God of the Rodeo

by Daniel Bergner

  I thought, You’re going to tell me something that isn’t true.

  He began quietly, slowly: “When I was about eight years old, one morning I wasn’t fixing to go to school ’cause I felt sick. And I told my dad, and,” he paused, “my daddy ended up,” he paused again, “molesting me. And it went on for about four years. But it wasn’t an on and on thing. It was every now and then. And I didn’t know what was happening in my life. But I knew this wasn’t right. And he always scared me about, If you tell your mama, if you tell your brothers, it’s gonna bust the family up. You know, this is why I want to work with children if I ever get out. Because a child can hold something in his mind for so long. And then they explode. See, this is what the world is drawing to. I mean, probably eighty percent of the world has been through some type of abuse. But they don’t talk about it. But I remember when I was twelve. It was a cold night. And my daddy woke me up. I was in a room by myself. And I told him, I stood up in the middle of the bed, ‘This ain’t right. If you touch me again I’ll kill you.’ Where I got that, I don’t know. But he left me alone. And my daddy’s a well-respected man. He’s a beautiful man if you meet him. I forgive my father for what he done. ’Cause in order to be forgiven for the things I’ve done, I had to forgive that past. But it started out that I had to prove, to everybody, that I was a man. I wasn’t going to be no punk. I wasn’t going to be no queer. I was going to prove that. And I started all kinds of fights. Fights, fights, fights, fights. Kicked out of school. I always was a violent person. I hated people. I loved my mother to death….”

  He veered on. The story seemed a clear attempt to win my sympathy, my forgiveness. Or his own. Maybe he had convinced himself of the story’s truth. Maybe he needed the delusion to tolerate his own living. But then again, some inmates had surely suffered through such childhoods, some greater percentage of men in prison than elsewhere….

  “My mom knew something was wrong. And I never told her. She always used to ask me, ‘What do you have hanging over your daddy’s head?’ Because Daddy—from when I said I’d tell—every time I’d get in trouble, he wouldn’t whip me or nothing. She kept asking me. So I had to say something. And I told her Daddy was mixed up with the mafia. And he blowed up a house full of people. And killed them all. And that’s what it was. She didn’t believe me. But I said no, that’s what it was.”

  My skepticism dissolved, partly. The detail of what he’d told his mother—the Mafia, the house blown up—seemed far too ludicrous, too perfectly childlike, to be his later invention.

  “Why did I do this?” Danny asked now. He’d been saying he could have killed any number of people, any of a dozen men he’d fought brutally, battered or slashed outside of bars, anyone who had triggered him in any way, “because that’s the kind of person I was, but I never thought about killing no one….

  “Why did I murder this woman I didn’t even know? All she’d done was let me use her phone. Two times. All she’d done was give me that ride. I think my mind was overloaded. And when she said that? That about I wouldn’t never be nothing?

  “I exploded.”

  It was easy to imagine how quickly Danny had killed her. Besides “Ears,” his other prison nickname was “Popeye,” for the lumps and ridges of muscle he’d once had all over his lean body, and for how suddenly he would put his strength to use. (Lately he had told other inmates about the chance of surgery for his ears. “Don’t go getting that operation now,” they sometimes called out to him, and the first time he’d heard this Danny asked, “Why?”

  “ ’Cause then you wouldn’t be Popeye.” They would miss the entertainment of the fights he was goaded into.)

  He had let the distension of his body shrink over the past year. Still, his shoulders were broad and his forearms were solid and he had those hands. But he said he had gained self-restraint. “I done taken control of myself,” he told me. “That’s what I like about me.” And while he had few kind words for the guards in general, he talked about the staff who were helping him.

  There was the Toastmasters sponsor. A tall man whose uniform pants reached only to his ankles, Captain Newsom carried his skinny body without a hint of physical assertion. And he did not like to speak. He had seventy pen pals—“some full-time, some part-time,” he said—and spent his off hours at his computer, communicating with his unmet friends all over the world. At the Toastmasters meetings, he sat in a corner, sipped his coffee, and never so much as made a comment. When the members forced him to the lectern for “Table Topics,” their competition in impromptu speechmaking, he droned out a few sentences and reclaimed his seat. He was like the high school tennis coach who’d never touched a racket. Newsom took pleasure in watching those meetings. He took pride in Danny’s improvement, and in his own gamble that Danny could keep his destructive emotions under control and function within the club. He told me, when we spoke alone, “Danny’s come a good way since September.” And Danny said gratefully, “He took that chance.”

  Danny praised, as well, his first teacher in the literacy program: “That woman drove me.” When he tested out of the lowest level, she insisted he stay another few weeks, to be sure he was ready. Now, with a new teacher in the next phase, he was learning to use a computerized study program. Last month, the instructor had taught him to use a mouse. “I like hearing that music that plays when I get the right answer,” Danny said with a laugh.

  And he told me he had talked with Warden Cain since his bull ride at the rodeo, walked up to him after a Lifers Association meeting in the visiting shed. Danny had spoken about his ears, how tired he was of “waking up every day with all this picking on me,” about the teaching hospital he had heard of and the surgery being free.

  Cain, Danny said, had listened. He hadn’t walked away. He had focused.

  “I’m going to look into it,” the warden had promised. “I’m going to see what I can do.”

  Terry Hawkins had lost the jumpy bravado I’d noticed when he first explained his Guts & Glory strategy to me in September. Since late October, when he had felt unqualified to approach Sister Jackie’s pulpit for salvation, then been healed in the ribs and legs at her insistence, he no longer slouched with jiggling knees wide apart as we talked. Now his long body remained upright, still. At first, I thought he’d grown more composed. But as I got to know him better at Christmastime, I realized how far he was from calm.

  Terry couldn’t study his case without being haunted. And studying their cases was something the inmates liked to do. Any mistake in the testimony against them—that the crime had happened, say, in a “strip mall” instead of a “shopping plaza”—gave them a sliver of hope, and they would stare at that bit of their transcripts, trying to convince themselves that it could mean reversal and freedom just as soon as they paid one of the counsel substitutes a few packs to file for them. Or, if they had pled guilty, as Terry had, they stared at their police reports, hunting for misstatements there. Often there were many, and so the pleasure of removing these documents from the safe bottom of their locker boxes, and of rediscovering the errors, could be experienced many times each year for decades.

  But whenever Terry started to read his paragraphs, the image of his boss, Mr. Denver Tarter, on that hall floor came at him. The way the gash had been so deep into his throat. He’d almost chopped the man’s head off. The way the blood from the wounds to his forehead had streamed across his bald spot. The way, before Terry had thrown the ax behind the hog-scalding tank, he’d seen Mr. Denver Tarter’s hair stuck to the blade.

  The sound of his boss’s desperate breathing had been half like gagging, half like the air suction in a dentist’s chair. Terry had stared down long enough for the blood to pool on the floor. Then he had seen that his own boots and clothes were covered in it, and felt where it had splashed onto his face.

  A few weeks before Christmas, Sister Jackie had returned to Angola and asked again for all those who would give themselves to the Lord. Terry rose, balance tenuous, sat back down, decided to stay sitting
, felt himself pulled strangely forward to be saved. With six or seven other inmates he stood before her. Waiting, he held himself together, trying not to disintegrate as the praise team attacked him with singing so slow each note seemed to last minutes.

  O the blood of Jesus

  It washes white as snow….

  O the love of Jesus

  He freely gives to me

  At last Sister Jackie began to address the unsaved, to teach them that faith and submission were all that Jesus required. She spoke and made them recite the Bible’s words, led them away from Romans 6 and back again, away from “the wages of sin” and back to “the free gift of God.” She asked the entire congregation to repeat along with the men up front, so that Terry heard his own mumbled need and willingness multiplied by fifty voices, made huge, overwhelming, something he couldn’t possibly contain, and he began to lose the battle against disintegration, the shivering starting to happen like when he’d been healed, moving outward from his chest to his shoulders, the congregation not only magnifying his longing but making it melt into theirs, making him melt, making him wish they would stop, that Sister Jackie would stop, that they would let him fit the pieces of himself back into place, fit them hard and tight. “While we were still weak… the righteousness based on faith says… on your lips and in your heart… that Jesus is Lord and that God raised Him from the dead… His love for us… His love for us…”

  Her hand was on his forehead. Faith City’s assistant ministers had taken the hands of other convicts, but Sister Jackie had moved toward him. The heel of her palm braced against one eyebrow and her fingers seemed to enwrap his skull. The rest of his body lost still more control, chest threatening to tear open and shoulders to spasm. “I call out the spirit of demons in Jesus’ name,” she spoke over Terry. “O Karishira. I call out Satan, O Lord, I command those forces loose their hold, I call them back to their place of origin, O Lord, I give this man strength in Jesus’ name, O Lord, strengthen him, Lord, strengthen him, O we give You praise, O Lord, O we glorify You…”

  It did not work. Not according to Terry. He told me that she had said quietly that he was not ready. “She said I got too much devil in me. She said that’s why I was doing too much trembling.” She had said, by his report, that he could not yet be saved.

  Later, I told Sister Jackie of Terry’s account. She cautioned that she could not be sure what had happenend, that during her services her words were given by the Spirit and were not easily recalled. But she was, for all her charismatic faith, a perfectly reasonable woman, and she added that it was extremely unlikely, even close to impossible, that she would ever declare anyone unfit for salvation. “His trembling was the power of the Lord,” she said. “That’s what happens in my church. That trembling was God’s love. I would never have told him it was the work of the devil. I prayed for the devil to come out. But when I proclaimed all those men delivered by the authority and in the Spirit of Jesus, I meant every one of them. All men are worthy of Jesus’ love.”

  Every Tuesday night since the end of October Terry had been attending Bible study in one of the two or three small meeting rooms at his camp. Now, after his failure to be saved, he told me he needed to “get more with my prayers and with my Bible,” and he concentrated still more deeply during these Tuesday night sessions.

  And all over Angola, all through the year, in a tradition old as anyone could remember, inmates read and explained verses to one another in these scripture groups, watched by no guard, their attendance marked by no record—a suggestion that Angola’s worship was about more than conning those with control over their lives. For some, it was a way to keep an afterlife in mind. One man spoke of heaven’s reflective gold pavement. “Here I look in the mirror and see what I see, but there, whenever I look down, I’ll see my face coming back in that gold.” For others, it was an effort to distinguish themselves from prison churchgoers they saw as insincere. (“They confess it but they don’t possess it.”) One inmate, who confided his rage when a clock he’d made in the hobby shop had been stolen, taught himself restraint. He read his passage, then lectured, “We have to pray when demons come to tagulate us. Lord, keep that clock! I don’t want it!” For almost all, it was a way to reinforce their belief. “Faith is paradoxical,” I heard one convict announce. He asked whether anyone knew the word “paradox.” When no one answered, he read a definition, then proceeded. “In faith being paradoxical, it goes beyond reason. Faith believes without understanding why. Faith glorifies in tribulation. Faith chooses to suffer. Faith is a surrender.”

  I was never sure how much Terry understood of what was said by the other men around the table, their quoting and analyzing. Afterward, he could never talk in much detail about it. He rarely spoke during the meetings. Others shared their thoughts furiously (“He will tell you what you need, He will plant you with the true desires, that’s what it means right here: ‘He shall give thee the desires of thine heart’ ”); mutely Terry turned in his King James Bible to the verse called out. Sometimes he had to shift the letter and certificate he kept between the Bible’s pages. They were from his daughter, Jamonica, who wrote of wanting “some gold for my teeth.” The certificate said, “Student of the Week,” and had her name written by hand above the line. Terry slipped these papers within other biblical chapters, and stared at the passage being read. Sheer comprehension must have been a struggle. Once, I’d seen the drafts of a letter he’d sent me. In the margins, he had practiced the spelling of words like “dinner” and “Saturday.” The word “finished” had emerged as “frinst,” “alcohol” as “ocall.” He could not have had an easy time with the language of King James. But he had an orange marker, and neatly highlighted every passage cited. On his cot before bedtime he would read the lines over to absorb them.

  A few weeks after Christmas Sister Jackie returned. When she beckoned the unsaved to come forward, Terry kept to his seat.

  The day before, he had been alone in the shower after his shift in the kitchen. (The bathroom in Terry’s dorm was half-hidden by a partial wall from the rest of the quarters.) Another inmate, a man he’d been friendly with for years and “didn’t know was no freak or nothing,” began showering a few nozzles down, staring at Terry’s penis. Soon the man burst out, “I got to have me some of that.” Terry gave little resistance as the man applied his hand and then, down on one knee, his mouth.

  It was not Terry’s first sex at Angola. He’d had, as he calculated it, “one or two relationships.” He recalled a man he’d known at Main Prison. “Yeah, I fell in love with him,” he said, and tried to explain: “He looked just like a little woman. And he acted just like one.” He had made Terry’s bed and fixed his snacks.

  Whatever Terry meant about the man’s appearance (to my eye, the inmates looked and dressed invariably like men, though the gal-boys had their flourishes-an extra seam stitched down the center of their jeans, or hair plaited a certain way), and whatever he meant by love, there had been a strict division of sexual roles, as there was in nearly every Angola partnership. The punk did the sucking and the punk got fucked. He had either come to prison a homosexual or been maneuvered (“thrown into a cross,” the way Littell had maneuvered the orderly) into serving as one, to be passed or sold from convict to convict for the rest of his sentence. Or, as one inmate urged me to recognize, “After ten years of no attention or affection, you might just give up and decide to be gay.” You might decide to let go of your “manhood.”

  The one who did the fucking never returned the favor. Nor did he ever use his lips or his hand. Whatever love meant here, the punk masturbated later, by himself, or paid for one of the underclass of prison prostitutes who would service him. As Terry put it about the inmate he’d been in love with, “He would never even ask me. He knew better. He respected me as a man.”

  Terry said he hadn’t felt much of anything for the inmate giving him a blowjob in the shower. There was no stirring of attraction. “There wasn’t nothing to be attracted to.” But, to borrow the phra
se other convicts had used in discussing their sexuality, it had been a long time since he had been “inside some warm flesh.” The inside of that mouth felt too good, the sheer contact too precious and powerful—the plain heat of another person against his skin. He let it go on and on. Until an inmate walking in to use the toilet—though unable to see what was happening on the other side of the four-foot partition—pushed the level of Terry’s shame too high. He set his hand against the punk’s forehead, and shoved him away.

  He did not feel Sister Jackie’s palm on his own forehead the next evening. He did not step anywhere near her. To everything else, he had added another reason he was unworthy.

  “Sometimes I can’t believe it,” Johnny Brooks said. Engaged to be married in an Angola wedding come next September, at Christmas he listened to Marvin Gaye on his Walkman and dreamed of Belva.

  Had Warden Cain been willing to name inmates he thought should be let go, Brooks would surely have been near the top of the list. Other highly ranked staff were willing, and they told me that Brooks was fully rehabilitated, that if he was released, he would never be back. But his particular rehabilitation—his mastery of horses and cattle—and the support of Angola authorities had come at a price.

  The magnitude of that price was impossible for me to judge: because I was white and he was black; because the price had been paid in dignity; because I could never tell how deeply the payment cut within him as he went on smiling and saying “Yassuh” and never, even after he opened up about other things, speaking a critical word about anyone of importance on the prison staff.

  That staff—especially the range crew boss, Mr. Mike Vannoy, who had taught Brooks to work livestock—were fond of saying, “There’s only one Johnny Brooks.”

  “Yassuh, Mr. Mike,” he would answer.