God of the Rodeo

by Daniel Bergner

  I answered that his ears weren’t that noticeable. But perhaps the more straightforward response would have been more comforting: Yes, I would.

  I asked if he planned to ride in next October’s rodeo, if he would try again to win the warden’s okay on the surgery if he didn’t get it this year.

  “I really don’t know if I will. Some of us were talking about the rodeo the other day. It just makes us look like a bunch of monkeys.”

  He tore out the two pages of copied words, folded them into his pocket. He headed down the Walk and climbed the stairs to the A Building meeting room.

  Through narrow slats, the windows in the room offered one of the few second-floor views at Angola. They looked down on the passageways of Main Prison, the coils of razor wire in the blue-gray dusk. The walkways were clearing. Most of Angola’s inmates were already locked down in their dorms.

  About thirty old school chairs with attached desks were arranged in a semicircle. On a table against one wall stood an electric coffee maker along with a stack of Styrofoam cups. Beside the cups were a battered collegiate dictionary and a pink cardboard hat in the shape of a tall cone, the hat decorated with Magic Marker drawings of a cartoonish man saying, “Uh,” “You know,” “Um,” “Ah,” and “Well.” The inmate who uttered more of these “clutch” words than anyone else would wear the cone at the end of the meeting. The evening’s designated “ah-counter” was in charge of keeping track.

  The Forgotten Voices’ blue-and-gold banner was tacked to the lectern at the head of the room; the American flag hung from above a window. In a back corner a timer like a traffic light-green, yellow, and red-rested on a pole five feet high. All of the setup, from the formation of the chairs to the exact placement of the dictionary, had been approved by a member specially appointed and trained by the club to make certain the room was in order.

  The club’s inmate officers put great emphasis on organization. Like the Bible students who said, “They confess it but they don’t possess it,” this was the Toastmasters’ way of distinguishing themselves from the rest of Angola’s prisoners, of declaiming, They, those others out there, are the bad ones. Long minutes were taken at the executive sessions; motions were made and seconded; and at the general meetings the leaders beckoned each other formally, by officially worded rank, to the lectern, “And now I welcome Distinguished Toastmaster Mr….”

  The leaders, and every member on down to Danny, told me repeatedly of the club’s success. It had begun only five years ago, the inspiration of a state court judge—and Toastmasters International devotee—who sometimes visited Angola. There had been just enough interested convicts who could pay the Toastmasters dues: forty dollars initiation and four dollars per month. (Danny paid his with money his father sent periodically.) In the last year the Forgotten Voices had not only won the Battle of the Institutions. It had been given “Select Distinguished” status by Toastmasters International, and The Forgotten Voice Articulator, the group’s monthly newsletter, had been named a Toastmasters International Top Ten Publication. The Forgotten Voices members had earned forty CTM ratings and six ATMs—Competent Toastmasters and Able Toastmasters—and the chapter was ranked first in District 68.

  Just before tonight’s meeting officially convened, Danny motioned to the club’s sergeant at arms, a bony young inmate with a mustache that did little to toughen his mouth of bright, flawless teeth. They stepped out into the hall. Danny needed help with certain words: “circulatory” and “respiratory” and “dioxide.”

  “Circulatory,” the sergeant at arms pronounced quietly, so the other members in the hall wouldn’t hear.

  “All right,” Danny said.

  “Don’t you want to practice it?”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “Say it.”

  “Circa—Damn! I hate that word.”

  “Try it again.”

  “Circalutary.”

  “Once more. Cir-cu-la-tory.”

  “Circulatory.”

  “That’s it.” The sergeant at arms, half a head shorter than Danny, reached up to pat his shoulder.

  They hurried through “respiratory” and “dioxide,” then went in just as everyone stood and faced the flag, placed their hands over their hearts, and pledged allegiance. The next words, too, everyone recited by heart: “The mission of a Toastmasters Club is to provide a mutually supportive and positive…”

  The meeting began with “Table Topics.” The sergeant at arms called a series of inmates to the lectern, picked a Toastmasters International subject slip from a cap, and read it aloud to the inmate, who had to deliver a two-minute speech. One man in his sixties, gray hair greased back, drew the question “What does friendship mean to you?” His quavery, heartfelt answer went like this: “Friendship is something you can’t buy…. You earn friendship by being a friend…. A friend in need is a friend in need.” The members applauded loudly. Captain Newsom, uniform pants exposing his shins and thin hair dragged across his scalp, clapped along.

  The next man up, by contrast, gave a dazzling mock oration on the importance of thumbs: “My fellow Toastmasters, I am talking about that finger left out of every fist, that pacifist, that voice of independence and reason that stands opposed to the four-man posse….”

  The formal part of the evening began. “Mr. Forgotten Voices President,” the sergeant at arms said, “Mr. Master Evaluator, Captain Newsom, fellow Toastmasters. Since September Danny Fabre has proven to a lot of people that he is not who he used to be. The title of his speech tonight is ‘An Introduction to Science.’ But with every speech, he is introducing himself to us. He is introducing himself to himself. Danny, you’ve begun to show everyone who you really are. Come on up and show us some more.”

  Unlike the others, Danny had no laminated CTM or ATM pin on his chest. In his dingy white V-necked T-shirt he accepted the lectern, took the two sheets of paper-with their tattered spiral notebook edges—from his jeans pocket, unfolded them, spread them, and looked long and steadily around the room. “Mr. President, Mr. Master Evaluator, Mr. Sergeant at Arms, Captain Newsom, fellow Toastmasters,” he opened, “this evening I would like to give my introduction to science.”

  He glanced down at the sheets and smoothed them on the lectern. He checked one and the other, confused about which came first. He put up his hands, palms outward, close together, a shield. Stepping out from behind the lectern, he clenched one fist. His biceps seemed swollen with all the words waiting to spill out. His ears were a brightening pink. “I’m a little nervous, but I’m going to talk from the heart.” Then he remembered that this was supposed to be a written speech. He stepped back to the lectern, searched his two pages again. “Well, I just learned this here today,” he said, “and it really made an impression on me.”

  At last he found his starting point, and read what he’d copied from the computer. “ ‘Introduction to Science.’ Simply defined, science is the study of ourselves and everything around us.” His voice occupied the room without effort. It carried a strange conviction. “Science is concerned with questions such as: How does a tree in Brazil affect people living in Chicago? How do human activities affect the world in which we live? Science is also a way of thinking.” When he announced, “In the following minutes I’m going to explain to you some of the broad questions that scientists ask,” the line had an ungrounded resonance, as though Danny perceived some profound emotion encoded within the textbook words.

  Yet he couldn’t string the sentences together. He paused between each one, wondering if anything he read made sense, and now, peering down at his handwriting, he paused still longer, finally blurting another title. “ ‘The Most Marvelous Machine.’ I don’t think I copied this off right.” He put up his palms again, extending his arms, shielding himself, pushing his audience away. “But this is really what I wanted to tell you about.

  “Mr. President, Mr. Master Evaluator, Mr. Sergeant at Arms, Captain Newsom, fellow Toastmasters, let me interest you in a wonderful machine.” He po
inted his long, thick forefinger at his listeners. With that hand, he had punched and choked a fifty-one-year-old woman to death. With that hand, he had rammed a ten-inch stick into her right eye through her brain, leaving the stick protruding from the socket. “It can run on many different kinds of fuel.” He gathered momentum. “It can operate in blazing heat or cold. It seldom breaks down, but when it does it often fixes itself. In fact, it is constantly making and replacing parts that wear out. It has powers that the largest computer cannot match, yet it is completely—” He came to a halt. “Port. Able. Wait a minute.” He lifted his head. “Because this is important. This is what I need to tell you about.” He pointed. “It is completely port-able. Well, I guess that’s what it says. It pumps liquids. It filters air. It removes poison. It fights off attempts to break it down. If you haven’t guessed by now, ‘it’ is you. The human body is the most marvelous machine ever made.”

  He listed the organs, the systems. “Respiratory” gave him no trouble, but “circulatory” remained a tongue-twister and carbon was paired with “dinoxide.” He lost his place and found it with several uh’s. “Can you guess what the largest organ in the body is? This is what blew me away. My fellow Toastmasters—” he slapped his chest loudly with his open hand, left his hand on his heart, ventured again from behind the lectern, remembered himself, returned to reading. “Well, the answer may surprise you, even though it is right under your nose. In fact, it is also behind your ears, on the palms of your hands, and between your toes. The largest organ in the body is the skin. It can weigh seven pounds and cover twenty square feet. Amazingly, this largest of organs is completely replaced about once a month. If you are looking for a new you, you don’t have to wait. You grow about a thousand new skins during your life.”

  He studied his audience, the president with his arms folded and Captain Newsom without expression. (Newsom had encouraged him, by Danny’s thankful count, twice in the five months since Danny had joined, saying, “Don’t let me down” and “Just take one step forward at a time.”) The sergeant at arms, who’d welcomed him so enthusiastically, didn’t look so enthusiastic. They didn’t seem to get it. They seemed to be waiting for something more. “Isn’t that amazing?” Danny added. “That blew me away. I never knew that before. A thousand new skins. Hey, I like the way they put that.” He glanced again across their faces.

  “Well, thank you, Mr. President, Mr. Master Evaluator, Mr. Sergeant at Arms, Captain Newsom, Fellow Toastmasters,” he said, and soon, after the rest of the formal speeches, he was awarded the cone hat by the ah-counter.

  It was presented in a joking ceremony (“And now, that dreaded moment…”), and accepted with a jolt of laughter from Danny himself. He placed it lightly on his head. He was supposed to wear it for the last half hour of the meeting, while club business was discussed. He tried not to think of what he looked like. He tried to remind himself that other people had worn this same hat. He tried not to let every voice reverberate and distort and echo and bounce back off the walls in a way that bent and blurred a comment about club finances into a comment about his hat and his ears. He tried to avoid, as he put it to me later, “bugging up.”

  And what kept him from lashing out or simply leaving the room was the memory, from a few years ago, of waking in the middle of the night and seeing his dorm in a way he never had. The men slept, as always, with their white sheets pulled over their heads. But for the first time it had struck Danny that the dorm, with its rows of shrouded bodies, looked like a giant morgue. His change had begun slowly then, led him to GED school and Toastmasters. He forced himself to recall those corpses now. He had been one of them. He had felt he was among the dead. He set his palm on the point of the cone, pressed down to stop the tall hat from wobbling, and stayed.

  SIX

  I DROVE FROM MANHATTAN TO AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS, thinking hard of Louisiana’s most heroic politician, Huey P. Long. His career as governor and senator in the 1920s and ’30s had been marked by corruption—but also by benevolence. He had brought schools and services and enfranchisement to the poor. I thought of Long because during early February, as I tried to reach the warden by phone to win his promise that I could complete my year without interference, and as he ducked my calls and finally said he didn’t want to discuss anything over the phone, I had read the story of the can-relabeling plant. That is, I’d read it with more care than I had previously allowed myself. In an old Boston Globe, and in a series of old articles in the Baton Rouge Advocate, it had been waiting for me.

  Around the time he took over Angola, about eighteen months before I first traveled there, Cain had met a California businessman who hoped to take outdated or damaged cans of evaporated milk and tomato paste, bought indirectly from Nestlé, and sell them under a different label. Such resalvaging was not, in itself, illegal. That the old, rusty cans failed to meet Nestlé’s own standards for taste and safety did not necessarily mean they fell short of federal requirements. The businessman, Charles Sullivan, planned to sell them in less than prime markets—state agencies and third-world countries. All he needed was some cheap labor to spruce up the cans.

  And quickly, at Angola, a team of fifty inmates was scrubbing off rust and pasting on labels: “Veronica” for the tomato paste and “Pot o’ Gold” for the milk. For the prison facility, the requisite guards, and for each eight-hour shift of fifty workers-for four hundred man-hours—Sullivan paid the state a total of $220.

  It could have been a lucrative arrangement, at least for Sullivan, except that an inmate paralegal soon wrote to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He inquired about the legality of both the resalvaging itself and the practice of paying inmates four cents an hour for work done on behalf of a private company.

  The letter wound up with Louisiana’s own health officials. Unthinking, they revealed their inmate source to Angola’s administration. Right away Cain transferred the convict from his trusty job as counsel substitute to a spot in the field lines, and from his quiet, trusty dorm to a rougher section of Main Prison known as “The Wild Side.” It was too late, though, to save the relabeling plant. Cans were seized as unsafe and the enterprise was shut down. Sullivan pled guilty to minor charges, paid a fine of five thousand dollars, and assured the public that the cans already resold had gone mostly to Russia and Latin America.

  And Warden Cain maintained, during court hearings, that he had encouraged the business only in order to create jobs for inmates too weak for regular farm labor-because “idleness is the devil’s workshop.” The hearings were held by Frank Polozola, who had risen from magistrate to federal judge since the 1971 civil rights suit, and who retained oversight of Angola. Cain testified that he had been unaware of any illegalities in the operation; that he had transferred the whistle-blowing prisoner only because the language of his letter had been insultingly strong, not because he wished to punish anyone for raising concerns; and that the whole incident had left him feeling betrayed by private industry and by those now doubting his ethics. “Believe me, Your Honor,” he said, “you would have to fight me to bring an outside factory again. I am snake-bit.”

  He had brought up the episode, early on, with me. “That really caused me a lot of grief.” He held my gaze. “People wanted to say it was my deal. They found out it wasn’t. It’s obvious. I wasn’t involved in anything wrong. It was federally investigated and I’m still here. But it grieved me greatly, that hint of impropriety—that the Bible warns you to stay away from, and for good reason—because it cost me credibility with the inmates, and they’re my only job. The inmates.”

  I’d never quite accepted his words as truth, but I had focused mostly on the transfer of that convict. The retaliation, I’d decided, was just one of Cain’s excesses, his sizable ego slipping out of control. It did not outweigh the good he was doing at the prison. As for the possibility of his receiving kickbacks, there had been no hard evidence.

  But after our January meeting, as I sensed issues about himself Cain desperately didn’t want
explored, I no longer knew how to weigh anything, and felt that I had been fingering the scales too hard in Warden Cain’s favor. I concentrated on a fact I had thus far scarcely acknowledged, that the can operation wasn’t the first private business Gain had introduced under his leadership.

  As warden of D.C.I., he had established a chicken deboning factory. For a company owned by a man named David Miller, an associate of then governor Edwin Edwards, and co-owned by Charles Sullivan’s son, the meat of chicken thighs was stripped from the bone by a group of about eighty-five inmates. By Cain’s arrangement, the company paid the state the same $220 per shift as the relabeling plant later did, though this time, with the greater number of convict workers, the rate was even lower. During a legislative investigation into D.C.I.’s contract with the company, an investigation which led to nothing and which left the factory running, the legislative auditor reported that the company had saved $3.3 million in labor and other expenses during the thirteen-month period examined. It had wound up paying the state only $113,300, and once security and electrical expenses were figured in, the state had actually lost money.

  It was David Miller who introduced Charles Sullivan to Warden Cain as Cain was promoted to Angola. At both prisons, the entrepreneurs could expect the help not only of the warden but, if any trouble arose, of Governor Edwards, by way of a top gubernatorial aide, Sid Moreland. During the legislature’s investigation of the chicken contract, Moreland was reported to have called the committee chairman to discourage him from demanding too much information. Edwards himself had been indicted twice, though never convicted, on charges of racketeering. And Cain’s career had flourished under Edwards, flourished beyond the traditional power of a warden. Cain had boasted to me that in laying the groundwork for his “moral revolution” in penology, he had arranged with Edwards to place a loyal Cain supporter as Secretary of Corrections. Cain had no one except the governor to answer to.