In the Sanctuary of Outcasts (4 page)

Back in my prison room, I wrote a letter to Linda and the kids. I had promised to write every day. I had also promised Linda I would be truthful about everything. But I couldn’t tell her I was living in a leper colony and that one of them had spit on me, or that my cellmate wanted me to help market a penile injection device.

I was a master of positive spin, but this time I was stuck. I had no good words to write. I put my pen down. I rubbed the spot on my cheek where the leper had spit on me.

“Doc?” I asked. “Do body parts really fall off?”

“That’s a myth,” he said. “They lose hands, feet, even legs, but usually by amputation.” Doc walked over to the mirror, wrapped a washcloth around the head of a disposable razor, snapped it in half, and carefully removed the blade. As he unbuttoned his khaki shirt, he explained that leprosy was a neurological disorder. In some cases, if an infection goes untreated, the body absorbs fingers and toes. “It’s just awful,” he said. Doc took his shirt off. He picked up the blade from the shattered disposable razor, turned his back to the mirror, looked over his shoulder, and began, very carefully, to carve tiny incisions in the skin around a mole on his back.

While I stared, Doc continued to list the symptoms of leprosy—skin lesions, blindness, erosion of the nose, diminished immunity, and huge nodules on the face and hands. Some of the victims, he explained, looked perfectly normal. Others had minor deformities like a misshapen hand or foot. Still others had discolored skin, or feet
so swollen that shoes wouldn’t fit, or faces that appeared to have been dipped in acid.

Doc said the disease eats away at the extremities—cooler parts of the body. If leprosy is left untreated, the victim’s body literally begins to disappear. And there are no tests to predict who might be susceptible. Doc put the razor against his skin again and winced. I had watched as long as I could.

“What are you doing?”

“Removing a spot,” he said, gesturing with the razor in his hand. “Could be cancerous.”

“Aren’t there doctors here?”

“Idiots.” He scowled. “They’ll kill you.” He made another cut. A trickle of blood ran down his back. He pressed a tissue against the wound and sat on the bed again. “The worst thing about leprosy,” he said, “is the nerve damage. Total loss of sensation. The poor bastards can’t feel it when they hurt themselves.”

That night as I lay on my bed and thought about the old woman with no legs, being left here as a child, never to see her family again, it made me think about my children. I pulled their photographs from the back of my Bible and spread them on my bed. I’d brought my favorite shots. Little Neil, his strawberry hair almost blond from the sun at Walloon Lake, Michigan, where we vacationed in the summer. Maggie, so tiny, in her pink ballet outfit during a recital at the Louise McGehee School in New Orleans’s Garden District. One photograph of the four of us after an Easter church service sitting in the courtyard garden at St. Peter’s by-the-Sea. If I taped the prints on the inside of my locker door and left it open at night, I would be able see the photographs from my bed.

“Doc,” I asked, “can I borrow some tape?”

“Tape is contraband,” he said. “Use toothpaste.”

“Does that work?”

Doc grabbed a tube from a box under his bed and tossed it to me, “Tooth
-paste
,” he said.

I turned the photographs facedown on my bed and carefully spread Colgate on the back of one of the prints. I pressed it against the inside of the locker, and it stayed. I carefully applied toothpaste to the other photos and attached them to my locker door. Then I noticed my two rolls of quarters were gone.

“Damn it!” I said. “Somebody took my money!”

Doc chuckled. “Rumor has it there
are
criminals here.”

Ella Bounds

The guard banged his flashlight against the end of my cot and pointed it at my face. I sat up, covered my eyes, and told him I’d be right down. It was still dark outside. I looked over at Doc’s alarm clock. 3:45
A.M
.

Doc moaned, “You’ve gotta get another job.”

I had been assigned to the 4:00
A.M
. to 1:00
P.M
. shift in the cafeteria, six days a week. My pay: fourteen cents an hour. I was short on sleep. The inmates on my hallway stayed up until midnight playing dominoes, and instead of placing the dominoes down on the table, they slapped them down. The sound was like a firecracker. When the guards finally did break up the games, the snoring started. A half-dozen men, most of them over three hundred pounds, suffered from sleep apnea. They wore breathing machines, and their snores echoed up and down the hall. If the noise weren’t enough, two lights in the hallway remained on twenty-four hours a day. One of them, outside our doorway, cast a bright beam of light onto my bunk. I learned to sleep with my arm over my eyes.

I dressed in one of my green uniforms and walked the long, empty corridor toward the entrance where the leprosy patients lived. The hallways smelled musty and sweet. The door dividing the two sides was secured at midnight each night and was still locked, so I walked downstairs and joined a group of other inmates who were gathered in the prison courtyard waiting to be escorted to the cafeteria.

The buildings and corridors of the colony formed two huge quadrangles. The one closest to the river was reserved for the leprosy pa
tients. The patient quadrangle contained a few gardens planted by the patients and a tombstone commemorating the first one hundred individuals who died in Carville, some of whom were identified by nothing more than initials. The other quadrangle was ours. Surrounded by the two-story concrete walkway, the inmate courtyard was outlined by a quarter-mile serpentine walking track. Inside the track, the prisoners had access to a weight-lifting area and stationary bikes. The cafeteria building had been built in one corner of the leprosy patient quadrangle.

The stagnant summer heat, even at this hour, was heavy. The colony rarely felt a breeze because it sat at the base of the levee. The dead air and humidity pushed temperatures to a hundred degrees on most summer days. Within minutes of venturing outside, I felt perspiration soak into my shirt.

As we waited for the guard, I noticed the other inmates wore thick gloves, winter caps, and heavy jackets. I asked Jefferson, a skinny kid from New Orleans, why they wore cold-weather gear.

“He don’t know shit, do he?” he said to the others. Then they tapped one another’s fists. I was out of my element and felt stupid. A guard finally arrived, and we walked together to the cafeteria.

I had two jobs: washing dishes and writing menu boards. It seemed strange that the guards would bother with a menu board since we didn’t have a choice about what was served. But food was important here. Everything I had ever read about prison suggested that weapons or drugs or whiskey or some other contraband would be the convicts’ primary concern. Here food was currency, particularly fruit, which was reserved for the leprosy patients. Lemons, bananas, and oranges brought up to five dollars each. Strawberries, cantaloupes, and honeydew melons were rare delicacies. The only way for prisoners to get fruit was for an inmate to smuggle it from the cafeteria.

The lunch menu included barbecue pork, so on the menu board, I sketched an illustration of President Clinton skewering a pig. I finished both boards in less than an hour. Since I didn’t have to be in the dish room for another two hours, I walked through the industrial kitchen to see what the other inmates were doing.

The kitchen was empty. I checked the dish room and the dry goods warehouse. The stoves and cutting stations and mixers sat unused. I opened the door to the large walk-in cooler. The shelves were stacked with vats of mayonnaise, large blocks of butter, gallons and gallons of milk, and boxes of lettuce, tomatoes, and other vegetables. At the rear of the cooler, I saw a boot propped on top of a produce box. Jefferson and five other inmates sat in the back of the cooler, winter caps pulled tight over their ears, hands stuffed into coat pockets. The men were wedged between some half-empty boxes stacked against the back wall, sound asleep. With each exhale, soft steam floated out from their noses and mouths.

I went back into the main cafeteria and made a cup of coffee. Dark, strong New Orleans chicory coffee. I picked up a copy of
USA Today
. The room was quiet and still, and the smell of buttery dough reminded me of my high school cafeteria. I sat, sipped my coffee, read the paper, and wondered how breakfast would ever be ready with everyone napping in the cooler. The “Life” section of the paper featured a soon-to-be-released summer blockbuster film. I thought about taking Little Neil to see it. We would go on opening night, maybe to the Prytania Theatre, where the lines wouldn’t be as long, or maybe Canal Center. We would have a quick dinner at Gautreaux’s, get to the cinema early, and grab a seat in the front row with the other kids.

For a moment, lost in the story, I had forgotten. My son would see the movie, but not with me.

Through a lattice wall dividing the prisoner and patient dining rooms, I saw the old woman in the antique wheelchair cranking around in the leprosy side of the cafeteria. She saw me, too, and motioned for me to come over. I was growing accustomed to her chanting and her smile. And even though at first I didn’t want to breathe the same air, for some reason, she seemed harmless and sweet. Maybe it was learning about how she had been abandoned as a young girl.

I folded the paper, grabbed my coffee, and walked around the lattice.

“You’re up early, aren’t you?” I asked.

“Yep,” she said. “Already had my bath, too.”

I asked if I could bring her some coffee.

She nodded.

“How do you like it?”

“Black with sweets-and-low,” she said. “Lots of sweets-and-low.”

Rather than handing her the coffee cup, I put it on the table. I wanted to talk, but I also didn’t want to get too close. I sat down opposite her. Each square table was set with two chairs—the other two sides were left open for wheelchairs. She picked up the plastic coffee mug with both hands. The skin on her fingers looked like she had just applied lotion. She had all ten of her fingers. No sign of her body’s absorbing digits like Doc had described, but she was mindful with the coffee. She kept her eyes focused on the mug because, I assumed, she could not actually feel it. She took a sip and carefully placed the cup back on the table.

“My name is Neil,” I said, hoping for her name in return, but she just smiled and nodded. “What’s your name?”

She answered, but I couldn’t understand her. I wasn’t sure if she said Cella or Ella or maybe even Lola. I asked her again.

She spelled it out in a gravelly voice, “E-L-L-A.”

We were all alone and I had an hour before the inmates arrived for breakfast, so I continued. “I live in New Orleans,” I said, “but Mississippi is home. What about you?”

“I was born in Abita Springs, Louisiana,” she said. “But this is my home.” She picked her coffee up again. She held the cup between her palms and shifted in her chair. “How long you gotta stay?”

“About a year.”

“Long time,” she said. “Long time.”

We sat quietly for a moment, then Ella let out a soft sigh. “You can be my guest,” she said, “least ’til you get back to your place.”

Ella was trying to make
me
feel better, even though she had been here for decades.

“So,” I asked, “how did you end up here?”

Ella leaned back in her wheelchair, settling in. “Abita Springs,” she said in a whisper. “Nineteen hundred and twenty-six. I was in grade school.”

According to Ella, a doctor had visited the one-room schoolhouse to administer shots. The raised oval spots on her leg where the pigmentation had disappeared had caught his attention. He pricked the blotches with a needle. Ella felt nothing.

“Next week, white man drives up,” Ella said, “and I seen the Carroll boy pointin’ outside. ‘Oooh, Ella,’ he say, ‘bounty hunter fixin’ to carry you away.’ I look out and seen the man leanin’ on his truck, wearin’ the dark glasses, arms crossed all tight.”

A hand-painted sign—large enough to be seen from neighboring farms and which would later be nailed to the side of her family’s tenant house—extended from the back of the white man’s pickup truck. Ella couldn’t read the long word scrawled in large red letters. Later she would understand: “Quarantine.”

The schoolteacher put a hand on Ella’s shoulder, pulled her up from her desk, and led her outside. The other children ran over to the window. The teacher walked her across the small schoolyard toward the truck that idled at the edge of the field. The bounty hunter uncrossed his arms and pushed back his coat to expose a pistol. The teacher stopped and took her hand off Ella’s shoulder. The man pointed to the back of the truck, and Ella climbed in.

As he drove away Ella looked out through the wooden slats. Her teacher stood with her hands over her mouth. Her classmates’ frozen faces filled the schoolhouse window.

Ella sipped her coffee and took a break. I didn’t say a word. I waited for her to go on with her story. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was patient. I had no place to go. No meetings. No deadlines.

There was something remarkable about this woman. The way she held herself, and her eyes. She seemed to possess unwavering confidence. Or maybe it was strength. But at the same time, she was gentle and friendly.

For a moment, I had forgotten she might be contagious. She was so vibrant. My mother would have been able to tell me all about her wonderful aura. It was hard to believe Ella carried a debilitating disease.

A guard pushed through the swinging kitchen door and called out for me. “Inmate!” he yelled. “Get over here.”

I hurried toward the kitchen. The guard was a short white man with red hair and a moustache that needed to be trimmed. His pants were too tight. The gray material was stretched tight against his thighs. He looked uncomfortable.

“No fraternizing with patients,” he said.

Ella heard and looked directly at the guard. “We jes talkin’.”

“Yes, ma’am, sorry to interrupt,” he said, with deference. “I need this inmate in the kitchen.”

Ella called out to me, “See you tomorrow.”