leper

Specifically, the court ruled that a person could not be criminally punished for being a narcotics addict, which would be like making it a crime “to be mentally ill, or a leper, or to be afflicted with a venereal disease.”

We flew from New York City to New Orleans on November 28, 2016, my father, my mother, my husband, my two little girls and I. Our rental car followed the path of the Mississippi northward, snaking past suburbs and swamps, tin-roofed shacks and dirt roads until we reached the Gillis W. Long Hansen's Disease Center, formerly known as the Louisiana Leper Home, in Carville where my dad had once been a patient.

“It’s not safe. Especially with all these strangers in town. They’d send me to the leper hospital in Louisiana. Nobody ever comes back from that place.”

I sat in the balcony, half hoping that the leper man would be there.

This time when I went to the balcony, the leper was there.