God of the Rodeo (13 page)

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.

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 phrase 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.

“They threw away the mold,” Mr. Mike, with his squashed-down, stocky, resilient body, would say.

“Yassuh.”

“Do what you do when that bull comes out of the chute,” Mr. Mike would request, as employees and inmates stood around the barn getting ready to start their day.

And Brooks would bug his eyes and stiffen his neck and quiver his head and quake his knees in fear, and Mr. Mike and everyone else would laugh.

“Threw away the mold!”

Mr. Mike had requested him for the range crew after watching him in the rodeo years ago. Brooks had taught himself to ride long before that. There had been a pasture, with a few horses, across the dirt road from the small clapboard house where he’d grown up. A field of sugarcane grew behind the house, and every fall Brooks’s parents made some extra money by cutting the cane for their landlord. They had lived that kind of existence, putting together bits of income. The horses in that pasture were the joy of Brooks’s childhood. Their owner lived somewhere else in town, and at nine years old Brooks coaxed one of the animals to the fence. He leapt on without saddle or halter. He was thrown fast. With a clump of grass in his hand, he lured the horse back to the rails—he needed the height of the slats in order to jump on. He was pitched again. But soon, with scavenged hay string for a halter and reins, he stayed on; soon he had won over all the horses. Every day, checking to make sure their owner wasn’t around, he stole across the road, prepared his chosen mount with the hay string, and galloped from fence to fence, imagining himself like the cowboys he’d seen on TV.

He had become that cowboy at Angola, on the range crew. Showing him around the prison’s graze land, Mr. Mike had galloped after a dodging calf, slung his rope, and lassoed the neck as neatly as if both horse and baby cow were standing still. “Think you’d like to do that?” Brooks heard, and was schooled, first, on the ground, with a bucket for a target. When he could fling his rope around that every time, he graduated to calves held within a pen, and quickly to the open land. It took two years, he said, for him to “get good” out there. By the time I met him, and watched him work, he was easily the best roper on the crew, far better than any other inmate, far better than any employee, far better than Mr. Mike.