Quarantined

Daddy, increasingly frustrated, commiserated with family and friends about Mama's situation. His construction crew boss had heard that a dry climate was good for tuberculosis and told Daddy: Take your wife out of that place, and move to Arizona. Neither of my parents knew much about the country beyond Virginia, Maryland and Washington, but it was a plan they discussed during quiet visits, when Daddy brought candy, which Mama shared with Mary, or money for the lady on the porch, a patient who charged $2 for a press 'n' curl.

Daddy talked often about Mama's situation with his oldest sister, one of a relatively few black registered nurses of that era. Perhaps Aunt Flo already knew what a report published two years later would declare: The city did not have the resources to enforce every TB isolation order or to track down the patients who walked out of Glenn Dale. It wouldn't be until 1958 that Glenn Dale would get a locked detention ward for "uncooperative" patients and runaways. I don't know everything Aunt Flo told Daddy, but another of my aunts confirms that she did say this: She's your wife. You have a right to take her out of that place if you want to.

ON OCTOBER 15, HURRICANE HAZEL ROSE UP FROM THE CAROLINAS and slashed through the Washington area. In her room, Mama listened to radio reports about a man found dead in a tree with a small child still alive in his arms. Is it Johnny? With one of the girls?

About a week later, Daddy called the public phone on Mama's ward before he left for work. Mama walked down the hallway and took the call. Over the phone, Daddy said he was coming that night to take her out of Glenn Dale for good. Then he called the nurses' station. He told the charge nurse the same thing, that he was going to take his wife home that evening. The nurse warned him not to come, that it would mean trouble for him and that the police would just go to the house and bring Mama back to Glenn Dale. Mama fretted all day. What's gonna happen if we go?

When Daddy arrived on the ward that evening, he went straight to Mama's room. He told her to pack her things, but Mama resisted. I can't go, Johnny, she said. Once again, nurses and doctors and others dressed in white gathered around Mama's room. If you leave, the police will be at your house tomorrow morning, they warned. Mama tried to reason with Daddy, and when she saw that he was unmoved, she asked, But where are we gonna go?

Daddy was a bold extrovert who could be fiercely determined despite being called "boy" into his 40s; despite the French women who, when he was stationed overseas as a medic, asked to see the black soldier's tail; and despite having to go to the back door of a restaurant as his wife and children watched from the car. Daddy died in a car accident 14 years later, but Mama is clear about what happened next. "Just pack your things, Frank," he said. "I'll worry about the police."

The nurses, doctors and others stepped back and began to move away. One nurse helped Mama put the last of her belongings in her suitcase -- loafers and socks, a Bible, the shirtdresses she wore on the porch, a radio, pictures of the girls. Mary and Mama said goodbye, and Mama signed papers acknowledging that she was leaving against medical advice. A nurse gave Mama home hygiene instructions: Wash your utensils, plate, cups, laundry in hot, soapy water and bleach, and separate from the rest of the family's. Don't hug or kiss the children. Don't let them eat out of your plate or drink from your cup. Don't let them sleep in your bed.

Mama and Daddy walked toward the DeSoto in the small visitors' parking lot. The girls slept in the back seat. Mama didn't try to touch or wake them. Daddy put them to bed when they got home.

The next day, back at the little house on Knox Street, Mama looked the girls over -- Are they clean? Did they lose weight? -- but she didn't play or cuddle with them. Daddy stayed home from work, and he and Mama took turns peering out of the front window. That month's Time magazine reported that a woman named Alvina Page was fined $500 and sentenced to six months in jail for walking away from the Julius Marks Sanatorium in Lexington, Ky. My parents didn't know this or what they would do if the police came -- they had no real plans to go to Arizona. In the afternoon, a public health nurse called and told Mama to report to the Upshur Street clinic the following day. Daddy stayed with the girls and Mama went alone. She did not know what to expect, and she did not know what to think when the nurse delivered more news.

Mrs. Young, the nurse said, you do not have tuberculosis.

Much of my reporting for this article has involved trying to discover not just what happened to my mother during the time of my birth, but also, as the story grew more complicated, to understand how it happened. Beyond considerations of race and class, many public health departments pushed young mothers to the top of their sanatoriums' waiting lists, I've learned, so great was the threat they posed to children in the home. Today, the CDC recommends initiating drug treatment for pregnant women whenever the probability of TB is moderate to high, although the infection is rarely passed on to the fetus.

But that does not explain why Mama's doctors at the clinic, according to her recollection, did not do a more thorough diagnostic work-up -- skin test and sputum culture, plus X-ray -- before sending her to the sanatorium. Or, if they did, why they rushed her to the sanatorium before knowing all of the results. If her tests at Glenn Dale were all negative for TB, why didn't the sanatorium release her weeks or months earlier, or order outpatient testing?

Mama's new diagnosis, she learned that day, was sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease that may be an immune system disorder. It is not contagious. The disease causes tiny lumps that cast a shadow on X-rays similar to those of advanced tuberculosis, and it can be debilitating. Mama's case, however, was benign. To this day, she says, she has never had any symptoms or problems related to the shadow on her lung that still shows up on X-rays.

The nurse had no answers for Mama that day, no explanation for why she had been left to languish on the porch for 114 days. Taken together with my mother's pregnancy, the young children at home, conflicting tests results, public worries and, perhaps, her race and social standing, the health department apparently adopted an act-first-and-ask-questions-later policy toward my mother. That is the only answer I've been able to give her. Reichman explains the procedures Mama remembers undergoing at Glenn Dale: The cold, metal tube forced down her throat no doubt was a 1950s bronchoscopy, used to inspect the airways and retrieve tissue samples from the lungs. The scar at the base of her neck, still visible, is probably from a lymph node biopsy. The puncture in Mama's left side was probably an attempt to aspirate fluid from her pleural cavity.

Reichman notes that for patients who were not seriously ill, sanatorium admission criteria often were vague. "A guy would go with a cough to his doctor, and they'd send him," he says. In my mother's case, he says, "if all the tests were negative [for TB], the X-rays not getting worse, they should've been able to let her go."

After September 11, 2001, most states dealt with the threat of possible bioterrorism by enacting stronger quarantine and isolation laws for people with infectious diseases. Before and since, the laws have been used infrequently, said Darryl Hardge, a CDC official assigned to Washington's Bureau of Tuberculosis Control. Newly reported TB patients -- about 55 in Washington last year -- are hospitalized for about two weeks and released when they are no longer infectious. After that, they take a six-to-nine-month course of drugs. Most important, a health-care worker must observe the patient taking the medication. Household members and other close, personal contacts are tested for TB, as well. Such control efforts have proved effective enough that "there's no strong need for isolation," Hardge says. In the 1990s, however, as the nation faced an outbreak of a multi-drug-resistant strain of TB, New York City quarantined patients in a once-abandoned sanatorium on Roosevelt Island. Mostly homeless people, drug users and new immigrants, they did not take their medications and continued to expose others to infection, the city charged in court. Most were held for two years.

Before Mama left the clinic that day in 1954, the nurse who had told her she did not have TB offered no explanations and, nonetheless, repeated the home hygiene instructions Mama had been given at the sanatorium. I found these in an old Glenn Dale Patient Handbook: Stay indoors on damp, rainy days. Discard your used tissues in a paper bag to be burned. Do not kiss anyone. Stay away from children.

By 1960, six years after Mama left Glenn Dale, tuberculosis-control drugs proved so effective that many sanatoriums closed or converted to other uses. Today, the TB sanatorium is considered an important part of the history of public health. The sanatoriums performed a service by separating people, sending them out to the country for fresh air and rest, and breaking the chain of infection, Reichman says. As for the therapeutic benefits of a sanatorium, the TB survival rate of 50 percent, he says, was the same for patients inside and outside.

Glenn Dale became a nursing home for Washington's indigent patients in the 1960s, before it closed for good around 1982. The campus has been used for police training. The city sold it in 1995 to the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. Chuck Montrie, who supervises the site for M-NCPPC, says the county has set aside 150 acres of the campus for parkland and requires the buildings to be converted into a continuing-care retirement community. There have been no acceptable proposals for such development.

For now, Glenn Dale is a local legend with a young following, listed by a group called the Maryland Ghost and Spirit Association as an "official" haunted site, and included in the book Weird Maryland. Graffiti mar the still-smooth stone columns and cornices. According to Montrie, signs of satanic rituals and other nefarious activities have been found inside the buildings, where overturned furniture, water-damaged papers and vintage medical equipment continue to rust and rot. A county law enforcement officer lives in a trailer on the property and issues criminal trespass citations to those caught roaming, the most daring through underground tunnels connecting the buildings. "We're very, very lucky we haven't had something very, very bad out there," Montrie says.

Mama and I returned to Glenn Dale last summer. On a sunny day, we stood in front of the Adult Building, in front of the empty black holes lining the east wing. Mama paced back and forth, looking up and around. She pointed to the second floor. "That's the porch. That's where I was," she said. She nodded in agreement with herself, said little else and showed no emotion as Montrie drove us around the building, pointing out the morgue, then across the road by the cottages, around a slope and past a newly scorched patch of grass. That night alone, Mama says, she thought about the time that she had lost with her family. For the first time in decades, she says, she cried about what had happened there so long ago. This time, the tears were angry.

AFTER MAMA GOT THE NEWS OF HER MISDIAGNOSIS, she left the clinic and took the streetcar back to the little house on Knox Street. The reunion that should have been joyful, however, was sedate. Now, the fear that she had been infected at Glenn Dale tortured her, and she felt the first of many stings when, a week or so after her homecoming, she opened the door for trick-or-treaters, and someone yelled, "Y'all don't want none of that lady's candy!"

Still weak from months of confinement on the porch and what she believed were the lingering effects of a difficult birth, Mama felt especially uncomfortable around me, nearly five months old when Aunt Lillie brought me home. Mama kept me nourished and comfortable in my crib, but she didn't bring her face close to mine for peek-a-boo or lean in to hear her baby coo. "You were a new baby," she says, explaining her fear that TB would just announce itself one day with a cough. She would not risk passing on the deadly infection. For the same reason, she kept my three older sisters at a distance, as well. "When I [returned] home, I just didn't want them in my face."

My mother's instinct to protect her children proved stronger than her desire to nurture us. She steeled herself, a stance that must have taken tremendous resolve and a personal toll. This steeliness was the something I must have felt that day as a 3-year-old, when I formed the words, "Mama, why don't you love me?"

I have a younger brother and sister, born five and 11 years after me, respectively, and all but one of my siblings say they felt something, too. "I never remember sitting on [Mama's] lap, and I always thought I didn't sit on her lap because she didn't have time," my oldest sister, Diane Merchant, says. Of the months Mama was away at Glenn Dale, Janet Taylor, the one who cried all the time, tells me, "All I remember is they took our Mommy away, and I didn't belong to anyone. I remember being very, very little and being very, very sad."

Emotional ache at such an early age left a mark on me, I'm sure. It was not life-condemning, thankfully, but it may explain why I am a loner. Or why I have to work hard to remember to hug and kiss my own children. Or why I sucked my thumb until I was 12 years old.

A generation before society and parents doted on and adored kids, our childhood, for the most part, was colorful, with encouraging parents and a close, extended family of Bible believers that grew to 37 aunts and uncles and 69 first cousins. After my father's death in 1969, my mother gave up full-time homemaking and went to school to become a nurse's assistant. She worked and sent all of her six children to college, and the Glenn Dale story has shed a new light on her fortitude and emotional courage. As adults, we have evolved into a warm and welcoming clan. My mother hugs and kisses each one of her children and 15 grandchildren in all of our comings and goings. We can even laugh now when she inevitably reminds us at a family gathering, "I don't drink out of nobody's cup, and I don't let nobody drink out of mine."

AFTER MAMA WALKED OUT OF GLENN DALE, it took almost a year for life to return to normal. Few family members, besides Aunt Vi, Aunt Doll and Aunt Shirley, visited. Neighbors kept their distance. Mama remembers that she struggled for a long time to regain her strength and peace of mind, even though a letter she sent to evangelist Oral Roberts was answered with a note saying, "You're already healed."

When I was still in diapers, Daddy would come home from work and ask, "Where's the baby?" When Mama pointed upstairs, he pressed her, "Why don't you ever bring her down?" Mama said she was still too weak. But after that, she says, things began to change. In the mornings to come, after she dressed the girls and changed my clothes, Mama began to carry me downstairs for the day, my sisters bouncing ahead of us.

During my adulthood, my relationship with my mother has deepened. Except while at college, I've never lived more than 30 minutes away from her. We talk on the phone regularly about everyday things, see each other a few times a week and spend all of the holidays together. Over tea on a rainy night last month, Mama said she finally told her story about Glenn Dale for her children's sake. With hands clasped, she bowed her head, then looked up. "I'm glad for you," she said. "You needed to understand."

Leah Y. Latimer, a former Post reporter and editor, lives in Maryland. She and her mother, Etta Young, will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.