Authors: Daniel Bergner
“When you coming?” he asked, relieved to steer away from his drug money, which neither she nor the monitors could know about.
She said she had wanted to visit last weekend, but that her cousin wouldn’t drive her, because they had just been to see Cook’s brother at Winn Correctional.
The recorded voice came on to warn them: “You have one more minute for this call.” Cook could phone her back for another fifteen, but he knew she couldn’t afford it.
“All right,” he said.
“I’m going to be there soon, I’m going to try.”
“Write me something.”
“I will, you know that.”
“And thanks for sending that picture. I almost forgot that.”
“You put it in your album?”
“I did. I love you, Mama.”
“I love—”
The line went dead.
Then, after our talk and after delivering the sugar bags and borrowing a cassette from someone on his dorm, he would go running. The music on the cassette was unknown to him; he couldn’t name the group. He paid no attention to the music. When he’d first asked his dorm-mate for a tape, Cook had said only, “Give me something loud.” And that was all he knew about whatever he put into his Walkman and played twice over during his long run, that it was some kind of hard rock and that he kept it loud. “I really couldn’t tell you,” he said when I asked if the man gave him the same tape every day. He couldn’t recite a single lyric or reproduce a line of chords. It was just a wall of sound, and he ran right through it.
In bare feet. Ten miles around and around the Yard, wearing cutoff jeans, no shirt, no sneakers. And he watched for the few stones, to come down on them. To toughen him. Not that he planned to take those hills without shoes. But he knew he would have to keep running, no matter where he was cut, no matter what bone he had broken, no matter if a snake bit into his leg. He needed to stay free only long enough to reach Alexandria. The last escape, before the murder, had been to be with all his family. This was to find his ex-wife and the friends who had turned him in. The music was nothing to him. The stones were nothing. Ten miles did not wind him. Every day for the rest of their lives, he wanted those people to think of him. “Because I’m going to be in Angola for the rest of mine.” He would break into his friends’ houses while they slept, and he would cut their right hands from their arms. He hadn’t yet decided exactly how. He imagined a few options. But every time they reached for something, every time they went to open a door or pick up a cup of coffee, there would be Cook, remembered.
“I don’t blame them for what I did,” he said. “But I blame them for me being here.”
And later that night, before the police caught up with him, he
would pick the lock on his ex-wife’s front door. He would climb the stairs quietly. He would stand over her bed while she slept. He would pour acid over her face. It would eat at her cheeks, her nose, her lips, her chin, her hair, her neck. He would be careful to avoid her eyes. Every time she looked in the mirror, there in her everlasting disfigurement, she would see him.
Part of me had believed, when I had found Cook in the Toy Shop back at Christmas, that his entire life was changing, and that the change would be solidified by the shop’s charitable works. Now my hope—and the fact that I liked this man, despite what he seemed quite capable of doing—left me faintly sickened. I was sickened, too, by the immediate knowledge that I would write everything he told me, and that my words would probably cost him years at Camp J. But nothing ate at me quite so much, over the coming months, as my early ideas about Warden Cain.
Through June and July, I struggled to substantiate that my initial vision had been, at least partly, right. I tried to make the Huey Long version come true. I talked not only with inmates but with staff at all levels, asking again and again about Cain’s role in the programs—Toastmasters, the Toy Shop, the CPR team, education—he advertised. The employees stared back at me quizzically, as though I might be demented.
They were happy enough to talk with me. I’d expected hostility when I returned after the lawsuit; instead, I received smiles and jokes, quietly spoken. Men who’d once told me Cain was the best warden in their long memories, now quoted to me from the newspaper’s account: “ ‘I love you like a brother,’ “ they mumbled or winked as I passed by. “ ‘Just business, just business.’ ” When I ran into a group of guards in a bar down the road from the prison, they couldn’t get enough of their favorite punch line: “Dan, listen,” they
leaned forward, breaking off from the topic of conversation, “I’m trying to build a barn for my wife….”
I began to feel like Dorothy, her house having just fallen on the Wicked Witch. The staff celebrated my victory. The only problem was, they were still besieged. The witch wasn’t crushed, only bruised. Cain, worried that one of his staff might have the temerity to finger him for something that wouldn’t dissolve, governed as he always had, warning his employees by flaunting his power, perpetually demoting, shunting aside, and firing lifelong personnel. And the staff had no recourse. Cain held a seat on the civil service commission and seemed able to influence a majority of its seven votes.
But now that the staff knew I wasn’t his man, they were glad to answer my questions. So after searching my face for signs of dementia—how, after what I’d discovered firsthand, could I go on inquiring about his mission at the penitentiary?—they told me about Cain’s commitment to Angola. Discounting for the fact that he didn’t live on the grounds, he spent far less time at the prison than any warden they could remember. To facilitate this, he had commanded the gate guards never to log him in or out. Cain said that because he lived outside Angola, he needed to enter unrecorded so he could surprise employees who were up to no good. The staff found this wildly funny. If a criminal or abusive guard had a friend at the gate, he would be much more quickly alerted to the warden’s presence by a call from the gate phone (or a message relayed) than by driving miles across the penitentiary to check the logbook. Cain’s order, those at higher levels said, allowed him to spend his time starting up a private prison business in neighboring Mississippi.
“But what about something like the Toy Shop?” I asked. “Hasn’t he accomplished something there?”
The shop was producing more toys now, yes, but only through the efforts of its convict founders and the assistant warden who was its sponsor.
“What about Toastmasters?”
Begun under John Whitley, it was the same size it had always been, twenty-five or thirty members.
“The CPR team?”
No different than when Whitley had started it.
“But overall, is it possible that more inmates are involved in those kinds of programs now than before Cain took over? Is it possible that there are more clubs, more organizations? Is it just possible?”
Maybe, I heard, Cain had played some role in the growth of the literacy program offered to the general prison population, from about one hundred to two hundred inmates. But the numbers themselves were suspect, and any expansion was due to the program’s coordinator, who was tireless in finding convicts to serve as teachers, in scraping together materials and staking out classroom space. Cain was uninvested.
And no, there had been no overall increase in the number of inmate organizations. They were as scattered as they had always been, with no greater number of convicts involved.
I thought, as the staff asked me what else I wanted to know, of Danny Fabre somewhere among the 5,000 men on the 18,000-acre penitentiary. He had access to one of Angola’s twenty or thirty student computers. He had his membership in Toastmasters and Captain Newsom’s words of encouragement, given in passing once every two months. He was one of Angola’s lucky few. He was on his own.
“You want to know what’s grown?” one employee was asking. “It’s Burl’s lies.”
The inmates, too, felt free to talk. One told me of a rumor that had circulated before the lawsuit: that I was Warden Cain’s spy. Why else, the convicts had reasoned, would I be allowed to roam the prison and hold my interviews without anyone listening in? Warning
myself not to fall prey to the paranoid thinking that takes hold readily among lifers, I wondered nevertheless if Cain himself had been the source of the rumor. I’d heard that he had tried to do this once before, to one of Polozola’s court-appointed team. It was a way to make sure all comments were positive.
The comments, now, were not. The grumblings I’d heard—from the abolished band and from others I’d dismissed, early on, as too self-interested or too driven by a prisoner’s flailing rage—grew louder and much more frequent. “Be fair,” I emphasized after the suit. “Don’t think I need to hear something critical. Wouldn’t you have said the same things about Whitley? Wouldn’t you have said the same things about Maggio?”
“Maggio was the Gestapo,” one older inmate answered. “But he had a prison to clean up. And Whitley? No, Whitley had some kind of caring. I’m not trying to yeast things up, this complaining. I’m telling you, when it comes to positive morale around Angola, Cain is going to take whatever there is.”
The changes Cain had actually brought to the prison, I learned, were represented by his expansion of Angola’s shoe-shining detail. Shoe shiner had always been a semi-official inmate job at the penitentiary. But the bootblacks, provided for staff only, had been spread thin. So Cain had told his classification officers that he wanted more appointed. It wasn’t necessarily hard to find volunteers. The job gave the inmate an opportunity to joke and beg for a few cigarettes, or a Coke, from the guard whose shoes he was polishing. And tradition had it that the guard would sometimes humor the convict by paying him in this way. I had assumed that the bootblacks had always been prevalent. But only under Cain had the work become a thriving program. At any hour, at one of the gateposts along the Main Walk, you might see a sergeant chatting with one of his colleagues, an inmate with rag and polish crouched at his feet.
Or perhaps Cain’s style of leadership—and his approach to the
humanity of the inmates—was best captured in his dealings with the
Angolite
. The bimonthly magazine called itself the country’s only uncensored prison publication, and while this had always been stretching the point (for the editors were kept by the men they might criticize), it had, since the seventies, been instructed to include any information it judged true. The result had been a number of national awards and a place as a symbol of transformation.
Wilbert Rideau, the editor in chief, had arrived at Angola in 1962 with a ninth-grade education and a death sentence for murdering a bank teller. He had educated himself while on death row, had begun working on the
Angolite
after capital punishment was temporarily ruled unconstitutional in 1972, and had spent the last quarter-century making a prominent contribution to journalism. In addition to winning the George Polk Award and a National Magazine Award nomination, he had edited a collection of Angola writing published by Times Books, and had narrated segments on the prison for National Public Radio.
But Warden Cain did not hold Rideau’s or the magazine’s accomplishment in much esteem. During the spring of my year there, he shut off the phone line the writers had always used to gather information from outside the prison. He prohibited the staff from earning money by writing articles for outside publications, a privilege the inmate journalists had always been granted. Given Cain’s many business dealings and his interaction with me, it made good sense that he remind the staff who was in charge and whose virtue they should never question. But he had difficulty with more than the chance of critical reporting. He had trouble with the stature of Rideau himself, with the way he was treated, by some, as a fully rehabilitated citizen, someone worthy of respect and even honor. That spring, Rideau got word of a decision Cain had made back in January, when the Louisiana Bar Association had notified the warden that it was giving its Excellence in Legal Journalism prize to a
film on the death penalty Rideau had written. It would have been accepted procedure to let Rideau attend the awards dinner. (A previous warden had sent him with an escort to be honored at two press conventions in Washington, D.C.) Gain told Rideau nothing about the prize, sent his first deputy to the banquet, and kept the plaque in his office.
Yet what should I make of the contact visits and literacy classes the warden had instituted on death row? Or of Cain in the death chamber, holding the condemned man’s hand and telling him the angels were coming? As I thought obsessively of the figure who dominated my life, the man who, though he avoided me through the summer, floated tauntingly before me like an image with one slender yet crucial fragment missing, I sometimes saw that he might possess a grand element of mercy. And then I would imagine him more clearly as he held the convict’s hand and signaled for the lethal injection: Cain at the apogee, manifest as Lord, killing and forgiving and resurrecting in the same instant.
The final fragment wouldn’t materialize until October. Then, at the rodeo, the figure became whole.
Meanwhile, I reckoned with the fact that Cain’s emphasis on religion did help bring people—maybe only a few, maybe many more—a little bit closer to a life of peace.
Chaplain Holloway was assigned to Camp J. (Cain had hired extra ministers and put one at every camp.) Wearing a knit shirt with a pattern of tiny golfers, Holloway pushed a grocery cart full of inspirational literature. A grocery cart. Just like in the A&P. Just like the homeless on the street. This one had red chipping paint. He pushed it up the Walk at J, yelled out “Gate!” and waited for the guard to let
him onto the dim tier. He pushed it past the cells, past the men who sometimes tried to pee on him through the bars, past the inmate who liked to flex in his own feces. “What’s up, bro?” the chaplain asked at each set of bars. “What can I get for you, bro?” Built thick, a football player in college, he was a white hipster in a golfing shirt in the middle of the Inferno. I don’t know what he was, but he was tireless. And kind.
“How’d you end up back on One, bro?” he asked an emaciated man, referring to the worst of J’s levels, where you were let out of your cell—into a solitary dogrun—only two hours each week.