Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 24, 1993 TAG: 9306240176
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GARY L. WRIGHT KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: GOLDSBORO, N.C. LENGTH: Long
Taken from his home and family, he was sent to an insane asylum, castrated, then locked away and forgotten.
Wilson wasn't mentally ill. He was deaf.
But by the time authorities at Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro figured out that he didn't belong in a psychiatric hospital, Wilson was in his 70s and had been there 45 years.
No one bothered, all those years, to communicate with him using the archaic sign language he knew. No one taught him standard sign language. So he made up his own language.
Through it all, Wilson managed, somehow, to keep his sanity.
Today, at 95, he finally is being taught to sign. After almost 68 years, he may soon be released from Cherry Hospital.
"He's a survivor," says John Wasson, a social worker who, as Wilson's guardian, is fighting to improve his life. "Or he wouldn't have lasted this long.
"I can't imagine what strength of spirit it would take to persevere under those conditions. Not only was he in a mental hospital for 68 years, he couldn't speak. And he couldn't be understood. That makes it all the more remarkable."
Wilson's story stunned Terry Stelle, chief of North Carolina's mental health services for seven years.
"When I first got wind of the situation, I said, `Oh, my God,' " Stelle recalls. "It was not only shameful but also embarrassing. . . . He just must have gotten lost through the cracks.
"He's the last vestige of what formerly was a very unfortunate and often inhumane system of care."
These days, Wilson moves with an ease that belies his age, his stocky, 5-foot-6 body swaying to a shuffling gait. He's remarkably alert to what's happening around him.
He could pass for a farmer, often dressed in overalls, a baseball cap over a full head of gray hair, a wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek.
Since a stroke seven years ago, his right shoulder sags and his right hand can manage little more than clawlike grasps.
Visitors bring a quick smile. When he spots people signing, he nods and laughs.
He still enjoys going out for meals. With a wink and a jerk of his head toward the parking lot, he'll sign "drive out eat."
Asked about his family and where he used to live, he shrugs and shakes his head. He signs: "far away" and "long ago."
Wilson's nightmare began long ago - in 1925 - and far away - near the coast in the New Hanover County town of Castle Hayne.
He was 29 when he was jailed - a black man charged with assault with intent to commit rape. At an inquisition of lunacy - as the hearings were called then - Wilson was declared insane, dangerous and incompetent to defend himself.
In the foot-high stack of medical records, only a handful date to Wilson's first 40 years at the asylum.
Among them are Judge F.A. Daniels' order committing Wilson and a three-page transcript of the Nov. 18, 1925, inquisition, at which Wilson's guilt seems to have been taken for granted.
So Junius Wilson was committed to what was then North Carolina's asylum for black people, the State Hospital in Goldsboro, 50 miles southeast of Raleigh.
"They locked him up and threw away the keys," says Jim Wall, director of litigation for Legal Services of Lower Cape Fear in Wilmington. "There was no effort to do anything more than warehouse him. He was written off as a human being."
Shortly after his arrival on Nov. 21, 1925, Wilson was castrated. Medical records from more than a half-century later called the operation a "therapeutic" castration and "customary in those quaint and past days for the kind of crime that he is alleged to have committed."
Wilson spent years - the records don't disclose how long - locked in the building for the criminally insane.
The building was "dank, dark and fetorious," according to a state inspection in 1948 and, one inspector warned, "a disgrace to the state."
"It is inhumane, unsanitary, and even cruel," the inspection said, "for patients were found locked in cages for long periods of time. One man had been kept in the cage for approximately four years."
On the second floor, as many as 70 patients were jammed into a room called the "bull pen." They had only two toilets and drank from one water barrel.
Twenty-two years went by before Wilson saw his family again.
On June 5, 1947, his father, Sidney Wilson, and sister, Carrie Gill, visited.
"She was going to build a house and wanted patient to help," a social worker's handwritten note says. "Carrie insisted that [Wilson] be released to live with his mother."
He wasn't released. That was the only family visit Wilson has had in almost 68 years at Cherry.
Over the years, Wilson forgot much of the sign language he had learned growing up. He communicated with crude signs, grunts, gestures and facial expressions.
"He has made up his own sign language," a physician wrote in 1972.
As he grew old in Cherry, Wilson retained what medical records described as "a keen power of observation." His doctors and social workers called him outgoing and intelligent, sociable and charming, playful and industrious.
He was granted unusual privileges, like fishing in a nearby river. He befriended stray dogs with scraps of food. He'd ride his bicycle everywhere.
With money earned at the hospital's car wash, Wilson bought bicycles, watches, clocks and, for his room, a television and a recliner. Hospital workers drove him to town to pick out jigsaw puzzles.
"Rides his yellow bicycle with the greatest of ease and confidence," a staff psychiatrist wrote of Wilson, then 88. ". . . He is able to perform jigsaw puzzles of unlimited complexity with great speed and certainty."
Cherry Hospital Director Field Montgomery said recently that hospital officials knew that Wilson wasn't mentally ill. But they didn't want to release him.
"We were not going to kick him out on the streets," Montgomery said. "How could he survive on the outside? He was a very old man who had lived here almost all his life. He had no place to go, no family. He had no job skills. He couldn't talk. He showed no interest in leaving.
"It would almost be suicide for him by sending him out into the community."
What happened to Wilson remained a secret - at least outside Cherry Hospital - for more than 65 years.
But in September 1990, the hospital petitioned the courts to declare him incompetent. Wilson, the hospital said, could not communicate well enough to make decisions about his life and well-being.
Wilson was declared incompetent, and in 1991 John Wasson, an assistant director at the New Hanover County Department of Social Services, was appointed his guardian.
Wasson was appalled to discover, reviewing records, that Wilson had no diagnosis of mental illness.
"His incarceration, his subsequent castration and the many years at Cherry cry out for public scrutiny," Wasson wrote to Cherry Hospital in February 1991. ". . . It is difficult for me to imagine anything else that could be done to hurt him that has not already been done."
Wasson enlisted the help of three legal experts - Roger Manus and Paul Pooley with Carolina Legal Assistance in Raleigh and Jim Wall with Wilmington's legal aid office.
Manus and Pooley had worked on - and won - a huge class-action lawsuit that challenged why hundreds of mentally retarded patients had been confined at North Carolina's psychiatric hospitals.
Astonished at Wilson's case, Wasson and the lawyers pressured the state, threatening to sue, writing and urging officials to improve Wilson's living conditions.
"Mr. Wilson is very elderly and may not live much longer," Wasson wrote in June 1992. "Nevertheless, I insist that in the time he has left, that his unique need to communicate be accommodated.
"It seems to me that given Cherry Hospital's unwillingness to meet any of these needs for 67 years, that you and your staff would feel some moral obligation to make the time he has left as productive and as pleasant as possible."
In October, the state agreed to settle out of court.
Now, Wilson is being taught the sign language skills he lost over the years. Hospital workers are learning, too.
The hospital has found a companion, a deaf man in his 60s who lives in town, to visit Wilson and go on outings with him.
"I remember the man two years ago and the one now," Wasson said. "They're two different men. He was depressed two years ago. Now, there's life in his eyes - animation and expression in his face. He has come alive."
Three months ago, Wasson and others took Wilson back to his hometown of Castle Hayne, a New Hanover County community of about 1,000. He hadn't been there since 1925, but he hadn't forgotten.
"He grabbed the van driver and started gesturing and pointing wildly," Wasson recalled. "It was the dirt road where his home used to be."
"It was a very moving experience - not only for Mr. Wilson, but for the rest of us."
Wilson might finally be released from Cherry Hospital. That, too, is part of the settlement.
Hospital officials are leery.
Staff psychiatrist Thomas Smith says Wilson has made it clear that he doesn't wish to leave.
"The humanitarian thing," Smith wrote about six months ago, "would seem to be to permit him to go ahead and live out his life in the hospital setting, where he feels `at home.' "
Wasson knows Wilson can never reclaim the wasted years.
"You can't give him back those years. My goal is to make his remaining days - however long that is - as productive and comfortable as possible.
"I'm not sure we've changed the world. But we changed Mr. Wilson's world."
by CNB