God of the Rodeo
Page 16
“The other night,” he started, his voice big and relaxed and needing no microphone for this crowd of seventy-five, “I was out with our man from the Corps of Engineers. We were standing on top of the levee and looking out over those sand boils. That’s where the Mississippi is seeping through, and we’ve got ninety of ’em now. And we were hoping no alligators were going to climb up and bite us, and we were putting sticks in the ground to check how damp that levee was getting, and he said to me, ‘Warden Cain, I feel the Mississippi River right under my feet, and there’s only two people I know can walk on water. That’s Jesus Christ and you.’”
He smiled and waited for the laughter. It came.
“So we’re prepared to move out if we have to, but meanwhile we’re working to save this prison. Everyone is working together. Inmates and freemen, side to side, man to man, even friend to friend. We had a little scare last night, where one boil looked like it wanted to make us run, and we had inmates working underwater, all night, to stop that leak. And that leak is stopped. We’ve got Warden Bonnette out there driving a front loader, and we’ve got Wilbert taking those Angolite pictures, documenting all this for history. Wilbert’s scared of heights and he begged me not to make him go up in that helicopter to photograph, his knees were shaking and his teeth were chattering and he was just begging me—isn’t that right, Wilbert?” And Wilbert Rideau, who had been in Angola thirty-four years, and whose articles in the Angolite had won some of the nation’s most prestigious honors in journalism—the George Polk Award and a National Magazine Award nomination—nodded and grinned. Or rather, grimaced, his face stiffening. “But Wilbert went up there. And we’re going to blow up an aerial shot of the tent cities, put ’em up in all the visiting sheds, so y’all can show your families what you built. We’re going to do that.”
As soon as he stopped, the convicts wanted to know how quickly they would be let out of the dorms. “How do we know we’re not getting trapped inside there?”
“Isn’t there a guard in there with you?” Cain answered.
“He doesn’t have the key.”
“Well, we’re not going to lock him in there to drown. Think about it. If you’re hearing we’re going to leave you in there, that’s just rumormonger, rumormonger, rumormonger.”
“What about the ones can’t swim?”
“Can’t you swim?” Cain joked with his questioner.
“I can.”
“We’re not going to be swimming. We’re not going to let it get that far. Everyone’s going to be safe. That’s what I’m thinking about first. I’ve got a commitment to you all.”
The men asked what they could bring if there was an evacuation.
“Take your blankets. Take all the clothes you can put on your body. Wear two pairs of jeans if you can. And bring your Bibles. That’s everything.”
He asked for more questions. He was in no hurry to leave. He enjoyed standing before them, responding to the same worries again and again. He recounted the reinforcement of their prison, praised the shoulder-to-shoulder effort, promised he would protect them. He confided, “Two nights ago I went out on a boat, and I yelled to that water, ‘Kiss my ass, River’ three times. And last night we had that scare, that boil. So I won’t yell at the river anymore.”
He announced that when the crisis was over there would be a day of unlimited Coca-Cola served at all the camps, and that every inmate would be given a Moon Pie. With that he left for the prison radio station.
The inmate deejay, in his cubby of albums, stood from the turntable when Cain walked in, and faded out Otis Redding when Cain was ready. The warden delivered the same message he had to the inmate leaders. “Well, sir,” the deejay broadcast, summing things up, “you’ve been with us all along. And we just want to thank you for stopping the rumormongers, and for all you’re doing to stay on top of the situation. I think you’re our greatest asset, Warden Cain.”
Otis Redding faded back in.
“You deejays been asking to expand, play your music all night instead of like you do now?” Cain asked.
“We would like that, sir.”
“Well, that’s good. We’ll make that happen.”
At the end of that evening, Warden Cain led me into the Ranch House bedroom. Motioning me to a chair, he sat on the unmade bed where he’d been catching what sleep he could during the crisis. We discussed money once more. At first he backed away from his earlier demand. “It might not be ethical.” Then he claimed he’d found a publisher for his own book about his leadership of Angola. I asked which publisher. He wouldn’t say. I asked again. He admitted he’d spoken with no publishers at all, approached none. He asked what percentage of my royalties I would be willing to pay if we did arrive at some arrangement. He asked and asked and asked.
“Warden Cain,” I kept saying, “it’s been a long, long day.” I extricated myself without answering, and managed to avoid any time alone with him for the rest of my visit.
Gunshots echoed across the fields at night, the only ones I’d heard at Angola since September. The guards hunted beavers and any other animals that might gnaw at the precarious levee. They rode the embankment in pickup trucks, searching with floodlights and taking aim. They had a grand time, razzing one another when they missed into the water.
Under a full moon Cain delivered sandbags in an army personnel carrier. He’d bought two such carriers for the penitentiary when he took over; he liked to drive them along the dirt roads in the Tunica Hills. Now, happier than the riflemen on the levee, beaming behind the wheel of the immense, tread-borne, open-bed tank, he bounded across the prison, a general at war. He stopped at the levee’s edge. Tank idling loud, he yelled down at a crew of inmate sandbaggers, yelled down to the base of the hill, “Where you want your drop?”
Whose voice was that? Was that Warden Cain up there in the cab window? Yes, lit by the moon, that was him! That was his white hair! That was his wide face looming out! And he was talking to them, not to their guard; he was asking them!
He was asking Buckkey.
Errant strands of blond hair lit by the tank, and his rubber boots covered in muck, Buckkey climbed the levee’s hill. He stood at the rear corner of the tank, raised his gloved hand. He signaled tentatively. “Pull back a little, Warden Cain.”
“What’s that?”
“I said, pull back a little,” he risked shouting at the warden.
The face floated out again from the window. “You just tell me where you need me to go.”
“Come on back a little more,” Buckkey motioned with his hand, then held it flat. “Wo. Okay. A little more. Wo.”
The inmates started to unload, passing the white sacks down the levee to the boil. At the bottom they were thigh-deep in water, setting the bags at angles atop one another, building the walls. From the dark pool a neatly squared white fortress rose to the surface. Cain gazed down, and soon put his tank into gear and went for more supplies. An hour later they heard and then watched him return out of the darkness, the carrier approaching across the sodden, glistening fields. Buckkey directed him again, waving easily. “Right there, right there is good.”
It was every boy’s dream, being indispensable to his father, guiding him into the parking space. Except that this was eight times better and eight times worse; here they were saving the kingdom, here they were saving the prison. The cab door opened. Cain stepped down. He walked around to the back, where Buckkey was the point man, swinging bags from the tank. “You guys really do good work,” he said, before his radio called him: “Angola One. Angola One.” And afterward, at midnight, riding in a pickup back to their dorm, Buckkey looked at the inmate who’d stood right below him on the bank, the man he’d handed the bags to, the man Cain had been talking to along with Buckkey.
“Yeah, I know,” the other said, catching Buckkey’s glance.
But Buckkey wanted it spoken. “It was like we were needed. It was like we weren’t prisoners.”
The evacuation began two hours later.
The Corps of Engineers had spotted something more than seepage—a part of the levee seemed to be softening toward collapse. The lights were turned up in the dorms, the guards announcing, “All you need in your hands is a blanket and a Bible.” Loaded onto cotton trailers and cattle trucks, the inmates began the seven-hour journey to the tent cities. There was lots and lots of waiting. Armed convoys had to be formed, because no weapon-and for that matter no guard—could be put amidst the throng on the truck beds. And the inmates had to be counted as they were loaded, and counted when the trucks were ready to leave, and counted as they were unloaded and marched, all of them, to the tents outside the administration building, and counted before half of them were sent down the highway to the tents in the forest. “Spruce One… Ash Four… Hickory Two…” the guards called out the names of the dorms, followed by the name of each convict. The front gate was plugged tight, a mobile home steered poorly and wedged across one lane and all the pickups full of kids’ bicycles and old chests of drawers lined up in front of the other. The morning sun was bright. The fields were serene with yellow blooms and white clover. Jammed within the fenced siding of the cotton trailers or the slats of the cattle trucks, the inmates felt a numb lethargy beyond the palpable depletion of will that seemed to affect every one of them, always, even the most tightly wound or determined. They wondered if the evacuation was really necessary, and at the same time wondered if the few things they owned, everything they’d been forced to leave behind, would be ruined. They hardly spoke during the seven hours. The place they inhabited seemed larger than it ever had, the land already being limitless and the Warden supreme and now the Mississippi coming alive to tell them, once and for all, that they had no control.
Cain marshaled them to the tents and, almost immediately, back along the same seven-hour route to their dorms. The danger had been declared a false alarm. But the evacuation had been, he would soon announce, the largest mass movement of prisoners in U.S. history. The river hadn’t whispered any message of submission into his ears. His will was historic in scale.
The following afternoon he convened another audience of inmate leaders. He radioed an officer to bring me to the meeting, and I was pulled abruptly away from an inmate interview and rushed through Main Prison. After his speech of reassurance to the convicts, Cain led me outside to the Main Prison parking lot.
“I want you to sign that editorial agreement,” he said beside a row of white D.O.C. vans. “I want you to sign that piece of paper or sign out.”
I had, in fact, seen no actual piece of paper, no actual agreement, and he had none now—it seemed he’d realized suddenly, that day, that I might write about his retirement and barn-building plan, about our Amherst meeting, and the agreement had become a matter of full panic. “It’s going to be real simple. You’ll have it in the morning. So you just be ready to go ahead and do the best thing.”
I told him I couldn’t.
“Warden Peabody,” he called.
His pallid and dour first deputy stepped over.
“Is this fence galvanized?” Cain asked rhetorically, turning from me to run his thumb over the nearest chain link.
“Yes, it is,” Peabody answered.
“Does this fence looked galvanized to you?” he asked me, brushing at the metal.
I concurred that it did.
“Well, sure as this fence is galvanized you’re going to be on the other side of it if you don’t sign that piece of paper.” He spoke metaphorically, as we were nowhere near the front gate.
It amazed me that he was willing to threaten so hard in public, that he didn’t worry I would turn to his deputy, or to his press secretary, who stood close, or to the few other employees passing by in the parking lot, and describe his demand for money. But, apparently, he didn’t worry, not within his universe.
I made no accusations. My only hope was to win back his favor.
I told him I would think things through overnight. He told me to think hard.
“I love you like a brother,” he said, “but this is just business.”
The next morning, Thursday, one of Cain’s men walked me silently to my car, then watched to make sure I drove out the front gate. And as I headed away from Angola, knowing that I could never sign what the warden needed, I tried not to see too much significance in my own loss. When he had first requested money, I had been at least as panicked about my project as I should have been outraged by his use of the prison and its inmates in attempted extortion. (And I hadn’t thought about the human spirit or the possibility of God. I had thought about my book.) Driving past the bloated swamps, I was no defeated champion of inmate concerns.
Yet I felt that the convicts I knew were now underwater behind me. Littell Harris was out. Littell I would spend time with. But the others would remain forever where they had already been for a decade or much longer, submerged. Voiceless, unknown, they existed far below the surface, on a deep river bed.
EIGHT
LITTELL UNWRAPPED HIS DREADLOCKS. THIRTY-eight years old, free from Angola after serving fifteen years, he lived, that Easter, at a halfway house in Baton Rouge. There, in a narrow vestibule, he brought out his cut hair to show me how he had saved it. He was clean-shaven now, the slight cleft in his chin exposed, his jawline hard, the corners of his lips almost undetectably yet constantly retracted in a suggestion of universal disgust. His short Afro revealed small patches of gray.
While I thought wildly of how I could soothe or trick or fight the warden, Littell was all I had. I’d wanted to know something about human possibility. It was this.
The dreadlocks, two feet long, he protected within a sheet of newspaper surrounded by a tissue-thin piece of plastic that seemed to have been torn from a dry cleaner’s bag. It had about that resiliency, and was dingy and streaked, as though he had taken it off the street. The wrapping was closed by a single bit of masking tape, which Littell removed slowly with his long fingers so as not to damage too much of the plastic. Stooping, he set the bundle at our feet. He crouched and parted the wrapping. He turned to glance up at me. Then he gazed back down.
“There it is,” he said. “There’s my hair.”
Other residents squeezed past us. They had not come from Angola. They were, most of them, not ex-convicts; they had arrived at O’Brien House, in this run-down neighborhood adjacent to downtown Baton Rouge, to shed their drug and alcohol addictions. Littell had found his way here from a state-run treatment center he’d asked to be sent to back in January, when he was two months short of completing his sentence.
He hadn’t considered himself an addict in prison. He had only smoked marijuana when he could afford it and drunk Angola’s white lightning (mashed rice or fruit fermented in his locker box, with a bottle of bleach beside it to kill the smell) once in a while. But he worried about his enemies taking revenge during his final weeks, when he would hesitate to defend himself. The treatment center was a way out. There, he told his counselor about his life before prison, years dominated by drugs, mostly angel dust and an injected synthetic called “T’s ‘n’ Blues” that had been popular in Lake Charles before he was put away. His counselor, afraid he would fall back as soon as he was free, helped to place him at O’Brien. Littell was eager to go. He didn’t know if he was still an addict, but he knew that his mother wouldn’t want him living with her. He never called her as his release date approached. He knew that once he completed his sentence he would have no home.
As he spread the dreadlocks, laying the ropes of hair side by side, he didn’t seem aware of the men and women edging by. Perhaps his lack of embarrassment came from all those years in a place where nothing was private. Perhaps it came from knowing that these people, too, had so little, had begun without much and lost nearly everything, and that they would see nothing strange or shameful in his adoring some long-nurtured hair preserved within a sooty plastic cocoon. But also it was because the loss from cutting that hair went so deep.
“This is the first time I’ve actually taken it out.”
He arranged them evenly in straight lines, on the newspaper. He ran his hand along the ropes to smooth them.
“There’s me in that hair.”
He shifted, from crouching to kneeling. He lifted one of the ropes, brought it to his face, smelled it, kissed it. He set it back down.
“Man, that hurt me, it hurt me,” he almost whispered, thinking back to the cutting, as he began rolling the package again to store it. “My counselor at the treatment center convinced me. She saw I was determined to get myself established. She was a white lady, and she told me, people judge you by first impressions. She told me, ‘You can’t change the way people are going to judge that hair, but you can change your appearance.’ She told me I looked bizarre. And I hated to hear that. I hated her when she said that. But this woman was genuinely interested in helping me. I clung to her, man. So I did it. And I don’t regret it. I can’t wait to see me in a business suit. But after this dude clipped it off, when I went to my group session the next morning, I was like a dog when you shave him. You know how he’ll sit with his tail tucked between his legs? Right now, I’m living my life in the nude.”