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By Davida Hill-Beckum
Daily Times Leader
Neil White was not confused about what he did to land him in prison.
“It was just business,” White said, certain the FBI investigators would understand his decision to transfer funds he didn’t actually have by between accounts, a practice known as “kiting.”
“Two weeks later, one of the agents told me I was one of only two criminal suspects who had not lied to him,” said White.
On May 3, 1993, White reported to the U. S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Prisons Federal Medical Center. He now had a clear idea “kiting checks” was illegal. However, he remained unclear exactly where he would be serving his two-year sentence.
White will share his experience tomorrow during the Friends of the Library’s Luncheon with Books at noon at the Bryan Public Library.
White will discuss “A Sanctuary of Outcasts,” his first novel which was released in June.
The prison, located in Carville, La, sits on a short strip adjacent to the Mississippi River.
The “experimental prison” housed federal prisoners and leprosy patients.
White, a magazine publisher and journalist prior to his conviction, said he carried a pencil and notebook at all times.
“I made a secret pact with myself,” White said. “I would not buy into all this inmate stuff. I would be an undercover reporter.”
Because of the leprosy patients, White said he was afraid and disoriented when he arrived.
“The first time I saw the patients up close was when my wife dropped me off,” White said. “I was sitting in a hallway on a bench and a man was waving to me and he didn’t have any fingers.”
Those feelings of fear subsided as he learned more about the plight of the leprosy patients. It was among the patients that he rediscovered the pleasures in simplicity and surrender, friendship and gratitude.
“I found a new best friend in Ella Bounds,” White said.
Bounds, a black double amputee, developed leprosy at the age of 12. Although Bounds, who is Ella Brown is the book, lacked a formal education, White describes her as a “woman of great wisdom.”
“As I fumed about my incarceration, struggled with my wife’s decision to leave me and planned for my grand comeback, Ella guided me,” White said. “Sometimes directly, sometimes with story and metaphor, but mostly by how she lived.”
In 1926, a hunter tried to take Bounds from her one-room schoolhouse and transport her to the leprosarium at Carville. Her father, a strong sharecropper, stood up to the bounty hunter, who had a handgun, and would not allow the man to take his daughter. Later that week, he took his only daughter to the colony himself in their mule-drawn wagon.
When White met Bounds, who died in 1998, she had been a resident of Carville for nearly 70 years.
According to White, his relationship with Bounds and life-long leprosy patients, as well as his relationship with the inmates helped him to rediscover values he had once ignored during his drive to succeed at all costs.
While White will never forget the friends he made at Carville, he changed the names of the characters in the book to protect their privacy.
“A diagnosis of leprosy can destroy lives,” White said. “Not the physical effects as much as the stigma surrounding it. Some people still believe leprosy is a curse from God. Relatives of leprosy patients often guard the diagnosis as a dark secret never to be revealed.”
Leprosy is an infectious disease that has been known since biblical times. It is characterized by disfiguring skin sores, nerve damage, and progressive debilitation. A number of different antibiotics are used to kill the bacteria that causes the disease. Aspirin, prednisone, or thalidomide are used to control inflammation. People on long-term medication become non-infectious because they no longer transmit the organism that causes the disease. None of the residents of Carville were infectious, so the inmates were never at risk of contracting the disease.
White continues to see one of the leprosy patients two or three times a year. He is one of 16 residents who continued to live in a remote corner of the colony after it was sold to the National Guard of Louisiana and now houses juvenile delinquents. White also exchanges letters with another inmate, who is back in prison following convictions on 18 securities violations.
“I also keep up with a handful of other friends from Carville,” White said, “But there were just too many people and stories to include everyone.
Since his 1994, White has remarried. White describes his wife, Deborah Hodges Bell, a law professor at The University of Mississippi as very supportive as his decision to write his memoirs. White, a native of Gulfport, lives in Oxford.
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