Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 69

Tennessee Williams and ‘‘Mother Yaws”

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lack of treatment options in the story emphasizes the gravity of the disease and the
deadly seriousness of Williams’s intentions. I contend that in ‘M other Yaws,”
Williams may popularly be alluding to one of the first manifestations of AIDS in
the United States.
Though not labeled AIDS by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) until 1982, the highly contagious disease was festering far earlier.
The date of Williams’s story may not have been too early to observe the disease
markers, especially since cases of AIDS had been diagnosed in the Congo in the
late I950’s and in Scandinavia in the 1970’s. The “AIDS virus probably arrived in
the U.S. in the mid-1970’s” according to David Johnson, who prepared “Timeline:
AIDS Epidemic.” Randy Shilts— in And the Band Played On—begins his chronicle
on the spread of AIDS in America on 4 July 1976, when “Ships from fifty-five
nations” sailed into New York harbor to celebrate our nation’s 200**’ birthday party.
Shilts evocatively recalls: “Deep into the morning, bars all over the city were
crammed with sailors. New York had hosted the greatest party ever known...the
guests had come from all over the world. This was the part the epidemiologists
would later note, when they stayed up late at night and the conversation drifted
toward where it [AIDS] had started and when” (Shilts 3). Drs. H.W. Jaffe, W.W.
Darrow, and D.F. Echenberg, et a l researched the hematologic abnormalities of
AIDS as early as 1978. The abstract for their article, published in The Annals o f
Internal Medicine (1985), begins: “A cohort of 6,875 homosexual men, initially
seen at the San Francisco City Clinic between 1978 and 1980, were studied to
determine the incidence and prevalence of the acquired immunodeficiency
syndrome...”.
In all likelihood, the unnamed disease could have been known and
manifested by 1977 when Williams published his story in Esquire. Not only was
Williams a world traveler, but he surely was familiar with the pleasures and fears
of the cosmopolitan New York gay scene. Retrospectively, as Nell Boyce reports,
“In 1981, the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a brief
clinical report on five gay men in the Los Angeles area suffering from pneumonia.
It was not the kind of information that the typical American would have paid
attention to. But Terje Anderson [a gay man] vividly remembers the early buzz
about what we now call AIDS. For a gay man living in New York City (when the
CDC report was released), the news was paralyzing” (Boyce). Epidemiologically
speaking, Barle’s doctor in Gatlinburg in the late 1970’s, however, would have
known the difference between pneumonia and something more rare, more
threatening than this disease. Yaws would hardly make news in a medical journal
in 1977.
Lacking a clinical name for the disease which gave Barle her “terrible
sore,” Williams gravitated toward yaws perhaps because of its high contagiousness.