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.
In 1954, at the age of 16, my dad was living with my grandfather in the Bronx when he was diagnosed with Hansen's Disease, the preferred designation for leprosy. He was sent to Carville where he stayed under federal quarantine for nine years, until he was cured and discharged in 1963. Fifty-three years later, he was going back for the first time.
