Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racist violence.

The story uses the motif of water to highlight the interconnectedness of humans with each other and nature, an intimacy that is often denied by social structures like racism and colonial slavery. In the story, Wideman references the water that carries slave ships from Haiti to Philadelphia, with many passengers dying below deck on the journey; the mosquitos that thrive and breed in standing water, spreading the contagion; and Water Street and its surrounding alleys filled with swampy dilapidated housing on the Delaware River. Wideman writes that “[f]ever descends when the waters that connect us are clogged with filth. […] The waters cannot come and go when we are shut off one from the other” (132). The passage suggests that water is a metaphor for the natural features of life that connect humankind. Rendering structures like slavery and racism as “filth” that disrupts these natural connections, Wideman portrays the way water has both life-giving potential and deadly power.

“Fever” contains frequent images of bodies, using these to symbolize the city, the moral bankruptcy of colonial slavery, and the long-term consequences of anti-Black racism. Rush and his assistant dissect bodies, searching desperately for the cause of the fever in hopes of finding its cure.