Quarantined

ONCE CONSIDERED THE MALAISE OF THE PRIVILEGED CLASS, tuberculosis sickened a Who's Who from ancient and modern history. King Tut, Moliere, Voltaire, Keats, Emerson and Poe, Chopin, Gauguin, Chekhov, Kafka, the Bronte sisters. And later, Doc Holliday, W.C. Fields, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Simon Bolivar, Ernie Kovacs, Eleanor Roosevelt and Vivien Leigh. The disease became part of the cultural landscape, romanticized in opera ("La Boheme") and literature (Camille), but there was nothing romantic about the thin, sickly-looking women on the porch with Mama. Rest and quiet ruled there. Staff at some sanatoriums were known to chastise those who laughed too loud, cried too much or spread pessimism. Even so, the women on the porch regularly interrupted the calm with quiet chatter and hollow coughing and choking and spitting into tissues that turned pink or red. The women maintained a delicate death watch, with couched updates about who "didn't make it."

All of the women on the porch were black, but Mama's first roommate was an older white woman who cursed and moaned from what Mama believed was alcohol withdrawal. Daddy saw the woman have an angry outburst during one of his visits, and the next day Mama moved to another room. Her new roommate was a frail black woman named Mary, who looked 40, but maybe she was 30 and robbed of her looks by the disease. Mary told Mama about her "street life" and said that her only family was a brother who had not visited in Mary's four years at Glenn Dale.

Mary became Mama's guide to Glenn Dale's subculture, pointing out a woman who swore she loved her husband but now had a boyfriend in the men's ward. She told Mama about "wild things" that have been confirmed by other sources. For example, staff members confiscated so much smuggled "whiskey" from patients that the stockpile made the newspapers. William Rigoli, now 83, worked at Glenn Dale briefly as a teenager. He says most of the staff knew about sexual liaisons among patients, and often stumbled upon couples outside at night.

Mama never set her feet on the campus's winding walkways and paths -- she was not allowed on the grounds. Patients required absolute rest. But she delighted in the part of the treatment that was served on steam tables rolled down the hall: chicken and gravy, smoked ham, fresh cabbage or greens, hot rolls -- as much as Mama wanted. (A decade before, when Congress held hearings on conditions at Glenn Dale, the meals had been so bad that patients reported finding fingernails in food that was also poorly cooked or spoiled. Congress ordered improvements.) Mama's days on the porch were interrupted by more chest X-rays, skin and sputum tests, and a changing cast of doctors. If they explained what was going on, Mama doesn't remember. Unlike the other women on the porch, she did not have a regular "rehab" meeting with a medical team to go over her progress, test results and prospects for discharge. A nurse with a wheelchair arrived at her room somewhat regularly, though, to take her to the surgical unit. Once, a doctor forced a cold metal pipe down her throat. Another time, a doctor punctured the base of her neck and inserted a needle, on the right side, leaving a scar. Another day, a tube was inserted in her left side, and something was withdrawn.

Mary, because of the connections she had developed in her years at the sanatorium, proved a source of important information for Mama. A woman who worked in one of the offices and who had befriended Mary told her that Mama's tests all were coming back negative. I don't know why they're keeping your roommate, the woman said. Mary told Mama this, and something else: It doesn't matter what your tests say -- the stay at Glenn Dale is at least six months.

DADDY FUMED WHEN MAMA TOLD HIM ABOUT THE NEGATIVE TEST RESULTS. The news, though hardly official, fueled his suspicions. He had told his family that his wife didn't look sick. Mama began to keep more to herself and felt a new uneasiness around the women on the porch. She disliked the way some of them pierced the calm with cussing. And she tired of the coughs that ended in the sound of strangling and choking. In the ward's communal bathroom, Mama noticed how the women washed and brushed their teeth in the sinks, spitting with each rinse, and coughing. Mindful of Mary's news, Mama avoided the sinks altogether. She brushed her teeth in the shower after she saw a housekeeper clean and disinfect it. Mama asked Aunt Vi, who brought her a home-cooked meal every Sunday, to bring silverware she could keep so that she wouldn't have to eat with utensils the other patients used.

One night toward the end of summer, Daddy dialed the patient phone on Mama's ward and said he'd be by that evening. When he didn't arrive by the end of visiting hours, the familiar worries crashed around in Mama's mind. Something's wrong with the children. When he finally walked into the hospital that night, Daddy had the girls with him. Mama got word that her family was downstairs but that now it was too late for a visit. She thought she heard the muffled cries of children. She grabbed her shoes and sweater, and announced that she was getting her stuff and going home.

By then, Daddy was upstairs -- he had left the girls with a nurse on the first floor. When he saw Mama crying, he started to lead her away. The staff gathered, and various voices threatened and warned.

You can't take her out of here.

The police will get you and bring you back.

Without knowing what they would face if they left, and with no plan to take care of Mama if she got sick at home, Daddy must have thought better of what they were doing. He turned and led Mama back to her room. A nurse coaxed Mama into taking something to calm her, and she slept deeply through the night and most of the next day.

By mid-September, 10 weeks or so after her admission, the separation from home and family was nearly unbearable for Mama, the confinement numbing. She was weak, but she wasn't wasting away as the others were. One day, a woman on the porch mentioned a former patient who, like Mama, had grown up on a farm. She told Mama that the young woman sat on the porch and ticked off, hour by hour, all day long, every day, what her family back home was doing at that very moment. Don't you know that girl lost her mind? the woman said. Mama thought about the story for a long while. She made a promise to herself: I'm not gonna lose my mind.