This week in class, we’re discussing the 1793 outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia. For the first time this semester, one of the affected communities (Black, in this case) we’re reading about gets to speak for themselves.

Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, two prominent freed Black leaders in Philadelphia, organized the Black community to help treat people afflicted with the fever, and later wrote the first book published by Black Americans in U.S. history.

Their book, sadly, was a response to allegations that the Black community had resorted to extortion during the epidemic, for such crimes as expecting to be paid like any other medical professionals who delivered intensive treatment in the home would.

We’re doing most of the lessons asynchronously this week (for obvious reasons), and I decided for the remarks setting up this particular reading—an article about the episode, and then the primary text by Jones and Allen itself, to find a fitting location in town.

I discovered that I live less than two miles from one of the historically Black cemeteries in town, one where some of the victims of the so-called “Servant Girl Annihilator” are buried.

I’ve driven past it countless times and never stopped. It’s fascinating. Ornate graves of the rich, barely marked graves of the poor. At least one of the victims of the Annihilator is now buried in an unmarked grave in an unknown location. But it was a suitable setting.

And I talked about why what my students are going to read is important. Lots of people never got a voice. We’ve read accounts *about* people, but they don’t get to speak for themselves. Now, we have the rare opportunity to hear what they have to tell us.

These kinds of unfiltered moments are few and far between, especially in an undergraduate seminar. I don’t know if I did justice to the moment, but I tried to impart wisdom about how voices are carried historically.

And, yes, maybe it’s because I needed to get out of the house today and think about something else, but I feel like as instructors sometimes we let these moments pass without really explaining why they’re significant. Especially, at this moment, we can’t take that for granted.