In the Sanctuary of Outcasts Read online

  The bounty hunter held his hand up, fingers outstretched toward the porch, and curled his index finger in against his thumb. “Three days,” he said. “If she ain’t there in three days, I’ll come for her.” Ella’s father didn’t move. He knew the man would return. Ten dollars was a lot. The bounty hunter climbed into his empty truck and drove away.

  “We feasted that night,” Ella said. “Daddy kill a chicken. We had greens, biscuits, fatback, and punkin’ pie. We didn’t eat like that except for Christmas.” Although Ella didn’t know it at the time, her father must have. It would be their last meal together as a family.

  That night, Ella’s father handed her a burlap sack he used for gathering turnips. In it she placed two picture books, a copy of the Saturday Evening Post, her boots, three or four everyday outfits, and the yellow Sunday dress that had been sewn for a cousin but now belonged to Ella. The next morning, while her brothers were still asleep, Ella and her father left in the dark. A neighbor’s mule pulled the wagon. The trip from Abita Springs to Carville would take two full days.

  On the slow ride west, Ella sat on the front of the wagon. She had never before been allowed to sit alongside her father. Along the way, they stopped to have a picnic under a shade tree. They picked wild blueberries and ate them on the shore of a pond. When they reached the river road near Carville, they parked on the levee and walked down to the Mississippi River. Ella put her feet in the muddy water. Her father suggested she put on her Sunday dress. She changed behind brush at the river’s edge. Late in the afternoon, they arrived at the colony gate. A man who appeared to expect them went inside to alert one of the sisters.

  “I ain’t never seen a nun before,” Ella said. “Big, white bird wings on her head scared me stiff.” Ella held her bag as she looked at the nun and then back at her father. He nodded and pointed toward the Sister. Ella, in her yellow dress, walked over to the Sister of Charity, who put her arm around her and led her toward the building. They stopped at the door. Ella looked back at her father and waved. From the front seat of the wagon, he nodded again. Then she turned and stepped into the building where she would spend the rest of her life.

  CHAPTER 19

  One balmy night after the 10:00 P.M. count, Link invited me to his room. He had something to show me. Chains rattled as the guards walked up and down our hallway, yelling that the count had cleared.

  “Clark Kent gonna see some shit tonight,” Link said, as I walked into his room.

  Link’s roommate, Bubba, was from New Orleans. He motioned Link to be quiet. We sat for a few minutes waiting for Link’s surprise. It was the longest I’d ever seen him silent. Link grinned, like he knew something remarkable was about to happen.

  Then, from outside, I heard someone tap on the window. Bubba raised the window, reached out his hand, and helped a man climb into the room. The two men embraced each other.

  “You’re breaking into prison?!” I whispered.

  “Hey,” the man said, in a thick New Orleans accent, “what are brothers for?”

  Bubba’s brother Butch was a free man, but he had complete access to the prison because no guards were stationed at the gate at night. The brothers undressed and exchanged clothes.

  Link, who was not very good at whispering, said, “Tell me this ain’t some fucked-up shit!”

  “Shut up!” Bubba and Butch said in unison. Link put his hand over his mouth.

  Bubba climbed out of the prison window, dropped to the ground, and scampered away. Then he would climb under the fence and up the levee, where his girlfriend was waiting with a car. Butch, now wearing his brother’s prison clothes, climbed into Bubba’s bunk and pulled the covers over his head.

  The switch was crazy, but ingenious. Inmates weren’t required to wake up for late-night counts. If a guard could see an exposed body part, we were allowed to sleep through the count. The system the Bureau of Prisons employed for identifying escaped inmates seemed reasonable. But the Bureau could never have anticipated this exchange. Tonight, Butch would take a long nap inside our prison and be counted by the guards. His convict brother, after an evening in Baton Rouge, would time his return carefully to walk in the shadows thrown by the ancient oaks and tall buildings to take his rightful place.

  “I gotta find a motherfucker to come up in here for me,” Link said. Then he looked at me, “You got any black friends?”

  Bubba wasn’t the first person to escape, briefly, from Carville. The leprosy patients had used the same technique for decades. The patients called it going through “the hole in the fence.” Jimmy Harris had gone through the hole to meet family members. Younger male patients left to dance and drink at a honky-tonk in Baton Rouge. The patients spoke freely of their escapes, as if telling old war stories.

  One patient, Annie Ruth Simon, and I shared a common past I could never have imagined. “I’m Annie,” she said, as she sat with me one day after lunch in the cafeteria.

  Annie didn’t look like a leprosy victim. If I’d met her on the outside, I might have mistaken her for a librarian or a retired elementary school teacher. She showed no signs of the disease, except for a slight shortening of the nose. Annie Ruth was not much over five feet tall, probably close to seventy-five years old, and not at all self-conscious.

  Annie Ruth and her husband, when they were younger, had climbed through the hole in the fence on a fairly regular basis. Their favorite destination was the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. Annie Ruth told me about their exploits in fine restaurants and expensive hotels, so I assumed they came from prominent families. They had no way of earning money at the colony. Annie Ruth laughed about slip ping through the fence to attend LSU football games. She and her husband never missed a home game between LSU and Ole Miss.

  When I was twelve, my father took me to Baton Rouge to see an Ole Miss/LSU game. I sat in the midst of fifty thousand screaming fans, surrounded by the smell of bourbon and cigar smoke, women in fur coats and men in blazers and topcoats. On the last play of the game, with Ole Miss ahead, LSU was threatening to score. The Ole Miss defense held and we went wild, jumping up and down, slapping hands. But the LSU timekeeper had failed to start the clock on the snap. His error added almost four seconds to the true length of the game. With the extra seconds, LSU’s quarterback, Bert Jones, threw a touchdown pass to win the game.

  When I asked Annie Ruth if she had been at the game in 1972, her face lit up. “We were there!” she said. “I loved Bert Jones.”

  Twenty-one years earlier, and twenty-one miles north of Carville, Annie Ruth and I had been in the same stadium. As Annie Ruth and I exchanged memories of the game from 1972, a couple of other patients gathered around. They were all LSU fans. Like all LSU fans, they remembered the historic Billy Cannon punt return on Halloween night in 1959. And like all Ole Miss fans, I brought up the 21–0 revenge Ole Miss took upon the Tigers in the Sugar Bowl to capture the national title.

  I felt like an insider as I sat around the cafeteria table with a half-dozen leprosy patients. We told our stories. I was more than an undercover journalist. I was more than an eyewitness. I was participating in a new kind of community. Prisoners and leprosy patients might have been considered outcasts by most of the world, but we were stuck here together. I was still a bit apprehensive about touching them, but I realized they wouldn’t want me handling their finances either.

  Ella rolled by. “Boy, you always meddlin’.” That’s what Ella called it when I interviewed people—meddlin’. She shook her head, and I went back to making notes.

  Jimmy Harris interrupted. “I’m writing a book,” he blurted out, even though we had all heard about it repeatedly. “Already got a title. King of the Microbes— catchy, don’t you think?”

  The other patients were looking toward the door behind me. I turned to see a guard walking toward our table.

  “Inmate!” he yelled at me. “Get over here.”

  I had never seen this guard before. He wore a different kind of uniform. He stood tall in the midst of the wheelchairs and
walkers. As I walked toward the prison cafeteria, he said under his breath, “I’m gonna write you up.”

  From behind the latticework dividing the cafeterias, I listened to him chastise the patients.

  “You shouldn’t talk to inmates,” he said.

  “You can’t tell us what to do,” one of the patients said.

  “No, I can’t,” the man said, “but I’m warning you; these aren’t choirboys. They’re convicts. They steal. They lie. They’re dangerous.”

  “Everybody makes mistakes,” Harry said. Harry was shy and usually didn’t say much. I was honored that he would stand up for our right to be friends, especially after I had not taken his hand.

  As the guard walked toward the inmate cafeteria, Ella called out, “They just childrens.”

  In the office, five guards peppered me with questions. You want to go to the hole?! You think your little comments on the board are clever, don’t you!? How many times have I told you—you can’t fraternize with patients! The four guards deferred to the new guy. One of them called him “Lieutenant.”

  I stood quietly until they ran out of things to say. “May I be candid?” I asked.

  “Hell, no!” one of the guards yelled.

  The lieutenant sat down behind the desk. “Say what you gotta say.”

  “The patients talk to me,” I said. “They’re nice. And old. I don’t want to be rude. I’m just trying to be kind.” I failed to mention my secret, undercover identity. Then I said, “If you don’t want us to fraternize, why did you put us here together?”

  The guards exchanged concerned looks.

  “You won’t be together for long,” the lieutenant said.

  I wanted to ask for an explanation, but if he knew I cared, he wouldn’t offer any information. I stood still and quiet.

  “They’re going to be removed,” he said. “Relocated.”

  CHAPTER 20

  I was appalled that the Bureau of Prisons would force the leprosy patients to leave their home. Even for me, Carville was turning out to be a good place to serve a prison sentence. Though I wasn’t able to live at home with Neil and Maggie, most weekends we spent eight hours together playing, laughing, and telling stories, without the distractions of a television or phone or obligations. The weekends when Linda couldn’t bring the kids, I had a long list of people willing to make the drive to Carville. My mother would sometimes collect Neil and Maggie and bring them to spend a Saturday in the visiting room. And my father would drop by unexpectedly, just to catch up. John Caridad, a priest from Gulfport, spent a Sunday afternoon with me. A week later, an Episcopal priest from New Orleans dropped by. My friends from church, the Singletarys and the McCrarys, spent an afternoon at the colony, as did Jack Yelnick, my college buddy from Chicago.

  I was one of the lucky ones. Many of the men in Carville, like the leprosy patients before them, had been disowned. Brian Kutinly, a friendly young man from Connecticut who mishandled funds at his home health agency, said his father accused him of ruining the family name. He said he never wanted to speak to Brian again.

  But I did have a loving family and loyal friends. Life on the inside could have been much worse. I also loved getting back to investigative journalism. My early success with interviews for my prisoners-in-the-leper-colony exposé had the same feel and energy as my first foray into reporting.

  When I launched my first newspaper straight out of college, I called it the Oxford Times. For 105 years, the town had been served by a rather complacent daily newspaper, the Oxford Eagle. It was part of the elite, the establishment. The editor and publisher had no interest in fighting for underdogs or the disadvantaged. In my view, they did nothing to challenge those in power.

  Launching a newspaper that practiced real journalism, I thought, would be one step toward fulfilling my mother’s prophecy of “doing great things.” I imagined I felt the same excitement as Henry Luce when he started Life and Time. I knew William Randolph Hearst had started out just like me, with nothing more than an idea and energy. And I understood the power that came with owning a media company. I kept a copy of H. L. Mencken’s quote tucked away in my desk drawer: “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own the press.”

  The inaugural editions of the Oxford Times were greeted with enthusiasm. The town was in dire need of a new voice, and ours was greeted with praise. We were the first to report on public meetings, expose conflicts of interest among the powerful in the town, and report the proceedings from the criminal courts in Oxford. We worked to find riveting stories, and we reported them in great detail: the Santa Claus who was shoplifting from the mall (concealing the merchandise in his big red bag); the Peeping Tom who argued in open court that he was conducting research for his romance novel; the town drunk who drove away in an ambulance to expedite his inebriated friend’s arrival at the emergency room. I was having fun. I felt like I was on an important mission to make Oxford a better place to live for all its citizens. And the applause was intoxicating.

  My undercover Carville story got another boost when a new prison librarian started work. Patty Burkett, a pretty, red-haired civilian from Baton Rouge, whipped the library into shape. She organized the books in a more traditional manner, enrolled us in an interlibrary loan program with the state of Louisiana, and even started a library newsletter for inmates. Rumor was that she had recruited some English graduate students to lead a weekly book club. I was excited about Patty’s arrival and volunteered to help out.

  She called a meeting of inmates interested in working in the library. On my way to this first gathering, I heard a raspy voice call out from one of the adjoining breezeways.

  “Hey,” he said. “Over here.”

  It was one of the leprosy patients. He stood in a dimly lit section of the hallway. Smoke from his cigarette floated around his head, and I noticed burn marks between his fingers where cigarettes had scarred his numb hands. I’d seen him in the cafeteria. They called him Smeltzer.

  Smeltzer had a head of thick gray hair, slicked back with hair tonic. He wasn’t terribly disfigured, but he had trouble with his hands and feet. He wore shoes with big Velcro strips and leaned on a walker.

  He motioned for me to come closer, but I didn’t want to breathe in the smoke he had just exhaled. He held a small piece of paper in his claw hand. A prescription. He held it up for me to see.

  “Ten dollars,” he said.

  “No, thanks.”

  “It feels good,” he said in a low conspiratorial voice.

  I couldn’t believe a leprosy patient was trying to sell me drugs. I told him politely that I didn’t want anything to do with drugs, and reminded him we inmates were routinely tested for narcotics.

  “No, no,” he said, shaking his head in frustration. “A pedicure…it’s a script for a pedicure. At the foot clinic.”

  For a moment, I considered it. But I had seen the patients coming out of the foot clinic, legs extended from the wheelchair, toes gnarled and twisted, some with no toes at all. Smeltzer held out the paper, enticingly.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  As I started to walk away, Smeltzer said, “Tell your friends I’m here.”

  I wanted to ask him why he needed money. The government provided for all his needs. I looked back to see Smeltzer leaning against his walker, prescription held tight in his one hand, a cigarette dangling from the other.

  CHAPTER 21

  I spent the late summer afternoons walking the inmate track. It was the one place I found solitude. By early afternoon, with temperatures near a hundred degrees, almost all the other inmates, as well as the guards, sought refuge inside, where the thermostats were set on sixty-eight degrees. Only the Mexicans were outside at this time of day. They played handball, but they rarely spoke to me.

  The track was a wide concrete sidewalk that circled the perimeter of the prison courtyard. As I walked around and around with no guards watching and no inmates screaming or slamming dominoes on tabletops, I could let down my guard and relax. My imagination ran w
ild.

  I imagined Linda and the kids on the beach at the Singletarys’ Florida condominium, running from the waves. I dreamed of adventures with Neil and Maggie. I fantasized about magazines I would launch. I ran through dialogue and scenes, imaginary encounters with people on the outside.

  At times, when I couldn’t fend off the guilt about the burden this incarceration caused my family, I let anger engulf me. And I walked. I walked fast until I was sweating profusely, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. Awash in self-pity, I thought about all our family would miss together—Maggie’s ballet recital, Little Neil’s first day of school, Saturdays at Audubon Park, Sunday brunch at La Madeleine. And, worst of all, Neil’s and Maggie’s birthdays.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I walked and daydreamed. Hours disappeared as the rhythm of walking pushed me into a state of meditation. Days slipped away. I realized I could fast-forward time, one repetitive circle after another. But it wasn’t my first experience with manipulating time.

  My initial success as a journalist in Oxford roused the established daily paper from its slumber. The publisher of the established daily, the Eagle, launched an aggressive marketing campaign depicting us as troublemaking outsiders. We lost some advertisers. I believed my commitment to good journalism would prevail, but soon I ran short on cash.

  My biggest advertiser was a local grocery store. On the last day of March 1986, the owner had promised to pay a bill—for almost $5,000. Taking the grocer at his word, I wrote payroll checks. The check from the grocery store owner did not arrive.

  With two newspapers in town, customers could easily move advertising from one paper to the other. As desperate as I was for that check, I was equally desperate to keep the grocer as a long-term customer, so I didn’t want to be too pushy and risk alienating my biggest client.

  The next morning I called the grocery store. The owner was out of town and would be gone for two days. No checks were to be issued in his absence. I put the telephone down and looked at my clock: 9:00 A.M. At 10:00 A.M. the bank would stamp my payroll checks, “Insufficient funds.” I had one hour to raise $3,000.