Authors: Daniel Bergner
“Take your time,” he yelled.
Buckkey apologized to Paper Doll for not spending more of the day with her.
“I’m glad you didn’t. That’s how it was supposed to be. You know what he says now? ‘I been visiting him for sixteen years. It’s time
he
come.’ ”
Buckkey climbed into the cab of his boss’s pickup. His arm dangling out the window, he lifted his hand almost casually toward his son. Then he leaned out, not only his head but his shoulders, like a dog, mouthing
Come back
silently as though to make it a subtle and pressureless message. Chris answered with a brief wave from the basketball court.
“You all right, Buck?” Mr. Jimmy asked as they drove beneath the great bank of sweet gum and oak trees at the edge of the prison and turned toward Camp F.
“Yeah. I’m all right.”
S
ETTING
OUT
TO
BE
SAVED
AFTER
LAST
YEAR’S
rodeo, Terry Hawkins had believed that his new involvement with Rev and Sister Jackie, and with his Bible, would help him “stay out of wrong and make everything happen better for me.”
He would rise from big-stripe to trusty, from fry cook to a job with the range crew. He would ride a horse that would be his own, learn to rope, meet Mr. Gerry Lane. With the promotion, he would be moved from his dorm at Camp D to one at F, where the compound had no barred gate and the men just wandered out their front door, strolled across the road, sat alone under the pecan trees on the banks of a pond. Terry had heard a family of ducks was living there. He had heard you could fish. He had heard it was a whole lot nicer. And the promotion and move had been sure to be given. Besides his commitment to religion, he had the guarantee of what he’d done at the rodeo, body catapulted and crumpled yet hand seizing the chip in the Guts & Glory—in front of Mr. Mike Vannoy and his brother, Darrell, and in front of Warden Cain.
But his effort at salvation had fallen apart. Since the day after his blowjob in the shower, he hadn’t been back to Sister Jackie’s church. It had been six months. And no assignment to the range crew or spot at Camp F had come his way.
Instead, by July, Terry lived in a dorm on the west side of Main Prison, the Wild Side. The dorms of the main complex bore the names of trees—the softer woods, Ash and Magnolia and Spruce, to the east, and the harder, Oak and Hickory and Walnut, at the other end. The west held younger, tougher inmates, men who hadn’t yet hit bottom and had enough of J and begun to navigate some new approach to existing in prison. It held, too, older convicts who’d fallen back and been sent there, to begin working their way up again, after serving their terms in the punishment cells. In this, his twelfth year at Angola, Terry found himself living in Walnut.
There, at two A.M. one night, Terry woke to see a man sliding a pair of sneakers from beneath another’s cot. While the second inmate slept under the soft blue of the security lights, the man pulled the high-tops onto his feet, laced them snugly, tied them, and, fully dressed now, walked up the aisle to his own bed. He removed the padlock from his box. Holding it, he returned to the sleeping inmate, knelt on top of him, and pinned his head to the pillow with one hand. Terry guessed he was about to deal out a whipping with the padlock, then saw he carried a razor in addition. Earlier in the day, Terry had overheard him complaining, in a high-pitched, half-whiny voice, about an unpaid debt, whether for drugs or gambling or the prostitution of his punk wasn’t clear. Now he carved with the razor. He sliced deep from temple to jaw.
Then
he dealt out the lock-whipping. And
then
the guard’s backup arrived.
Terry’s route from Camp D to the Wild Side had begun one May afternoon when a shakedown team, in its military fatigues, had poured through D. The guards strip-searched the inmates, told them to dress, and sent them out onto the Yard while they tore through every box and turned over every garbage can. At a fence dividing the camp into sections, Terry watched a basketball game played on the
other side. The shakedown team finished with the dorms and fanned out over the Yard. A sergeant, approaching the fence, saw Terry throw something—quickly—a few feet away into the grass. Terry insisted, to the sergeant and later to me, that it was a cigarette. With the sergeant, he pointed to a butt on the ground. The officer peered not far from that spot, bent down, and showed Terry a roach.
Right away, the lieutenant in charge of the search offered him a deal. For tips on stashes of drugs and weapons, the nub of marijuana would be forgotten.
“I don’t know nothing about any of that,” Terry said, abiding by the old code, though it was not so well abided or universally enforced anymore at Angola. The older convicts all said that with the safety that had come in the 1970s, the snitches had begun to proliferate. They didn’t even have to ask to live in the protection dorms.
“I couldn’t tell you about none of that,” Terry insisted.
“Pack your toothbrush,” the lieutenant said.
Angola’s judicial system worked like this: The inmate was handed a white jumpsuit to change into; he was shackled and cuffed and taken to a cell; he was brought to trial within a week. The prison held hundreds of such trials every week, in out-of-the-way offices just big enough to fit a pair of gunmetal desks. The inmates, in the shackles and cuffs and the torn or half-buttonless jumpsuits and the slippers they’d been told to pack with their toothbrushes, lined up in a hallway. A guard called them in one at a time to stand before two judges, a senior officer from security and someone from classification. “Would you like the assistance of counsel?” they asked the defendant. They meant the inmate paralegal on duty that day, who stood sandwiched between wall and file cabinet, and who had won his job through recommendations from security and classification. Whether or not the defendant accepted, the hearing started right away and ended within two minutes. Charges were read; a rebuttal was put forth. “122173, Counsel Substitute Mark Hall, we ask you
to consider that those were prescription drugs the inmate had forgotten to take and was saving only because his prescription might not be renewed. That, simply, is our defense.” The paralegal tilted his head at a mourner’s angle as he spoke, though the reason seemed as much shame that his client had provided him such a lame argument as regret that his client was doomed.
After the paralegal’s terse statement, or after the inmate himself gave his account—“I didn’t tell no guard no F-curse. I
explained
to the man it was the other orderly’s job, but I didn’t tell him no F-curse. Nah, I ain’t about all that”—while gesturing despite the cuffs, which were belted tight to his belly, so that his plaintive hands looked like seal fins flapping from his stomach—immediately after the defense fell mute, the senior officer told the two inmates, “Step outside.” The judges turned through the colored folder that held the defendant’s prior record at Angola, his “jacket.” They conferred for thirty or ninety seconds, called the accused and the paralegal back in, and rendered a verdict grounded in past conduct, a necessity since the present evidence consisted of a few sentences—or nonsentences—scribbled on a pink slip by the arresting guard. But most of the judges’ assumptions were surely right. The same convicts appeared in court again and again. Some shuffled in ten or fifteen times a year.
Terry argued that he’d demanded a urine test from both the sergeant and the lieutenant of the shakedown team, and that they had refused. He requested a test again now, in court. The judges replied that the charge was not for
smoking
marijuana but
possessing
it. The test, they ruled immediately, would be irrelevant.
“Step outside.”
Terry shuffled out.
His jacket showed more than fifty write-ups over his twelve years. The violence seemed to have faded away—he hadn’t blackened the eyes of any more guards—but he had a marijuana charge only two years old.
And he’d told the same story then. He’d been denied a urine test that would have proven his innocence.
“Inmate!” one of the judges yelled, and the guard posted outside the door let Terry back in to receive his sentence.
So in May, he’d been put in the Camp D punishment cells. Double-bunked, the cells were about six feet across, eight feet deep, eight feet high. Between them, Terry and his cellmate weighed over four hundred pounds. Terry, the second to arrive, got the top bunk. The heat rose. He lay on his mattress, sweating, sheet “rain wet.” Eventually he switched to the floor. His cellie allowed him the concrete. At Angola, the man with the bottom bunk always made this accommodation.
Other accommodations involved the toilet. You warned your cellmate when you had to squat; he sat on the floor with his face to the bars, closest to the corridor’s air. And you kept flushing and flushing to cut down on the smell.
It was a working tier. Every morning, after sixteen hours of lock-down, the guard yelled, “Get it together! Work call! Get it straight!” and Terry lined up his rubber boots and shower slippers against the wall, dusted the bars of the cell to pass inspection, and pulled on his work boots. The guard opened the cells from the end of the tier; the locks released with a
thunk
and the bars slid back with a grinding and clanging like an old train getting started in a railway yard. Terry was grateful for the sounds, relieved to be marched to the camp gate, handed a hoe, marched a mile down the road, and ordered to hack at weeds in a drainage ditch. Work was better than the sixteen hours before and the sixteen hours after.
Through the early hours of the night on his top bunk, with the cracked concrete ceiling lowering close as the lid of a coffin to his face, he lived with his slaughterhouse boss, Mr. Denver Tarter. Terry had stood over him forever, it seemed now. So much returned to him
so clearly, it was as if he had stared in order to memorize, not in disbelief. He saw the blood streaking parts of Mr. Denver Tarter’s short, thinning brush of hair but not others. Focusing on the memory of the clean tufts, Terry could half convince himself for a second that the man had only passed out drunk, that nothing permanent had ever happened. Terry longed to bend and place his lips over the bloody, severed throat, to “blow air back inside him.” That was what he longed to do
now
. But he couldn’t forget what he had done then. Nothing. Just shaken his head finally at the monotone question running through his brain,
How did all of a sudden this happen
?—just shaken his head and walked away in a weird calm.
He stretched his hand toward the ceiling to assure himself it lay more than inches above him. There was no question of waking his cellmate to talk of what he heard and saw in his mind, though they got along well given the situation, played dominoes sometimes, even spoke of their children. Men at Angola just didn’t talk of their crimes. Terry tried to think of anything—a pornographic picture that had once been his favorite; the Student of the Week certificate his daughter had sent months ago—to distract himself. He had flipped the ax to the sharp side and swung over and over and over and over.
He sat up off the drenched sheet and knelt facing the back of the cell, overlooking the steel sink and toilet. He shut his eyes. “Lord,” he prayed, “Mr. Denver Tarter hunting me down tonight. I need you please to get him off my mind. He’s on my conscience, Lord. Please do me this one thing, Lord. Please for tonight. Please put me sleep. Please take him off.”
Terry told me he’d been put in the cell because he’d quit going to Sister Jackie’s services. Whether he meant that God was punishing him for his absence with this false charge and unfair sentence, or that his lapse in worship had led to weakness, and to his getting high and getting
caught, I was never sure. But I knew that his avoiding her Camp D church (because he was unforgivable) was a failure that, in itself, told him again how unforgivable he was.
Then, during the summer, he experienced a series of good turns—all because of the rodeo. First, an officer in charge of the field lines expressed dismay at the sight of Terry, with the others from his cellblock, swinging a hoe.
“Hey, crazy man,” he yelled, stopping his truck. “Is that you, crazy man, crazy man from the rodeo? Come here. What are you doing out here with a ditch-bank blade?”
Terry stepped over. “Shakedown team got me bad. Said I was messing with marijuana. You know I don’t mess with no marijuana.”
“Crazy man, I can’t have you sweating so bad out here. Got to save your energy for those bulls. How many times you grab that token last year?”
“Just once. Was the only one did it, though.”
“I saw you that first Sunday. Bull had you up there, huh?”
“Won the Convict Poker last year, too.”
“You’re the one to watch, crazy man. Bull had you up there like a little girl on a trampoline. You hold on for today. Tomorrow I’ll get you a layout.”
“Thank you.”
“Be out there in October, won’t you?”
“Long as they got money between them horns.”
“All right, crazy man. I’ll get you that layout.”
And the officer was true to his word. Starting the next morning, Terry filed tools. Or, rather, he sat at the roadside sharpening a hoe blade occasionally, as needed, and periodically, when the mounted guard beckoned him, Terry hauled water for the rifleman’s horse.
Next, the rodeo freed him from his punishment cell. At the late June meeting Warden Cain had called to bless my book in front of the inmates I’d been following, Terry, in the cuffs and shackles
required whenever he was out of his cell and not working, approached the warden. He informed Cain, in a deferential mumble, of his recent marijuana charge, of his innocence, and of the fact that if the review board didn’t lift his sentence soon, he would be barred automatically from this year’s rodeo. That, he said, would prevent me from finishing my book.
Terry’s words surprised me. But I didn’t interrupt to tell the warden that my project would survive whatever Terry’s fate. Cain, nervous that any complaint from me might arouse Polozola’s ire, turned to one of his assistant wardens and told him to look into the situation. By July the review board sent Terry back to the dorms, to Walnut. He was also promoted from filing tools in the fields to a job unloading and storing vegetables under the shade of a zinc roof.