Authors: Daniel Bergner
And yes, Brooks knew what the public came for. “Some of them, sure,” he said when I asked about rooting for broken bodies. But not
all. “And if you give them something good… ” He spoke more of technique, of the bull’s “pivot point,” of a “suicide tie” for his right hand, of locking his right elbow, of watching J. W. Hart and Tuff Hedeman and Ted Nuce on ESPN, “studying them tight, tight.” Then he talked again of the spectators, who cheered loudly for the best performances. He had heard it. He knew they did. And he recalled the day a rodeo clown—hired from the pro circuit to draw the bulls away from fallen riders—hugged him, lifted him off his feet in congratulations after a beautifully executed ride. “He liked what I done,” Brooks remembered, his eyes completely at odds with the understatement of his words, “and he just picked me up like this.”
Ten years ago Littell Harris was mixing a cocktail of his own feces at Angola’s Camp J. This October, on the rodeo’s opening day, he sat in the convict section of the bleachers. He had a profusion of dreadlocks, vines spilling in every direction, and a thick beard that hid much of his face. The hair was an aberration at the prison. His harsh eyes, with their faintly Asian slant, were almost his only visible feature. By early spring, being one of Angola’s lucky few, he would have served his fifteen years for armed robbery. Under laws increasingly severe, more recent Louisiana armed robbers would spend the rest of their lives in the penitentiary. But for Littell, a few more months and he was gone.
The cocktail was accomplished like this: Littell lined the steel toilet at the back of his cell with newspaper. He shit onto the paper. Then he crouched down, with his back to the bars, and mashed and stirred the stool in a cup of water; at the right consistency he would pour the liquid into a drinking bottle with a squirt top. He could stir in private because Camp J, where Angola’s worst disciplinary cases were sent, had single-man cells on only one side of a narrow concrete hall. The nearest guard sat at the end of the corridor, outside a
barred gate. Because of cocktails like Littell’s, the guard preferred not to venture down that hall.
In this case the mix was meant for another inmate. When that man got his tier time, to shower and to walk along the seventy-foot-long corridor, Littell would douse him. A self-proclaimed “Camp J warrior,” he did battle in this way with three or four men on the tier. He no longer remembered why. That was just how it was: something had been said; “draft” in cigarettes had gone unpaid; someone came from the wrong town, the wrong part of the state. “They shitted me down”; Littell did the same. Or they each found ways, makeshift and intricate, to reconfigure and extend the electrical circuits behind their ceiling light fixtures; by running a wire into their toilets they boiled water for flinging. Or they added Ben-Gay to the scalding water, creating what was quaintly called “a stinger.” It worked on the eyes like acid.
So Littell stirred his feces. “I’m sitting there,” he recalled when we talked alone, “and I’m doing this disgusting ass shit, and it’s like I had an out-of-body experience, man, it’s like I could see myself from the back, squatting down, playing with these fucking turds, mashing this fucking turd up, souping it up, and I’m watching myself, and I said, Man, that’s a fucking shame, fucking disgusting animal savage that I’ve turned into. Savage. And I’m looking at myself, and I started thinking, I don’t know nothing, I don’t read, I’m caught up in this bullshit. I knew then that I had to turn around…. From that day on I tried to enlighten myself. But I still went and did what I had to do. Because I don’t want to be no fucking victim.”
There was plenty that Littell still “had to do.” He had finished his most recent stint at J and on other disciplinary cellblocks only months before he sat in the rodeo stands—with about two hundred other convict spectators, separated from the public by a simple rail—and less than half a year before his scheduled freedom. If nothing major happened, no prison murder or stabbing to warrant new state
charges against him, he would go more or less directly from savagery back into the world.
For the first time, he watched the rodeo’s opening procession. At his back the Main Prison sprawled. It housed half of Angola’s inmates. The outermost of its tall, razor-wired fences surrounded the stadium. In the distance were maroon-and-yellow guard towers, endless fields, the levees that lined the Mississippi, the lake the river had left behind, the outcamps that held the rest of the convicts. “Louisiana State Penitentiary. L.S.P. Last Slave Plantation,” Littell said. Below him the Rough Riders, the mounted inmate drill team, galloped into the arena. In red bandannas and black straw cowboy hats, they veered in tenuous patterns—their practice had been scarcely more extensive than that of the rodeo competitors—and finally lined up along the red, white and blue rodeo fence. They settled their horses. They bowed their heads for the chaplain’s prayer.
Waving in the breeze above their heads were the flags they carried: the state’s, the country’s, the penitentiary’s, and, in this prison whose inmate population was 77 percent black, whose guards were two-thirds white, and whose administration couldn’t have been more pale, the Confederacy’s. There were two of those flags, with the blue X and the thirteen stars and the red background, one carried by a black man. The crowd was virtually all white. “Do you see this?” Littell leaned toward the inmate beside him. “That fucking idiot.” The next man down the bleachers answered, “It ain’t nothing but a piece of cloth.” And the prayer began.
The chaplain gave thanks to the warden, thanks to God. He asked Jesus to bless this rodeo and to bless all the riders with protection. “Heavenly Father, you have favored us with this day and with the hope and beauty of this Creation…. Bless all of us with an appreciation of the joy of living.” Littell wasn’t feeling too joyful. He stared hard—without pleasure—at any attractive woman he found in the stands, his main purpose for being here. But as the chaplain’s
words seeped in, he figured he did have something to be thankful for. At least he knew what he should about that flag. At least he wasn’t like the men around him, illiterate. At least he’d educated himself. Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, he’d read about them all since that moment on Camp J. “And at least I’m getting ready to take my GED,” he said. “I’m getting ready to establish myself.”
At least he was getting out of here.
So he tried to enjoy himself, ignore the guards barking down into the convict section, “Caps off! Get your hoods off!” as the loudspeaker introduced “the greatest song ever written,” ignore his own thoughts about pride and nationhood as the inmate band played the national anthem. A young horsewoman, sent by the car dealership that sponsored the rodeo, rode around the arena bearing the American flag through the day’s drizzle, the rhythmic sloshing of hooves on the wet turf audible beneath the band, a slow and strange percussion. Littell tried to concentrate on the woman’s body in her blue spangled jumpsuit.
The black guys hurt him the most, but the whites—who made up about half the rodeo’s participants—sickened him, too. They were all willing to price their lives at zero. They were all willing to turn themselves into a joke. “Waiting in Department of Corrections bucking chute number one, serving lllllife…” he heard the mounted emcee (like the clowns, hired from the pro circuit) announce the six riders in the first event. “Waiting in Department of Corrections bucking chute number two, serving
LLLLLIFE…”
“LLLLLIFE,”
the emcee bellowed.
“LLLLLIFE! LLLLLIFE!! LLLLLIFE!!!!!”
All chutes opened at once, and six convicts on six bulls churned into the arena. This was the “Bust-Out,” a special feature of Angola’s rodeo. The name was a play on “escape,” the event designed for futility.
It was hard enough for an untrained man to avoid injury when riding a bull alone in the ring; with five other animals and five other hapless contestants all bounding and tumbling at one end of the arena, the risks multiplied. Johnny Brooks wanted to score points early. He wanted Angola’s all-around cowboy belt buckle when the month was over (the all-around champion’s only prize, though first place in each riding event would bring fifty dollars). Wearing elaborate suede chaps in turquoise and black, a matching vest, a black felt hat studded with moons and stars, all commissioned from a convict who did his tooling in a prison hobby shop, Johnny Brooks spurred frantically and kept from keeling as his bull twisted and leapt off all four hooves. But he couldn’t control where the animal went amid the chaos, not at the last instant, when another inmate, a rodeo veteran and past belt buckle winner, sailed sideways. Brooks’s bull trampled across the man’s back, injuring him badly enough to keep him out of the rest of the month’s competition. Thrown in the process, Brooks scored no points at all.
Soon a small wooden table was carried out to the center of the ring. It was time for “Convict Poker,” a new event that year, another special feature, the inspiration of the range-crew bosses. The table was painted bright red. Four folding chairs were placed around it, and four inmates jogged out to occupy those chairs. Johnny Brooks was one. There were no cards involved. The men would merely sit as though playing poker. The emcee boomed, “Brrrrring on the dealer!” and in one of the chutes, an inmate delivered an electric prod to a 2,000 pound black bull with perfectly sweeping, perfectly pointed white horns. The animal bolted into the arena. The last man sitting would win one hundred dollars.
The trouble was that bulls aren’t attracted to stationary targets. And the men were stationary, palms flat and fingers spread on the table, never turning to check on the animal as it circled behind their backs, knowing that if the three minute whistle blew with more than
one convict left, the one who had moved least, who had kept his trembling under control, whose fingers hadn’t so much as twitched, would win. The crowd—all those fans who’d waited for hours along the shoulder of the road to buy their eight dollar tickets; the prison staff; the inmates in their section of the bleachers; the few members of the media in their ramshackle press box; me—wasn’t going to get its payoff.
So the clown, usually a figure of protection, started taunting. He tossed his floppy hat into the bull’s face. Imitating a bull on the verge of attack, he stooped down, snorting, and scraped the dirt with his hands. He grabbed Brooks’s cowboy hat and waved it behind Brooks’s shoulder blades. He climbed up on the table, made a racket with his feet, ready to jump over the inmates’ heads to safety as the bull charged.
It didn’t. It only convinced one man to leave his seat with a side-caress of horn, and ambled off to a distance of four or five yards. The clown picked up the vacated metal chair. He lifted it over his head and hurled it into the bull’s snout. It clattered against the horns, and still the men did not shift. At last the animal processed the message, drove forward to deliver on the promise of its size, on the promise of those gorgeously sweeping and immaculately pointed horns which slammed, by one convict’s pure good fortune, into the minimal back of his folding chair instead of into his kidney. The man was now down, the bull ready to spear or stomp. But at that moment Johnny Brooks lost his nerve or gained his sanity, leapt out of his seat, and began sprinting for the fence. The bull caught motion in the corner of its eye. Fleeing across the arena, Brooks stayed five feet, two feet, twelve inches ahead of the horns. Arms and legs pumping, and back arching away from his own death, he looked like a cartoon character in comic escape. As if a firecracker had been lit under his ass, he scrambled up the rails of the fence.
“How did you enjoy the Convict Poker, ladies and gentlemen?”
the emcee asked. There was some applause. And laughter. I’m sure some of the reaction to the event was electrified, exhilarated, the thrill of watching men in terror made forgivable because the men were murderers. I’m sure some of it was racist
(See that nigger move)
, some disappointed (that there had been no goring), and some uneasy (with that very same disappointment). I’m sure nearly everyone, including me, felt some measure of each of these things. But I know as well that many people were not laughing, were too bewildered or stunned by what they had seen, even if they’d heard about the new event named Convict Poker and it was exactly why they had come. Angola’s stadium is an intimate place. There are no faraway seats. And just outside the arena inmates sold Cokes and hot dogs and cotton candy. They sold what they made in the hobby shops—key chains and purses, dollhouses and oil paintings. Some were allowed to deal directly with the customers, others called out from a fenced bullpen while prison employees stood with the craftwork. The spectators had bought these handmade things. There had been brief transactions, the briefest of dialogues. The convicts at the center of the ring had become men, only men, to at least a degree.
Or perhaps this was only a wishful, sentimental perception on my part. Since September I had begun to know the inmates. I felt a confusion of reactions, electricity and revulsion and disappointment and discomfort and, as Johnny Brooks took flight, a tinge of racism: certainly it was easier for me to watch—and be curious and analytic about—a black man in danger and fear and abasement, precisely because he had that adjective next to him, black, was slightly less close to being me. Perhaps my sense of the crowd was only projection. I spoke with few of the public. Perhaps I should limit myself to saying that the crowd, overall, was quieter than I thought it would be. Quieter than two concessions across from the Cokes and cotton candy suggested. At one, fans paid a dollar to get themselves locked inside a freestanding jail cell and have an inmate snap a Polaroid
through the bars. At the other, for the same price, a convict took their pictures while they stuck their heads up from a wooden body with a cut-out neck, the body painted with a prisoner’s old-fashioned striped jumpsuit and adorned with a ball and chain on each ankle.
The bull riding came second to last. Here was an event that replicated the pro tour. The rider had to stay on for eight seconds to score points; the better his form, the more points he would receive. Here was the chance for Johnny Brooks to prove himself, to rise above the helplessness and degradation of contests like the Bust-Out and Convict Poker, where pure luck and sheer craziness played such overwhelming roles, the chance for this forty-year-old man, who would most likely never leave Angola, to prevail on skill and reveal his grace. He could show himself no different from J. W. Hart and Tuff Hedeman and Ted Nuce, the stars of the pro circuit, whose rides were hailed weekly by the ESPN announcer not only as demonstrations of talent but as testaments to integrity and good values. He could be those figures. And he could be, in front of the public, what he was at least part of the time in his job at Angola, a cowboy.