By Erin Entrada Kelly
On June 18, 1996 — a cloudy summer day in Washington D.C. — a diminutive 78-year-old woman dies of heart failure and is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery. Her modest apartment is packed with nearly nine hundred books, many autographed theater and ballet posters from her time as a volunteer usher at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and a few albums. Her obituary is brief and relatively unextraordinary. She’s identified as a retired secretary and volunteer usher from Manila. When her friends clear out her apartment, they find nothing of her life predating her move to Washington. They likely assume that this woman, who they know as Joey Leaumax, has lived an unremarkable life, not much more than the obit offers.
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Rewind a bit from Joey’s death on that cloudy day, however, and you’ll land on a frame at San Francisco State College, where Joey (short for “Josefina”) has enrolled in baccalaureate classes at the age of 47. She’s majoring in English with a minor in Spanish. She sits next to 18-year-olds, but no matter. She goes on to get a master’s degree in Spanish literature from Middlebury College before joining the Peace Corps and serving in Niger, Colombia, and El Salvador, where she teaches children and adults how to read and speak English. She also teaches music and drawing. After the Peace Corps, she moves to Washington, where she dreams of listening to concerts and symphonies. She’d always had an appreciation for classical music, particularly Brahms. As a volunteer usher, she is gifted this luxury.
Rewind even further. See a woman fighting deportation and pawning her Medal of Freedom, which she received at the end of World War II. See her stepping off the wide front porch of a leprosarium, a hospital for people with leprosy, in the hot, humid Louisiana air. Go back ten years, 15, 20, 30. Go back to the lush rolling land of Lucban, Philippines, in the 1920s, and you’ll find her there, stepping through the grass, pretending to be Joan of Arc.
• • •
On the surface, Joey is an unlikely war hero. When the U.S. and Philippine Armed Forces enter World War II in December 1941, you wouldn’t pick her out of a crowd and assume she’d receive service medals. She is small — less than five feet tall, fewer than one hundred pounds. She is a devout Catholic, a devoted wife, a loving mother. But 1941 is a year of great change in more ways than one. After incessant nose bleeds, unrelenting fever, and debilitating pain and fatigue, Joey is diagnosed with leprosy, now known as Hansen’s Disease. By law, Joey is supposed to report to the authorities and enter forced quarantine. Even though leprosy cannot spread through casual contact, the disease is deeply feared and reviled. When Imperial Japan invades the Philippines after bombing Pearl Harbor, Joey is hiding her disease from everyone except her doctor and her husband, Renato, who takes their daughter Cynthia away.
Joey believes she will die soon, but she doesn’t fear death — her faith is too stalwart for that. Instead, she thinks of Joan of Arc, who was led into the battlefield by faith, self-belief, and an unwavering loyalty to her people. If Joey is to die, she wants it to mean something. When a friend recruits her into the guerrilla movement to work as a spy, she barely hesitates.
“I can’t do big things,” she says. “But every little bit helps.”
• • •
At first, Joey spies on Japanese soldiers from the relative safety of her home. Then she becomes a courier. “A little errand boy,” she says. Her code name is Billy Ferrer. She hides messages inside pieces of fruit, in the braids of her dark hair, in the soles of her shoes. At times, her illness is dormant and invisible. She uses these periods to befriend the soldiers themselves. She flirts with them, asks questions, pretends she’s a silly girl with big curiosities, all while eyeing and memorizing their movements, which she reports to the guerrillas.
In early 1945, Capt. Manuel Colayco gives Joey a dangerous task. All her tasks have been dangerous, of course, but this is uniquely perilous — he needs her to deliver a minefield map to the American cavalry more than 35 miles north of Manila. If she’s discovered with the map, she will certainly be killed. Joey immediately agrees and makes her final confession to a priest.
When she reports for duty, she’s in the middle of a flare-up. She has visible, painful sores. Every part of her body aches. Unfortunately, the only safe place to carry the map is on her body, which is pocked with lesions. They tape the map—big, bulky, and folded inside an envelope — to her back.
The quickest way to the cavalry is the main road, but that’s no good. Too many checkpoints. It will be impossible to get there safely by car, so she’ll need to make the journey on foot, through the jungle, which teems with snakes, insects, snipers. When she emerges from the jungle, she’ll need to get across the river, which is scouted by river pirates. When she reaches the cavalry— if she reaches the cavalry — she’s instructed to ask for an American named Captain Blair.
Joey sets off. Soon enough, she is stopped by a Japanese soldier who demands to search her. The soldiers are known for their thorough searches. Sometimes, they order you to strip naked.
Joey agrees, not that she has much choice. When the soldier approaches, she makes sure he sees her body. The lesions. The discolored patches. The sores.
Leprosy cannot be transmitted through touch. Joey knows this. But she also knows how frightening she must appear to him, and how profoundly people loathe lepers. It wasn’t that long ago that people with leprosy had to ring bells, wear shrouds, and yell ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ as they walked down the street. Across religions, cultures, and oceans, lepers are seen as cursed outcasts, unworthy of basic respect.
The soldier steps back and waves her on.
• • •
Fast-forward to the cavalry storming Manila, and you’ll see Joey there, walking through active gunfire. You’ll see her leading people to safety. You’ll see her praying over the bodies of soldiers who are dead or wounded. Since her diagnosis, she has anticipated death, but it doesn’t come for her — not when she’s on the battlefield, not when she’s eventually reported to authorities and forced into quarantine with no running water and no clean beds, not when she travels to the U.S. to receive care at the Carville Leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana. It doesn’t come for her as she battles deportation, or when American customers belittle her because of her accent, or when she enrolls in school, or when she serves in the poorest regions of the world with the Peace Corps.
It comes for her on that cloudy day, when she is 78 years old, a woman who has spent the final decades of her life listening to music and surrounded by books. In this final frame, a quote comes to mind: something she said in an interview long ago.
“I am just a simple, ordinary person,” she said. “I only did what you or any other would have done.”
Erin Entrada Kelly, a two-time Newbery Medalist, is best known for fiction. The story of Joey Guerrero inspired her first work of nonfiction — “At Last She Stood: How Joey Guerrero Spied, Survived, And Fought For Freedom,” out now from Greenwillow Books. Kelly, a Filipino American, grew up near Carville, La., where Joey was treated for leprosy.