God of the Rodeo

by Daniel Bergner

  About five foot seven, round, with full white hair swept across his forehead, Cain had waved to the rodeo crowd.

  In September of 1996, a month before this year’s event, I had met him for the first time. Our introduction came at the end of a week I had spent at the prison, preparing what I’d thought would be only a magazine article about the inmate riders. “So you want to talk about the barbarism of the rodeo,” he said before hello, before we shook hands, when I was shown into his office. He smiled. His candor more than counterbalanced the pictures I’d seen and descriptions I’d heard of his grand entrance. Leaning back at the head of his long, polished conference table, he acknowledged that barbarism was a factor.

  “Look,” he explained, “the rodeo, to us, is kind of like making a good cake.” He wore a white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, and a colorful, unknotted tie draped around his shoulders like a minister’s stole. Now he sat forward, interlacing his pale, chubby fingers on the gleaming wood. “And so there’s all the ingredients in it. Some of the ingredients by themselves wouldn’t be fit to eat. But you put them all together and you have a nice cake.”

  A nice cake? I had seen the rodeo once, as a spectator, several years before. In the Buddy Pick-Up a careening rider’s forehead had connected, at full gallop, with a metal post. I had learned that the man was carted off to the prison medical center, then shackled and shipped out to a hospital in Baton Rouge, where his head was rebuilt with a steel plate.

  But I had heard nice things about Burl Cain. And the highest praise had come from those I expected to be his natural enemies, the state’s capital-defense attorneys. As warden, Cain carried out the executions. He stood in the chamber and gave the signal for the lethal injection. But he had made great changes for the men on death row. Given them regular contact visits with their families, something Angola had allowed only once each year and most prisons in the country seldom if ever permit. (At those others, the men awaiting execution see their visitors through Plexiglas or glimpse them through perforated steel.) And offered them literacy classes. Literacy classes! For what? They were going to die! Cain insisted on their humanity, focused on the fact that they were living now. And he hoped to save them. Though they were free to read what they wished, he hoped they would read the Bible. He hoped they found faith. Cain’s own religious beliefs bred his compassion—and his deep misgivings about the death penalty. “I don’t know what God would have said if He’d been in that room,” a local reporter recalled him muttering, visibly shaken, after his first execution. At his second and most recent, as the convict lay strapped to the gurney and the technician struggled to find a vein, Cain had held the condemned man’s hand.

  “I didn’t come to the rodeo for about eight years,” he went on, his head almost bowed over his folded hands, “because I saw a man stomped and paralyzed. And that grieved me greatly, and I wouldn’t come back. I don’t want to see the inmates hurt. I don’t want to see the blood and I don’t want to see the guts. But the rodeo raises thousands of dollars for the Inmate Welfare Fund. And the rodeo is good for morale, for those riders, for everyone involved. The rodeo brings lifeblood into this prison.”

  So it was a necessary cake. The tickets, I knew, supplied much of the Inmate Welfare Fund’s account. And though the participants rarely mentioned this as a reason for signing up, the Fund helped pay for the GED program and the inmate-run magazine, the Angolite, for TVs and sports equipment, for security on the rare trip out for a family funeral if the convict could get permission—things the state wouldn’t appropriate money for, that made an entire life in Angola bearable and possibly transformative.

  And he was right about morale. The riders, the concessionaires, the inmate artisans, all looked forward to the rodeo. As for lifeblood, maybe the occasion was, in a sense, sacramental. The men offered up their bodies, and in return the public came to see them, acknowledged their existence. For the rest of the year Angola was nowhere, isolated in its own corner of the state, the nearest tiny town thirty miles away. The rodeo was a rite of grace, of barely perceptible reconciliation between the inmates and society.

  Even the convicts who ran the Angolite, self-educated and sardonic men, had said something to affirm this. They were, mostly, harshly critical of the rodeo. One editor had told me, “Most of Angola’s inmates suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder,” by way of explaining the men’s willingness to be broken as long as they were noticed. “And whenever someone’s paid attention to them, it’s been to beat them up in one way or another.” A second editor had added, with laughing resignation, “One thing God gave all of us: a man’s allowed to choose his own path to hell,” meaning not that signing up for the rodeo was a sin, but that the whole spectacle was a goddamned shame. Yet they’d said that if it were up to them, the rodeo would continue. “It brings the public here. They lay eyes on us.”

  Certainly nothing else would bring them. No one was going to drive hours for an inmate basketball game.

  Cain’s light blue eyes, when they weren’t lowered toward his solemn, prayerful hands, were leveled on me. He talked of wanting society to see the inmates as people, “not as some devil with a fork and a tail,” of wishing the public would gain some common sense about sentencing, see it in terms of economics if not morality, tell their legislators to “cut these life no parole sentences and give a man the chance to get out, the chance for a hearing, once he’s at least forty and has served twenty years.” He spoke of the need for maintaining hope among the inmates, and of his effort to do so despite the lottery-like odds of a governor’s pardon. He tried to make life meaningful even here. He was fostering the GED program, nurturing a club that built toys for charity, an inmate CPR team that traveled outside the prison to give classes in local schools, a Toastmasters public-speaking club, the Forgotten Voices, that had just been honored by Toastmasters International. He talked of the work on the range crew, of men like Johnny Brooks learning to rope and tag, to palpate cattle for pregnancy, and to birth baby calves. And he talked about religion, about the absolute forgiveness he extended, according to the Gospels, to every inmate as they entered the world of Angola, about the new clergy he’d added to the staff, about saving souls. “The first meeting I had when I came here to Angola, the first meeting I called on the first day, was with the chaplains. I told them that they are shepherds and that they feed sheep. And these inmates are our sheep. God put them in my charge and I’m responsible for them, just like they’re my children.”

  But Cain had started out after college teaching agronomy in a rural high school. Wasn’t the running of prisons, I asked, an improbable career path?

  “I’m a weird warden,” he grinned. “I don’t care.”

  As early as that initial conversation, I knew that I had to come back to Angola not only for the rodeo and not only for a magazine article, but for something much larger. Johnny Brooks’s agility and preparation in the saddle shed, his floating and self-schooling; the Angolite editor saying “They lay eyes on us”; the redemptive found where it was least expected—the rodeo fit with a grand and unlikely promise Warden Cain held out: that Angola was, as he put it, “a positive prison.” Its inmates would die incarcerated, yet it was a place where, under Cain’s leadership, men made themselves better human beings. Society might think, They can’t get out, they have nothing to lose, no reason to improve. Still, they had improvement itself, self-elevation, to gain. They had their humanity. “Our cake is good,” Cain said of the penitentiary. I needed to find out if it could be true.

  Unbeckoned, as Cain and I continued talking, an inmate set a can of Dr Pepper beside the warden, on one of the coasters already placed at regular intervals around the conference table. The inmate had made no sound coming in across the green pile carpeting, nor in resting the can on the simple cork disk rimmed with black plastic. Earlier during the week, I had noticed the man, along with another convict, dusting the warden’s office. I had seen this first thing every morning, before Cain arrived, when I checked in at the administration
building. Silently the pair of dusters, in state-issued jeans and work shirts, passed their spotless rags over the picture frames and fax machine, the blades of the ceiling fan and the leather seat of the warden’s desk chair. All was as clean as the dark wood of the table, which reflected Cain’s face.

  He sipped his Dr Pepper, spoke in his faintly scratchy, Southern-accented voice, and a few minutes later another man came in from behind my shoulder, unheard, and set something down before Cain. This was an assistant warden, and his offering, a knife, was laid on the glossy surface as gently as the drink. The weapon had a crude cylindrical handle and a rough eight-inch blade. The shakedown crew had just caught someone trying to take it onto the Main Yard.

  “Yes,” Cain told me, gesturing with the shank to demonstrate what it could do, “we find these. This is a phenomenal prison, but it’s not a perfect prison. And we shouldn’t have been talking about all those good things before we talked about security. Those clubs, that church, you can’t have any of that before security. I wish they’d have taken you to that ditch-bank deal the other day.”

  The call for help had come in over the truck’s radio while I’d been touring the grounds. “Out of control, it’s out of control,” the dispatcher’s voice had gone on for minutes, giving the location. I’d asked my guide to take me there, but he had demurred, unsure the warden would want me as witness. Two inmates, it turned out, were battling each other with ditch-bank blades, sharp-edged hoes with six-foot handles. They were out with a farm line, mounted guard over them. The guard fired into the air; the inmates ignored it, swung at each other’s faces. He fired a second time up at the sky. One prisoner chopped into the other’s scalp. Cain drove into the field as the fight finally came under control. “I told that freeman,” he recalled for me, “ ‘There’s no such thing as a second warning shot.’ I told him, in front of all those free folks and all those inmates, ‘Next time, shoot both of ’em.’ I wanted them all to know it. I wish they’d have let you see it.”

  Later I found out that Littell Harris—dreadlocked, bearded, recently released from Camp J—had been in that farm line. He told a different, or perhaps more complete, account of what had been said. The guard had protested to Cain that other inmates were trying to break up the fight. If he fired down at the two men, he risked hitting one of the others. “I don’t care who it is,” Cain answered. “Kill some of ’em, open fire, that’ll stop ’em.”

  I didn’t know whether to believe Littell’s version. I still don’t know. It didn’t matter terribly to me either way. If Cain had said those words, he didn’t mean them literally. And I was taken with the paradoxes of the warden, his talk of forgiveness and enforcement, his quoting from the New Testament and, two hours into our long first meeting, from a book called Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, which his teenage son had given him. “ ‘Leaders must expect continued improvement in their Huns.’ ”

  Was he concerned by the contradiction, Jesus and vanquishing general? “I have to be both.” He picked up the shank again. “No convict can improve himself if he’s worried about this going through his back.”

  And almost all the inmates had spoken well of him, even though I’d maneuvered so staff were out of earshot. They’d told me how he’d debated on TV against the New Orleans D.A., arguing for the release of elderly, infirm prisoners, and for a second chance for changed men. The Angolite had written, “Cain is as much concerned with events outside the prison as he is with internal problems. He is aware that prisoner bashing is the vogue, and that anyone who argues on prisoners’ behalf will be ridiculed by posturing politicians,” and then the magazine had detailed the courageous TV appearance and a series of radio and newspaper interviews Cain had done. He was on their side.

  Of the legislators and past Angola wardens who, he told me, didn’t like him, the charioteer said, “It’s there in the Bible. No one likes a prophet close to home.”

  A second Dr Pepper was delivered as soon as he’d drained the first. He declared of five thousand men, five thousand murderers and rapists and armed robbers, “I am their daddy.” He referred back to Attila the Hun and said, “All people aren’t born leaders of men. It’s an honor to be one.” And while his excesses kept me off balance, the fact was his domain was amazingly peaceful. Besides a momentary shoving match, the confiscated knife and the fight on the radio were the closest I’d come to any violence, to any hint of violence, during the week I’d spent seeing every part of Angola. Everything was clean. Every inmate was polite. Even when I factored in their need to impress the visiting writer, the civility was remarkable. This was a world of the worst criminals, a fallen world, brought to order.

  The striking tranquillity at Angola—confirmed by the ACLU’s National Prison Project and Louisiana’s own watchdogs—could not be credited to Warden Cain alone. Twenty-one years ago conditions had been so anarchic and murderous a federal judge had ruled that the prison “shocked the conscience” and breached the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment. Reform had begun then. Reform—but the reclamation of men was Cain’s own standard. In an era when rehabilitation was a concept for fools, he said urgently, “This penitentiary is about changing lives.” To men who had followed the most immediate needs of the self, he taught the self-abnegation of religion. Spirit over flesh. God over ego. The warden aimed not merely at warehousing inmates safely, but at rebuilding them, at redeeming them, whether in terms of his Southern Baptist belief or in religious terms more broad (“Love thy neighbor…”) or simply in the sense of learning to live in some valuable way, without the impulses that lead to destroying others, to self-destruction.

  “Wouldn’t you like to run this prison?” Cain asked me.

  I laughed but felt: Yes, I would like the chance to bring so much good into being.

  He had to leave for a meeting in Baton Rouge. He asked me to ride with him in his car so we could keep talking. He would have his press secretary follow us and drive me back. His press secretary and I had laid out a different itinerary. I looked toward her. “He’s never made that kind of invitation before,” she said. Cain seemed to sense what I did, an affinity between a Baptist-Cracker-Warden and a Journalist-Yankee-Jew.

  What would become my year at Angola began, effectively, then, though two months would pass before I asked the warden formally for such long-term access to his prison. Already I imagined what the growing affection between us could bring: the latitude to get to know the inmates, to follow them through their daily lives without a staff escort—a rare chance, wardens of maximum-security penitentiaries being notorious for excluding the press, or for directing carefully what little was seen and heard. Privacy would be crucial to answering the first question that would drive my year: Could Warden Cain really change lives? I needed the inmates’ honesty. And to answer the second, I needed their intimacy. Given their endless sentences, what exactly were these men living for?

  Once, I had been through a federal trial of a large-scale drug dealer who received, upon conviction, a mandatory term of life without parole. My wife was the prosecutor. Though I had rooted for her victory and didn’t feel much for the defendant (who stared at her arrogantly throughout the trial and who’d already squandered his second chances), the sentence, however inevitable once the verdict came in, shallowed my lungs and thinned the blood in my legs and made me want to cry out in panic. How could that man exist—even contemplate existing-for the rest of his life in prison? I would kill myself, I thought reflexively.

  With the most infrequent exceptions, Angola’s inmates did not kill themselves. Each year, scarcely a handful tried. And now, with the warden’s trust, I might understand.

  Out of nothing, out of less than nothing, out of a place where men declared themselves by spraying each other with feces, what kinds of lives could the inmates build and why did they bother? With so few who would ever leave, Angola should have been a pure Hobbesian universe, where sheer animalism ruled. If it was something significantly more, what a miracle that wou
ld be. To observe it would bring me more than understanding, it would bring comfort. That even when all the artifice of society, all we erect to blind ourselves to our deepest beings—that animalistic core—was stripped away, there was still something higher, something striving. To witness this would be to know—palpably—that what we call the human spirit was something more than a pretty veil obscuring a darker awareness.

  And if I could find enough that was positive at Angola, whether in its barbaric rodeo or within the prison’s caves of cinder block, I could feel in the improbable goodness a hint that there was, as the true believers say, a reason for everything and that all the world was guided in a mysterious, beneficent direction. Ridiculous as it may sound, I sensed that at the prison I might find affirmation for my own tenuous faith in God.

  So I got into the warden’s car. He pulled out past the the penitentiary sign that bore his name. We discussed Biblical passages and Angola’s bloody history. We ranged back to the nineteenth century and convict-leasing, and returned to the present, while he drove eighty down the winding state highway inmates call the Snake Road, the only way to and from the prison.

  My chances of finding reassurance and affirmation at Angola were much increased by Warden Cain’s determination to elicit the good in his men. And switching between Jesus and Attila the Hun, he himself was an example of the elevated within the Hobbesian. But there may have been yet another reason for my attraction to him. I cannot be sure it was a reason at all, and if it was, I cannot guess its importance, great or small. While Cain spoke of himself as the inmates’ father, he became, in a certain way, my own.

  My real father had spent his working life as a public health official. In tiny, rational ways he tried to improve upon human fallibility. His legacies were a study leading to child guards in the windows of New York City, and a more efficient Emergency Medical Service in Seattle. Undoubtedly, indirectly, his work had saved lives. Yet I had always been somewhat disappointed in it. There was something lacking in his pragmatic career, in his reasonableness that was so unshakable—and in his scorn for all things religious. Warden Cain was his opposite. Warden Cain wrestled with human fallibility on a giant scale, embodied in the convicts. He believed in miracles and meant to carry one out. He had preached to his inmates, most of whom lived in open dorms of sixty-four men, “You are your brother’s keeper. Your bed is your house, the aisle is the street, and two beds down is two houses down. That dorm is your neighborhood, and this is your community.”