In the Sanctuary of Outcasts

by Neil White

  It turned out Kahn was escorting me to the cafeteria. A hand-carved wooden sign, the kind you might see at a southern diner, was nailed over the door. It read magnolia room. Kahn left me at the door and told me to go inside to get my assignment.

  In the cafeteria office a guard asked, “You got good handwriting?”

  Actually, my handwriting was superb. I had spent years perfecting it. I had even invented several of my own fonts. In high school I was always asked to help create school signage, and I learned early on that teachers were reluctant to mark up a beautifully written assignment. I loved the praise that came along with fastidious manuscripts. The notes teachers wrote—Beautifully written. A pleasure to read. If only all my papers were so neat!—inspired me to strive for even greater perfection.

  “Penmanship is one of my strong suits,” I told the guard.

  He handed me a menu for the day’s meals and a set of dry erase markers.

  “Write the menu on the board in the patient cafeteria,” he said. “Right through there,” he added, pointing at a door.

  As I walked through the kitchen, I saw an inmate stirring a huge pot of soup. He noticed the markers and yelled, “Write big ’cause them lepers can’t see worth a shit!”

  I would think twice before bragging again. I pushed through a heavy swinging door and saw them. Fifty, maybe sixty leprosy patients sitting at the tables. I scanned the room for other inmates, but I was the only one. The menu board was on a wall on the opposite side of the room. I kept my eyes on the floor as I moved through a maze of wheelchairs and walkers, canes and crutches.

  An Asian man sat at a table in the middle of the cafeteria. He stared at me as I approached. A white growth completely covered one of his eyes. Between his two digitless hands, he balanced a pork chop. His good eye followed me as I walked. The skin around his mouth and chin was covered with a dark blue ointment, and his hands were shaped like mittens. I didn’t want to stare, but I couldn’t help myself. The pork chop slipped from his grip and fell onto his plate. He mumbled something, his mouth full of chewed meat.

  I passed men and women with odd-shaped noses, discolored faces and disfigured hands, oversized sunglasses, irregular-shaped shoes, and stumps from missing limbs. I held my breath, hurried toward the menu board, and stood as close to it as possible, my back to the lepers.

  I couldn’t believe lepers still lived in America. Leprosy was something that happened in third-world countries. I had always imagined lepers—dangerous and grotesque—the way they were described in the Bible or portrayed in Hollywood films, being forced out of cities and told to wear bells or clappers to warn travelers of danger.

  I didn’t want to breathe the air, or accidentally brush up against one of them, or get close enough that the infection could reach out, take hold in my body, and turn me into a horror.

  Focus on the menu, I told myself.

  I took off my apron and wiped away the sloppy handwriting that described yesterday’s meals. I started to copy the menu from the paper the guard had given me. Then I felt a tap on my back.

  I froze. I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want to face these people. Doc was wary of the disease, and I figured he knew plenty.

  I felt the tap again. I reluctantly turned and saw the man with one white eye. He pushed himself up out of his wheelchair.

  “Use the purple!” he yelled. A drop of spit flew from his mouth. It hit my cheek. I took a half step back.

  “We can see purple the best!” This time the spit landed on my apron.

  I nodded. I desperately wanted him to go away. He sat down in his wheelchair and rolled toward the exit. I scrambled to find a clean corner on my apron to wipe my face. My heart pounded, and I felt dizzy. I couldn’t believe he had just spit on me. Then I remembered Doc’s words: inhalation of an infected droplet. I took shallow breaths. A cold burn ran through my cheeks. Part embarrassment and part rage, but mostly shock.

  I needed to pull myself together. I needed to stay calm and be reasonable. Right now, I had a job to complete, and I wanted to finish as soon as possible.

  The room had an overpowering sweet smell like the syrupy stench of fresh-cut banana trees. Combined with the thick, greasy odor of fried pork chops, the smell made me nauseated. I gathered myself and wrote in big purple letters: French Toast. Tuna Casserole. Meat Loaf. The side items—Mashed Potatoes, Green Beans, Tater Tots—I wrote in yellow.

  As I carefully transcribed the menu, most of the leprosy patients exited the cafeteria. Some used walkers, but most were in wheelchairs. Thankfully, they left me alone. I reboxed the markers. Then I saw the old woman in the antique wheelchair, the only one left in the room. She cranked her wheelchair toward me. She stopped a few feet away, not too close, and uttered the same odd incantation. “There’s no place like home.” Aware, I think, of my discomfort, she looked at me and said, “Hope you get back soon, ’cause there’s no place like home.” She smiled and cranked her wheelchair out of the cafeteria. When she reached the exit, she called out again, “There’s no place like home.”

  An inmate who had come in to mop the floor whispered to me. “That lady,” he said, pointing toward the old woman, “she got the leprosy when she was twelve years old. Her daddy dropped her off one day and never came back.” Then he asked, “Still feeling sorry for yourself?”

  I guessed the woman was close to eighty. That would mean she’d been here for about sixty-eight years. I was going on my sixth hour.

  Maggie’s ballet recital.

  Little Neil at Walloon Lake. Photographs I attached to my locker with toothpaste.

  CHAPTER 5

  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 a
nd 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.”

  PART II

  Summer

  Ella Bounds

  CHAPTER 6

  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 patients. 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?”<
br />
  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.”