by Neil White
They could see that there were no bars, no really dangerous people. And I didn’t want them to be caught off guard at school if someone brought up the fact that their father was in jail.
“I want to talk to you about camp,” I said.
“I forgot,” Maggie said, “why did you have to come to camp?”
I reminded Maggie of what we had discussed—that I got a little bit greedy, wanted to buy too many magazines, and used money I wasn’t supposed to use to buy them.
“Boy, Daddy,” Maggie said, “you must’ve really loved magazines.”
Then I told them that this place, Carville, wasn’t exactly a camp. It was a prison camp. Kind of like a jail, but different.
Maggie had taken a bite of cookie. She looked up and asked, “Are you a bad guy, Daddy?”
“Of course not,” I told her. “Remember, camp is kind of like time-out for adults. Only adult time-out lasts longer than kid time-out.”
“Did you used to be a bad guy?” Maggie asked. I shook my head. I hated that I had put my daughter in a situation where she would have to ask such a question. I looked over at Little Neil. He didn’t ask any questions. He stared down at the floor. Maybe he didn’t want to talk about this. Or maybe he just wanted to go outside and throw the ball.
I took Neil and Maggie out to the visiting room deck and gave a coupon to Bean, the inmate photographer. Prisoners could purchase a family photograph for one dollar. All proceeds went to the inmates-in-need fund. Linda said she didn’t want to be in the picture, so I put Neil on my shoulders, and Maggie stood on the bench next to me. As we posed for the photograph, Steve Read walked by.
“Ah,” Steve said under his breath, “prison memories.” Neil and Maggie didn’t seem to notice, so I let it go.
I continued to write letters to Linda and the kids every night, and I made collect calls from the pay phones that lined the walls in the hallways. But some nights the phone line was too long, and I went to sleep without speaking to them. Other nights, I would call about 9:00 P.M. to say good night to Neil and Maggie. Sometimes, I would call late at night so Linda and I could have a conversation without the kids overhearing, though it wasn’t really private since inmates were usually standing close by waiting for their turn.
Every three minutes, a recording interrupted the telephone conversations: This call originated from a federal correctional facility. It was designed to discourage phone scams, but when it interrupted my conversations with Linda, it was just another reminder of where we stood.
The night before Neil started first grade, I called to talk to him. It seemed like an inopportune time. Linda was cooking dinner; Maggie was running around the house screaming; Neil was doing something that clearly irritated Linda. They had been arguing.
I wished I could have been there to help. I would have taken the kids into the courtyard to play, or I would have offered to cook dinner to give Linda a break. I wanted to climb through the telephone line, hug the kids, and tell Neil his first day of school was going to go just perfectly.
Linda handed the phone to Little Neil, and he took it into the closet and shut the door. He was crying. He didn’t cry very often. I told him how much I loved him, how proud I was of all that he did, but it was no substitute for a hug. If I’d been there, I would have picked him up, put his head on my shoulder, rubbed his back, and rocked with him until he felt better.
The best I could do was listen. “Tell me what’s going on?” Neil tried to keep from crying, but he couldn’t speak. “Tell me what you want, buddy?”
He cried until he caught his breath, and then the words came out. “I want you, Daddy.”
CHAPTER 28
Initially, I couldn’t fathom why the federal government would decide to put inmates in the same facility as leprosy patients. Link and his buddies claimed we all were part of a secret government experiment. He was certain we would catch the disease, which, of course, was fine with him since he planned to cash in on the situation. Link’s theory was corroborated by other inmates, who pointed to the experiments on prisoners at Tuskegee and in Nazi Germany.
The logic behind this experiment was hard to follow. Did some bureaucrat announce, “Hey, I’ve got a good idea. Let’s put federal convicts in with the leprosy patients!”?
But now I was beginning to realize what an insult it was to the leprosy patients. Despite how the inmates felt about it, for the patients, it was another slap in the face. That the federal government thought nothing of moving criminals into their home said a lot about their standing.
When Link was finally given a job, he was assigned to the cafeteria, an assignment that brought him into contact with the patients. He intentionally bungled his tasks. He let pots and pans pile up in the wash room, he filled the salt shakers with sugar, and he ran the floor buffer over its own cord and burned up the motor. The guards wisely decided not to let him get near the food.
Link wasn’t happy about having a job, and his opinion of Carville was changing.
“This place is all fucked up!” he said.
“It’s not so bad.”
“It is. Ghosts everywhere. About a thousand of them leopards died in this motherfuckin’ place. And the goddamn Mississippi River flows north!”
I’d heard other men say the river flowed north at Carville, but I found it hard to believe.
“Link,” I said, “I thought this place was like a country club?”
“It is!” Link said. “A fucked-up country club!”
Though he spent most of his day sleeping in the back of the walk-in cooler, Link was assigned to the patient cafeteria to help pick up trays and dishes after breakfast and lunch. Most days, I helped him. But a guard usually had to rouse him from sleep. One day when I was preparing the menu board, the patients left an unusual mess. Link entered the room and saw the pile of trays left by the patients.
“Goddamn leopards!” he yelled.
I looked up and saw Ella still eating. Harry, who was leaving, stopped and turned around. He looked like someone had just punched him in the stomach. Stan and Sarah, the sweet blind couple, reached across the table and held tight to each other’s hands.
I felt terrible that Link had hurt them. They had chosen to stay in Carville, their safe haven, to avoid this kind of pain. But with the arrival of the inmates, the stigma of leprosy had slowly crept back into their home.
At that moment, I saw in their expressions just how vulnerable they were to the odious label. I promised myself I would not view my new friends as “lepers.” And I made a commitment not to use the word that had caused them so much suffering.
I called Link over to the menu board. For all of Link’s street savvy, he wasn’t so good in the sensitivity realm.
“They hate that word,” I whispered. “Plus, you’re saying it wrong.”
Link shrugged. I led him over to the corner and talked in a low voice. “Link, a leopard is large cat.” I looked at him to make sure he was following. “People with leprosy are sometimes called lepers—but they really, really hate it.”
“What the fuck?”
“They hate being called that as much as certain people hate being called certain words,” I said, hoping Link would make the connection.
“Nigger!” Link yelled. “You mean nigger?”
“Well,” I said quietly, hoping Link would follow my lead, “that’s one of them.”
“I say that word all the motherfuckin’ time!” Link said.
I was about to launch into an explanation about the subtle difference in delivery, source, history, perspective, but instead I just asked Link again not to call them lepers—or leopards.
“What the fuck you want me to call them?”
I didn’t know. But I would find out.
Link and I finished with the trays; he went back to the cooler for a nap, and I apologized to Ella for what Link had said.
“It don’t bother me none,” she said. “That word in the Bible. And there ain’t no leprosy in heaven.”
Ella�
�s attitude was amazing.
“We do our sufferin’ down here,” Ella said. “Jesus gonna be waitin’. So it don’t bother me none.” Ella was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “But that word do hurt other peoples.”
CHAPTER 29
Carville was strange in many ways, not the least of which was the use of aliases. No one, it seemed, used his or her real name.
Inmates were issued numbers by the guards, as well as nicknames by Link and his friends. Link had called me Clark so often that most of the leprosy patients and inmates actually thought it was my real name. That was fine with me—a nickname that was the secret identity of a superhero who posed as a journalist. Father Reynolds had taken a new name when he entered the Franciscan monastery. All the Sisters of Charity were given new Christian names when they made their vows to chastity and poverty.
And the leprosy patients took on pseudonyms when they arrived. Jimmy Harris had used J. T. Holcomb for decades; Ann Page picked her name from the label of a jelly jar, and a Texas beauty queen chose Molly for her first name, after her prizewinning cow.
Though most of the inmates thought Ella’s name was Cella, she never did take an alias.
“Didn’t see no need to change,” she said. “Ella the name my momma gave me.” Then she asked, “You want to change your name?”
No, I told her, but I wouldn’t mind a new Social Security number.
Monikers at Carville were not restricted to individuals’ names. Leprosy had all sorts of aliases, too. Most patients almost never spoke the word leprosy. Among themselves, they referred to it as “the disease,” “the package,” or “the gazeek.” In fact, the patients had launched an international campaign to rename leprosy.
In 1931, Sydney Levyson, a pharmacist from Texas, was shipped to Carville by railcar. Sydney was a handsome, stylish young man. With his topcoat buttoned and leather bag in hand, he sat inside the locked car as the couriers talked about the “leper” inside.
Sydney, like most arrivals, took a new name. He would forever be known as Stanley Stein. Though he had been diagnosed with a dreaded affliction, being called a “leper”—and all that came with the word—didn’t sit well with Stanley. He decided to do something about it.
He launched a publication entitled The Star. Its purpose: to eradicate the use of the words leprosy and leper. The stigma associated with leprosy was so ingrained in society, Stein argued, that nothing short of a name change could lift it. Stein and crew at The Star promoted a new label named after Armauer Hansen, the Norwegian scientist who discovered the bacteria that caused leprosy. The slogan on the cover of each edition of The Star read: Radiating the Light of Truth on Hansen’s Disease. They made great progress in their campaign among health-care workers, victims of the disease, and their advocates, but they seriously underestimated public paranoia. And ignorance.
In many ways, the renaming actually fostered fear and stigma. When uninformed citizens discovered that a Hansen’s disease patient was afflicted with a disorder formerly known as leprosy, they felt duped. The stigma was transferred to the new term. Their paranoia and suspicions were fueled by what they perceived to be a covert act—hiding the true identity of the ancient disease.
CHAPTER 30
Doc had one close friend at Carville, Dan Duchaine. Dan was in his late thirties. His short spiky hair was beginning to gray at the temples. He also had no body hair. He shaved his entire body every couple of days. Dan was a nationally recognized steroid and bodybuilding expert who knew as much about physiology as Doc. Duchaine and Doc would sit for hours and discuss mitochondrial biogenesis and weight lifting, varying reactions in type I and type II muscle fiber, genetics and human endurance, caloric consumption and heat. Dan, who for most of his career had promoted steroids and supplements, had an interest in Doc’s heat pill, especially its potential for burning fat off bodybuilders.
Dan was a superstar in the bodybuilding industry. He started out as just another bodybuilder, but he didn’t have the genetic makeup to compete on a national level. What his body lacked, he made up for with brains. In 1988, Dan instructed major Olympic athletes in techniques for passing drug testing. He was so adept, authorities designed tests and regulations and programs with Dan in mind. When he introduced a new supplement to the marketplace, the FDA wasn’t far behind to prohibit its use. Dan had written four books, including The Underground Steroid Handbook, which sold thousands of copies among bodybuilders.
Dan was in the midst of another project, creating an audiotape of interviews with “The Steroid Guru” on diet, supplements, weight lifting, and exercise. A friend recorded the interviews while Dan answered questions on the pay telephones inside the prison.
One afternoon in the inmate courtyard, I asked Dan how they dealt with the recorded message that interrupted telephone conversations from Carville.
“We leave them in,” Dan said. “We can charge more.”
Dan understood the value of inside information. The bodybuilding world—at least the bodybuilders who used steroids—knew their guru was imprisoned. But he couldn’t be silenced. Much like Doc, who spent hours each day reading the latest developments in medicine, Dan put his prison time to good use. He had dozens of inmates who were more than happy to serve as his guinea pigs. They ate exactly what Dan told them to eat. They lifted weights using his techniques. They followed his instructions on when and how to exercise. Then, for a fee, Dan reported the results of his studies over the prison phone lines. From a marketing perspective, it was brilliant.
Dan had suffered a stroke a few years ago, when he was in his mid-thirties. That’s why he’d been moved to Carville. Except for stiffness in his left arm and a slight hesitation in his speech, the stroke hadn’t done much damage.
Dan scoffed at the idea that steroids might have contributed to his condition. To me, he sounded defensive, but I wasn’t the expert.
On a Saturday afternoon when Dan and Doc took a break from sharing theories on the most efficient methods to enhance energy consumption at a cellular level, I asked them if they knew about the attempts to rename leprosy.
“Yeah, Hansen’s disease,” Doc said.
“It didn’t catch on,” I said. “What should we call them?”
“Lepers!” Dan yelled.
I ignored the remark and pointed out that most of the patients didn’t have an active bacterial infection. So calling them “patients” didn’t seem right either.
Duchaine suggested, for accuracy and political correctness, that we call them carbon-based units with residual effects of ancient bacterial infection.
“It’s really a public relations issue,” I said. I told Doc and Dan that I wanted to help Ella and Harry and Annie Ruth. “They’re good people. They don’t deserve this.”
Doc rolled his eyes. He told Dan that I had fallen prey to their heart-wrenching stories. Doc looked over at Duchaine. “He believes them.”
Duchaine was never short on opinions or advice. He was happy to share his thoughts on just about any topic. “They lost their childhoods,” he said, pausing for a moment to reflect. “It’s not uncommon for them to create new histories, even new identities.”
Doc raised an eyebrow. “See?”
I left the two of them to their science and cynicism and walked the track. I thought about whether Ella and Jimmy and Annie Ruth would really create histories for themselves. I had no way of knowing. But the thought occurred to me that Doc and Dan had been in jail for years. Maybe I should be questioning their stories.
I walked until the sun started to set. Then I went back to my room, propped a pillow against the wall at the end of my bed, and picked up a book.
Link, who had just finished an all-day game of spades, walked into the room.
“What that book?” he asked.
“A book my mother sent me.”
“What it called?”
I closed the book and read the title aloud: “Pleasing You Is Destroying Me.”
Link threw his head back. “Man, you is so white
!” Link had a point. “Why you white people read books to solve your problems?”
“You might be surprised,” I said. “Books can change your life.”
“Where was that book when you was robbing them banks!?”
Doc, who rarely spoke to Link, added, “Neil wants to save the world. And help the patients.”
I couldn’t believe Doc was siding with Link. I looked at both of them, trying not to sound too earnest, and said, “It feels good to help people.”
“If I need some money,” Link said, “it’ll make you feel good to give me some? ’Cause I need seven dollars.”
My father had just put $100 in my inmate account. I walked over to my locker and counted out twenty-eight quarters.
“I’ll give you this, if you promise one thing.” Link waited for the caveat. “Promise,” I said, “that you will never carjack when there’s a kid in the car.”
“All right,” Link said, grabbing my quarters, “and I’ll pay you back if you promise you won’t rob no more banks.”
A pebble hit our window. I looked out. It was Smeltzer. I pushed the window up and looked out. Smeltzer reached into his coat pocket and pulled out two Ziploc bags, one full of chicken wings, the other pork chops. Smeltzer stretched out his arms and dangled the bags. “Hungry?” he asked. Food smuggled by a leprosy patient didn’t do much for my appetite. “I have a newspaper, too,” he said. I said no thanks, and he told me to get my roommates. Link took my place in the window.
“How much?” Link asked. Smeltzer said he could get both packages for two dollars. Link counted out eight quarters from the money I had just loaned him.
“You lepers is makin’ too much money off us,” Link said. I looked at Link and shook my head. He smiled, like he was proud to have used the term correctly.
“Don’t call me that!” Smeltzer yelled.
“You got leprosy, don’t you?” Link said. “What the fuck you want us to call you?”
