Plague: The Great Leveler

Experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic these last few weeks has reminded me of a section of my unpublished novel, Nocturn: The Ethiopian Orthodox. In it I describe the shift that occurs in a population as a disease moves from bubonic form, carried by fleas, to pneumonic form, carried through the air. In it the gap between rich and poor all but disappears.

Let me set this up just a bit. The impoverished Bengali Sufi community in the Tower Hamlets of east London has been quarantined and barricaded. It was there that the bubonic plague began from a flea infestation. But now a wave of healing is sweeping through their community at the hands of a ten-year-old Ethiopian Orthodox boy, just as the airborne variety emerges, traveling through the neighborhoods of the well-to-do.

While I realize our current COVID-19 pandemic is not exactly parallel to what I write in my novel, there is enough here to make me wonder about the distinction between rich and poor diminishing in this season.

When a slave community passed unscathed through plagues that decimated Pharaoh and his people, that story became a banner of hope for all the oppressed.

Sometimes when luxury liners sink, those forced to travel third class float to safety on the flotsam of the rich. Given enough time, forces of nature move people toward a state of equilibrium.

When bubonic plague lodges in the human respiratory system, the divisions between the wealthy and impoverished mean nothing. A flea infestation can be fought. One can extinguish rodents and other animals by burning the wretched creatures in furnaces. You can lock victims away in their homes. But the Yersinia pestis bacterium travels through the same air inhaled by rich and poor alike.

The disease rockets its way through the city, wafting past street guards and into respectable neighborhoods. It is inhaled indiscriminately by princes and paupers. Pneumonic plague is one of society’s great levelers. But, like lamb’s blood on the doorposts of Hebrew slaves, so is childlike faith in the Tower Hamlets. Faith that, despite what most believe, God is indeed partial, favoring the marginalized, the excluded, the oppressed, the humiliated. Even the Bible admits it: “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.”