In the Sanctuary of Outcasts (21 page)

“Hey, Harry,” I said, “this is my last day.”

“You goin’ home?”

“No, changing jobs.”

Harry tipped his hat, like he always did. “Good luck,” he said.

“Do you have a job?” I asked.

“I get minimum wage,” he said.

“What do you do?”

“I help out,” he said. Harry assisted other patients. He pushed their wheelchairs to and from the infirmary. He rescued patients with a dead wheelchair battery who might be stranded around the colony. He ran errands. “I do what they ask me to do,” he said.

No fanfare. No complaints. The work was simple. It was quiet. In fact, I hadn’t even noticed his tasks were jobs. It looked more like a routine. He helped people. Each little rescue was important. Harry spent his days doing small, great acts.

I would miss seeing him in the cafeteria, watching him eat while using his special utensils. He was as friendly as any person I had ever met. But I was curious about one thing. He never called the inmates by name. He would tip his hat and give us a smile, but he never did use our names, or even nicknames.

“My name is Neil,” I reminded him.

“I know,” he said, like I had insulted him.

When I asked why he never called any of the prisoners by name, he looked down at the floor and shuffled his Velcro shoes. Embarrassed, he said, “You all sort of look alike.”

When Ella arrived for breakfast, I poured her a cup of coffee.

I felt a love for her like I’d not felt before. Not quite like I loved my siblings or my wife or my parents. I respected her and she treated me with respect, even though I was a convicted felon.

“Saturday will be my last day,” I reminded her. “I’ll miss having coffee with you.”

“Miss you, too,” she said, smiling.

I would see Ella in the hallways, in church, on our daily walking routes, but I would miss our early mornings together.

“I’ll miss our talks most of all,” I said.

“We’ll talk,” she said.

“Where?”

“In the breeze,” she said, staring off into the leprosy patient courtyard.

I nodded like I knew what she meant, put my hand on her shoulder, and told her I’d see her later. As I walked toward the kitchen to turn in my apron and dry erase markers, Ella stared out the window. “Yep,” she said in an airy voice, “I’ll see you in the breeze.”

On the morning before my first day of work as a teacher, about fifteen men lined up outside the door of my prison room. I’d never been in the room at 8:00
A.M
. on a Monday morning. I’d always been mopping the floor or writing on the menu board. One at a time, the men walked into our room, stood in front of Doc’s bunk, and described their symptoms. Doc would listen, look down their throats or feel underneath their jaw, and jot down a few notes. Then, he would tell them exactly what to tell the physician assistants they were to see later that morning.

“Clark Kent,” one of the inmates said, “you didn’t know Doc here saved my life last month.”

Doc had caught a mistake made by the prison doctors. A deadly combination of drugs had been prescribed, inadvertently, by two different physicians.

The men who came into our room to be examined were young and old, Christian and Muslim, black, white, and Hispanic. For all Doc’s talk of not wanting to be around these men, he still honored his Hippocratic oath. He examined the men, made a diagnosis, and sent them on their way. Not a penny exchanged hands. Doc was full of surprises.

When I arrived in the education department, Ms. Woodsen sat at her desk in the corner of the room. I had convinced her to let me take the lead in helping the inmate students pass the GED. The Bureau of Prisons received money for each inmate who graduated, and I was certain I could teach them enough to pass a high school equivalency
test. Never one to set the bar low, I had a secret goal of 100 percent graduation, but I told Ms. Woodsen I thought I could achieve a 50 percent graduation rate.

My strategy for success was simple. I would start with questions. I would discover what the men did
not
know. That was the key. I introduced myself to the class and told them about my background. I emphasized that questions and curiosity were the secrets to learning. I wanted them to be comfortable asking me any question. I waited for someone to speak up, but they were slow to ask.

The classroom was filled. Several students were my friends. Ricky, a handball buddy, sat on the front row. Mr. Dingham, a union boss from Newark who had signed labor deals for thousands of stevedores at the port, sat in the back. I was surprised he didn’t own a diploma.

“C’mon,” I said, smiling, trying to make them feel at ease, “you must have questions about something.”

Mr. Dingham raised his hand and said he had two questions. “Is it true,” he asked in a strong New Jersey accent, “that vultures ain’t got no assholes?”

Ms. Woodsen screamed at him from across the room. “You can’t use them words, Mr. Dingham!”

Dingham yelled back. “I heard they just puked up everything and don’t never need to take a shit.”

Ms. Woodsen stood up and pointed a chubby index finger at him. “We use scientific language up in here!”

I stepped between them and assured Mr. Dingham that what he’d heard about vultures was a myth, but that it might be true that vultures regurgitated. Even scavengers had trouble digesting bones and feathers, I explained. Then I demonstrated to the class how one would rephrase Mr. Dingham’s question, scientifically.

“Is it true that vultures don’t have a rectum?” I recited. “Because I heard they regurgitate their wastes and, consequently, do not excrete feces.”

Ricky, my handball buddy, was confused. “Feces?” he asked.

“You know,” I said, pointing to my own rear, “poop…. dook.” Then tentatively, “Shit.”

Ricky smiled like he understood. Then he leaned over to his friend. “You’re a feces head.”

I jumped in and told Mr. Dingham to ask his second question—reminding him to avoid curse words.

“Well, I’ve always wanted to ask…,” Mr. Dingham hesitated.

I assured him it was fine. “There’s no such thing as a bad question.”

“Well…” he said, “I’ve always wondered…what’s a vowel?”

The other men in the room didn’t laugh or snort. And no one rattled off the letters. They were waiting for my answer, too. I turned my back to the class and wrote
A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y
on the chalkboard. To reach my goal, I would have to spend hours tutoring after class.

This was going to take longer than I’d thought.

As the gray winter months lingered, the leprosy patients became more and more anxious about their future. Word spread about an inmate who had filed a federal lawsuit against the Bureau of Prisons for exposing him to leprosy patients. A preliminary trial date had already been set in Baton Rouge, and the documents filed by the inmate’s attorney included inflammatory language about unsuitable, dangerous conditions of a minimum-security facility where federal convicts and leprosy patients were free to mingle.

We all knew this would bring the battle for control of Carville to a head. The Bureau of Prisons, intent on taking over the entire colony, had offered to help pay to relocate the patients. The patients weren’t sure if they would be offered some form of compensation, or if they would be provided a new building somewhere else on the three-hundred-acre colony, or if they would be transferred to a nursing home. Their fate was uncertain, and the Bureau was not sharing the details. Or asking their opinions.

The patients were suspicious from experience. In the early days, they were kept in the dark about decisions on furloughs, new treatments, and patients’ rights. Privileges promised by one director would later be revoked by his successor. And recently, the patients had been misled by the Bureau of Prisons. They were told that only geriatric, invalid prisoners would be housed at Carville. They had no inkling that more than 250 healthy, possibly dangerous prisoners would be a part of the arrangement.

But the real problem was money. The $17 million budget to maintain 130 patients at Carville was scheduled to be cut.

Money—and currency—had always been a problem for leprosy patients. Most colonies around the world minted their own coins and currency to prevent leprosy patients from amassing money to fund escapes, as well as to avoid infecting the general population. The coins usually honored Lazarus or the current leader of the country. But Carville was never required to produce its own currency. In the early days, cash was fumigated with disinfectants. Later, checks and cash mailed by patients were baked before circulating among the general public. Within the colony, though, money caused problems. A staff person who performed tasks like radio repairs for a patient might be wary of taking contaminated currency. On more than one occasion, patients who paid for repairs would later discover that the bills had been run through a commercial washing machine and hung out to dry on a clothesline. Even the people who worked at Carville were afraid. And the ones who weren’t wanted to keep up pretenses.

The staff at Carville was paid a 25 to 50 percent premium for working at the colony. It was called hazard pay—a premium for risking their well-being to work at the hospital. Stanley Stein and the staff at
The Star
had fought to eliminate hazard pay. This battle pitted the Carville crusader against the very people who cared for him. Stein became quite unpopular among some of the staff. In the end, a nomenclature compromise was reached. Pay would not be cut, but it would be renamed something more innocuous.

On a Sunday morning after a rare winter frost, Sarah and Stan talked to Father Reynolds about their growing anxiety. Sarah was worried about being placed in a strange nursing home.

“Can you imagine their reaction?” she said. For blind patients, any relocation would mean learning to navigate new paths.

Ella was worried, too. After church on a Sunday afternoon, she was waiting for me at the entrance separating the prison side from the leprosy side. I made sure no guards were around and stepped into
the screened corridor. It was the first chance we’d had to talk since I had been transferred to the education department. Everyone else was inside watching football playoffs.

“Hey, Ella,” I said, “what are you doing here?”

“Settin’ in the breeze,” she said.

And she was. There was no wind, but she was sitting in the spot the patients called the breezeway. This was where we would talk. Ella asked about my new job, and I asked her about the new menu board guy. Then Harry rode up on his bike. He stopped and shook his head. He couldn’t believe he was going to be relocated. Harry had lived at the colony since 1954. Other than a furlough each year to see his mother in the Caribbean, Harry had spent forty years at Carville.

I wished I could help put a stop to the plans. I tried to be encouraging, pointing out the most obvious benefit, the proposed $33,000 annual stipend.

“If the stipend comes through,” I said, trying to be upbeat, “you could move into a house. In a neighborhood.”

“This here is your prison,” Ella said, “but it’s our home.”

Harry shook his head again, and for the first time since I had known him, he frowned. He stared at his shoes. “People back away,” he said. He grabbed the brim of his hat with his two good fingers and placed his mitten hand against the back. He pulled it down over his brow and muttered, “Never get used to it.”

“People don’t want folks like us stayin’ on they street,” Ella said.

“That’s not true,” I told them. “People would understand, once they got to know you.” I pointed out that we were neighbors, right now. “I’m honored to live next to you. And I would have been on the outside.”

Ella looked at me, skeptical. “
Mmm uhh!
”

Then I remembered Lionel Day. In 1973, Lionel moved down the street from my house. He was the first African American kid to live in our neighborhood. His father owned gas stations. They bought a two-story house in all-white Bayou View, two doors down from where my grandparents once lived. I overheard adults talk about plummeting property values. I heard one mother say, “The nerve of those people.”

A week after his family moved in, Lionel left for school and saw a for sale sign in his yard. I don’t know if kids did it as a prank or if adults did it for more ominous reasons. But the message was clear.

I listened as some of the older boys in Bayou View plotted more pranks—deflating the tires of their car, lining their driveway with watermelons, spray-painting their lawn with the word
nigger
in green, glow-in-the-dark paint so it would show up only at night. And when they laughed at their own cleverness, I pretended to laugh right along with them.

Lionel was my friend. We were both on the student council. I wanted to make him feel welcome in our neighborhood. I wanted to knock on his front door and invite him to my house. I wanted to apologize for the actions of my fellow whites. But I didn’t do any of those things.

I was afraid of the older kids. Afraid of the names I’d be called. Afraid to be on the outside.

“I’m not leaving,” Harry said, serious and assertive. Sweet Harry, with the great straw hat, all of a sudden seemed sturdy, forceful.

Ella nodded. “I ain’t leavin’ neither.”

I tried to imagine Ella and Harry living on the outside and how the neighbors might react to their missing legs and absorbed fingers. But they would carry much more into the neighborhood than their disfigurement. Ella and Harry would be found out. People would discover a “leper” had moved into the neighborhood. A for sale sign in the yard might be just the beginning.

I had done nothing for Lionel Day. I might have been honored to be his friend, but not enough to stand by him publicly.

I understood perfectly why Ella and Harry refused to leave Carville. The world, out there, was full of people like me.