Nonfiction review: In the Sanctuary of Outcasts: A Memoir

NONFICTION

Every age has its high-flying buccaneers, but few are as candid about their fall as publisher and journalist Neil White is in his affecting memoir, "In the Sanctuary of Outcasts."

Wanting to do good, White also knowingly did wrong and consequently was incarcerated in the Louisiana prison that was also the last leper colony in the continental United States.

At 24, White, eager to take on powerful politicians and businessmen, had started an alternative newspaper in Oxford, Miss. As revenues declined, he began kiting checks -- a practice he continued when, dreaming of being another Henry Luce, he began building a media empire along the Gulf Coast.

Initially successful, and eager to do good as well as make money, White "consciously acted in a manner to appear trustworthy -- I went to church . . . volunteered . . . proclaimed to be the journalist who would watch over criminals and politicians." But soon losing money, he began defrauding his investors and the banks. His fall was public and humiliating.

Like all notable chroniclers of crime, punishment and redemption, White not only enumerates his wrongdoings but also records his attempts to change and learn. When sentenced in 1993 to a year in the minimum-security federal prison at Carville, White told his two children he was "going to camp," He assumed that he would be in a regular prison so was startled to learn that the prison adjoined a leper colony.

As he learns more about Carville's history, White, though terrified of contracting leprosy, gets to know the lepers. He is soon especially close to Ella, who has lived there since 1926, when, as a teenager, she was diagnosed with leprosy and compelled by the state to leave home. The lepers' plight -- many are sightless and deformed -- is increasingly a reproach to White's past behavior.

During his first weeks in prison, White was determined to come up with some plan -- an expose of the convicts and leprosy patients -- that would make him famous and wealthy. There was certainly enough material -- fellow prisoners included Jimmy Hoffa's lawyer as well as an airline CEO. But when White's wife asked for a divorce and custody of his children, White finally faced what he had done and become. "Finally, in a sanctuary for outcasts, I understood the truth. Surrounded by men and women who could not hide their disfigurement, I could see my own."

This memoir represents an atonement persuasively made in an unlikely setting by an accomplished and engaging writer.

Judith Chettle is a Richmond-based book reviewer and writer.