Authors: Daniel Bergner
The air-conditioning was turned way too high. I wanted a sweater, I wanted a cup of coffee. I was freezing. I couldn’t give him editorial control, but a staff minder was nearly as impossible. It didn’t matter if it was someone from classification. How well could I get to know Terry Hawkins, how well could I get to know Danny Fabre, with a prison employee sitting beside us as we talked, and following me as I followed the inmates through their days? Everything I wanted for my year would be lost.
“This might sound crazy,” I started, “but if you want to be sure I’m not on some muckraking mission, why don’t you give me a lie-detector test? Why don’t you hook me up right now, and ask whatever you want to ask about my intentions?” I held my jaw tight, my teeth clamped shut, to keep from shivering.
“A lie-detector test?”
“I’m serious. Your investigations unit must have one. Put the machine right on your desk. Hook me up. Ask whatever you need so this project can go forward the way it should. Let’s clear the air.”
He smiled. “How much are you getting for this book?”
“How much?”
“How much is your publisher paying you?”
I had been surprised back at Christmas by his question about God; now I was caught completely off guard. We had gone from the intimacy of faith to the intimacy of money. I laughed nervously. “All right,” I heard myself say. “I guess I owe you an answer.”
Why? Why did I owe him anything? I felt I did, I suppose, because he had let me into his kingdom, because, in a country whose laws and courts gave him nearly unmitigated say as to who in the media his prisoners spoke with, he had given his prisoners to me.
But my playing along in what became a guessing game—“More
than twenty—five?” he asked. “More than forty?”—came, as well, from a need to retain some feeling of strength. My advance was neither large nor small, but it was about the same size as his yearly salary.
“Well, that’s good, that’s good,” he said. “That’s more than I thought.”
He ruminated silently on the figure.
“Look,” he continued, “here’s what we’ll do. We’ll let you finish your visit like you want. You can have your privacy. And then next month, I’m going up to Amherst, Massachusetts. To the university up there. They want me to come speak. It’s a symposium. So what we’ll do, we’ll meet up there. That’s your country. That’s Yankee country. So I’ll meet you on your grounds, and we’ll work out all this editorial business. We’ll get it straightened out. It won’t be any problem. Everybody’s going to be happy. You’re going to write a good book. The right book. I know that.”
We would work it all out in Amherst, and then I could drive with him to the lecture hall. There he would speak on a subject that tore at his heart, the death penalty.
I spent the final day of that trip to Angola—my last day at the prison before the warden opened himself up to me—with Danny Fabre. Hair newly cut, making no attempt to conceal his unconcealable ears, he sat before a computer in his GED classroom.
On the screen, a wolf leapt off a cliff, pounced toward a house belonging to little pigs. One pig popped up onto the roof with a bow and arrow. Danny searched the multiple-choice answers in his computerized study course. If he picked the right one, the arrow would glide across the screen to annihilate the wolf. There were ten questions in each section—math, science, history, and spelling and grammar. There were ten wolves waiting on the cliff, three pigs in the house. If Danny missed three questions, the house was destroyed.
Math, at the moment, was a good subject for the wolves. Common
denominators had just arisen in the curriculum. One third plus three fourths, four fifths minus two tenths-more than one home was consumed. Danny switched programs to one that awarded fork-toting devils for every correct answer. If he did well, he could assemble an entire satanic legion. He amassed a squad of three.
“Can you ask your teacher for help?” I suggested.
“I might,” he said. And didn’t.
Twenty computers were placed around the perimeter of the room. The twenty students worked independently, on whatever subjects they chose, each facing a screen and, behind that, a bit of blank wall. The teacher, one of the handful the prison employed through the state education department, sat at the front of the room and did not move. Not once, in the hour I sat with Danny that morning, did the teacher lean over a student’s shoulder to guide him through a problem; not once did he address the class from his desk, which was mostly walled off from the inmates by a book-lined hutch. Yet Danny spoke highly of him. Danny spoke, in fact, with gratitude and affection. Two months ago, the man had taught him to use the mouse.
I had to wonder just how much effort Warden Cain put into carrying out his mission. How much did he try to inspire his staff? So far, I’d never actually bumped into him on the grounds, never actually seen him stop in at the Toy Shop to offer his encouragement, never seen him stroll the Walk to remind his staff of his goals by his mere presence. Probably it was sheer chance that our paths hadn’t crossed. But one thing was certain: He hadn’t influenced this instructor. If he had, Danny might have learned to assume, at the late age of thirty-three, that teachers were there to assist him when he couldn’t figure out an answer.
Yet Danny seemed able to thrive, or at least inch upward, on the minimal attention given him. And on the good fortune of a spot in that classroom. Since October he had climbed two tenths of a grade level in reading, from a 6.9 to a 7.1, and despite today’s demolition of the little pigs’ house, from a 6.2 to a 7.2 in math.
Giving up on fractions, he moved on to science. He read a passage that would lead to questions, to another try at earning an army of devils. “Look at this,” he said. “Are you reading this? Did you know this? I think I’m going to use this tonight.” He copied down the three paragraphs in deliberate handwriting.
School ended at ten. After count and lunch, he went to his job turning dirt on the yard. The job entailed a good deal of hoe-dragging, slapping at soil already turned, yet it involved occasional teamwork, or at least working side by side. Each man was given a “cut,” a section of ground about seven feet across, to till. The men worked in a line, but not all that close. Danny did not do well at such collaborative effort. He often felt the world was crowding around him, misusing him. The other convicts got in his way, the freemen planned the projects inefficiently. Usually, by around two in the afternoon, Danny wished the man next to him would say something, start something, so he could let loose. He wished the freeman would bark at him one more time—Danny would teach him a lesson in respect, the kind of lesson he’d quit teaching lately. He wouldn’t care what happened to him afterward; let them lock his ass up; he would do it; fuck Toastmasters and GED and all that; people didn’t call him Popeye for nothing.
But today he chopped at the dirt without even noticing the crew he usually perceived converging around him. He thought of tonight’s speech, was thrilled by his topic. Until this morning he hadn’t quite known what he would speak on, a particular problem because this assignment, from his Toastmasters “Communication and Leadership Program” manual, was supposed to be written out and read aloud. There would be no hiding his lack of preparation. He’d almost been ready to find one of the Forgotten Voices executives, to own up. The admission would not be treated with sympathy. A sonorous voice was Danny’s natural strength; preparation wasn’t. The members had urged him, after recent speeches, to spend more time organizing his thoughts and rehearsing key points in advance. If he admitted that
he had nothing written at all, they might put him on probation. They would, at the very least, lecture him on his responsibilities, on the limited space in the club, on the Forgotten Voices’ goal: to prove to everyone the positive things convicts could achieve.
Well, fuck them
, Danny had been thinking over the past few days. Fucking rat checkout model prisoners. How many weak assholes were in that punk organization? All of them, it looked like.
Now he thought that if this speech went well they might elect him to the team for their next outside competition. He might represent Angola at the next Battle of the Institutions against chapters from other Louisiana prisons. And if he could make trusty before the Forgotten Voices traveled to the Holiday Inn for the next District 68 Toastmasters convention like it had last year, he might step up to the microphone and hold that free-world audience spellbound.
Back at his cot, he wrote out the paragraphs yet more carefully in his spiral notebook. I let myself speculate—because of his Toastmasters ambitions and his short haircut that granted his ears their extraordinary prominence—that his desire for cosmetic surgery might be fading. I knew he hadn’t heard anything more about approval for the operation, and I asked if he still thought about it.
“Yeah. I think about it all the time. Have I ever told you about the way I got picked on when I was a kid?”
He’d tried to give me the details. I’d deflected his attempts. I’d told myself it was because the phrases of torment would be so predictable. But I think I didn’t want to hear him out because I knew his pain would be absolutely basic, fundamental. I couldn’t bear to find myself standing with a murderer who was also a defenseless child. Now, again, I showed no interest in the specifics of his childhood.
“Yeah, I think about it,” he said. “Wouldn’t you?”
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.