God of the Rodeo

by Daniel Bergner

  “ONE OF THE MOST FASCINATING BOOKS

  PUBLISHED IN YEARS.”

  –LARRY KING

  “An eloquent and valuable book… Even people who know something about prison rodeos will find it hard not to be caught up in the richly etched lives he discovers behind the ghoulish pageantry…. Bergner’s rich, probing and compassionate book is a rare look at both the physical and spiritual world on the other side of the bars.”

  –The New York Times Book Review

  “A bare-knuckled and in-depth portrait of the lives, motivations, hopes and failures of seven hard-timers incarcerated in one of the most notorious prisons in America. And equally important, this insightful author dissects the curious relationship between the captives and their captor, a seemingly born-again Christian warden named Burl Cain…. God of the Rodeo’s contribution to society—and it is a meaningful one—is that Mr. Bergner reveals America’s hypocrisy about prisons and rehabilitation.”

  –The Dallas Morning News

  “An unusually stirring and transcendent work about a former slave plantation in Louisiana that is now one of the nation’s most isolated prisons. Important, timely, and disturbing.”

  –JONATHAN KOZOL

  Author of Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

  “If you’ve ever thought that parts of contemporary America closely resemble the Old South, God of the Rodeo gives new proof. Daniel Bergner pulls back the barbed-wired curtain on Angola, Louisiana’s farm-prison on the Mississippi, to reveal a place much like the slave plantations of old. Here is a stunted world presided over by Warden Burl Cain, a modern master who is half evangelist, half despot. Under his watch, prison life ebbs away in a cycle of futile work, self-improvement, and fleeting salvation.”

  –EDWARD BALL

  Author of the National Book Award-winner Slaves in the Family

  “Sure to become a classic in the field of prison literature.”

  –Chicago Tribune

  “Bergner’s gift is for understanding both his subjects and his readers-for getting into the former’s heads and putting the latter inside the prison, so they know and maybe even like those who have committed unspeakable crimes…. Bergner neither sentimentalizes nor demonizes these men, neither judges nor approves; he just paints them as they are and in so doing delivers an astonishing lesson in sympathy.”

  –Men’s Journal

  “[Bergner’s] compassionate but unapologetic portraits of the convicts themselves—most of whom are killers, serving life without parole—vividly illuminate a dark and disturbing world where punishment is a cell the size of an office cubicle, and redemption is a punctured lung and a couple of broken ribs from the horns of a two-thousand-pound bull.”

  –Forbes

  “Difficult to shake from your mind… Bergner’s brilliance lies in making us understand what seems at first unambiguously self-destructive, futile, and ugly. He makes the rodeo a window into the foreignness of prison life, and it’s the long year between rodeos that makes the book…. We come to understand that like the convicted men, the warden is not an easy man to judge—and that’s one of the triumphs of Bergner’s unwavering eye and his compassionate, well-paced storytelling…. What is most compelling about Bergner’s book, however, is that it lacks any agenda save the search for something human in the piss and misery of the concrete cells. He succeeds. As long as that is possible, we are not entirely inhuman.”

  –Salon

  “Very powerful and beautifully written… The autumn rodeo was the catalyst for this book, but it is not the focus. The rodeo is a symbol of hope for these men, and if not hope, a way to mark time and a break in their dreadful routine. Bergner does the near impossible: he creates empathy for the prisoners yet never allows the reader to lose sight of the reasons for their incarceration. Some people should not live in society, but we can’t turn our backs on their innate—if deeply flawed—humanity.”

  –Booklist (boxed and starred review)

  The names of a few very peripheral figures have been changed to protect their privacy.

  Parts of this book originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in Harper’s magazine.

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1998 by Daniel Bergner

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Ballantine Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com/BB/

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-90990

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76586-4

  This edition published by arrangement with Crown Publishers, Inc.

  v3.1

  FOR NANCY

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ONE

  WHEN HE HAD FINISHED WORK-BUILDING FENCE or penning cattle or castrating bull calves with a knife supplied by his boss on the prison farm—Johnny Brooks lingered in the saddle shed. The small cinder-block building is near the heart of Angola, Louisiana’s maximum-security state penitentiary. Alone there, Brooks placed his saddle on a wooden rack in the middle of the room, leapt into it, and imagined himself riding in the inmate rodeo coming up in October. He prepared himself. The afternoon he first showed me what he did, the shed’s corrugated metal door was half shut. The air in the unlit room had a dusky, textured quality, almost like the weave of a fabric. He floated on it, the fabric. To vault himself into the saddle, which rested at chest height, he did not use a stirrup. Nor, it seemed, did he bend his knees. He merely flicked his ankles to rise well above the leather, and for an instant he was frozen there, suspended above it, legs spread in perfect symmetry and spine impeccably upright.

  That morning, in early September, I had watched him train a colt in a tight, fenced ring. Brooks stood at the center and taught the young quarter horse to cut, to switch directions fast, on command, so that eventually it could work the cattle. “Get around there,” he demanded. “Get around; get around.” And warned, “Better behave yourself.” The colt kept half an eye on Brooks always. Brooks’s voice was quiet, but the horse had no desire to feel the whip he carried. And though floggings were a thing long past at Angola, Brooks maintained his own sidelong glance on his boss, one of the “freemen” who ran the range crew, leaning against the fence. The sleeves of Brooks’s T-shirt looked taut as rubber bands around his muscles, which were thick as tree roots. His boss was short, heavy, more like a softening stump. “Give me handle,” he said, and Brooks answered, “Yassuh,” and “Yassuh” was much of what I heard him say during the first weeks I knew him, whether in response to me or to prison employees. He kept his shoulders stooped. His head hung slightly. Often his eyes were lowered. He had, at times, an unrestrained, affecting smile that included his eyes, though he was missing three bottom teeth and the upper ones didn’t look so healthy. He was a caricature, an illusion
from another era, humble black servant, Stepin Fetchit.

  “Yassuh,” he replied after finishing with the colt, when another of the freemen called, “Mr. Jimmy wants his truck washed.” He jogged over, caught the keys that were tossed his way, and hustled off to soap, scrub, rinse, and dry.

  But later, inside the saddle shed, his shoulders were straight and his speech gained authority. The air seemed not only textured but, like the air over all of Angola’s vast grounds, laden, palpably heavier than the atmosphere outside the gates. Five thousand men were incarcerated there. Eighty-five percent had killed or raped or robbed with violence. About eight in ten were sentenced either to life without parole or to so many years they might as well have been. (Louisiana had good claim to the toughest sentencing laws in the nation. It was one of only three states where all lifers were “natural lifers”—the governor’s clemency offered the only way out. Other states with a natural life sentence used it sparingly.) Brooks, here for beating a woman to death during a robbery twenty-two years ago, was no longer floating above his saddle. He sat on the brown leather. Yet his new posture and voice, and his eyes that were suddenly direct and animated, defied more than his submissiveness; they defied Angola’s excess gravity.

  In the previous year’s rodeo a gold-tinted bull had knocked him unconscious. Hurtling, the 1,600 pound animal snapped Brooks’s neck back then forward, slamming his head into the knobby rock of muscle between the bull’s shoulders. Now Brooks envisioned drawing the same bull, reminded himself to stay out of its “territory,” not to let his weight fall too far back. Or he would lose all control and the whiplashing would start.

  He schooled himself, in the hush of the room, to slice the air with the elbow of his free arm, the way the pros on TV did, for balance against the bull’s spin. He taught himself to spur constantly against that spin, a plea—as much as a command—for an end to centrifugal force. The bull rope would be tied around his right hand. He imagined how hard he wanted the rope pulled by the inmate helping him in the chute. “It should feel like the tire of a truck pinning me there, Mr. Dan,” he said. “When I get done it should feel like my hand been inside a vise.”

  To fix his eyes only on the bull’s left shoulder, never on its head—he trained himself about that, too. The head was a temptation but would trick you; the animal always went where the shoulder did. And he tried to anticipate the sensation when the chute gate opened and the bull exploded. Fear would blacken his mind, make him deaf to every sound. There would be no conscious control from then on. There would be only the reactions he tried to drill into himself here, daydreaming.

  Besides last year’s injury, Brooks had, after his first ride in his first rodeo more than a decade ago, been kicked in the back by the bull that threw him. He had then watched another convict thrown immediately in front of the chute. The bull found the man on the ground and shook him between its horns, cracking his spine—the man was left a quadriplegic, living in the Department of Corrections’ version of a nursing home. A few years later, Brooks had broken his arm, and the year before last the flesh just below his eye had been sliced open by a bull’s horn. Rodeo anywhere is a dangerous sport, bull riding its most extreme event. The prison staff who oversaw Brooks on the range crew, and who organized Angola’s rodeo, were quick to remind me of this. Brooks’s medical history would be about the gentlest on the pro tour. But many pros enter two rodeos in a weekend, ride several bulls every week, hundreds in a year. Each year Brooks mounted exactly four. His odds were not gentle at all.

  They were not meant to be. The inmate rodeo, a thirty-two-year-old tradition that year, 1996, was held every Sunday in October and was billed by the prison as “The Wildest Show in the South.” The public was invited through Angola’s gates, lured by write-ups in the fun section of the local paper promising untrained convicts “thrown every which way.” The men could not practice. Many, unlike Brooks and a few others who worked with horses as part of their prison jobs, had never so much as ridden a pony at a childhood street fair. They were not given the protective vests the pros wear to save themselves from shattered ribs and punctured lungs when the bronco kicks or the bull stomps down. Broken shoulders or wrists or ribs occurred daily. One past rider, petrified on his horse in a slapstick event called “Buddy Pick-Up,” had died of a heart attack. Hours before the rodeo started, to be sure of getting in, the fans would line their cars along the shoulder of the road leading to Angola; there was rarely enough room for everyone in the prison’s old 5,000-seat arena. Weeks before, the convicts signed up to compete in the spectacle—and signed a release absolving the prison of all liability—then begged their way into the featured events.

  And yes, Brooks knew what the public came for. “Some of them, sure,” he said when I asked about rooting for broken bodies. But not all. “And if you give them something good… ” He spoke more of technique, of the bull’s “pivot point,” of a “suicide tie” for his right hand, of locking his right elbow, of watching J. W. Hart and Tuff Hedeman and Ted Nuce on ESPN, “studying them tight, tight.” Then he talked again of the spectators, who cheered loudly for the best performances. He had heard it. He knew they did. And he recalled the day a rodeo clown—hired from the pro circuit to draw the bulls away from fallen riders—hugged him, lifted him off his feet in congratulations after a beautifully executed ride. “He liked what I done,” Brooks remembered, his eyes completely at odds with the understatement of his words, “and he just picked me up like this.”

  Ten years ago Littell Harris was mixing a cocktail of his own feces at Angola’s Camp J. This October, on the rodeo’s opening day, he sat in the convict section of the bleachers. He had a profusion of dreadlocks, vines spilling in every direction, and a thick beard that hid much of his face. The hair was an aberration at the prison. His harsh eyes, with their faintly Asian slant, were almost his only visible feature. By early spring, being one of Angola’s lucky few, he would have served his fifteen years for armed robbery. Under laws increasingly severe, more recent Louisiana armed robbers would spend the rest of their lives in the penitentiary. But for Littell, a few more months and he was gone.

  The cocktail was accomplished like this: Littell lined the steel toilet at the back of his cell with newspaper. He shit onto the paper. Then he crouched down, with his back to the bars, and mashed and stirred the stool in a cup of water; at the right consistency he would pour the liquid into a drinking bottle with a squirt top. He could stir in private because Camp J, where Angola’s worst disciplinary cases were sent, had single-man cells on only one side of a narrow concrete hall. The nearest guard sat at the end of the corridor, outside a barred gate. Because of cocktails like Littell’s, the guard preferred not to venture down that hall.

  In this case the mix was meant for another inmate. When that man got his tier time, to shower and to walk along the seventy-foot-long corridor, Littell would douse him. A self-proclaimed “Camp J warrior,” he did battle in this way with three or four men on the tier. He no longer remembered why. That was just how it was: something had been said; “draft” in cigarettes had gone unpaid; someone came from the wrong town, the wrong part of the state. “They shitted me down”; Littell did the same. Or they each found ways, makeshift and intricate, to reconfigure and extend the electrical circuits behind their ceiling light fixtures; by running a wire into their toilets they boiled water for flinging. Or they added Ben-Gay to the scalding water, creating what was quaintly called “a stinger.” It worked on the eyes like acid.

  So Littell stirred his feces. “I’m sitting there,” he recalled when we talked alone, “and I’m doing this disgusting ass shit, and it’s like I had an out-of-body experience, man, it’s like I could see myself from the back, squatting down, playing with these fucking turds, mashing this fucking turd up, souping it up, and I’m watching myself, and I said, Man, that’s a fucking shame, fucking disgusting animal savage that I’ve turned into. Savage. And I’m looking at myself, and I started thinking, I don’t know nothing, I don’t read, I’
m caught up in this bullshit. I knew then that I had to turn around…. From that day on I tried to enlighten myself. But I still went and did what I had to do. Because I don’t want to be no fucking victim.”

  There was plenty that Littell still “had to do.” He had finished his most recent stint at J and on other disciplinary cellblocks only months before he sat in the rodeo stands—with about two hundred other convict spectators, separated from the public by a simple rail—and less than half a year before his scheduled freedom. If nothing major happened, no prison murder or stabbing to warrant new state charges against him, he would go more or less directly from savagery back into the world.

  For the first time, he watched the rodeo’s opening procession. At his back the Main Prison sprawled. It housed half of Angola’s inmates. The outermost of its tall, razor-wired fences surrounded the stadium. In the distance were maroon-and-yellow guard towers, endless fields, the levees that lined the Mississippi, the lake the river had left behind, the outcamps that held the rest of the convicts. “Louisiana State Penitentiary. L.S.P. Last Slave Plantation,” Littell said. Below him the Rough Riders, the mounted inmate drill team, galloped into the arena. In red bandannas and black straw cowboy hats, they veered in tenuous patterns—their practice had been scarcely more extensive than that of the rodeo competitors—and finally lined up along the red, white and blue rodeo fence. They settled their horses. They bowed their heads for the chaplain’s prayer.

  Waving in the breeze above their heads were the flags they carried: the state’s, the country’s, the penitentiary’s, and, in this prison whose inmate population was 77 percent black, whose guards were two-thirds white, and whose administration couldn’t have been more pale, the Confederacy’s. There were two of those flags, with the blue X and the thirteen stars and the red background, one carried by a black man. The crowd was virtually all white. “Do you see this?” Littell leaned toward the inmate beside him. “That fucking idiot.” The next man down the bleachers answered, “It ain’t nothing but a piece of cloth.” And the prayer began.