The Leper Spy

by Ben Montgomery

  Out there I was told the angels have a whale of a time!

  A tour included a mountain climb to the famous Matterhorn,

  Terra firma for me, I like my feet on solid ground.

  Like many countries, France has the great River Seine,

  Across her span the Bridge of Sighs all over again.

  Germany has her Rhine, through Italy’s valleys, the River Po.

  Nostalgic memories of muddy Mississippi follow wherever I go!

  At last I stood in reverent awe before a saintly man,

  His frail body in raiment white, his lean face lined and wan—

  Before him all of Europe’s grandeur faded into bliss,

  As I knelt down to receive his blessing of peace.

  Home holds enchantment no matter where you roam—

  In any time or clime, there is no place like home!

  Old yearnings weave a magic spell in this happy sphere—

  For here I shall find gold, frankincense, and myrrh!

  She did not curse or gamble or drink, and she only smoked when offered, to be polite. She went to Mass every day and knelt in the same spot in the Catholic chapel, praying to be clean.

  Two years, three years, four. Treatments, physicals, sulfone shots. Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven. Letters, letters, and more letters, which she closed with prayers and signed “Your little friend, Joey.”

  “I cannot speak of the future too much. I do not know what God has in store for me, or what He wills of me,” she wrote to a man inquiring about her plans after Carville. “Whatever He desires, I desire; whatever He wills, I will. If it is His desire that I never get well, and die here, to lie beneath the brown sod under the Louisiana skies would not be bad. And as long as I live, no matter what, provided that my life is a fitting Calvary, and I a fitting instrument to bring millions of hearts to Him, who is the true reason for my being, what else have I to wish for? I only ask that I love him with all my heart, all the days of my life, that I remain forever pleasing and beautiful in His sight. That is all I ask, nothing more. I accept, and as He desires, He will give to me the graces to carry, as He has given to me to carry on with joy and peace of heart. Some day, my boat will come and carry me to the home I have longed for and dreamed of.”

  45

  WALK ALONE

  The sizzling storm clouds rolled in low over the swamp, and lightning cut the sky and threw short, sharp flashes of brilliance down on the oak trees dotting the campus of the US Public Health Service Hospital in Carville. Thunder rattled the windows of the building that housed the auditorium, which was filling with folks from all over, shaking off the rain, taking their seats to watch the commencement.

  Two patients were graduating—Joey, the valedictorian, and Bert King, an eighteen-year-old from Florida, salutatorian by default. Newsmen arrived early—Hugh Milligan from the Associated Press, Ed Clinton from the Baton Rouge State-Times, Charles Pierce from the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. The Baton Rouge WJBO’s Brooks Reed taped a fifteen-minute interview with Joey, which would air nationally on Morgan Beatty’s World News Roundup. Philippines consul general Benjamin T. Tirona was ushered in. A former chief nurse from the Fourth General Hospital in Manila, Miss Elizabeth Simon, who had met Joey after liberation, drove down from Ohio. They all called Joey their friend and meant it.

  Sister Laura Stricker banged out “Pomp and Circumstance” on the piano. The stage was decorated with fresh flowers, and the resident chaplains, Rev. Edward Boudreaux and Rev. Carl Elder, offered the invocation and benediction. Dr. John W. Melton, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Baton Rouge, handled the commencement.

  Joey Guerrero poses before her graduation at Carville, Louisiana, in July 1953. National Hansen’s Disease Museum, Stanley Stein Archives Collection, NHDM-1930

  Joey was up onstage wearing a white cap and gown, smiling, throwing little waves when she spotted someone in the crowd she recognized. An old man slowly sipped on a bottle of beer in the canteen, watching the hubbub. He remembered his own graduation thirty-five years before, just before he contracted leprosy and was sent, or sentenced, to Carville. Stanley Stein was in the audience, too, dark glasses over his eyes but looking proud nonetheless.

  Joey was thirty-six now. She had worked for four years toward this night, and it had come with the requisite chaos that defined her life. The day before, she was scheduled to participate in a “deportation hearing” held at Carville by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service. The same government that had cut tape to extend a welcome to the woman who helped the country win a war was now in the process of trying to eject her. Joey’s visa had expired, and without help from someone in the bureaucracy, she would be sent back to the Philippines, which was still trying to recover from the war and still dealing with a violent Huk insurgency. On the bright side, by July 1953 her health had improved dramatically. Dr. Johansen had been having great success with the sulfones—Diasone, Promacetin, and sulphetrorie. The doctor, who had just retired after twenty-nine years at Carville, knew the drugs could cure secondary infections and halt the spread of leprosy. When he first arrived at Carville, many thought there was no hope for a cure. But he knew that now, if the disease was caught in its early stages, a patient could get treatment with sulfones for two or three years at Carville, then be discharged without any disfigurement. After that, treatment was outpatient. Joey’s classmate, Bert Wood, was an example of that. He arrived in Carville two years before without any of the telltale disfigurement that typically accompanied Hansen’s disease. And he was slated to be discharged after the graduation ceremony, thanks in large part to the hard work of Dr. Jo.

  In fact, Dr. Jo was responsible for the visitors there to see Joey graduate. It was he who had thrown open the doors to guests. The hospital now had a softball team, and they played in an open league in Baton Rouge. Patients were allowed to visit their homes twice a year and stay for a month.

  “In days now gone, the best word we could give the new patient was one of possibility or chance that his condition would not become worse,” Dr. Johansen wrote in an editorial in the Star. “For some—many still young—Carville was the end of the road. But, today, we can talk with some degree of confidence about the hope of recovery and rehabilitation, provided the patient receives prompt and proper medical attention and continues his medication. Now, we may think of the treatment period at Carville as we regard the time spent under care for any other illness that requires longer than usual hospitalization.”

  The advances against the disease in the past ten years had been swift and accurate, and they dovetailed with Stanley Stein’s public relations campaign to enlighten the country. His thousands of letters were paying off. Old superstitions were on their way out. Even Harry Truman took note.

  “My congratulations to THE STAR on its Tenth Anniversary,” the president had written to Stein. “I know that it has consistently carried out its objective—radiating the light of truth on Hansen’s disease. Steady progress is being made in dissipating public fear of this disease, so that those afflicted by it can lead more normal and happier lives. It is important, of course, to get rid of Hansen’s disease altogether. Because medical science is making such remarkable progress, it is reasonable to believe that this can be done. I am certainly glad to note in the pages of THE STAR that a new method of treatment is proving effective. THE STAR deserves full credit for contributing to a better understanding of Hansen’s disease.”

  One example of the changing attitudes among the general public came in 1949, a year after Joey arrived at Carville. The sulfones worked on Gertrude Hornbostel, as she predicted, and the disease was arrested. She and Hans decided to move to New York. And the move was made void of the expected controversy. A short story ran on page 11 of the New York Times, prompted by Major Hornbostel himself, who issued a statement to the press, an appeal for understanding.

  “For years my wife and I have fought to enlighten the people. Our only medium has been through the press. Leper and leprosy are word
s that should be stricken from our language, as the doctors have already done,” his statement said. “Of course, the trouble lies with popular superstition, ignorance and fear that goes back to Biblical times. Those who have Hansen’s disease today and who have the wherewithal to buy the new sulfone drugs are far better off than if they had any other disease I know of but unfortunately these same people will suffer mentally until the people of the United States appreciate what this disease really means.”

  Gertrude, too, kept up her activism and had several letters to the editor published in the Times.

  T. H. Richard, a writer on staff at the Star, noted the importance of the convergence of Joey and the Hornbostels at Carville, writing that the “chain of circumstances” had led to “rewriting the dialogue for the roles played by the general public in Hansen’s disease.”

  “The Major brought Hansen’s disease into the headlines of American newspapers by announcing his desire to continue living with his wife,” he wrote. “Joey came to this country to become a patient at Carville and added her bit to the increasing favorable publicity that is shaking the superstitious outlook on Hansen’s disease to its roots.”

  Life inside the fence had improved by leaps as the fear faded. The Louisiana legislature removed “leprosy” from the category of quarantinable diseases like smallpox and yellow fever, and state workers laid blacktop over the fifteen-mile stretch of gravel road that led from Baton Rouge to the hospital. A new book about Carville, written by a former patient, was making waves and had been condensed and published by Reader’s Digest. Millions of listeners heard Joey tell her story on the CBS We, the People broadcast, and newspapers across the country carried glowing reports about the “fascinating and unusual” program. “When the facts about Hansen’s disease and the activities of Carville patients reach the attentive ears of some 10,000,000 listeners and the watchful eyes of 1,000,000 simultaneously, then we really are going places,” Ann Page wrote in the Star.

  Joey cut the ribbon that formally opened the hospital’s plush new Club Lounge, a gift from Mrs. John F. Tims of New Orleans. The same big-city socialites who had worked so hard at historical preservation in the French Quarter found a new target for their charity up the Mississippi River at Carville. The patients held a Christmas party sponsored by the Women’s Activities Club of the Louisiana Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company, and they opened gifts donated by the Campbell Soup Company in Chicago. The guard at the gate counted 366 visitors who turned out for the celebration. The American Legion Auxiliary donated another station wagon for use at Carville, their fourth. The Louisiana Voyageurs sponsored a bicycle drive and gave a bike to every patient who wanted one. Lake Johansen, named after Dr. Jo because it was his pet project for years, opened on campus and was stocked with fish. The patients were soon having fishing rodeos and speedboat regattas. The recreation department organized a golf tournament on the nine-hole course on campus, and the American Legion Auxiliary sent seventy-five homemade cakes for the occasion. They celebrated Mardi Gras with an extravagant parade and ball. Orchestras and theater troupes were now making stops in Carville to perform, and Joey wrote reviews of the performances for the Star. The beautiful Broadway and Hollywood actress Tallulah Bankhead had taken a keen interest in Stanley Stein. She pestered her highsociety friends in New York to subscribe to the Star and often wrote notes of encouragement, which Stein printed in the magazine as “Tallulahgrams.” “My darling Stanley and all the wonderful people at Carville,” one read. “May I extend my deepest appreciation, love and congratulations to you and your co-workers on your tenth anniversary with THE STAR. It has deeply interested me, as you know, and so many of my friends. Thank you for having enlightened us.”

  Perhaps the biggest event, or the most symbolic, was when men removed the strands of barbed wire atop the fence ringing the campus.

  And now the auditorium was filling for the first formal school commencement exercises in the fifty-nine years the hospital had been open. At first they wouldn’t let Joey take classes. She had wanted to enroll in a college correspondence course in journalism but lacked the appropriate high school credits in the States. The school at the hospital, which opened in 1949, was reserved for the younger patients. She eventually talked her way into class.

  “My first day at school was uncomfortable, both for myself as well as the others,” she wrote in the Star. “The boys were shy at having someone considerably older than they were in the classes, and I was shy because everyone else seemed like a child to me.”

  As the days went by, though, everyone relaxed. Joey started to feel like a child again, stimulated by the schoolwork and the companionship of much younger students, all full of curiosity. She made straight As and completed all the required courses.

  At the graduation ceremony, a representative for Louisiana governor Robert Kennon presented Joey with a letter of congratulations from the chief of state. A petition circulated in the audience, pleading with the president of the United States to help Joey gain permanent residency and citizenship. A national radio program mentioned the effort as part of a newscast.

  When it was her turn to give the valedictory address, Joey walked to the microphone, smiling. “It has not been easy,” she said. “I have often been discouraged. I was sick. I was tired. I was disgusted. And there were moments when everything seemed wrong and without purpose. But I told myself that I cannot live forever on the charity of my friends. I must stand on my own two feet. But how? With crutches? With stilts? With leanings? No. I must learn to walk alone.”

  She had in mind the days ahead, when the drugs had done their work and when her tests came back negative for leprosy each month over the course of a year. She’d be cleared, and she would be given the freedom to choose her own course.

  “What if I should leave the hospital suddenly? What, I asked myself, could I do?”

  46

  PRAISE

  On August 24, 1953, Time published a letter from its publisher, updating readers on the heroine who was the centerpiece of the magazine’s July 19, 1948, story that generated more than four thousand letters to the editor, the vast majority expressing sympathy and interest in Joey’s future.

  By now most people have probably forgotten the story of a frail heroine from the Philippines named Josefina (“Joey”) Guerrero. After the Japanese invaded the Philippines, Joey became a guerrilla; when the Americans landed on Leyte in World War II, Joey continued to be a US spy, flitting back & forth across the Japanese lines, carrying messages, maps, food, clothes. She had a sure immunity from capture: her face and body were blotched with the sores of leprosy, of which the Japanese soldiers were morbidly fearful.

  The publisher had received a letter from Joey herself, a short note expressing personal triumph: “Dear Mr. Linen. This is it! I thought you might like to know that I made it! I wanted you to rejoice with me.”

  She was graduating from high school, she told him. He asked a Time correspondent named Ed Clinton to head to Carville and check on her, to send a report on Joey’s school career and her graduation.

  On her graduation day, reported Clinton, Joey was no longer wan and nervous. Treatment had brought her disease almost to the arrested point, and only a few pocked scars remained. Dressed in a white cap and gown, she mounted the steps to the stage of the hospital auditorium to make the valedictory address to some 400 fellow patients and friends, including the Philippine consul from New Orleans.

  Joey told her story with simple feeling. The last five years had not been easy ones. Shortly after her arrival at Carville, her illness was complicated by an attack of double pneumonia.

  Many years had passed since her days in the convent school in Manila. The return to studies, as Joey expressed, was not easy, but she had finished and she wanted her friends to know.

  After four years of such investing, Joey collected her due interest: an accredited high-school diploma. She also landed a job as one of the paid, part-time staff members of the Star, the community news magazine. No
w, Joey hopes to study shorthand, bookkeeping, and journalism. She also hopes to achieve her greatest ambition: permanent residence in the U.S. and U.S. citizenship.

  In recent weeks that hope has been shadowed by the possibility of deportation, since her temporary visa has expired. Last year two special bills to grant her citizenship died in committee when the 82nd Congress adjourned. And a fortnight ago, an Immigration Service official ordered Joey to leave the country, but gave her the privilege of voluntary departure. Last week, however, Joey’s future was brightened again. Immigration officials in Washington promised that no action toward her deportation would be taken for several months. That will give Congress time to consider another private bill granting her permanent U.S. residence.

  47

  BUREAUCRACY

  There’s a fine chance that a glitch in the great American system of governance was solely to blame for the regular, soulless letters arriving at Carville for Mrs. Josefina V. Guerrero from the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), informing said leprosy patient and war hero that her temporary visa had expired and she was no longer welcome on American soil, that she should voluntarily depart the United States at once.

  There were several problems for Joey when she received the letters. The first was the stress. She was still receiving treatments, and the thought of being kicked out of the country by a bureaucrat with a clipboard put her health in jeopardy. She hated the thought, hated the worry that seemed to hover over her head. The second problem was that she had nothing to return to in the Philippines. Although that was the plan originally, the letters had slowed and then stopped, and she had fallen so far out of contact with Rene and Cynthia, as ostracized as she was, that going back home lacked appeal. They had moved on with their lives, and she had moved on with hers, even to the point of dating other patients. Cynthia, in her late teens now, did not know her mother. As painful as it was, Joey had become something entirely different since she left home. Part of that transformation was learning how to survive and even thrive in a place of possible permanence. Even with the success of the sulfone drugs, none of the patients knew for sure that they’d ever be released. They could hope. Meanwhile they had to learn to exist inside an insular world behind the fence. Joey would see Cynthia again, one last time, but the two were strangers and the meeting would be awkward and short and leave the daughter with burning questions about the mother—questions with no answers.