera ground.” I don’t know if I heard it on the ferry crossing, in the choppy waters on the way back home, but somewhere in the green hills of that volcanic island, near the sea-coast in the dry winds, it called to me, beckoning me to come back there, to come back and remember.
Sue Eisenfeld is an author, poet, and faculty lecturer with the Johns Hopkins M.A. in Science Writing program. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, National Parks Traveler, The Forward, Gettysburg Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Full Bleed, and many other publications, with essays listed six times among the Notable Essays of the Year in The Best American Essays. Her books include Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal as well as Wandering Dixie: Dispatches from the Lost Jewish South.