Paw Paw, 2020
I remember a conversation with my friend, Dellie Norton, that would have taken place about 1978. She told me about a time, sixty years earlier in 1918, when the Great Flu swept through her community of Sodom and the entire world., killing an estimated 30 to 50 million people. Now, 102 years after the time Dellie described, we’re faced with a similar pandemic and I wonder who will tell this story one hundred years from now.
It’s been a long time ago. It was long before I was married. They had that bad flu through here. I don’t remember what year, but I sure remember the time. I must have been about thirteen years old. I can remember it good. We lived right over there in that old big house. We all had the flu. Every time I raised up, I’d faint. My nose bled so. Daddy, he got out and gathered this red willow. That’s the best medicine for flu and fever ever was. He got out and would break it up. Get the tender limbs and boil them and that would just cool you off if you had the highest fever ever was. He’d have you drink the water from it.
There were so many that died. All the pregnant women died. Every one of them. I knowed them all. Matthew Ramsey’s wife died. James Davis’s wife died. There’d be seven and eight dead at a time. Couldn’t get people to strip them. They didn’t take them to the funeral home back then like they do now. They had people in the community dig their graves, put their clothes on them, and bury them. Jack Ramsey used to make coffins. There was the awfulest bunch of pregnant women that died ever was. I think it was the fall of the year. Nowadays, people will say they’ve got the flu, but they know nothing about the flu unless they had that kind.
Dellie Norton
—from Sodom Laurel Album