With the publication date for the paperback edition of The Colony approaching, it’s a good time to share some news about several of the more prominent characters in the book.

On September 28, at 12:40 a.m., Olivia Breitha passed away. She died at the Kalaupapa care home, only a few hundred yards from the spot at which she first set foot in the settlement, 69 years earlier. Olivia was 90 years old. She was buried the afternoon following her death, in a grave dug alongside that of her late husband, John.

I spent a good deal of time with Olivia during the reporting of The Colony. One morning in her cottage, I asked Olivia what confinement had meant to her. At various times she gave different responses to this question, or similar questions, and the replies seemed to vary depending on who was doing the asking and her mood. On this day, however, she answered, “As strange as this may sound, it didn’t bother me. When you’re in a locked place and you can’t run away, what are you going to do? The key is not yours to open doors. Plus I got to know God better than if I hadn’t come here. I don’t know what I would have been if that had not happened. I probably would have been a ruffian or something. So getting to know God was good thing. You know that you can take what comes to you because you know somebody else is with you. It helps me from being angry.” The response was classic Olivia: heartfelt, wry, and with an astounding lack of bitterness. She had a wonderful ability to find the smallest slivers of silver within life’s darkest clouds.

In her powerful memoir, Olivia had observed:

“We all make the best of our lives here. This is it for us. This is the end of our fight. You know how it is. You fight against the isolation. . . . You fight yourself, the disease, the other patients, the board of health. Then finally, you give up, and find yourself.”

Another resident of the Kalaupapa community who figures prominently in The Colony is Henry Nalaielua. I spent a lot of time with Henry as well during my reporting, both at Kalaupapa and on Oahu, at Kalihi Hospital. We spent our time discussing books and art and history, and some afternoons we just went to the movies. Henry had been diagnosed with leprosy in 1936, when he was eleven years old, and, as I described it in The Colony, was eventually sent to Kalaupapa:

As a boy, Henry had stood at the rail of a steamer and spotted the Molokai cliffs for the first time. “It took forever to get here,” he recalled about that day. “I thought I’d never get here.” When they had put him on the boat, Henry had known nothing about Kalaupapa and imagined it might be a wasteland. Then he saw the immense curtain of rock. “That’s when I knew that I’d like it here,” he said. “If there were cliffs, there were streams, and if there were streams, there were beaches. It would be like home.” One of Henry’s friends in the community, a man named Paul, had remarked of the residents, “The more we suffer, the more strength we have. The more suffering, the closer we are to one another. Life is that way. If you haven’t suffered, then you don’t know what joy is. The others may know something about joy, but those who have gone through hell and high water, I think they feel the joy deeper.”

While I was working on my book Henry was also working on a book, writing in longhand on large pads of paper. That memoir, No Footprints In the Sand, has now been published. Do Henry — and yourself — a favor: buy a copy.

Among the many radio interviews from last week were two long-form call-in shows, both on Public Radio. If you’d like to waste an hour or two, have a listen. (You’ll need to launch your Real Player to listen to these.) The first is from the Kathleen Dunn show, in Wisconsin — lots of chat about native son Joseph Dutton in this one. Earlier in the week I was in Washington D.C. talking with Kojo Nnamdi, and of course we touched on the Washington D.C.-based story of John Early: crank, victim, outlaw, and, as readers of The Colony know, the nation’s first leprosy activist.

Last month I did a reading in San Francisco, at A Clean-Well Lighted Place for Books. The reading — and a question and answer session with the audience — was recorded and broadcast as part of Writer’s Voice Radio. If you’re interested, take a listen. (One caveat: the audience members’ questions were not picked up by the microphones, so you’ll just hear my answers.)

By the way, an unabridged audio version of The Colony is available, in CD and also MP3 formats. For more details, check here.

As I mentioned, I’ve been receiving an abundance of e-mails and letters from people with a personal connection to the colony. Some want help in finding lost relatives, others want to know if I have more details on their ancestor, and many write simply to tell me their story. And again, I’m happy to share my research. Just send me an e-mail.

Dear Mr. Tayman,
I just finished reading your book and found it one of the most extraordinary and best written stories I have ever read. I thought you wrote this history with great sensitivity and thoroughness. I do have a question that I would appreciate your help if it is possible. My aunt, Alice Wickman, worked at the Colony as a teacher or a nurse for several years, I believe in the 1930’s, before she contracted tuberculosis and sent back to the mainland. My question is there some kind of registry of nonpatient workers and if so where is it located? I would like to inscribe her history in the book so our family does not forget her dedication. Again, congratulations on writing such a terrific book.

Dear Mr. Tayman,
Thank you for writing the book. It is of extreme interest to me because my aunt’s sister Mary Teresa, from New York, worked at the colony for about 30 years. In my meeting with her, which was only twice, and when I was very young, she told me only about the goodness of the people that lived there. She was a nurse and worked mostly with the girls in the girl’s orphanage. I had no idea of what the place was even about. Her name was Katherine, Aunt Kitty to her family. Thank you so very much.

The Colony is, in essence, a character-driven narrative of a small American town. Granted, the population of that town over the years included brigands, murderers, corrupt lawmen, feckless bureaucrats, and a number of very unscrupulous physicians. Yet persons of immense grace and strength also made their home in the colony, including one extraordinary man and one remarkable woman who, having already been beatified, are on track to be sanctified by the Catholic Church—thereby making this tiny spot the only place in the nation where two saints labored and died.

One character I write about in the book is William P. Ragsdale, a lawyer and government translator who caught the disease and booked his own passage to the colony. Ragsdale’s tale inspired a Jack London short story, and his life also obsessed Mark Twain, who had earlier met and wrote about the colorful Ragsdale while reporting a series of travel dispatches for the Sacramento Union. Here’s Twain on the young Ragsdale at work in the legislature:

“His tongue is in constant motion from eleven in the forenoon till four in the afternoon, and why it does not wear out is the affair if Providence, not mine. There is a spice of deviltry in the fellow’s nature, and it crops out every now and then when he is translating the speeches of slow Kanakas who do not understand English. Without departing from the spirit of a member’s remarks, he will, with apparent unconsciousness, drop in a little voluntary contribution occasionally in the way of a word or two that will make the gravest speech utterly ridiculous.”

Ragsdale was the son of an American lawyer and plantation owner who had migrated to Hawaii from Virginia and wed a Hawaiian chiefess. The couple had three children, who were raised, as Twain imagined, “in the midst of the ancient idolatrous system.” Twain began to jot an outline for a Hawaiian novel, with Ragsdale as its protagonist. The work was never finished—you’ll have to read The Colony to find out why—but Twain’s deep love for the islands crept into a series of prose poems he published, including this ode to Hawaii:

“For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes, I hear the plashing of the brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.”

Such passages by Twain, which he repeated in countless public readings, helped launch what would eventually become Hawaii’s leading industry: tourism. So there’s some irony to the fact that that industry was nearly derailed by the simple existence of the colony. That story—the rise and near-fall of Hawaii’s tourism industry—is the subject of this excerpt of the book, which ran in Conde Nast Traveler.