Chapter 34 - Reverend Cray—Attica State Penitentiary
When they land in Buffalo, Jared has no clue where they are until he sees the sign: “Greater Buffalo International Airport.” He’s never been in this part of the country. However, he quickly grasps why upstate New York is an artist’s delight—especially during early fall months, such as now, when Nature’s beauty is particularly resplendent and profuse. It’s September and Jared’s deep into the vibrant landscapes as they drive over from the airport. He’s entranced as daylight whisks dusky handkerchiefs off hills of treed intrigue and morning majesty. He, like so many before, succumbs to the area’s natural magic.
Especially its light. Its luminosity and texture has delighted and enthralled artists of paint and stone—schools of Romanticists, Naturalists and Illuminists. The landscape is a fitting diversion, a benevolent obscuration of the doorway into hell that is about to welcome Jared.
As Steve makes a sharp left, Jared is awestruck as he beholds “The Wall.” He gasps audibly.
“Magnificent, isn’t it?” Steve comments right in sync with Jared’s gasp. “Just magnificent.”
Attica’s outside wall is thirty feet high, with a thickness measurable only in density of imagination. It’s a barricade, and not unkindly regularly compared to a concentration camp. For the first time in his life, Jared is soundly terrified.
It staggers him as it has so many others. Some hail The Wall as more profoundly numinous than Saint Patrick’s and more ethereally vibrational than Stonehenge. It is considered the imagistic source for the obelisk that Kubrick floated in front of the acidheads of hippiedom and sci-fi devotees at the conclusion of his magical film, 2001. To Jared, The Wall is the end of a quest as he is finally at the entrance to a mysterious castle, a fortress of the gods of cruelty.
Once inside Jared is relieved to don prison garb. As Steve escorts him through the corridors, he begins to feel less vulnerable because he’s more invisible—just an inmate, 8867-114 again. His world stabilizes. Here he knows the Institution’s rituals and procedures. Here he is ironically but truly protected. The Man has all the guns!
The cons’ arsenal of home-made weapons is dwarfed by the guards’ storehouse of armaments. In this respect, Attica is a functioning dream of nonviolence. Its inmate horde of roaming peasants, outcasts and rejects all huddle within an embrace of nonviolence. Attica, as a culturally sacred image, is one with the Statue of Liberty. For the “huddled masses” have found a home here. Here they are protected from the street’s most violent and destructive social and cultural forces—themselves! All about, Jared sees inmates, lying down like lambs Inside the Wall.
Steve can’t figure what’s got into Jared. He’s walking, almost sauntering behind him, and muffling bursts of laughter. His chuckles and short snorts indicate that another alternative reality show is being aired within his brain.
“What the hell’s so funny about this?” Steve pokes him in the shoulder—asking as they come to a stop in the area called “Times Square.” This is the center of the prison complex, the meeting point of the four inner corridors.
Jared is in good form. “It’s all so crazy, I mean, man, look, it’s so fucking peaceful.” He stresses peaceful as he sweeps his arm around full circle. “This is exactly what people believe. That if you have enough guns and bombs and instruments of terror, you will have peace. And they got it, and its name is Attica!”
Something about this makes sense to Steve, but he can’t get it in focus.
“Walls!” Jared’s poetic tongue is loosed, mocking and ironic, “Walls of stone, of flesh, of skulls. Walls of thoughts, Great Ideas, the Great Society! Walls of songs, kisses and embraces. Walls—we build them with every conceivable thing. We build them resplendent in visibility and invisibility.”
“What?” Steve looks at Jared. He’s going nuts! Loony. Screwball. What’s he so worked up about?
Jared is reading Steve’s mind. “Fucking-A, man, it tells you something if you’d just fucking-A listen. See, hear it? What makes one fully human is the act of breaking down walls.”
Why he has been taken to Attica, Jared can’t figure. Before last month, he hardly knew the place existed. Millston, Lewisburg, Milan, assorted county jails and now here. For sure Steve’s following some grand plan. This has to be some royal mind-fuck experiment!
Soon after entering Millston, Jared heard about START, the federal program being used at the medical prison in Springfield, Missouri. It’s testing the premise that “Personality is a social product, not an individual possession or right.” By manual and design, using psychoactive drugs, an inmate’s personality is slowly eroded, until very little is left. All his trust relationships —with Mom, Dad, brother, sister, lover—all are shattered. Then, the hack-shrink is supposed to be able to build a personality, one that will be socially and morally useful. At one point, early in the Ride, Jared feared that he was going to START. Now he wonders what type of bogus scientific theory underlies his current reformational regimen.
Steve and Jared stop outside the Chaplain’s office. Jared balks. “Why?” Steve doesn’t answer. He nudges and half-pushes Jared inside ahead of himself.
Within is Reverend Cray, a middle-aged, medium-height, gangly figure with a retreating hairline and ill-fitting spectacles that he adjusts constantly. What is most striking are his arms. They are long, much longer than most, way down past his pockets. As the Reverend stands, his arms sway like pendulums, keeping time in a universe other than the one they currently occupy.
As Cray rises, he closes a file which, in light of his greeting and subsequent remarks, Jared knows is his.
“Mr. Jennings, I am pleased to meet you.” This is said with an air of pastoral friendliness that is accompanied by an assumption of familiarity. Cray sits down with Jared as Steve nods and quietly leaves.
A thermos of coffee is unscrewed and two cups of java poured. Cray’s opener stands as a clue to why he was chosen. “I’m a former Dominican, did they tell you that?”
From there, they distract each other with stories and quotes, academic citations and adventures, seminary escapades and happenings, and earnest explorations by eye of each other’s spiritual soul. Ignoring his internal sentry, Jared relaxes into the banter and settles into a comfort zone with Cray. Not such a bad guy.
While Cray is now a Methodist, he’s been trained by the Catholics in Rome, Paris, and Cambridge, and by the Protestants at the theological union in Berkeley. His degrees are of substantial academic weight, so an unspoken question on Jared’s mind is why Cray has ended up in Attica.
The Reverend, in his ramblings—covering many topics in a sequence and direction he controls but which appear spontaneous—mentions Uncle Sam, not knowing Jared’s blood relationship. Jared stores that possibly fortuitous coincidence away for the moment. The file he has on Jared is mostly summary, and the details of this key relationship are inadequately stressed. It would have led to greater insight by each about the other since Cray remains a fervent student of Uncle Sam’s. Notwithstanding Cray’s love for his now Trappist mentor, they parted—and did so with all the bitterness and dark love of parent and rebellious child—over the issue of the function, place, presence, and Biblical basis for the Holy Spirit. While this is an issue dead to many in its abstraction and esoteric character, it is for them a fundamental spiritual truth with profound implications for how to live a spiritual life.
“Why am I here?” comes around at the point where Jared wants to test Cray’s mettle.
He’s equally direct, “Someone wants to know if you’re sincere.”
“Sincere?”
“Let me say,” Cray gets up and walks to a window with a view on Yard A, “there’s a strong interest in you . . . and I’m supposed to determine whether you’re a dupe or a doper—or divinely inspired.”
“Divinely inspired!” Jared roars, guffawing so hard that his halo falls down around his neck! His jollity is short-lived, cut down by Cray’s vexed gaze.
He’s dead serious! He’s freaking dead serious, man!
Jared starts to get a fix on why Cray left the Catholic Church and religious life. He intuits the pattern—that despite his former Catholic or present Methodist demeanor, he’s a charismatic, a Pentecostalist, a mingling of Holy Roller and faith healer. Once grasped, Jared sees it all in Cray’s eyes. Why did I miss that?
He knows clearly that men like Cray can never survive in the Catholic corridors. There, divine fire is majestically controlled with theologically complex, at times twisted, often tortured language. After centuries of perfecting the magic, the Catholics have the Holy Spirit dancing in tongues of fire but only as a flame atop a devotional votive candle. This spiritually subdued third person of the Holy Trinity, Cray could never worship!
Another of Jared’s unasked questions is answered without words. Cray strayed because he caught the Sacred Fire in his gut. His soul. His every word became an act of “speaking in tongues”! The ironic humor of it all, Jared muses. He’s a heretic, a clerical outlaw—just like me. No wonder he’s here!
“Come with me,” and they step outside the office and head towards the Yard. Cray turns pastoral, “The men who are here have deep needs. They have the need Cain must have had the day after he awoke from slaying Abel. They see that they are like others, normal. That they have eyes and legs, emotions and desires, but that they are not like others. Abnormal. They—and I will forestall your appeal to ‘social conditions,’ ‘the effects of poverty’ and any other sociological or anthropological reductionist explanation—these men are agents of Satan. Demonics. Possessed. How they became so, whether through conscious decision or a slow infection through bad habits, I do not know, do not care to know, but they’ve joined his fiendish army.”
Cray places his right hand on Jared’s shoulder, stares into his eyes, probing his soul. “Do you believe me?”
It’s a moment of first recognition. Like the address to those being baptized, “Do you renounce Satan?”
Jared responds, “I believe you believe yourself.”
Without hesitation, Cray slaps him. Claps him with an open palm so the effect is more sound than pain. It’s so quickly done, from shoulder to cheek, that Jared doesn’t even reflex. In all, it simply evokes a shocked titter.
“Don’t tell me what I believe. What do you believe?”
They resume walking, more slowly. Inmates pass by. Hacks pass by. They amble through Yards A to D and then around the inner periphery, always within death-shot of a guard tower. Jared fails to admire the Superintendent’s lawn. Cray has him enrapt. Within this timeless stroll, they begin to round back towards Cray’s office.
In asking Jared numerous and theologically nuanced questions about his beliefs, Cray reveals what he himself deeply believes. For Cray, the Garden of Eden is real. Its facticity he passionately speaks about after impressing Jared with his doctoral degree and advanced studies in Biblical archaeology and historical linguistics. “The evidence is crystal clear. There is no more factual repository than Holy Writ. Everything, just everything we have created, even our rationalism, all stem from events in the Bible. The hideousness of it all is we live just outside of Eden, and—damned as we mortals are!—we hold blinders to our eyes.”
Cray suddenly stops speaking. It’s a momentary fracture in which Jared is also quiet since he senses that Cray is simply reloading. Aptly, in less than a minute, Cray bounces off on a new spiel, exploding with a piercing energy. “Jesus shows us the way. He sends the Holy Spirit to heal us and to bring us Home.” This outburst, this declaration, this act of witnessing occurs as they come full circle in the inner periphery, right below a guard tower. Jared pictures them as being protected by an angelic guardian.
“There is nothing and I mean no thing which is rooted in Scripture that is not a manifestation of God’s Spirit.”
Cray sums up the message he wants to deliver. “In His divine scheme, America is the latest and the newest opportunity, most definitely the second chance for the fallen people to live in the Holy Spirit!”
Back inside his office both sit down facing each other as before. Almost ceremonially, Cray tips the thermos and fills Jared’s cup, not asking, just doing. Jared reaches over and takes his cup, cradles it, blows on it but doesn’t drink. Leaning back in his chair, Cray takes a deep draught, then puts his cup down and in a practiced motion raises his open hands in a posture of pleading, fingers writhing as if afire with pain, and interrogates a second time, “Do you think all of this is not divinely inspired?”
He asks with earnest optimism, as if their little walk should have converted Jared. Failing Jared’s instant response, he presses him. “Can you not feel the Presence? Can you not feel the similarity between these walls and monastic walls?”
Cray rises, comes and stands next to the sitting Jared. He lays both arms upon his shoulders and looks, drills himself into Jared’s eyes. “These prison walls are a new manifestation, a new revelation. Do you grasp that?”
Jared is silent, unmoving. Cray presses forward: “Truly, God is benevolent, but the Spirit is terrible. The Holy terrifying Spirit. It is He who works in here.”
The Reverend leans his full weight upon Jared. His arms press down so hard that Jared’s shoulders almost tear apart and set free his inner holy spirit.
“Have you not felt the terror in your soul when in the presence of Dikbar?” The name rocks Jared’s ear, causes him to tremble. How can Cray know this? All speech and rational sensibility desert Jared. Cray is relentless. Words fly that make Jared’s heart thump.
“Have you not felt the terror in your soul when your woman chose abortion over your child?”
He almost blacks out, teeters at the edge of Satan’s fiery pit.
Cray’s eyes demand an answer. Your child!
Jared reels, almost slumps off the chair. Cray is relentless.
“Have you not felt the terror in your soul when that gay whore spit out your seed and made you the slave of his passion?”
His dead child, Dikbar’s beating, Brusier’s sexual pleasure—Only God should know this! Embarrassed and angered, on the verge of freaking out, the urge rises and so he does push the Reverend’s arms away, shoves him backwards as he jumps to his feet. What to do? Where to run? In a panic Jared stomps halfway across the room. Pauses. Turns and hurls back his own prophetic fire and brimstone.
“You are using the knowledge of evil people,” he’s so pent up that he sputters, “you know things that you shouldn’t know. You—you are the Devil!”
“Repent!” The Reverend urges, implores, condemns. Thunders again, “Repent!”
Like Jared, when first in Segregation, the Reverend starts to rove around the room, hitting, slapping the wall, furniture. His body is God’s Hammer. He bashes and smashes with steely anger, kicks with wild fierceness and slams his body against the wall like a man insane.
Jared cuts him no slack. He denounces him. “You belong to this World of Walls. You and Steve and all the hacks of the world. You believe you can, that you have the right, the god blessed fucking right, man, to invade the intimate spaces—the heart, the soul—of another human being and to fuck with him!”
A heaved pause.
“God, you’re so corrupt . . . you, you are the most corrupt. Because you’ve made a religion of violence. It’s you—you miserable fucking asshole of a preacher—it’s you who’s been possessed by Satan.”
Jared stops suddenly as if a hand has come down and gently pressed his lips together.
Cray instantly strikes back. He knows a lost soul when he sees one and Jared words are those of the devil. Righteously, he condemns and expels him.
“Damn you, you do not fear God! To the devil I cast you out!”
With that done, Cray hits a button on his phone and just above a whisper through clenched teeth issues a surprisingly calm, “The prisoner’
s ready.”
The Reverend stands sentry, waiting for cell block security. His hands hang down by his sides, slowly swinging in small metronomic arcs. He’s silently praying. His prayer is a refrain from 2 Timothy 4:3. It’s one he has invoked before to help drive out the Devil, as he has done today with this poor lost soul.
For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths. As for you, always be steady, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.
“Be steady! Be steady!” The Reverend utters, very low and steady. Jared knows full well that Cray is praying for the strength of the terrifying Spirit. “Be steady! Be steady!”
Still enrapt in evocation, the Reverend fails to register that Jared’s been taken away.
Kill the dove! Page 34