“Come closer,” she urged him. Georgia squeezed his hand hard. The pain was incredible. “Will our baby be okay?” She looked up at his dear face. When her father had sent her to Carville, she had felt as though she were being sent to the death chamber. No one would touch her; no one would even look her in the eye. But at Carville, she had found acceptance and love. She had found Miguel.
Miguel looked at the doctor who had a smile on his face. “How does it look, doctor?”
“It looks fine. The head is crowning; it’s time for one more big push.”
Georgia clung to Miguel and pushed hard. She was fraught with emotion. For nine months she had carried this baby and she loved it to distraction. Everything within her wanted to clasp it to her breast and love it forever. But that couldn’t be. The doctor had told her that leprosy wasn’t passed to a child during gestation or childbirth, but it could be passed by close contact afterwards. So, she knew what she had to do. And it wasn’t like she had a choice. “God help me!” she screamed as her child slid from her body.
“It’s a girl!” the doctor announced.
Instinctively Georgia held out her arms for her child, but the nurse stepped up and took the squirming, wiggling, screaming infant from the doctor’s arms. With tears streaming down her face, she watched as they wrapped her little girl in a blanket and prepared her to leave. “Bring her close, I want to look in her face just once,” she pleaded.
The nurse hesitated, but Miguel added his appeal. “We just want a moment with her. We’ll never see her again. Have mercy on us, please.”
Dr. Cheshire nodded his permission to the nurse who had looked to him for guidance, then moved a few steps nearer to the new mother and father who were about to say goodbye to their infant daughter before they had even said hello.
Georgia’s heart filled with love even as it broke with utter despair. “She is so beautiful. Just look at our baby, Miguel.” Together they stared at tiny fingers and tiny toes, a button nose and a head full of curly black hair. Georgia gasped in magnificent agony. “I love you, Savannah.” She didn’t know if the name she chose would be given to her child or not, but she prayed it would be so. “Mama will pray for you every day. In my heart, I will always be with you. You’ll never be alone. And I will never, ever forget you.”
SAVANNAH
At 12 years old
Savannah edged just as close to the wall as she could. All she wanted to do was hide behind something, but there was nowhere to go. These nice people with their pressed Sunday clothes and too-wide smiles weren’t going to take her home with them. No one ever did. She was unwanted. And it wasn’t because she was too old; although, she was almost a teenager, it was because she was dirty. And it was the kind of dirty that you couldn’t clean off of you. With jerky movements, she scratched nubbins of grey paint off the sheetrock with her thumbnail. She’d get in trouble for it, but she didn’t care. The scars she put on the wall could never be worse than the scars on her soul.
“Stop that, Girl!” A hard slap upside her head caused Savannah to reel sideways and a sharp ringing started in her ears. A rough, gloved hand grabbed her by the collar of her worn cotton dress and led her through the door of the Baton Rouge Humane Services Department out into the stark sunlight of a hot summer day. “This was a damn waste of time. Nobody’s ever going to adopt you!”
What her current foster father shouted came as no surprise to Savannah. She knew she wasn’t going to be adopted. She had already been rejected twelve times. No one wanted a child born at the leper hospital, no matter how healthy and polite she was.
For a long time, the word leper had confused her. Why was being a leper bad? At first she had thought they were saying leopard hospital, and she had liked that. Later, Savannah had found out being a leper was shameful. Harlan Mosby, her foster parent’s oldest son had taken great pleasure in explaining to her what a leper was and why she was tainted forever.
It was state law that the circumstances of Savannah’s birth had to be disclosed to any couple who might consider bringing her into their family. But they wouldn’t tell her or anyone else who her real parents were. The details of Savannah’s birth were sealed by request of the family and a court ruling. That worried Savannah. Why didn’t they want her to know who she was? It couldn’t have been to protect her, because she was not being protected by anyone.
All she had been given from her real family was a tattered Bible. For years she thought there were no clues in it at all. But one day, she had been reading it and discovered that two of the back pages were stuck together. When she had carefully separated them, what she found were just a few words scrawled in blue ink. They didn’t make any sense to her: ‘Forgive me daughter. You are my greatest failure. May the Word bring you comfort. God save us both.’ And it was signed, ‘the Prophet.’ One day, Savannah vowed, she would find out what that meant. Savannah wanted to find her mother and father, she didn’t care if they were lepers or not.
“When we get to the house, I want you to get back to cleaning out the basement. If you want a room
