Epilogue

At night, the sky above Sea View is coal black, and the pavilions, no longer lit, are indistinguishable from the landscape. Inside the buildings, the wards have decayed, and in recent years, workers removed most of the beds and wheelchairs, desks and bookshelves and medical equipment. They swept shelves, tossing trays and medicine and bandages into large bins; whatever missed the containers or fell to the side remained on the floor, creating mismatched piles, remnants of a bygone time. In the basement, they overturned filing cabinets, spilling tens of thousands of medicals records onto the floor. From end to end, the folders sprawled, knee-deep, one life heaped upon another. Rain fell and seeped in and turned the pages to pulp.

Today the buildings continue to deteriorate; whatever windows remain dangle from their frames, and entire floors have collapsed. Now, sometimes at night, Virginia hears the patrol dogs barking, and the voices of urban explorers and curious teens scouring the abandoned buildings and acres of woods for stories of ghosts and witches and child killers with names like Cropsy and the “Gray Man.” Maybe the Bone Man too.

The former Sea View nurse recently turned ninety-one, and believes she’s “the last living Black Angel.” After a long career in nursing and fighting for labor rights, she finally retired in 1995. When she moved back to the restored nurses’ residence in 2008, and saw the pavilions and the skeleton of the children’s hospital every day, she began to crystallize what her aunt Edna and all the women had accomplished.

“They helped cure tuberculosis,” she said, “and close down the hospital.”

In 1961, the last patient walked out of Sea View Hospital, a mere decade after the start of the isoniazid trial. Since then, the drug has become the gold standard for treatment. In 1955, Edward Robitzek and Irving Selikoff, together with scientist Carl Muschenheim from Hoffmann–La Roche and Walsh McDermott, were awarded the Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Award, also known as the “American Nobel,” for their medical research on isoniazid drugs.

Dr. Robitzek eventually remarried and, together with his second wife, raised his sons while running a successful private practice and continuing to volunteer his time, this time at the Mariners Hospital. He retired in 1973 to Baltimore, where he lived the rest of his life.

But through all their work and research, the doctors and nurses live on. Unlike smallpox, tuberculosis has not been vanquished: it remains the second leading infectious disease in the world, responsible for over 1.5 million deaths annually. Isoniazid has blunted the bacteria’s effects; they are no longer as powerful, and since 2000, the combination therapy has saved 66 million lives. But the microbe remains resistant and elusive, and scientists are always looking for new ways to understand it. Now that COVID-19 has shaken the world, they have turned to the ancient disease to try to conquer this one.

For Virginia, all the progress brings joy, and she often wishes that her aunt Edna and the other nurses could see the legacy they created. After Sea View, Edna Sutton found another nursing job and remained active in her church and in her community: she started a nurses’ club and was a card-carrying member of the Urban League, the NAACP, and the ANA. She hosted fundraisers for scholarships at her home so that Black women could attend university. She also brought up more family: cousins and nieces and nephews. Americus received her nursing degree from the St. Philip School of Nursing in Virginia. Though she almost married twice, both engagements ended in tragedy when her fiancés died unexpectedly, and so, believing it “wasn’t meant to be,” she remained single, living with Edna all her life. Forest Jr. married and then served in the navy during the Vietnam War.

On December 22, 1988, Edna was admitted to the hospital for cancer; it was the first year she didn’t put up a tree. She died on Christmas Eve and was laid to rest beside her husband in Frederick Douglass Memorial Park.

Mamie Blair, now Mamie Daniels, has never forgotten Sea View or the nurses or the disease that almost robbed her of life. She turned ninety at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. After being released from Sea View, she married and had three daughters and helped her mother, Ruby Lee, establish a soup kitchen on Staten Island. Today she lives in Florida, but Staten Island is never far from her mind: once a week, she participates in a virtual food pantry in her old community and attends her Staten Island church via Zoom. She, like so many others, will always be grateful for the sacrifice the nurses made. “They and God are why I’m alive,” she said.

And finally, Missouria. She left Sea View in 1961 and spent the rest of her career as a private-duty nurse. In the early 1980s, after almost fifty years in the profession, she retired her nurse whites. But she kept working, continuing her professional duty by spending part of her day tending to people in the neighborhood, foremost Mr. Cofano, the now bald and stout Italian man who’d originated the petition in 1944 to prevent her from moving onto the street.

For years following the petition, he scowled and side-glanced her, and then one day while she was gardening, he noticed her and nodded. She nodded back, and some part deep inside him, the one that told him she was ugly and bad because she was a Black woman, broke. And although vestiges of his former self remained—he never apologized or acknowledged the petition or his searing glances or years of harassment—Mr. Cofano came to like Missouria.

As the decades slipped by, they became friendly. Every day they met and stood on the edge of the lawn talking plants and gardening and growing beautiful things as the world around them shifted and changed.

Wheeler Avenue now teemed with new people and new houses. Mr. Cofano grew older, and his wife died, leaving him alone with his adopted disabled daughter; now he no longer cared who lived on the block. One morning during the AIDS crisis, Mr. Cofano fell to the floor, and the ambulance came and took him away, and modern medicine saved his life. But it couldn’t fix the damage to his heart. He returned home half paralyzed, confined to a wheelchair.

Missouria noticed he stopped coming outside, and days after the doctors sent him home, she did something that forty years ago was unthinkable. She knocked on the door, and he called her inside, where she found him in the wheelchair. The old man, thin and frail, his body crooked and slacking to one side, looked at her and told her to sit down.

Every day, Missouria crossed the street with her stethoscope, thermometer, and blood pressure cuff and took Mr. Cofano’s vitals. She talked with him and told him she was “across the street” if he needed anything.

Stepping out of his house, she walked over to Miss Claire McKinney, who lived at 181 Wheeler Avenue in a small yellow house with a fenced-in front yard that was really just a knot of weeds. Miss McKinney, once tall and strong, had also worked at Sea View as nurse. She was kind and funny and used to throw open the doors to her home, cooking and inviting everyone in the neighborhood to come and eat. But she harbored a secret: she was an alcoholic, and one morning her heart, weakened from years of drinking, slowed, and the blood stopped flowing. The ambulance came, and as it had with Mr. Cofano took her to the hospital, where modern medicine saved her life too. But she returned home a shell of herself. Without her alcohol, she closed the front door and became reclusive and depressed, except when Missouria arrived to check on her and bring her food.

After her daily visit with Miss McKinney, Missouria gathered her bag, passed the front yard with its weeds, turned right, and began walking up the block to the sound of too many cars passing.

Everything was so fast now: there were cordless phones and computers and Xerox machines that made carbon copies obsolete. Cameras were disposable. And every day, transatlantic flights flew thousands of people to Europe. On television, there was a twenty-four-hour music channel, and doctors could now implant an artificial heart, although not for Miss McKinney or Mr. Cofano. There was also integration for Missouria’s people. When she returned to Clinton, South Carolina, to care for her mother, there were no more plaques announcing “Coloreds Only,” “No Negros,” and “White Section.” The signs had been taken down, but their square imprints on walls and entrances remained. She hoped that in the ensuing years, those, too, would fade away, but for now she was happy.

When Mr. Cofano died in 1988, she wept, her family said, mourning him as if he had never wronged her. For Missouria Louvinia Meadows-Walker, the world was never a bad place, just one that needed fixing. And on March 23, 2007, before she died, she cried out to her God, and then closed her eyes, knowing that she and Edna and Miss Demby, Miss Evans, Clemmie, Miss Gillespie, Janie, Virginia, Miss R., Curlene Jennings, Marjorie Tucker Reed, and all the other Black Angels had been part of something profound, something that made the world better. As for herself, she had initiated and seen justice, as much as one human being could hope to see.