The Leper Spy (25 page)

She started a column for the
Star
called Jottings by Joey, where she kept readers informed about whatever charitable act she was up to. She also kept up the struggle to help the patients at Tala. One of the first improvements Joey had sparked at the colony was a nursery for babies born to patients. Before, the newborns were simply taken by the government and placed in orphanages, never to be seen again by their parents. A group of Franciscan nuns had volunteered to care for the babies at a newly built nursery, and parents
could at least see their children through a partition. But after Joey arrived at Carville, she received a letter from one of the nuns saying the government was threatening to shut down the nursery unless money could be raised to expand the facility and provide better clothing and medical equipment. Joey immediately began writing letters to anybody she could think of, friend or stranger, asking for help. She wrote to a steel magnate in Pennsylvania, an heiress in New York, and an oil man in Texas, pleading for donations. The contributions rolled in from all over, from Sister M. Florella's Xavier High Group in Phoenix, Arizona, and from Bishop Fulton Sheen and from Father Haggerty's group in Springfield, Illinois. A check for $1,000 came from Mrs. Betty Burdette, national president of the American Legion Auxiliary. Joey didn't know how much it would take to keep the nursery open, but she did everything she could to help.

Once a friend wrote to her asking, “What can I send you to help you pass the time, something you really need?” In jest, Joey wrote back, “We don't pass time here at the hospital, time passes us.”

She was convinced she could be cured but had no idea how long that might take.

“The doctors do not know how long I may have to stay, but of course I cannot leave until I am well, or have passed the 12 negative tests—three years, four, five, who knows?” she wrote to a man named Edward Harrigan. “Everything rests with God and science. I cannot speak of the treatments, as I do not know if I am allowed to do that. However, I feel that everything is being done for me: there is a sense of solidarity about this place. The medical staff are competent and highly efficient. The sister nurses are class A; they are always gentle, solicitous, kind, and very human. However, I think the secret lies in cooperation. There must be a coordination and cooperation between doctor and patient. In this way, I believe treatment can be a success. This is true of all things, isn't it?”

When she was alone, she wrote poetry, her hobby. Much of it was religious, hymnlike exaltations of almighty God or Mother
Mary. Some of it revealed the cultured environment in which she had been raised. Some spoke to the yearning she felt to be on the other side of the Carville barbed wire, to be able to see and experience the best the world had to offer.

Wunderlust

I went globe-trotting across the hemisphere—

In quest of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

I traveled through many a town and city,

In curious pursuit of art and things of beauty.

I browsed among the masters at the Louvre—

Took in the fashion shows and even the Follies Bergere!

I thrilled to the gory bullfights in gay Spain,

And for a constitutional, a stroll on the Rue de la Paix!

I sat in ecstatic rapture at the Scala in Milan,

Loved and lived a lifetime with Puccini's Cho-Cho-San.

Paris in the springtime, I had a rendezvous with Mona Lisa,

Her smile mocked at me like the leaning Tower of Pisa.

Curiosity for Farrouk took me to Biarritz and Monte Carlo—

I'll take a Bergman anytime and the luscious Greta Garbo!

The season found me applauding Sadler Well's Margot Fonteyn,

For unparalleled delight, give me the Dying Swan again!

I heard the Tower of London's twelve o'clock chime,

In Paris, I'd be having café au lait for an American dime.

The bitter taste of fog, the cold and mist I could not stand,

Give me warm Manhattan, roller coasters on Coney Island!

Shades of Louisiana lay among derricks of troubled Iran—

And painted deserts in the sky in Sweden's Midnight Sun!

Restless hearts smoldered in once-happy Yugoslavia,

Even peace got lost at St. Sophia's in Czechoslovakia.

On a pilgrimage to Portugal, I knelt before a shrine,

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.”

T
he 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 words 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.”