The nurse led me away. I was too scared to look anywhere but straight ahead. If anyone could look back, they would be braver than I was. No one had told me anything much, least of all the truth. If I had known what was going to happen, it would have been easier. But I had not even been given a chance to ask where I was going. It was just cold turkey, with a stranger grabbing my arm. All I knew for sure was that my mother was crying and that her heart was breaking.
The day was May 12, 1936. I was ten years old. From this day, I would be forever known as a “leper.”When Henry Nalaielua was diagnosed with Hansen’s Disease (then known as leprosy) at the age of 10, he was taken away from his family and everything he knew and housed at Kalihi Hospital in Honolulu. Five years later, he was sent to Kalaupapa, the remote settlement on Moloka‘i’s inaccessible coast.
Although it sounds like the makings of a sad and gloomy tale, No Footprints in the Sand—Nalaielua’s memoirs with Sally-Jo Keala-o-Anuenue Bowman—is anything but depressing.
Nalaielua approaches his life with an honest, straightforward outlook. A lighthearted storyteller, he relates tales of hunting in Moloka‘i’s valleys, fishing the shores, serving as a police officer in Kalaupapa, and his personal struggles with life and love. Sometimes, it’s easy to forget he is a victim of one of society’s most feared diseases. He, in fact, seems to forget it himself.
“One day I went hunting—barefoot, of course—in Waikolu Valley, and stepped on a broken guava branch…I walked out of Waikolu barefoot and went back to Baldwin Home and let the foot go…The wound started off the size of a pinprick and got worse and worse and worse…I thought to myself, ‘Oh, this will be all right.’ How could I know this would become a lifelong problem?”
The feet of Hansen’s Disease patients often become ulcerated and crippled. Their feet can lose all feeling, making it difficult and dangerous to walk in the sand. Thus, the title of the book comes from the smooth stretch of beach beyond the wharf at Kalaupapa that always lay untouched by residents’ footprints.
Not all the book’s action takes place at Kalaupapa. According to his condition, Nalaielua went back and forth to Honolulu over the years, visiting family, working, and creating a “normal” life in between bouts with the disease. But the disease always seemed to catch up with him.
As a young man, Nalaielua was employed at the Honolulu Power Plant: “‘Eh, Henry,’ my friend Sato said. ‘Get one red spot on your shoulder.’ ‘Ah, nothing,’ I said. But when I looked in the mirror, I knew that red spot was a tip-off. Deep down inside, I knew I was again reacting to Hansen’s Disease.”
Saddest are Nalaielua’s stories of his failed marriages and forced separation from his children. Yet, it’s inspiring to think that society has progressed from this time, both medically and emotionally, in that (we hope) people with contagious diseases are no longer treated with such clinical coldness, simply out of fear.
“Even though my wife didn’t cry or scream, I knew just by her looks that her world stood still,” Nalaielua wrote. “She had just given birth to a beautiful little daughter and she was not even permitted to hold her own baby.”
Nalaielua also tells of his years at the National Hansen’s Disease Hospital in Carville, Louisiana, and his travels on the Mainland. His talents as an artist and a musician are woven into his life stories as well.
Today, at 82, Nalaielua still lives on Moloka‘i, where he shares his life and history with visitors. That was where he first met Bowman, and the two developed a bond that eventually resulted in publication of the book.
It’s a powerful piece of history that will remain, long after any footprints in the sand have been washed away.