The Leper Spy (21 page)

The scene was too much for the young woman with curly black hair who wore her Medal of Freedom pinned to her blouse. She stood just five feet tall and weighed one hundred pounds, but she seemed larger than life.

“This is more than I expected,” she told the press.

The reporters didn't miss the significance of this defining moment. A newspaperman named John Chestnutt wrote in the
San Francisco Call-Bulletin,
“In other places and other, less enlightened times, there would have been no such welcome. Instead of being
greeted she would have been, quite wrongly, shunned because of her illness.”

After the celebration, she caught an air force plane to New Orleans, falling ill from nausea, and then ducked into an ambulance for the seventy-five-mile trip to Carville. She rolled down the window and felt the cool rush of wind against her face as they sped past rows of tidy houses and palmettos and zinnias on well-kept lawns. She saw the lights of downtown New Orleans and the black expanse of the mighty Mississippi and the cypress swamps thick with life.

“This is America,” she thought.

She felt like she was finally waking from a bad dream and standing on the threshold of a new life as rural Louisiana blurred by outside the window.

When the ambulance came down the gravel two-lane road and stopped in front of the clinic at Carville and the door swung open, the patients began to cheer. One of the Filipino patients forced a sheaf of ferns and red roses into her arms as a flashbulb popped in the morning light. The photograph captured a woman wearing red lipstick on a giant smile, stepping out of an old ambulance with M
ARINE
H
OSPITAL
stenciled on the rear doors. The Hornbostels, Gertrude and Hans, hugged her neck and praised her for her heroics.

“Welcome, Joey,” said Stanley Stein, a blind man who was the editor of the patient newspaper. “Welcome to Carville.”

She looked fresh and trim in a gray pencil-striped suit, white blouse, and summer costume jewelry. Someone remarked that she looked more like she was arriving at a fancy resort than a leprosy hospital. Joey was smiling but nervous.

“Thank you so much for the flowers,” she said.

One of the nuns took her arm and led her down a long porch and then a quiet corridor to a temporary room with “13” painted on the door. Joey giggled when she saw it.

At the window was a runner of red, yellow, and blue wool made by another patient, and on it were woven the words W
ELCOME
J
OEY
.
The room was filled with flowers. On a tray beside the bed sat a breakfast of grapefruit, warm toast, and drip coffee. Joey couldn't stop smiling.

Gertrude Hornbostel wanted to figure out the puzzle of how Joey had made it through enemy lines. Despite being at the center of attention during the race to Manila, the internees at Santo Tomas knew only what they heard through the grapevine and from their own intelligence gatherers. Hornbostel remembered hearing that when US troops got close to Manila, the Japanese planned to line the internees up in the courtyard and mow them down by machine-gun fire. She remembered hearing that a Nisei spy in the camp had found such orders on the desk of the Japanese commandant, notified the internee intelligence committee, then left camp to tell the guerrillas, with hopes they could inform MacArthur and tell him to hurry.

“Joey's exploits saved the lives of all those men who were rushing to save us by a 36-hour forced march,” Hornbostel would write. “They raced with the other outfit to see which could get in first. But the biggest thing in our lives was the fact that they were there and that they were there in time—thanks to Joey, but at that time we did not realize that we owed our lives to this one little Filipino girl, although we had heard by grapevine about her mission. We did not know then that she had come through safely. All this knowledge had to be put together piecemeal from what little information we could glean here and there. It was like working out a crossword puzzle with the word that gave you the key to the whole list as ‘Billy Ferrer,' Joey's name with the underground.”

When she finished visiting with the doting Gertrude Hornbostel, Joey took a shower and changed clothes, and the nurse guided her into a spring bed with clean sheets—both rare luxuries back at Novaliches—and fluffed the pillows around her. Joey then opened the door for the newspapermen who had been waiting. She answered all their questions the best she could. About the trip. About how she was treated during her travels. About Tala.

“The Filipinos look upon leprosy as a curse,” she said. “When I first got to the colony, conditions were vile. Patients were sleeping on the floor, living promiscuously, and the government could do nothing about it. So I took some patients and said, ‘Let's see what we can do with a little lye and soap.' Before long we had it all cleaned up. Then I wrote my friends in California and the letter was published and we began receiving gifts of food and clothing from America. And the GIs, how they helped us! They would come and bring something, maybe only a candy bar, but something.

“In changing squalid and almost unspeakable conditions there to at least bearable, and in exposing such conditions, some of my friends and especially Aurora ‘Baby' Quezon, daughter of our late President Quezon, stood valiantly by me,” she said. The reporters “were fearless in their reporting. But I know I shall be able to serve the patients at Tala much better when I am well, and I fully expect to get well here now that I can receive treatment with the new sulfone drugs.”

The Associated Press dispatch would run in papers across the country under the headline H
EROINE AT
L
EPROSARIUM
.

Mrs. Josefina Guerrero, who was known as Joey to the countless G.I.s she helped fight the Japanese in her native Philippines, arrived at the Carville National Leprosarium here today. She is the first foreigner ever to be accepted as a patient.

Mrs. Guerrero's journey to Carville had a dramatic touch early today. The plane carrying her from San Francisco hovered for 45 minutes over Harding Field at Baton Rouge, unable to land because of fog. It flew finally to New Orleans where a Carville ambulance met the heroine and brought her to the hospital here.

Mrs. Guerrero was permitted to enter the United States only after a special ruling from Attorney General Tom Clark. She was earlier unable to get a visa to leave
Manila because the United States immigration laws ban the entry of lepers into this country.

“Being at Carville is like a homecoming,” she told one reporter. “I feel that we all met before because of our long correspondence.”

To another she introduced a Chinese doll she was carrying. “I have had her since I was in high school and look at her, how worn she is getting,” she said as she picked at her breakfast. “Her name is Ah Choo—you know, like a little sneeze.” She placed Ah Choo on the pillow beside her as a nurse bustled about the room.

She told them the hardest thing about leaving was saying goodbye to the children at Tala. She had bonded closely with many of them, coming to think of them as her own.

“That's what I hated most,” she said. “When I said good-bye, they cried as though they were attending my funeral.”

When the reporters left, she inspected her surroundings. There was a ceiling fan and wall fan, a washbasin with hot and cold taps, a rocking chair, a dresser with a mirror, window blinds to shut out the sun. Three hundred letters addressed to her were stacked neatly on a table. One young man brought in a huge confectioner's box. Inside was a pink-and-white frosted cake rimmed with thirty tiny candles and bearing the greeting: H
APPY
B
IRTHDAY
. Stanley Stein asked Joey if it was her birthday. “No,” Joey laughed. “But it will be soon. On August 5, and then I'll be very old, 31 years.”

Joey was amazed. What comfort and luxury! But a sense of sadness crept in when she remembered Novaliches and her friends back home. If only there was a place like Carville in Manila. She fell asleep with those thoughts. When she woke a few hours later, one of the sisters told her she had several phone calls to return. Joey was escorted down a long covered walkway, past rows of bicycles, to the canteen, where a hushed quiet fell over the crowd when she walked in.

“This is Joey,” said the man escorting her.

“Hello, Joey,” one of the patients said.

“Welcome, Joey,” said another.

This was followed by a chorus of greetings from the patients. The ice was broken. Suddenly everyone was trying to help her.

“It's hot in here, isn't it?” someone asked. “Would you like a cold drink?”

“Dr. Pepper? 7-Up? Root beer?” someone else said.

“Ice cream, maybe?” said another.

In less than a minute, she had two dozen new friends.

Joey's escort showed her to the telephone booth, where she returned calls to even more reporters, patiently answering their questions. She was quickly becoming a darling of the news media. A radio show host from WWL New Orleans wanted to broadcast an interview with Joey from Carville. A photographer from the
New York Times
wanted to take a picture of her. A
Time
magazine correspondent wanted an interview for a story on the fight to bring her to the United States.

N
ot long before Joey arrived at Carville, many Americans wanted nothing to do with victims of leprosy. The hospital at Carville itself was the product of a fearful, uninformed public trying to deal with a “leper problem,” as reporters called it.

“Leprosy is dreaded most of all diseases, not because it kills, but because it leaves alive; not for its pain—though painful at times, the loss of pain and tactile sensation is dreaded more,” wrote Dr. Ernest Muir, a medical missionary among Bengal leprosy victims. “Mask face, unclosing eyes, slavering mouth, claw-hands and limping feet; or even worse, beetling brows, stuffed nose, ulcerating legs, and painful eyes drawing on towards blindness.”

Americans thought of leprosy as a disease that happened elsewhere, in another country, another time. It was a nightmarish relic, and the afflicted seemed almost inhuman. So, in cases in which Americans contracted leprosy, the general sentiment was to ostracize the victim.

The case of John Ruskin Early, an American patriot, serves as a shining example of this national attitude. Early hailed from the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, and he served as a private in the Fifth United States Infantry during the Spanish-American War. He saw action in Cuba, where he contracted what he thought was malaria, before being sent with his unit to the
Philippines. He quit the army to marry a girl, went to work back home in a pulp mill, and soon fell ill from the chemicals to which he was exposed. In August 1908, no longer well enough to work, Early decided to travel to Washington, DC, to seek his claim for a war pension. But his condition puzzled the medical authorities in the nation's capital. Soon they claimed to have discovered the leprosy bacteria in a skin sample they'd removed from his red and puffy face. He was immediately quarantined to a tent in a marshy spot on the Potomac River, where he awaited his fate.

No one knew what to do with Early. To send him back home to North Carolina violated the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1890 and 1893. Early's wife campaigned for his release, writing to President Taft and eminent leprologists, including the Norwegian physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen, who first discovered
Mycobacterium leprae,
the intracellular bacterium that causes leprosy. Mrs. Early's vigorous effort came to the attention of a New York City dermatologist who traveled to Washington to visit Early in 1909. The New York City Health Department didn't regard leprosy as so contagious as to require segregation, so the dermatologist arranged to treat Early in New York. Early was bundled into a boxcar with a Salvation Army medic who was instructed to destroy all eating and drinking utensils Early touched and to make sure the patient wore rubber gloves at all times. Once in New York, doctors could find no trace of the leprosy bacillus in Early's skin samples. He was soon cleared to leave on his own.

Early moved with his family to Virginia and found work on a farm, but when he returned to Washington to collect his pension, he was arrested and quarantined to the same tent he had lived in before. A spate of legal action followed, and he was again sealed in a boxcar and returned to New York. More troubling than his disease was his notoriety. The newspapers were up in arms.

Early and his family had nowhere to settle openly, so they fled to the West Coast and tried to make a home in Tacoma, Washington, but their secret was soon out, and the locals threw fits about
their new neighbors. The US surgeon general quarantined Early to Port Townsend, Washington, where he stayed less than a year before going on the lam. Early had hatched a plan to protest his mistreatment. He secretly traveled back to the East Coast via Canada and, using the alias E. J. Watson, checked into one of Washington's poshest hotels, the Willard, where several senators and representatives and diplomats were staying. When the city's chief medical inspector learned where Early was staying, he sprinted over and found Early talking to a gaggle of newspaper reporters.

“I knew that if I mingled among the well-to-do and the rich and exposed them to contagion,” he told them, “that they would arise out of self-protection and further my plan for a national home.”

He was right. Congress went into a tizzy. One congressman said Early wandering freely about the country was “worse than turning loose a band of murderers.” Another proposed banishing Early and other victims to an Alaskan island. Early's plan had worked, and a national leprosarium was suddenly part of the political agenda, but it would be situated far from remote Alaska.

In 1909, when John Early was headed for isolation at Carville, a survey of leprosy in the United States found 139 cases in fourteen states. Fifty of them were in Louisiana, more than double the number from any other state.