God of the Rodeo (11 page)

Whitley revered Maggio, but he had left Angola’s inmates with a very different sense of the man who governed them. There were many who actually remembered Whitley with affection. That he had run Angola after Maggio’s era gave him a huge advantage—he didn’t have to fight so hard for mere control. And then there was the residue of the past, the naiveté—or hope—he had “left somewhere down the Walk.” The residue hadn’t fully evaporated. Some of the programs Cain described proudly and talked ardently of fostering had gotten their start under Whitley. He didn’t mention it, but I knew that the CPR team had come together under his administration. Inmate tutors had begun working with illiterate convicts. And to death row, Whitley had brought one day of contact visits each year.

He was remembered, most of all, for what happened in 1991 when the state switched from the electric chair to lethal injection. A gurney had to be built, a table where the man would lie while the chemicals flowed in. Whitley toured state prisons in Nevada, Colorado and Texas to find the best design. He resolved on one resembling a slightly bent cross, to give easy access to the veins in the arms.

He returned to Angola, discussed blueprints with the officer in charge of the prison’s industrial complex, and was told the metal shop could handle the project. The next thing he heard, one inmate, then two, had refused to work on the gurney. Whitley sent an assistant warden over to the complex. By then the entire metel shop
had balked, and before Whitley could think what to do next, he learned that a D.B. court had been convened right in the middle of a prison passageway (rather than in the remote, closet-like rooms where the mini-trials were usually held). Every inmate walking past could watch as the entire metal shop was convicted of disobedience and sentenced to the fields. Worse, they could find out why. And news spread fast: that the brother of a recently executed man had been one of those assigned to construct the gurney, and that the metal-shop officer had tried to trick the men, telling them the gurney was a new kind of bed for the mental-health ward. That afternoon, four hundred inmates protested, would not go back to work.

Whitley responded as Maggio had fifteen years earlier. He knew that to lose hold here meant losing command of the prison. The tac teams marched in. Special marksmen aimed down from the roofs. All four hundred were locked up in cells. But then Whitley did something Maggio would never have done. He let every protester go. He announced to the inmates that he’d “screwed up.” He took the blueprints and contracted them out.

The admission and reversal were unheard of. They created an unprecedented trust. For the next four years, Angola’s peace was based on communication as much as militaristic order. When Whitley stepped down, Cain’s appointment came with this advantage. Just as Whitley had benefited from Maggio’s resolve, just as Whitley’s reputation for candor was made possible by the lasting effects of Maggio’s control, so Cain inherited both legacies. He was given order, and he was given trust. His improbable mission had a great head start.

S
TRINGS OF
C
HRISTMAS LIGHTS FANNED OUTWARD
from the top of the guard tower near the front gate, and giant, luminous angels encircled the base. More angels trumpeted through B-Line. In their camps, the inmates were on vacation from their jobs, hoping for—or refusing to hope for—visits that would not come. Those who were surprised sat for a few hours with their mothers or sisters or children, gazing at a four-foot tree and the words “Merry Christmas” written in a sweeping curve, in gold tape, on cinder block.

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 were 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.”