In the Sanctuary of Outcasts (20 page)

I waited for my team meeting with five other inmates.

“Don’t expect nothin’,” one man told me. “They just fuck with you.”

An hour later, my name was called. I sat in the middle of a big room surrounded by four guards. Mr. Flowers, the tall black man who dressed like a cowboy, led the meeting.

“Mr. White here had quite an offensive scheme going on the street,” Mr. Flowers announced to the group.

“I see you went to Ole Miss,” he said, staring at my file. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, looking at the other team members, “Ole Miss was the last major university to integrate.”

As I realized I was the only white person in the room, I remembered my first year in an all-white fraternity at Ole Miss. I was named Model Pledge. Later, as master of ceremonies, I guided new initiates through a ritual that had its roots in a secret society in fourteenth-century Bologna, Italy, when foreign students needed protection against the evil Baldassarre Cossa. Eventually, I was elected grand master.

Prospective fraternity brothers were scrutinized before receiving a coveted bid. Any shortcoming—the wrong kind of shoes, a floating eye, an unsightly mole, or any hint of a low socioeconomic background—could be grounds for rejection. When passing judgment on a potential member, a specially designed, two-compartment box was passed in silence from brother to brother. Inside one side of the box were white balls and black balls. The box allowed us to accept or reject
secretly, by passing a white ball or a black ball through a small hole connecting the two compartments. One hundred men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two sat in reverence of the ritual. To allow membership to just anyone would dilute our prestige. And that was unthinkable.

I dropped a black ball more than once to keep out an undesirable. I didn’t want to hurt the young men. I just didn’t want them associated with me, or with my Greek letters.

The worthy ones who did pass muster based on appearance or wealth or family reputation seemed like perfect companions. I was proud of our pedigree, and I didn’t hide it. Our fraternity T-shirts read a kappa sigma: the most wanted man in the country. The walls of the frat house were adorned with posters that read “Poverty Sucks” and “Greed Is Good.”

I felt entitled and important. I was the leader of a group of handsome, affluent, prominent men who would eventually be the leaders in our state, or maybe even the country.

Now I stared at Mr. Flowers and a room full of guards who could blackball me, keep me from a furlough, and block five days on the outside with Neil and Maggie.

“If I remember correctly,” Mr. Flowers said, “the National Guard had to be called in to protect Mr. Meredith.”

I wanted to point out to Mr. Flowers that I was two years old during the integration of Ole Miss. I also wanted to tell him that many of the students, even in 1962, were supportive of Mr. Meredith’s enrollment and integration. I wanted him to know I cochaired a Racial Reconciliation Committee and joined a group pushing to banish the Rebel flag as an official university symbol. But none of that would change his view of me. I reminded myself of Ella’s advice.
What he thinks of me is none of my business
.

“Do you think you deserve a furlough?” he asked.

I was glad to see him drop the Ole Miss topic. “I don’t know,” I said. “But I’d love to see my children.”

Then Flowers mentioned that he attended Jackson State University, a historically black institution. “We played our football games at night after the Ole Miss games,” he said. “We had to sit in stands filled with the trash and beer cups left from your party.”

I nodded. “We have some inconsiderate fans.”

“I’m glad to see you admit this,” he said.

Flowers reviewed their policy for furlough approval. “You can leave now,” he said. “In the unlikely event your furlough is approved, one of us will let you know.”

I left the meeting and walked to the library. As I turned the far corner of the colony, Link joined me. We heard the rattle of chains. Guards were running. The crackle of the guards’ two-way radios echoed down the hall, and Ms. Woodsen ran toward us. “Get in here!” she yelled, waving her short, fat arms. “We got an emergency census!”

Link and I waited with about thirty other inmates in the education building. Ms. Woodsen had us stand in a line against the wall as she counted and recounted us. I stood between Link and Big Gene, an inmate who weighed more than four hundred pounds. Big Gene leaned in toward me and whispered, “Somebody done left.”

When a prisoner escaped, all other inmates were detained and counted to confirm the escape. To Ms. Woodsen’s credit, she came up with the same number in each of her counts, but apparently a guard in another part of the colony could not get his numbers to match.

After standing for almost half an hour, Big Gene said, “Ms. Woodsen, my feets hurt.”

“What’d you say?” Ms. Woodsen said, moving into teacher mode.

“I said, ‘My feets hurt,’” he repeated.

“Oh,” Ms. Woodsen said, “OK, I thought you said ‘foots.’”

A few minutes later, Link yelled, “Ms. Woodsen, it’s hot up in here.”

Ms. Woodsen opened the door at the end of the hallway, and the putrid smell of chopped sugarcane rushed in. Carville, a former sugar plantation, was surrounded by sugarcane farms. When the rotten
stalk is chopped into mulch, the smell can drift for miles. We all grimaced and coughed at the rancid odor.

“God,” one of older inmates said, putting his hands over his mouth, “what
is
that?”

“That’s Ms. Woodsen,” Link said. “She opened up her ass and let some air out.”

“I know who said that!” Ms. Woodsen called out from her office. “I’m gonna write you up!” At that moment, another guard yelled that the census was clear. Link ran as fast as he could back to our dorm.

As I was leaving, Ms. Woodsen emerged from her office and grabbed me by the arm. “Mr. White?” she asked.

“Yes?” I said, hoping she wasn’t going to ask me to identify the inmate who said she was the source of the aroma.

“You still wanna teach?”

“Yes,” I said, without thinking about it.

“Good,” she said. “You start Monday morning.”

A teacher. I would be helping inmates prepare for the GED test. Relieved that I would no longer have to mop floors or wash dishes or serve in the cafeteria line, I realized I would also have to relinquish my post as garnish man and menu board illustrator. I would no longer have access to the leprosy patient cafeteria. I would lose my best opportunities to talk with Harry and Jimmy. And I would lose the chance to have coffee each morning with Ella. Our time together, before the sun crested the levee, when we could talk in privacy, was coming to an end.

The patient cemetery, where many of the tombstones are engraved with aliases.

Link was given a new job, too. The guards, who knew he was scared of ghosts, gave him a job weed-eating the grass around the tombstones in the leprosy graveyard.

The cemetery, covered in shade from pecan trees, was located at the back of the colony. Leprosy patients, most of whom had been abandoned by family, were buried there. With more than seven hundred white tombstones similar to military markers, the graveyard was visible from the second-floor hallway. As dawn came, the tips of the stones jutted out just above a shallow mist. The tombstones were often marked with nothing more than a patient number. When a name was engraved, it was often the patient’s alias etched in marble.

After his first day on the job, Link said he stepped in a sinkhole and his leg sank deep into the ground.

“I felt the goddamn leper bones!” he yelled. I didn’t believe him, but Link was superstitious. After the “leper bones” incident, he refused to set foot inside the graveyard. Later that week, a guard asked Link to climb under one of the buildings to repair a pipe. Link had heard about an inmate who, climbing under the same building, had been bitten by a snake. On the neck.

“But it wasn’t poisonous,” I said.

“Goddamn!” Link said. “It don’t matter. A snake bite me in the neck, I’m gonna have a motherfuckin’ heart attack!”

The following morning, two guards tried to coerce Link into going under the building. One of the guards, in a fit of frustration, tried to push Link’s head under, and Link bit his hand. Free of the guard’s
grip, he raced around the colony screaming, throwing his hands in the air, trying to bite anyone who touched him. When they finally caught him, he was sent immediately to the hole.

As the Bureau of Prisons geared up to take over the colony, the inmate population surged. A new crop of inmates would be transferred to Carville from other prisons, and they would take most of our jobs in food service. Doc got his hands on an internal memo that listed Carville as 99 percent over capacity. In order to abide by federal regulations, the warden would have to take over the entire facility. And that’s what he wanted.

I told Ella about my new job. She nodded, as though she approved. I wanted to know if she had heard about the future of her home. I wondered if the patients had been informed about the Bureau of Prisons’s plans. I couldn’t imagine the stress relocation would bring for long-term residents like Ella who had spent their lives here, where they were safe.

If Ella were relocated, I might not see her again. I found myself scheming about ways to pass her notes in the hallway. If I mailed her letters, no one would ever know. I could send letters through the prison mail system, and a few days later, it would arrive at Ella’s post office box. Even if she were relocated, we could keep up a correspondence.

For decades, mail at Carville was controversial. Until the late 1960s, all mail from the colony was sterilized before being released into the general population. It was baked in a huge electric oven. Even
The Star,
the magazine published by the patients, was cooked after it rolled off the press to be mailed to forty-eight states and thirty countries.

One issue of the magazine, almost eight thousand copies, was burned to a crisp because a staff member was inattentive. I would have been outraged had my magazine been charred before subscribers received it.

“Do you write letters?” I asked Ella.

“Nope.”

Many of the leprosy patients didn’t write letters. Holding a pen or pencil was difficult; for those with severe absorption, typewriters weren’t much help, either.

“Do you get any letters?” I asked.

“I gets some,” she said, “but I don’t look at ’em.” Ella said she gave them to a lady friend who read the important ones. I didn’t want anyone else reading my letters to Ella. And, if the “lady friend” was an employee of Public Health Services, as I suspected she might be, she might report me to the guards.

Jimmy Harris sat down at our table. “Good morning to you both,” he said, nodding to me and Ella. Jimmy was the one patient who would talk about any subject. I felt like nothing was off-limits with him.

“Jimmy,” I asked, “where was the oven—where they baked the mail?”

“Across the way,” he said, pointing toward the infirmary. “Every piece got the treatment. Sometimes they burned it.”

Jefferson, the skinny inmate with gold teeth from New Orleans, danced by our table. “They baked your mail,” he said, “but that ain’t shit. You shoulda seen what they did at the Loyola Street Post Office in New Orleans.”

“What happened there?” Jimmy said.

“They zap them letters with an X-ray machine.”

Jimmy and Ella were confused. “What you talkin’ ’bout, boy?” Ella said.

Jefferson told us he’d worked for the postal service in New Orleans.

“You delivered mail?” I asked.

“Naw, I worked at the main post office building. I manned that X-ray machine.” According to Jefferson, every single letter and package went through the X-ray machine before being processed.

“Ever see anything interesting?” I asked.

“Every damn day,” Jefferson said. “When I see cash money go through, I just pick up the letter and stick it in my back pocket.”

“You can see cash through an X-ray?” I asked.

“Hell, yeah,” he said. “It stands out like
you do
in prison.”

Ella laughed. Jimmy smiled, too.

“But people don’t send cash that often, do they?” I asked.

“Shit,” Jefferson said, bobbing his head up and down and laughing, “I loved them holidays. Christmas and Easter were the best. People be sending money to everybody they know. I made $900 one day before Christmas.”

Jimmy looked appalled, and Ella shook her head.

“You didn’t feel bad about taking people’s Christmas money?” I asked.

“Hey, I got a heart,” he said. “I took the time to read every one of them cards. Like on Mother’s Day, nicest notes you’ve ever seen. One said:
Mom, your family loves you. I hope this comes in handy.
And it sure did!” Jefferson laughed.

Ella scolded him for taking money from mothers. Jefferson acted as if he didn’t hear her. The more he talked, the more excited he became. “Birthdays was better,” he said. “I loved birthdays. I’d take them cards home and read every one of ’em. Then I’d count the money and have me a birthday party!” Jefferson started singing:
Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday, dear Jefferson. Happy birthday to me!

As Jefferson sang, I thought about the birthday cards I’d sent to Neil and Maggie and how I would have felt if someone had taken them. “Tell me you didn’t take money from little kids.”

“Sure did!” he said, proudly. “One day I got this card, it say:
Tommy, here’s a brand-new $100 bill for every year you’ve been alive
.” Jefferson smiled. “And that kid was five years old.”

“That’s terrible!” Ella said.

“It sure was,” Jefferson said. “I was hopin’ he was a teenager.” He laughed and danced some more. Jefferson said he had been named employee of the month on several occasions.

“I was always happy to work overtime on the X-ray machine,” Jefferson said. “They just loved me down at the Loyola Street Post Office.”

“I bet they didn’t love you when you got caught,” I said.

“Got caught!” Jefferson said. “I’m in here for money orders. Those dumb asses never knew about the X-ray machine.” Jefferson told us he had saved more than $40,000 from working the X-ray machine. “I’m goin’ legit,” he said. “I’m buyin’ me a franchise when I get out.”

He turned and danced into the kitchen. Ella shook her head.

“Mail wasn’t the only thing they baked in the old days,” Jimmy said. “They tried to cook me!”

Jimmy was one of a handful of patients who in the 1930s volunteered for an experimental fever treatment. Jimmy and the others were transported to an isolated wing of a marine hospital in New Orleans. There, they were placed in fever machines. Ella and I listened to Jimmy talk about the nurses, about spending Christmas in the hospital, about the doctor who pushed boundaries to raise his body temperature higher, and the fever machine that looked like an iron lung.

“The contraption had two openings,” Jimmy said. “One for my head. The other for the thermometer in my rectum.” At that, Ella turned away and rolled toward the coffeepot.

“Did it work?” I asked.

“Just might have,” Jimmy said. “But it almost killed me.” During his final treatment, Jimmy’s body temperature exceeded 105 degrees. He blacked out. The nurses told him later he had gone berserk. They stopped the treatments and sent everyone back to Carville. But a year later, Jimmy was released. Jimmy had tested negative for leprosy twelve months in a row.

Jimmy’s story corroborated Doc’s theories of thermogenic treatment. The heat had nearly killed Jimmy, but it worked. Doc’s heat pill might have been dangerous, but it seemed like a pretty good alternative for those with terminal illness. And, not unlike chemotherapy, many medical procedures almost kill the patient in order to kill the foreign object.

“If you were cured,” I asked Jimmy, “why did you come back?”

“Leprosy came back,” he said. “Stubborn little bug.”

Jimmy moved back and forth between Carville and home. But it was his wife who needed treatment most of the time. Jimmy built a
life and career away from the colony. During his first stint at Carville, a nun named Sister Hilary encouraged him to use a camera. So when Jimmy tested negative for leprosy, he made a living in Ville Platte as a professional photographer.

“I did more than seven hundred weddings,” he said.

“Did the people in Ville Platte know you’d been in Carville?”

“Most did,” he said.

“Did that affect your business?”

“Never!” Jimmy said. “And when I started shooting in color, I went to the bank every day. Not to borrow, mind you, but to put money in.”

Jimmy and his wife still came to Carville to get treatments, but they were outpatients, having lived independently for almost three decades.

“So why are you back?” I imagined his leprosy had returned.

Jimmy said his wife’s feet, devoid of feeling, were in terrible shape. She required daily treatments.

Jimmy leaned in toward me. “Most people won’t tell you this,” he said in a low voice, “but any of us who were forced to be here can come back to live.” He looked around to make sure no one could hear what he was about to say. “It doesn’t cost us a cent.” He sat back in the chair. “Not a bad deal, if you can get it.”

A guard came into the cafeteria. “Where’s Jefferson?” he asked me. I said I had no idea. “Go find him,” the guard said.

I found Jefferson asleep in the back of the cooler. We walked together back to the leprosy patient cafeteria.

“You got a new job assignment,” the guard told Jefferson.

Jefferson started dancing and singing. “I ain’t never washin’ another dish as long as I live!” The guard escorted Jefferson toward the hallway.

“Hey, Jefferson,” I called out, “where’s your new job?”

Jefferson looked over his shoulder and smiled, “Prison mail room!”