Authors: Daniel Bergner
Then, as Littell recounted it, “I got him in the back of the fucking shower and slid my dick in his ass and claimed him for ho.”
Littell had no doubts that he was heterosexual. Lately his most regular fantasy centered around an old, torn-off cover from
Vanity Fair
. It showed the nude profile of the actress Demi Moore, eight months pregnant. “I never wanted to have no fucking sex with no man, bro. I just did that to totally humiliate somebody. When somebody was to make me angry, I fucked him in his ass.”
But about who he was, he was worried.
I risked expressing to Littell what I sometimes felt, that Angola was an unexpectedly positive place.
“Man,” he said, “Angola is a fucking super-negative piece of negative fucking shit.”
I didn’t persist. I planned to follow him out. Even if I hadn’t, he wasn’t someone I cared to antagonize. As to his analysis of Angola, it was all a matter of perspective and degree. I had anticipated the worst and was finding much that was better. But it wouldn’t have been difficult to prove Littell right. Though his existence as a “rebel” was the exception, I knew there were others like him and those who did what he did with lesser frequency. I knew as well that while most of the guards tried to offer some measure of vigilance, of deterrence, there were plenty who tried only to get through their twelve-hour shifts without dozing off, and some who made themselves willfully
oblivious, and a few who took payment for their oblivion,
and
a few who, in their daily interactions with convicts, went beyond the typical brusque handling, the kick at the bedpost to wake an oversleeping inmate.
Since I had first arrived at Angola four months ago, two cellblock guards, in separate incidents at separate camps, had been arrested for forcing inmates to perform blowjobs repeatedly through the bars. Both had eventually been bit—the convicts knew that damage to the guard’s penis was generally the only way they would be believed. In other, similar cases, inmates had held the semen in their mouths, spit it into the cellophane of a cigarette wrapper, folded the wrapper tightly, and mailed it to a lawyer with their plea for help.
Forces seemed to conspire against the better impulses of the employees. Their pay was low, with a scale that began around $15,000 a year, and awarded captains, who’d put in years of service, about $30,000. At night they were locked alone inside dorms with sixty-four convicts. The guards were unarmed and, in most cases, didn’t even have a walkie-talkie, just a signal box that would bring help guaranteed to arrive within three minutes. As a means of containing disturbances, the doors were bolted from the outside. The “key guards” were instructed
not
to free a colleague until backup was present.
Combined with this vulnerability was a kind of authority few people could have anywhere else. The lowliest guard could tell a great number of men what to do. He could be extremely blunt in giving his orders. And if he was put on one of the shakedown teams he could, in searching for weapons and drugs, clear out entire dorms and tear through the belongings of those inmates, ransack their “houses,” their locker boxes, leaving everything from rolls of toilet paper to photo albums scattered across the floor along with the upturned benches (to check for contraband stashed in screw holes) and the contents of overturned garbage cans. In fact, he
would
do this,
was
expected
to leave their homes torn through, and probably couldn’t help being aware that he had this control over
killers
, couldn’t help feeling, as one assistant warden put it, “that superpower, like your chest grew six inches under that badge.” (Any softening of the atmosphere that might come from female employees was limited. Most women were stationed in the towers or at the control panels.) It was the very rare guard who stuck his erection through cell bars and demanded service. It was the very rare guard who gathered a colleague or two and beat an inmate for some past wrong. But a mixture of indifference and hostility seemed a requirement of the job.
Yet within this place, to whose negative-fucking-shittiness he had contributed a good deal, Danny Fabre—ears jutting at right angles and ribs healed poorly, still overlapping—appeared to have turned a corner. At the Toastmasters’ Christmas banquet, in the Main Prison visiting shed, where the club president delivered a hearty welcome to the scattered family members and sang a hokey version of “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” and where dinner began with onion soup, a slab of unmelting cheese floating at the surface, Danny took his Forgotten Voices Toastmasters club card out of his jeans pocket. “See here what it says?” He read from the back. “ ‘The mission of a Toastmasters Club is to provide a mutually supportive and positive learning environment in which every member has the opportunity to develop communication and leadership skills, which in turn fosters self-confidence and personal growth.’ ”
He stood close as we spoke at the back of the room. Everything about his features was exaggerated. Besides the yellow-tinged eyes and the ears ineffectively curtained by a back-sweep of blond hair, his cheeks were inordinately hollow above a chiseled jawline. And his hands were heavy, broad across the top of the palms and long and thick in the fingers. He showed me his “Communication and Leadership
Program” manual, issued by Toastmasters International. He turned to the evaluation pages for his first few speeches. Next to the questions “Was the speech topic appropriate for this particular assignment?” and “Did the speaker employ vocal variety to enhance the speech?” Danny showed me that he had received, from the inmate evaluator, checks under “satisfactory” and “excellent.”
Ten years ago, I reminded myself, he had been so volatile that during his triad his feet were not only shackled to each other but chained to the courtroom floor. And only this past summer the Toastmasters sponsor, Captain Newsom, had refused to let him into the club. “I know I’ve been King Asshole,” Danny had pledged to Newsom, “but I will prove to you that I’m Toastmasters material.” In September the captain had relented.
Danny pointed out, in the manual, the guidelines for earning “Competent Toastmaster” status within the organization. He pulled over one of the members, so I could see the “CTM” pin-a red laminated tag with a royal blue T etched into a gold circle—he would be able to wear on his white T-shirt after his tenth speech. He talked about the first one he’d given, the big traffic-light timer in his face and the other members in the school chairs around him. He recited the beginning: “Growing up is a hard thing to do, especially when you have one eye, one leg, retardation, or even ears like myself. When one has things that’s wrong with you, that’s out of the ordinary, kids in school, and all around you, seem to pick on you to get a laugh. You have a low self-esteem. You feel like everybody hates you. When one has a physical disorder, you should never tear them down. You should always upgrade them….”
For the first time, I took note of Danny’s voice. It was sonorous, intensely inflected within a confined range, emphatic without ever being loud. It carried just the hint of a southern accent. He bent the word “why.” I heard this over and over when, later in the week, we found an empty attorney conference room and shut ourselves in to
talk. But before we came, without any prompting from me, to that question regarding his choking his victim and spearing her through the eye—“Why? I don’t know why I did it. I can’t tell you why I did it. She was a woman, I could have raped her. I didn’t rape her. I didn’t rob her. Why did I do this?”—before all that, he said, “I’m going to tell you something I’ve told to only one other person.”
I thought, You’re going to tell me something that isn’t true.
He began quietly, slowly: “When I was about eight years old, one morning I wasn’t fixing to go to school ’cause I felt sick. And I told my dad, and,” he paused, “my daddy ended up,” he paused again, “molesting me. And it went on for about four years. But it wasn’t an on and on thing. It was every now and then. And I didn’t know what was happening in my life. But I knew this wasn’t right. And he always scared me about, If you tell your mama, if you tell your brothers, it’s gonna bust the family up. You know, this is why I want to work with children if I ever get out. Because a child can hold something in his mind for so long. And then they explode. See, this is what the world is drawing to. I mean, probably eighty percent of the world has been through some type of abuse. But they don’t talk about it. But I remember when I was twelve. It was a cold night. And my daddy woke me up. I was in a room by myself. And I told him, I stood up in the middle of the bed, ‘This ain’t right. If you touch me again I’ll kill you.’ Where I got that, I don’t know. But he left me alone. And my daddy’s a well-respected man. He’s a beautiful man if you meet him. I forgive my father for what he done. ’Cause in order to be forgiven for the things I’ve done, I had to forgive that past. But it started out that I had to prove, to everybody, that I was a man. I wasn’t going to be no punk. I wasn’t going to be no queer. I was going to prove that. And I started all kinds of fights. Fights, fights, fights, fights. Kicked out of school. I always was a violent person. I hated people. I loved my mother to death….”
He veered on. The story seemed a clear attempt to win my sympathy, my forgiveness. Or his own. Maybe he had convinced himself
of the story’s truth. Maybe he needed the delusion to tolerate his own living. But then again, some inmates had surely suffered through such childhoods, some greater percentage of men in prison than elsewhere….
“My mom knew something was wrong. And I never told her. She always used to ask me, ‘What do you have hanging over your daddy’s head?’ Because Daddy—from when I said I’d tell—every time I’d get in trouble, he wouldn’t whip me or nothing. She kept asking me. So I had to say something. And I told her Daddy was mixed up with the mafia. And he blowed up a house full of people. And killed them all. And that’s what it was. She didn’t believe me. But I said no, that’s what it was.”
My skepticism dissolved, partly. The detail of what he’d told his mother—the Mafia, the house blown up—seemed far too ludicrous, too perfectly childlike, to be his later invention.
“Why did I do this?” Danny asked now. He’d been saying he could have killed any number of people, any of a dozen men he’d fought brutally, battered or slashed outside of bars, anyone who had triggered him in any way, “because that’s the kind of person I was, but I never thought about killing no one….
“Why did I murder this woman I didn’t even know? All she’d done was let me use her phone. Two times. All she’d done was give me that ride. I think my mind was overloaded. And when she said that? That about I wouldn’t never be nothing?
“I exploded.”
It was easy to imagine how quickly Danny had killed her. Besides “Ears,” his other prison nickname was “Popeye,” for the lumps and ridges of muscle he’d once had all over his lean body, and for how suddenly he would put his strength to use. (Lately he had told other inmates about the chance of surgery for his ears. “Don’t go getting that operation now,” they sometimes called out to him, and the first
time he’d heard this Danny asked, “Why?”
“ ’Cause then you wouldn’t be Popeye.” They would miss the entertainment of the fights he was goaded into.)
He had let the distension of his body shrink over the past year. Still, his shoulders were broad and his forearms were solid and he had those hands. But he said he had gained self-restraint. “I done taken control of myself,” he told me. “That’s what I like about me.” And while he had few kind words for the guards in general, he talked about the staff who were helping him.
There was the Toastmasters sponsor. A tall man whose uniform pants reached only to his ankles, Captain Newsom carried his skinny body without a hint of physical assertion. And he did not like to speak. He had seventy pen pals—“some full-time, some part-time,” he said—and spent his off hours at his computer, communicating with his unmet friends all over the world. At the Toastmasters meetings, he sat in a corner, sipped his coffee, and never so much as made a comment. When the members forced him to the lectern for “Table Topics,” their competition in impromptu speechmaking, he droned out a few sentences and reclaimed his seat. He was like the high school tennis coach who’d never touched a racket. Newsom took pleasure in watching those meetings. He took pride in Danny’s improvement, and in his own gamble that Danny could keep his destructive emotions under control and function within the club. He told me, when we spoke alone, “Danny’s come a good way since September.” And Danny said gratefully, “He took that chance.”
Danny praised, as well, his first teacher in the literacy program: “That woman drove me.” When he tested out of the lowest level, she insisted he stay another few weeks, to be sure he was ready. Now, with a new teacher in the next phase, he was learning to use a computerized study program. Last month, the instructor had taught him to use a mouse. “I like hearing that music that plays when I get the right answer,” Danny said with a laugh.
And he told me he had talked with Warden Cain since his bull ride at the rodeo, walked up to him after a Lifers Association meeting in the visiting shed. Danny had spoken about his ears, how tired he was of “waking up every day with all this picking on me,” about the teaching hospital he had heard of and the surgery being free.
Cain, Danny said, had listened. He hadn’t walked away. He had focused.
“I’m going to look into it,” the warden had promised. “I’m going to see what I can do.”
Terry Hawkins had lost the jumpy bravado I’d noticed when he first explained his Guts & Glory strategy to me in September. Since late October, when he had felt unqualified to approach Sister Jackie’s pulpit for salvation, then been healed in the ribs and legs at her insistence, he no longer slouched with jiggling knees wide apart as we talked. Now his long body remained upright, still. At first, I thought he’d grown more composed. But as I got to know him better at Christmastime, I realized how far he was from calm.
Terry couldn’t study his case without being haunted. And studying their cases was something the inmates liked to do. Any mistake in the testimony against them—that the crime had happened, say, in a “strip mall” instead of a “shopping plaza”—gave them a sliver of hope, and they would stare at that bit of their transcripts, trying to convince themselves that it could mean reversal and freedom just as soon as they paid one of the counsel substitutes a few packs to file for them. Or, if they had pled guilty, as Terry had, they stared at their police reports, hunting for misstatements there. Often there were many, and so the pleasure of removing these documents from the safe bottom of their locker boxes, and of rediscovering the errors, could be experienced many times each year for decades.