Black Velvet Band

Black Velvet Band weaves together the experiences of three women, their friends, and their colleagues, during one of the most critical periods of 20th century American history. Nursing student Alice Denny and her classmates face the pleasures and pains that young women like them endured as they prepared to become registered nurses, one of the first professions established for women early in the 20th century. Mary Keith R. N., Superintendent of General Hospital in a major American city, aided by her colleagues and close friends, guides her institution through choppy waters. A severe drain of nurses, physicians, and adjunct staff, restrictions imposed by the Federal Government, and demands of Board members and city officials complicate the day-to-day pressures that fulfilling her institution’s mission demands. Sophia Palmer R. N., as the district’s American Red Cross nurse recruiter, culls through the area’s female population seeking every willing trained nurse to serve in stateside training camps and overseas military hospitals. Then she teaches classes to teach nursing skills to untrained women in an effort to fill vacancies left in general hospital nursing staffs. Suddenly in the fall of 1918, a toxic blanket of Spanish influenza reaches America’s shores and spreads quickly through its cities. More deadly than the weapons of war, the disease paralyzes communities just as it prostrates its victims. General hospitals are on the edge of foundering. Nursing students, the epidemic’s most vulnerable victims, face sickness, death and exhaustion daily.The hospital superintendent must find rooms and staff enough to fulfill her institution’s pledge to accept every sick individual and every accident victim that needs medical help.The Red Cross nurse recruiter must organize a network of willing but untrained volunteers to fight the disease throughout diverse city neighborhoods, at hastily established emergency hospitals, and in abandoned mansions.In reviewing real-time events, this fictive history novel, built on a thoroughly researched, factual framework and portraying actual historic individuals, seeks to discover the heroes whose intuition and creative teamwork allowed hospitals and communities to endure during the crisis.The goal of the novel’s fictive history approach is to give documented history a heartbeat and the real historic players in the drama personalities and emotional responses to the challenges they face.Human themes give depth to the characters: heroism and hope counteract annoyance and anger; pride that comes from successfully meeting a challenge head on replaces a sense of frustration over conditions that cannot be altered; humor and love counterbalance devastating feelings of helplessness and grief that the Spanish influenza pandemic created.Images of the individuals and the sites portrayed in the novel as well as a chronology of real-time events appear in the novel’s appendix.