Buckkey was the exception. Eighty percent of Angola’s inmates never saw their families at all; Buckkey’s stayed in close touch and drove the two hours regularly to the prison. He had just designed the invitation for his youngest sister’s wedding—fancy lettering and swirly adornments. He had worked with the fountain pen his mother had sent. The day after Christmas, when he was taken to the trusty park, he saw his wife, two of his brothers, one sister-in-law, three sisters, and his mother waiting for him at a picnic table on the hill. The gift of the runner-up buckle had changed nothing. His son was not there. The buckle, his wife later told me, sat in a box where she kept it for whenever Chris wanted it. So far he didn’t.
“You didn’t bring your kids to prison?” Buckkey asked me, when he returned to the range-crew headquarters, to immerse himself in welding trailer hitches, after his family’s visit. He liked to jab at me with deadpan questions.
“Not this time,” I said. “Maybe for my daughter’s fifth birthday party.”
“Where are they?”
“Home.”
“Well, what the hell are you doing down here then?”
“Came to see you.”
“Yeah, you’ve got your priorities straight.” He rolled his eyes. “Thanks, Buckkey.”
“Take it from an all-American dad like myself.”
That holiday week, I went to find the convicts I’d met at the rodeo, the men who would show me what it meant to fashion one’s life inside a maximum security prison, the men who would show me what people pushed to the absolute limit, pushed by their own deeds beyond the edge of human society, to a place that felt like the edge of the earth, were capable of. What life, what striving, what humanity, was possible here? In what ways, direct or indirect, would Warden Cain’s leadership touch them as the year unfolded? And could a man like Littell Harris—hurler of feces in Camp J—find a way to rejoin society?
But first I wandered through death row. There one inmate had cut out a small construction-paper Christmas tree and asked the sergeant to pin it to the bulletin board on the tier. Little by little the inmate had dressed the tree with more cutouts. A guard tower took the place of a star at the top. The light in the tower glowed. Shackles and handcuffs and jailer’s keys hung from the branches.
Otherwise, the holiday didn’t make anything much different. In the death-row cells, the men lay inert in their boxer shorts twenty-three hours each day. Once or twice during the week they shuffled off to a religious service, their legs in chains and their hands not only cuffed but restricted, by means of a belt and metal loop, to within inches of their navels. When they greeted one another in the meeting room it was with the most abbreviated, waist-high wave or fist pump. When they turned the pages of their Bibles they might have been afflicted with M.S. The chaplain, as always, brought his acoustic guitar. They requested “I Can’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore,” and he sang in a loud, plaintive, unmelodic wail. When the inmates tapped their feet slightly, the leg chains, surprisingly delicate, shivered between their ankles or slapped almost inaudibly against the floor.
Out among the general population, an old skinny man with a long gray beard jogged for hours. He circled the Main Yard over and over, in one-mile laps, following the dirt path worn at the base of the fence line. In the middle of the yard, eight or ten men worked out at the weight pile, a crude setup of rusty benches and lat machines with broken pulleys. The winter influx of sea gulls had descended on the grass. A pair of stray cats humped on a ledge outside one of the dorms. “That bitch is getting her issue,” someone said. Inside the dorms half the beds were filled with men dozing, white sheets pulled up over their eyes, up over their heads.
Various inmate clubs—the Toastmasters, the Toy Shop—put on holiday banquets for their members, served special meals they had paid for: a chicken cutlet; pound cake and ice cream; plenty of donuts. Of those lucky enough to belong to the clubs, a few had family to sit with, a handful had wives or girlfriends to make out with. By next Christmas, their families encouraged them, they would be out. By next Christmas they never were, but again put their wispy hopes in some glitch they’d found in their trial transcripts, or in the process of clemency. The lifers’ would mail off their applications to the pardon board. (Many could barely write well enough to fill them out.) Months later the fortunate would be issued a hearing date. Following their sessions in front of the board, the still more fortunate would be recommended to the governor. Then they would wait for what everyone knew as “the gold seal,” a letter bearing the executive’s embossed insignia in the corner. It commuted the prisoner’s life sentence to a fixed number of years. It did not mean that the inmate would be released anytime soon, only that, as the convicts said, he had “numbers instead of alphabets.” Through his first eleven months in office, the current governor had approved none of the board’s sparing recommendations. During the weeks leading up to December 25, when Louisiana governors had traditionally commuted at least a few life sentences, he had still reduced none.
The men held no expectation of release. Many refused so much as the wish. The newest member of the range crew said, “I look to die here. Period. One day I hope to be as good a cowboy as Johnny Brooks.” They just didn’t want to be buried in the powder-blue press-board coffins the state provided for those bodies not taken out for family funerals. The older men had all heard about those coffins, how the burial crew had to lay the dirt down in spits, because any stray rock would crack right through the lid that was no sturdier than Styrofoam.
But Littell knew he was out. His life in the punishment cells five months behind him, this Christmas Day he lay on his cot in the dorm, cushion of dreadlocks beneath his head, and counted the days until release. The dreadlocks had been a seven-year project, had nothing to do with any Rastafarian beliefs, were a declaration to himself that he was untouchable at the core. Nothing that happened, nothing about Angola, nothing that was done to him or that he did, could matter. His rarely cut beard completed the statement.
When he had first come to Angola in 1984, after serving two years of his sentence in a parish jail, he had been stunned. He had never seen so many black people in one place. Yes, his neighborhood had been all black, and the detention centers of his youth had been mostly black, and so had the jail. But this felt different, overwhelming. Blacks marching off in the field lines, hoes slung over their shoulders; blacks shining the guards’ shoes. Even back then Littell was not completely uneducated. He’d done moderately well in his detention-center classrooms. He knew, as he was shown to his first Angola bed, that Louisiana’s population was about one-third black. He knew, seeing that this huge maximum-security prison was filled with black people, that something was wrong.
Much later, at J, he would start reading some history. But right away he had decided there were only three kinds of inmates at Angola: field niggers and house niggers and those who rebelled. Field niggers were everyone from the obedient cotton picker to the trusty with the range crew. House niggers were everyone from the dorm orderly to the editor of the Angolite. The rebels were harder to identify. He sensed—rightly—no uprisings in the air. So he decided that the rebels were simply those who would not play by the rules. It didn’t matter whose bones they broke in the process, the guards’ or each other’s. Mostly they broke each other’s. Littell became one of them and stayed one of them, his mission to avoid being taken advantage of by freemen or convicts. He felt sure that his nickname, “Outlaw,” was a sign of his success.
The dreadlocks were part of his defiance, his resolve never to be the freemen’s slave. But he hoped the uncut hair protected him, as well, against the violent person guards and inmates had turned him into. He hoped it was like a buffer, forming a private zone. He tried to persuade himself that within that zone he was someone else.
Yet he couldn’t be sure who that someone else was. He knew that for the past several years he had read far more than the average convict; he believed he could pass his GED; he told himself that once these last weeks wer
e over he would never, never, be back in prison. Beyond this brief list, his private self was vague. And he knew that Angola hadn’t quite created his public, violent one. He knew that white people hadn’t quite created it. Once, just two or three years ago, one of the three black inmates who had attempted to spark racial protest by randomly choosing and killing a guard in 1972 had lectured him from the next cell, “You a pretty intelligent guy. Did a white man hold your hand and bring you in that store and put a pistol in your fingers?” Littell worried his public self was his only one.
And how would he change when he got out? He would have no money to speak of. He had spent so much time locked-down in the cells, his savings account had almost nothing in two-cent set-asides. When he was let go, the state would give him ten dollars and the price of a bus ticket back to the city of his crime, his home, Lake Charles. He hadn’t seen his mother for ten years. He hadn’t seen anyone in his family for six. Who was going to be waiting for him? What was going to turn him into someone different?
His Christmas gift was a rush of reminders about who he was. The memories ended, after the feces and the batterings with padlocks and the stabbings and the recollection of unzipping his bloody sweatshirt and of a guard passing out at the sight of him half-disemboweled and of being driven to an emergency room in Baton Rouge and of losing forty pounds and almost dying in the hospital, ankles ever shackled to the bed rails, and still, when he returned, carrying on as he had—the memories ended with a cellblock orderly who had stolen his radio to pay off a drug debt. The orderly denied it. “He played me cheap,” Littell explained to me. “He knew I was going to know that it was him, and he was thinking maybe I’m going to let him get away with that.”
Littell didn’t deal with retribution right away. A year later, they both wound up living at the same outcamp, where Littell enlisted the help of a towering, pumped-up convict named Popsickle. He had another accomplice distract the dorm guard in conversation—it wasn’t difficult; the guard faced twelve solitary, woozy hours in the steamy air. In the game room, Popsickle threatened the orderly with a knife. Littell intervened. The orderly was so terrified he was willing to believe in this act of kindness. When Popsickle backed off, apparently respecting Littell’s reputation, Littell told the orderly, “Just make it look like you’re my bitch. That way he won’t do you nothing. Just go in the shower and make it look like I’m fucking you in the ass. Just take this tube, just greaze up, I’m not going to stick it in.”
Then, as Littell recounted it, “I got him in the back of the fucking shower and slid my dick in his ass and claimed him for ho.”
Littell had no doubts that he was heterosexual. Lately his most regular fantasy centered around an old, torn-off cover from Vanity Fair. It showed the nude profile of the actress Demi Moore, eight months pregnant. “I never wanted to have no fucking sex with no man, bro. I just did that to totally humiliate somebody. When somebody was to make me angry, I fucked him in his ass.”
But about who he was, he was worried.
I risked expressing to Littell what I sometimes felt, that Angola was an unexpectedly positive place.
“Man,” he said, “Angola is a fucking super-negative piece of negative fucking shit.”
I didn’t persist. I planned to follow him out. Even if I hadn’t, he wasn’t someone I cared to antagonize. As to his analysis of Angola, it was all a matter of perspective and degree. I had anticipated the worst and was finding much that was better. But it wouldn’t have been difficult to prove Littell right. Though his existence as a “rebel” was the exception, I knew there were others like him and those who did what he did with lesser frequency. I knew as well that while most of the guards tried to offer some measure of vigilance, of deterrence, there were plenty who tried only to get through their twelve-hour shifts without dozing off, and some who made themselves willfully oblivious, and a few who took payment for their oblivion, and a few who, in their daily interactions with convicts, went beyond the typical brusque handling, the kick at the bedpost to wake an oversleeping inmate.
Since I had first arrived at Angola four months ago, two cellblock guards, in separate incidents at separate camps, had been arrested for forcing inmates to perform blowjobs repeatedly through the bars. Both had eventually been bit—the convicts knew that damage to the guard’s penis was generally the only way they would be believed. In other, similar cases, inmates had held the semen in their mouths, spit it into the cellophane of a cigarette wrapper, folded the wrapper tightly, and mailed it to a lawyer with their plea for help.
Forces seemed to conspire against the better impulses of the employees. Their pay was low, with a scale that began around $15,000 a year, and awarded captains, who’d put in years of service, about $30,000. At night they were locked alone inside dorms with sixty-four convicts. The guards were unarmed and, in most cases, didn’t even have a walkie-talkie, just a signal box that would bring help guaranteed to arrive within three minutes. As a means of containing disturbances, the doors were bolted from the outside. The “key guards” were instructed not to free a colleague until backup was present.
Combined with this vulnerability was a kind of authority few people could have anywhere else. The lowliest guard could tell a great number of men what to do. He could be extremely blunt in giving his orders. And if he was put on one of the shakedown teams he could, in searching for weapons and drugs, clear out entire dorms and tear through the belongings of those inmates, ransack their “houses,” their locker boxes, leaving everything from rolls of toilet paper to photo albums scattered across the floor along with the upturned benches (to check for contraband stashed in screw holes) and the contents of overturned garbage cans. In fact, he would do this, was expected to leave their homes torn through, and probably couldn’t help being aware that he had this control over killers, couldn’t help feeling, as one assistant warden put it, “that superpower, like your chest grew six inches under that badge.” (Any softening of the atmosphere that might come from female employees was limited. Most women were stationed in the towers or at the control panels.) It was the very rare guard who stuck his erection through cell bars and demanded service. It was the very rare guard who gathered a colleague or two and beat an inmate for some past wrong. But a mixture of indifference and hostility seemed a requirement of the job.
Yet within this place, to whose negative-fucking-shittiness he had contributed a good deal, Danny Fabre—ears jutting at right angles and ribs healed poorly, still overlapping—appeared to have turned a corner. At the Toastmasters’ Christmas banquet, in the Main Prison visiting shed, where the club president delivered a hearty welcome to the scattered family members and sang a hokey version of “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” and where dinner began with onion soup, a slab of unmelting cheese floating at the surface, Danny took his Forgotten Voices Toastmasters club card out of his jeans pocket. “See here what it says?” He read from the back. “ ‘The mission of a Toastmasters Club is to provide a mutually supportive and positive learning environment in which every member has the opportunity to develop communication and leadership skills, which in turn fosters self-confidence and personal growth.’ ”
He stood close as we spoke at the back of the room. Everything about his features was exaggerated. Besides the yellow-tinged eyes and the ears ineffectively curtained by a back-sweep of blond hair, his cheeks were inordinately hollow above a chiseled jawline. And his hands were heavy, broad across the top of the palms and long and thick in the fingers. He showed me his “Communication and Leadership Program” manual, issued by Toastmasters International. He turned to the evaluation pages for his first few speeches. Next to the questions “Was the speech topic appropriate for this particular assignment?” and “Did the speaker employ vocal variety to enhance the speech?” Danny showed me that he had received, from the inmate evaluator, checks under “satisfactory” and “excellent.”
Ten years ago, I reminded myself, he had been so volatile that during his triad his feet were not only shackled to
each other but chained to the courtroom floor. And only this past summer the Toastmasters sponsor, Captain Newsom, had refused to let him into the club. “I know I’ve been King Asshole,” Danny had pledged to Newsom, “but I will prove to you that I’m Toastmasters material.” In September the captain had relented.
Danny pointed out, in the manual, the guidelines for earning “Competent Toastmaster” status within the organization. He pulled over one of the members, so I could see the “CTM” pin-a red laminated tag with a royal blue T etched into a gold circle—he would be able to wear on his white T-shirt after his tenth speech. He talked about the first one he’d given, the big traffic-light timer in his face and the other members in the school chairs around him. He recited the beginning: “Growing up is a hard thing to do, especially when you have one eye, one leg, retardation, or even ears like myself. When one has things that’s wrong with you, that’s out of the ordinary, kids in school, and all around you, seem to pick on you to get a laugh. You have a low self-esteem. You feel like everybody hates you. When one has a physical disorder, you should never tear them down. You should always upgrade them….”
For the first time, I took note of Danny’s voice. It was sonorous, intensely inflected within a confined range, emphatic without ever being loud. It carried just the hint of a southern accent. He bent the word “why.” I heard this over and over when, later in the week, we found an empty attorney conference room and shut ourselves in to talk. But before we came, without any prompting from me, to that question regarding his choking his victim and spearing her through the eye—“Why? I don’t know why I did it. I can’t tell you why I did it. She was a woman, I could have raped her. I didn’t rape her. I didn’t rob her. Why did I do this?”—before all that, he said, “I’m going to tell you something I’ve told to only one other person.”
God of the Rodeo Page 9