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Williams builds a world near St. Louis where a free Black woman, Saint, purchases a town, renames it “Ours” and casts spells that cause a kind of “white plague.”

Tuberculosis was called “the captain of the men of death” and “the white plague,” for how it left its victims pale and listless.

The colonies are being killed by a disease of unknown origin — sometimes called white plague or white blotch — first identified off Virginia Key in 2014.

Why must all other species give way to the white plague?

By the 1950s, tuberculosis was being treated effectively with antibiotics, and many of the palatial compounds previously devoted to the white plague had shuttered.