In the Sanctuary of Outcasts by Neil White

Author:Neil White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

Me in Oxford, Mississippi, just after the fall that left scars on my forehead, 1961.

CHAPTER 36

As I immersed myself in reporting on the patients, my reaction to their deformities changed in ways I never could have imagined. The shortened fingers of a patient from Trinidad were perfectly smooth and symmetrical. At times when I saw him talk and gesture with his miniature hands, he looked like a magical being who didn’t have to bother with human traits like fingernails that needed to be cleaned or clipped or groomed. His hands were nothing short of perfect. For him.

I had grown accustomed to Harry’s distorted voice. When he would reach deep into his front pocket to retrieve his wallet and say, “My mudder taut me to do dat,” I heard him clearly. His specially designed Velcro shoes fit his unique feet in a way that made standard shoes seem like restrictive boxes. His tools—from a device to help him button his shirt to the utensils he used to eat—didn’t seem unusual anymore. And his incomparable hands. The white skin under his palm met the dark skin from the back of his hand to form a seam where his three middle fingers once existed. His hands were one of a kind. White circles covered the knuckles where his left thumb and index finger once were, as if the pigmentation had been rubbed off. I imagined no other man or woman on earth had hands quite like his. The more I saw them, the more comfortable I became.

Ella was no different. I couldn’t imagine her without her wheelchair. The only time she seemed odd was when she put on her prosthetic legs. I was so accustomed to the way her dress fell across the front of her chair, the way her hands gripped the handles of her cranks, and the way her wheelchair wobbled as if it were the seasoned gait of any other nondisabled woman in her eighties. Her deformities disappeared.

I had experienced this before—at the other end of the spectrum. When I dated the homecoming queen at Ole Miss, I was at first astonished by her loveliness. To see her walk across the Ole Miss campus, a beauty among some of the most beautiful women in the world, would make me light-headed. At times, I couldn’t believe she was attracted to me. I watched people stop to stare. Men couldn’t help turning their heads. Sometimes women did, too. She possessed the kind of physical perfection that seemed almost unfair. But as our relationship progressed, my awe of her waned. Her appearance had not changed, but I ceased to be dizzy when I saw her. Her perfect nose and lips and hair and eyes were as mundane as the features on my own face.

Intimate, prolonged contact, it seemed, made everything commonplace. Beauty and disfigurement disappeared with familiarity. Beauty queens became ordinary; leprosy patients did, too.

I had spent my life surrounding myself with beautiful people. And I made certain no one ever recognized my shortcomings.

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