Book Review: In the Sanctuary of Outcasts
White, Neil. In the Sanctuary of Outcasts. New York: Harper Collins, 2009.
In her classic novelty song “Rhode Island is Famous for You,” Blossom Dearie lists off the chief exports of each U.S. state like a sweet-voiced civics textbook, always circling back to Rhode Island (which produced “you!”). Louisiana gets off easy; in a list that credits Nevada with divorces and New Jersey with glue, we get cotton. We’re lucky Blossom Dearie was such a class act, because she could just as accurately have pointed out that for a solid century Louisiana was home to the nation’s official leper quarantine facility.
From 1894 to 1999 the National Leprosarium, where the country’s leprosy patients were quarantined and treated, was at Carville, Louisiana, in an abandoned plantation, nestled in a little loop of the Mississippi that briefly runs north. You can’t get much more haunted-sounding than “leprosy quarantine center in abandoned plantation next to hydrological anomaly;” but, God bless America, we tried. In the waning years of the center’s tenure as a home for leprosy patients, it was also used to house an overflow of federal prisoners. Writer and magazine publisher Neil White was among those convicts; he was sent to Carville in 1993, after his accounting became more creative than his prose. Some fifteen years later, he wrote In the Sanctuary of Outcasts, a memoir of his prison term and the fellow inmates and leprosy patients he met there.
White is a charmingly unsympathetic narrator. Convicted for kiting checks, he describes his crime vaguely enough that, to the financially un-savvy reader (or reviewer), it just sounds like he’s rapidly moving money around, like an obsessive-compulsive magpie. It’s too confusing to see why it’s illegal, which appears to be the point. He writes about how his mother always told him he was special, how he never really meant to hurt anybody and gave money to the poor besides, and how despite it all he is a really good writer and publisher. All this is probably true, but in a book that claims to be a memoir of redemption it comes across as jarring: “Yeah, I got redeemed, but I hardly needed it.” White seems like a man who’d be great dinner company, but whom you’d have to watch like a hawk when it came time to divide the check. That said, he does seem to be a very good sport: biased, naturally, but honest and forthcoming, and willing to describe uncomfortable events like his initial prison cavity search in laugh-out-loud funny terms.
While he may be too soft on himself, White has an amazing gift for characterizing his fellow residents at Carville. With a keen eye for the details that will make a person leap off the page, he makes these people on the absolute and ostracized margins of society incredibly, vividly real. The distracted and maternal Ella Bounds, recalling a long-ago picnic of blueberries with her father as he drives her to the leprosarium; brilliant scientist and staunch con artist Doc, cutting a suspect mole off his own back “just in case;” petty criminal Link, lurking for carjacking victims outside Popeye’s so he gets the chicken as well as the car—these characters will roam your mind long after you finish the book. Even people White never met are indelibly, exquisitely etched: the reader can clearly see the pretty Brazilian girl with half a foot who came to Carville for treatment and smiled as she passed.
White also takes the opportunity to advocate, as much as one can in retrospect, for the leprosy patients. Except when reporting speech, he refuses to use the common term “leper,” citing its painful history as a mark of shame and banishment. Some readers will wish for more of the history and science of leprosy, but White makes the most important points. The disease we know as leprosy, also called Hansen’s disease, is likely not entirely the same as historical leprosy; that is, while some of the Biblical and medieval lepers may have had Hansen’s disease, many certainly did not. Fascinatingly, many modern American cases of Hansen’s disease arise from contact with armadillos, the only other species known to be susceptible (and who contracted the disease from human beings.)
Most heartbreakingly, we now know that most of the human population is naturally immune to Hansen’s disease, and that transmission is difficult and rare even between those at risk. White makes this point clear in order to illustrate that the long (if not always strict) confinement of the patients at Carville was not a necessary evil, and that the sufferers posed no danger to their communities beyond the discomfort of seeing a body damaged by the progress of the disease. It is far too late to push for kinder treatment of the last century’s lepers, but White performs the worthy task of telling us that they deserved better.
In the Sanctuary of Outcasts may be a little self-indulgent, but it’s also funny, compassionate, and thought-provoking. Carville, for all of its mixed legacy, stands as a unique piece of Americana—no longer a prison, but still home to a last few Hansen’s disease patients, the facility also hosts a camp for at-risk youth and the National Hansen’s Disease Museum. Read this book over a few long summer evenings, then pack the kids into the car for an introduction to one of the most touching, and least appreciated, chapters of Louisiana’s history.