God of the Rodeo

by Daniel Bergner

  But gradually Terry started listening to Rev, partly because Rev made him think of Ora. Her explanation for Terry’s crimes was that “his mama wasn’t religious people” and “didn’t knock the stink out of him when he was doing some nasty cussin’.” Now, every phone call, she told him to “get off into that Bible and ask the Lord to clean your filthy heart and mouth.” Maybe it was that simple. Rev, too, made it seem so. “Man, straighten up,” Rev said, and analyzed all of Terry’s troubles, at Angola and before: “You just got hanging with the wrong crowd.” Though his prison record had improved over the past two years, Terry wasn’t so sure. Just a few weeks ago, a kitchen guard had rebuffed a suggestion—“You don’t tell me what to do”—and left him trembling. Enraged. Lips literally shivering. Mind racing so fast he had no mind at all. Too much like when he’d turned the ax around and used the blade again and again and again.

  Yet he hadn’t gone after the guard, had only trembled, then cleaned the ovens as he’d been told. And at last he gave in to Rev’s lobbying. He held hands in the circle and prayed.

  Rev’s group of ten or twelve met every day inside the vegetable cooler. Before their shifts stirring mammoth vats of gravy with utensils the size of spades, or frying eight hundred fish cakes, the inmates shut the door, kept the light off, took in the refrigeration and the view of the fields through the one small window. Then, surrounded by a huge potato peeler, a row of sinks, and shelves filled with okra and eggplant, they clasped hands and bowed heads. There was a man in squarish, state-issued eyeglasses, another with “Man of God” tooled into his tan belt, a convict who’d just dashed in from the weight pile and whose T-shirt was drenched.

  Each in turn, some barely murmuring a line and others going on for minutes, they asked for things all-encompassing, things specific. “Lord, let us decrease that You may increase…. I’m praying for them to make me a clerk, Lord…. Touch us with the faith to accept everything as Your will…. I need You to stop that trickeration today, glory hallelujah…. Help us to put on the whole armor of God, O Lord, to wrestle with the flesh, O Lord, we are flesh, O Lord, make us spirit, O Lord, make us better than we are, O Lord, shield us in the armor of faith, O Lord, bar that devil by Your armor, O Lord, and let us remind ourselves that even while the world wants to see us fall, O Lord, we got a host of witnesses up there wanting us to stand up, O Lord…. We thank you, in the name of Jesus, we thank you for bringing us Brother Terry this day….”

  Terry said little, but joined them before every shift that week. Then, on the third Saturday in October, he hesitated, put them off, told them no, and finally followed them to church that evening in what was known as the camp’s visiting “shed,” though it was simply a large room in the cinder-block complex. The Faith City International ministry had been coming to Angola every month for eight years. Rev had been helping with their services since the beginning as part of their “praise team.” Faith City happened not to be one of the new religious groups taking their message to the prison since Warden Cain had put out word for visiting preachers, since he had brought full-scale revivals to Angola, since he had declared, “This prison is open for religion.” But Terry could decide to attend church at the last minute, rather than having to submit his name in advance for the “call-out” sheet, because Cain wanted his inmates to worship.

  Was that why Terry went that night? So some captain who knew the warden might see him filing in? So his name would appear on some list of the faithful he imagined Cain compiling? Was that why he had joined Rev’s circle in the first place?

  To reach the service he left his dorm through the steel door, turned down the outdoor Walk, passed through a series of checkpoints with gates that could be slammed and locked in emergency. He lined up along a fence, still two massive barred portals from the front of the camp, and waited until a guard let everyone through another checkpoint into the shed. Inside, black plastic chairs, their backs stenciled faintly I.W.F. for the Inmate Welfare Fund that had purchased them, were aligned in precise rows, the brown laminate tables pushed to one wall. A Coke machine (for use by visitors only; the inmates could not have money), a Pac-Man machine, and a mural—this one a seascape with dolphins, a killer whale, a three-masted ship and a sky of puffy clouds-were the church’s side chapels. The pulpit was a dingy white wood, a small cross raised on its face.

  Rev and the rest of the praise team, work shirts ironed and pens clipped businesslike to breast pockets, sat up front. Terry wasn’t going to get himself trapped up there. He took a chair in the middle of a row about two-thirds back. An inmate tuned an electric guitar, another checked the keyboard’s amp. Terry stared down at the crease in his jeans. He always slipped a pack to the laundry man to get his clothes pressed, but tonight’s jeans were special, his own, the pair he’d ordered from a catalog as opposed to state-issue. Below the crease were white leather Converse high-tops, again distinct from the no-brand state sneakers he wore in the kitchen. This was the outfit he put on for his rare visitors. And he’d had time, as he gravitated toward coming here, to have his close-cropped hair trimmed by the camp barber.

  Many of the convicts around him were just as meticulously dressed. Levi’s or Lee blue jeans—subtly (or dramatically within the narrow confines of permitted dress) the men made this night different. And Sister Jackie, the leader of Faith City, encouraged the distinction. “They should feel they are going to a normal church,” she told me later. That evening she wore a black skirt and jacket, the jacket adorned with large gold buttons and, descending from the shoulders, a multi-layered arrangement of gold chiffon. Forty or fifty convicts waited for her to begin. I asked if she ever worried about their motives, that they might be trying to impress the warden, or dreaming of impressing the pardon board should they ever come before it. She said no. She did not worry. She hardly thought about it. “People in the regular world use church and God for all kinds of reasons—it’s the same in the penitentiary. But I would say most of the inmates I see from the pulpit are sincere. At that moment. How they are affected afterwards, how deeply the experience changes them, that isn’t my place to judge.”

  Terry watched this heavy, pretty woman, with perfect teeth and flawless brown skin and short, waved hair and gold plumage at her shoulders, say hello to the praise team and anyone else who waited his turn. She gave them each a long hug.

  “Hallelujah!” she cried, taking the pulpit. “Won’t you praise the Lord tonight?” She shut her eyes. “We welcome you, Lord, we glorify you, Lord, we magnify you, Lord, we love you, Lord, everybody stand and give the Lord a wave, a wave offering tonight….” And most everybody did, stretching both arms toward the rough stucco ceiling and swaying, though five or six at the back remained in their seats and chatted, enjoying the air-conditioning, and two sipped coffee and joked in open amusement. A lone guard sat near the entry-way, toying with his clipboard. “I bind every spirit of condemnation in Jesus’ name!” Sister Jackie declared. Terry swayed dutifully, rigidly.

  She beckoned another Faith City minister, a squat woman in floral, to a second microphone. Sister Jackie asked the musicians to step up and some of the praise team to join her, and Sister Jackie led the singing:

  We’re going up to the high places

  We’re going up to the high places

  We’re going up to the high places

  And tear the devil’s kingdom down!

  It seemed her voice wrapped from the end of the chorus around again to the beginning without a breath. The sound was big as a soloist’s in a fine gospel choir, and it made the plastic chairs, the yellowing ceiling, the dingy pulpit into joyful things. The praise team clapped, dancing almost in unison like back-up singers, yet also on the brink of disarray, chaos. One of them, a wispy inmate no older than nineteen, broke into a stationary hop every time she swept into the chorus again.

  Run, children, run

  This is the time to believe

  She surged into a new, even faster hymn, hardly pausing for the organ’s crescendo, and two convicts di
d what the lyrics instructed-ran around the room, circling the congregation, lap after lap until the words changed.

  Dance, children, dance

  This is the time to believe

  The wispy boy rattled a tambourine, and hopped and kicked and whirled with the abandon of Hasidim at a wedding. The runners switched to skipping in place. Off in a corner, eyes closed, one man gestured at the ceiling, furling and unfurling his fingers, apparently talking to God.

  Sing, children, sing

  Very quietly, Terry did.

  Sister Jackie did one last hymn, this one slow and a capella,

  Anointing fall on me

  Touch my hands, my mouth, my heart

  Anointing fall on me

  Fill my life, Lord, every part

  and steered the congregation toward prayer, everyone soon muttering separate words and she shouting over them, “In Jesus’ name I take authority over Satan’s power…. O yes yes yes yes yes.… O work with me tonight, work with me…. We know not how to pray but… we enter in by the blood….” Terry tried mumbling praise to God along with the man beside him, but just as in the vegetable cooler, he didn’t feel comfortable saying much. “O wonderful,” the inmates spoke around him, “O praise Jesus, O I know you hear me, Lord, O wonderful wonderful wonderful wonderful.” And then, led by Sister Jackie, whose tilted throat glistened with sweat and whose mouth produced “O yadareeba yasheeda. O badatimba kimba o shey,” they began speaking in tongues. “Abinda binda binda binda binda,” skidded from one man’s lips. It went on and on, she sliding back and forth between language, “Come into our presence, O Lord,” and these other calls, “O yadareeba,” while some inmates stayed deep in their strange sounds, and others didn’t speak but clapped randomly, loudly, without rhythm. A few turned blindly to the walls, palms lifted as though to feel their own shadows.

  Now and then the anarchy of syllables fell into a lull, and during one softening a man two rows ahead of Terry, a man with his body doubled over and his face buried in the crook of his arm, could be heard murmuring, “Shastada koondo koondolo po li ri ri koondo koondo koondolo.” The voice pleaded, dwindled, whimpered and all but sniveled, before it went on begging for something it could name only in these nonwords. “O li ri ri ri ri.” The syllables became more and more broken. They became only exhalations struggling to form consonants, like the sound of someone struggling to explain himself after he’s burst into sobbing. But the effort was minor, surrendering. It ended not in any explanation but in exhausted gratitude: “O thank you, thank you, Jesus, thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you.”

  Terry kept his head bowed and kept quiet. He studied the crease in his jeans. He didn’t feel qualified to be a part of this. He knew the Spirit was supposed to lead him to the right words, the right sounds, and he didn’t feel any Spirit entering into him.

  “Some of you,” Sister Jackie emerged into preaching, “are in some dead situations. Dead, dead, dead. And it’s worse than that. You’re in a cave. And that’s not all. There’s a stone at the front of that cave, a rock, a boulder you can’t move, and it’s laying there on your heart and blocking the exit from that pit, and it’s crushing you, it won’t let you breathe, and there’s nothing you can do about it, because you’re dead, you’re not living, you’re entombed! And all you have to do,” her voice thinned, as though she were a kindergarten teacher directing children in their first collage, “is say, ‘I believe.’ That’s all. ‘I believe.’ That’s the only price for getting that rock rolled away. That’s the only price you have to pay for Jesus’ love. ‘I believe.’ How many of you are in that tomb? How many of you are without Jesus? How many of you will let Jesus take your pain? How many of you will speak that faith, ‘Jesus died for me’? It’s so simple. ‘Jesus died for me.’ We’re all sinners. How many of you will accept the free gift of his love? How many of you will take what’s offered to everyone and barred to nobody. Nobody. It’s so cheap. You don’t even need to make four cents an hour! You just pay with your anguish. Should I make it sound a little bit harder? Should I raise the price and cut back supply? Get everyone rushing up here then. How many of you are ready? How many of you are ready to come up here tonight and be saved?”

  Five men went. They lined before her. The praise team stood at their backs, hands spread in the air a few inches from their shoulder blades, to catch them in case their knees buckled. “For the wages of sin is death,” she recited, and asked the congregation to repeat. “But God showed his love for us while we were yet sinners.

  “Do you hear that?” she broke off to ask. “We all fell when the Spirit left Adam in that garden. We all sank into our tombs…”

  Terry was not among the five. He felt he was not qualified.

  Next, she wandered down the center aisle. The electric organ stabbed out instrumental hymns, making the room itself bend with longing. “Someone,” she said, “is having circulation trouble tonight. I don’t know what kind of trouble, but it’s somewhere, I can feel it, where the circulation flows. Someone—”

  A hand went up. She heard the details, laid her palm on the inmate’s kidney. “I speak the mind of Christ. I call out infirmity in Jesus’ name. God wants to strengthen you, yes, that’s it, that’s it, yes….”

  Someone else suffered with “reoccurring thoughts, so many reoccurring thoughts you can’t even depressurate things”; she asked who that person was, curved her fingers over his forehead. “In the name of Jesus I stay your thoughts!” And someone ailed with one leg longer than the other and with pain in his ribs, someone who did not want to make himself known. Her gold chiffon shoulders drifted through the room. She crossed the border again away from English, then returned. “Someone, O Lord.”

  It was not that Terry didn’t recognize his own injury from the first Sunday’s rodeo, but that his legs were perfectly normal. He said nothing. She came behind him. She touched his shoulder, leaned him forward, brushed her hand across the back of his rib cage. “It’s going to be all right,” she said, calmly as the best mother would, before groaning, “We adore you, O Lord.” She stepped around to his row, moved the empty chair in front of him, and, bending, held one white leather Converse in each hand, drawing his feet toward her on the floor. She paired them, and revealed that the left did not reach as far as the right. The bottom of its sneaker did not match with the other but came only to the seam where leather and tread met. “It’s going to be all right,” she said again.

  She returned to the pulpit and asked the minister in floral to bring Terry up to the front. He didn’t need the help, though his thighs felt watery. He laughed to himself. Nothing was going to happen. Sister Jackie asked the other minister to bring a chair, and told Terry to sit down. She told him to stretch out his legs. She told him to lift his arms above his head. She straddled his shins, her black skirt touching them like the hem of a curtain. She prayed half intelligibly, half in that other language. She stepped back, took his ankles, slid his legs apart on the tile. She brought them together. He saw that now they matched exactly. She straddled him again, large body tipping forward, glistening neck near his face and breasts close to his shoulders and palms pressed to the sides of his ribs. His arms in the air were shivering. He felt his chest vibrating, his lips trembling, his chin about to shatter. She hugged him. “It’s going to be all right,” she said once more, “that’s just the Spirit moving through you.”

  The next day, the third Sunday in October, without pain in his ribs and, conceivably, with legs more evenly aligned, Terry Hawkins won the Guts & Glory. Whatever the physical improvements wrought upon him, they played no role in his triumph. To grasp the chip he simply let the bull knock him down—and was lucky enough to come up in one piece. But he felt himself to be a slightly different person, with different prospects. The money was part of it. “What you need?” he joked with a guard behind the stadium. “Fifty bucks?” The money may also have been the least of it. He felt that between Rev and Sister Jackie he had been drawn down a new path. He was going to �
�get off into that Bible.” He was going to please Ora. He was going to become a good person. And for this, and for his bravery in winning the Guts & Glory and, earlier, the Bust-Out, he would be rewarded. Warden Cain and all the assistant wardens had seen what he could do, what he was willing to do, with those bulls. He would be made trusty. There would be a job with the range crew. He would be assigned his own horse and the freedom to ride along the levee at the edge of the prison grounds. He would rise to the top in this life he was sentenced to.

  That Sunday and the next were filled with promise. The sun was bright, and the crowd, overflowing the bleachers, claimed the dirt beside the ring. Earlier they had thronged the hobby-craft tables, bought the cowhide belts, the strange sculptures—shaped like a giant’s fingers—made from cypress limbs and etched with scenes of leaping deer, the wallets, the birdhouses. The inmates would make enough money to order wood and leather and dye to last most of the next twelve months. Even the convict who told me his customers haggled over prices as though he were subhuman, as though “something gross” were attached to his body, seemed to be enjoying his brisk sale of zodiac key chains.

  And over at the photo concessions, where the fans got themselves locked in that freestanding jail cell—young couples; fathers and sons; toddlers coaxed to press their noses to the bars—the convict photographer looked pleased. In this way, he raised money for the Angola Sober Group. I asked if he was bothered by the element of mockery. “No, it’s not like that,” he answered with what seemed a twelve-step graduate’s rigid oblivion. “This is my chance to have a little contact with the public. I’m not an inmate for today. Today I’m free.” Minutes later, two round women smiled uneasily behind the bars. “You remember us from last year?” one of them asked. And the other said, “Yeah, now you got to hug him, Charlene.” Holding her half-clarified Polaroid between two fingers, Charlene wrapped her arms momentarily around his neck.