On Sunday I took a trip up to the maximum-security Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola. The prison is located on 18,000 acres along the Mississippi River and is often called “The Farm.” It is apparently a lineal descendant of a plantation called Angola whose owner leased convicts from the state to till his land; it was eventually purchased by the state and became the state prison. Some 5,000 men are imprisoned there now, and the place is still a highly productive working farm, responsible for producing much of the food consumed by the inmates.
I came to see the Angola Rodeo, the great event in the prison calendar. The Rodeo pits convicts, gladiator-style, against bulls and broncos in various dangerous games. It bills itself as “the Wildest Show in the South,” and friends told me stories of men getting gored by bulls, trampled by broncos, thrown twenty feet into the air by enraged animals, and carried off in stretchers to dozens of waiting ambulances. These stories were made slightly more plausible by the prohibition of all cameras and cellphones from the arena, and the Rodeo’s motto (“Guts and Glory”). But as you might expect, these stories were exaggerations.
The prison is in a remote location near the Mississippi border, inside a curve in the river which makes the prison a peninsula, and a single road goes in and out. The grounds are almost unfathomably vast: if you escaped from the prison building you would not be able to get off the prison grounds in a day without a vehicle, and if you had a vehicle, you would have to use the road. The only remotely fathomable mode of escape would be to leap into the river, and leaping into the Lower Mississippi is more or less like leaping into the most powerful ocean current in the world. You might live, but it won’t be because of anything you did. The water just decided not to kill you that day.
The road is very beautiful on an April afternoon, running through bright green forests and fields lined with white Kentucky-style horse fencing. There are herds of horses and cows visible from the road. The soil is black and lusciously fecund. It seems like the kind of place you would want your prison to be: a place where you can work out your redemption in the fields and with the animals, almost like a Cistercian monastery.
A stadium has been constructed for the rodeo, similar in shape to a racetrack, but in size more like a provincial Roman gladiatorial arena. Around the stadium is a little maze of shops and booths, with little families walking around buying cotton candy, young couples holding hands, gaggles of young women in tight tops, and plastic-rim-glasses-wearing twenty-somethings who looked like they were there to do work on their sociology dissertations. (And perhaps they were). In short, it looked like a county fair, and I found myself saying things like, “Ah, this is America!” (And perhaps it is).
The food concessions were mostly run by prison clubs. Hence you could get the “Friends of Islam Candy Apples,” “Angola Drama Club Crawfish,” “Men of Integrity Funnel Cakes,” “Angola Asian-American Society Chinese Food.” This last group surprised me, as I do not imagine there are very many Asian-Americans doing life sentences in Louisiana. But there were a few, and other members of the club joined for the food, the tattoos, and the Bruce Lee movies. Their favorite thing was a banquet they had once a year – in fact, much of the money they made at the rodeo went to paying for the banquet – to which they could invite their families. An NPR story has been done about the food at the prison and especially at the rodeo, which since it is prepared by the convicts is not your basic institutional fare but represents some unusual local Louisiana practices. As always, me not being a consumer, I had no interest in this aspect of the event, except for some doughballs that were fried in coca-cola, which I intended to get for dessert, but I forgot about it and never did.
Also attached to the rodeo was a huge “Hobbycraft Fair of Prison Arts,” in which inmates sold the things they had made – furniture, paintings, belts, wall hangings, and all manner of things. I will return to the hobbycrafts later.
The rodeo began with a prison official spouting a lot of nationalist rhetoric and some prayers (“for we are all united in the name of Chee-zus”). The participants in the rodeo formed a circle in the arena and joined hands and bowed their heads. The nationalist rhetoric was astonishingly tin-eared: “Lord, we thank you for our freedom… we thank you that we live in a free country, in this great land of freedom.” It was the same kind of stuff you would hear at a Republican convention, but it sounds a bit strange in the center of a circle of inmates in the midst of 18,000 acres of incarceration. Sitting opposite me in the rodeo arena were the prisoner-spectators, sitting behind a chain-link fence in absolute order and silence, like Roman senators. Someone came over the loudspeaker to announce the names of the politicians and famous people who were there, but the only person I recognized was “the one and only Billy Idol.” I was desperately hoping he would come riding into the arena on a motorcycle and play “White Wedding,” or at least that I would see him, but neither happened. The arena seats 10,000, so even the one and only Billy Idol can get lost in a crowd like that.
Then a huge barrel-chested Texan, with a deep gravelly voice that sounded like it was being forced out of his pancreas, took over as M.C. He was clearly a rodeo professional, and he had a wimpy sidekick with him for comic relief, who as the animals were getting prepared in between events would tell diarrhea stories, get-rich-quick schemes he had, and other light bits. The M.C. played the crowd to find out where they were from, getting the people from Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas to shout, and then saying, “And to those of you from NEWyork or California, welcome to the U.S. of A., we’re glad to have you.”
Some inmates came out on horses, the “Angola Rough Riders,” and they zipped around the muddy arena. Then the events began. First was bronco riding: men were placed bare-back on untamed broncos, with a rope to hang onto. The gates open and the bronco leaps up and down and after a few seconds throws the men off them. The power of the horses is of course astonishing, and as they would leap they would kick with both back legs with such force that you could see that any man who got in the way of the kick would be killed. It was a weapon as powerful as any in nature. And the sheer musclepower of the horses was impressive. The inmates all wore a kind of stiff jerkin on their torsos, presumably to stabilize their spines as they were tossed around by the horses. The winner lasted about eight seconds or so on the horse. This is a typical rodeo event, and later there was bullriding, which was similar, but probably easier, as the bulls do not have the leaping ability of horses. There was also “steer wrestling,” where two men tried to wrestle to the ground 400-pound (immature) steers. Only two pairs of men (out of perhaps twenty) were able to, so much strength is in the animal. All of these, as I understand it, are normal rodeo events.
The events that are unique to Angola are quite unique. One is called “Inmate Poker” or “Convict Poker.” A poker table is set up near the gates. Four men take seats at the table. A bull is then let loose into the arena, and the last man seated at the table wins the prize – six hundred dollars. Professional rodeo clowns wander through the arena to get the bull to decide a winner by making passes at the table. The first time through, all four men managed to stay at the table, and one man in particular astonished the crowd because the bull charged him, lowered its head, and swept the chair out from under him, but he stayed crouched at the table! It was as if he was made of stone. The second time through, the bull charged the (red) table and broke it into splinters. It may have been a Hollywood-style prop table, but two of the men seated at it went flying too, so you know the bull hit that table with some force. Amazingly, the man who won won because the bull didn’t charge him, not because he was braver than the others. They sat at that table until the bull smashed into them.
Another event was that the inmates had to ride bareback into the arena to rescue a friend who was standing on a garbage can. His friend then had to leap onto the horse’s back, a tricky thing, as the riders were inexperienced and could not control the horses. Some succeeded and some failed. The pair with the best time won. There was “Wild Cow Milking,” as teams of inmates chased lactating cows around trying to get milk from them. This was fairly comical.
For further comic relief, a herd of rams was released into the arena, and border collies were sent in to round them up into a pen, which they did with astonishing precision. The border collies were ridden by monkeys.
The finale was “Guts and Glory,” in which all the rodeo participants entered the arena with a single bull. A poker chip was tied to the bull’s forehead, and the man to get that chip from the bull’s head won. This was interesting to watch. It is essentially an impossible task for one man. Success occurred only when a large number of men dared to approach the bull, and while the bull concentrated on one man another got up to his side and grabbed the chip.
A few men were injured and carried off, but they seemed to be leg injuries and nothing inhumane occurred. Still there was an atmosphere of danger which provided the main excitement. Your pulse rises as you see a man approaching a bull which is watching him suspiciously and readying itself for a charge. In general, my feeling was what I always feel when I see people confront danger in sport: I don’t see why it’s necessary, and I’m certain it’s not worth a human life. (I feel this way about mountain climbing, Steve Irwin, skiing, skydiving, and the like).
The fact that these men were convicts undoubtedly added a great deal of mystique to the event. A professional who confronts danger you feel has weighed the risks and has figured out that his chances are pretty good. If he gets killed or seriously injured it has about the same significance as getting in a car accident: it’s just the result of statistics. But for these men you imagined the calculus of risk and reward might be different. It was clear that some of them were not comfortable in the arena, and were out there just to survive and not make a fool of themselves. They were not entertainers and did not have any matador-style. The Romans like watching both professional gladiators and random Christians – different styles of spectacles. The latter is more like what it would be if you yourself were in the arena. But of course it was edgier, because you felt these were lost men and had little to lose. They certainly were capable of tremendous amounts of courage, as the poker games indicated.
But more than anything, I wanted to see something of prison life and see what the people were like. The best opportunity for this was at the Hobbycraft fair. Several hundred inmates – perhaps as many as a thousand – had articles for sale there. They stood by their handicrafts and you could discuss what they had done, why they made what they made, and negotiate prices. As is usual with me, I was overwhelmed by their numbers. In these situations where I confront great sadness, my desire is to be in union with everybody and be helpful to everybody. I wanted to buy everything there, so everyone could go home from the fair happy, feeling that they had contributed something that the world wanted. But it was Sunday afternoon and most of their items were unsold and the next rodeo would be in October. You could tell this in their eyes, and watch as they started calling out to you with more desperation, knowing that the fair would soon shut down and people would leave and they would be left with all these unsold things.
Many of the prisoners were apparently reliable and you could walk right up to them, shake their hands and discuss their wares. But others were on the opposite side of a chain-link fence – the violent and the dangerous – and many of them just hung on the fence and glared at you from behind strange eyes. There was a “Silence of the Lambs” feel to it, and without a doubt their greatest interest was to call the pretty girls over to look at what they had made.
Their crafts were of good quality, though sometimes strange. There were paintings, but only one painter was any good. There were a fair number of burned-wood carvings, mostly featuring Bible verses. There was a fair amount of tooled leather, such as bookcovers (most of which said “HOLY BIBLE” on them) and leather belts. There was metalwork and jewelry, some of it quite pretty – I don’t know how it was made. There was a lot of furniture, mostly rocking chairs, but also toy chests, tables, and cabinets. Some of the carpentry was of superior quality, though I felt that the wood (mostly pine) and the lack of stains – most projects were blond wood with polyurethane – gave everything a cheap, almost sad feel to it, as when you see a man paint a tiny ceramic piano with great taste and dexterity – you wonder why such talent is wasted on such crap. But if that is not a basic truth of human activity, I don’t know what is. In the case of the prison workers, you can see why they would take shortcuts – they have to buy their own materials and run everything like it’s their own business. Buying oak or walnut timber and fine stains would vastly increase the cost of their projects and make them economically all the more doubtful. But many of these men had the talent to work with much finer materials.
There were other odd things there, especially the magazine clippings of celebrities mounted onto wall plaques and shellacked, and so much Dora the Explorer material that something seemed a little odd and perverse about it. Most striking was the Black Heroes motif – the paintings, etchings, and photos of Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Nelson Mandela, and now Barack Obama. In fact, the amount of Obama material almost made me cry, that man clearly plays such a psychological role in the minds of these prisoners. One man had dozens of leather belts into which he had tooled “Barack Obama,” in beautiful, well-formed letters. He was behind the fence. I thought about what Obama must think about this – knowing that in some cell in Louisiana there is a man who spends his days writing his name over and over again into strips of leather. The main theme of the paintings was Obama. There were burnt-wood etchings of Obama taking the oath of office with Michelle behind. Someone made a plaque which said, “It was all Predicted,” with a Bible verse that mentioned a “Barak” but otherwise seemed to have nothing to do with Obama. There were Obama key chains and hats and piggy banks. (In fact, the number of wooden piggy banks the prisoners had made was astonishing and I think psychologically revealing – they scrimp and save pennies all year to save for their banquets and sprees). The Obama cult – and he has only been in office three months – make me think that this man can really do something for America’s prison problem, by going and visiting prisons. He is a real figure of inspiration to these men.
They also sold garden plants, and I spoke with the very mild-mannered men who ran the plant stand. They had sold most of the plants they had on sale and I was unable to buy any from them. But they were all very gentle and very normal – yet two of them had been in for more than twenty years, and another had more than twenty years ahead of him. I had the overwhelming impression that these were men who had simply made some kind of horrible mistake. This is not to excuse them or make light of what a “mistake” means to the people whose son might have been murdered by these men or the woman who might have been raped by them. But the men who were allowed to mingle with the crowd showed no signs – at all – of being unusually bad people. Two of them I spoke with did seem unusually stupid, and may have been the ones left holding the gun while their more clever friends got away. One was particularly intelligent though, and a muslim convert, and we had a nice conversation about my novel.
I wished I could have spoken more with them. I decided to buy an Adirondack chair, nicely designed of alternating slats of pine and cedar, and large enough to fit long-legged me, which is rare, with a matching footrest. The price was $125, not dirt cheap, but about $40 cheaper than could be gotten elsewhere for the same items (a large one made of half-cedar). But of course – my life being this way – I was with two friends who had driven up in a Volkswagen bug. It couldn’t fit the chair no-how. So I made (complicated) arrangements to pick up the chair on my trip north in two weeks. This took up the rest of my time, and there was much more I could have seen there and more people I could have spoken to.
Here in America we incarcerate more people – far more people – than any other country, with the possible exception of China, from whom we do not have reliable statistics. One percent of our country is behind bars now. Angola seems like a decent model – with all the work the men do there, and all their clubs and hobbies and activities, their life somewhat resembles a normal human life. Victors at the rodeo get the privilege of wearing a special rodeo belt buckle around the prison – the kind of honors and distinctions we humans crave. But it is also a place of unimaginable sadness and hopelessness. I heard that the average – average – sentence there was twenty-four years. The average 18-year-old who enters that place will leave it when he is forty-two. It makes me think of what we can do to change this – and to continue to work to make this country truly a land of the free.
“Drugs” by the Talking Heads.
23-Apr-09A link to this song can be found here.
Sometimes the value of a song is the sense it conveys of inner experience. This is true of the Talking Heads song “Drugs.” There is not much musical structure to it. Its value depends a great deal on its production: I have heard live performances which have no significance for me. But the studio version, I feel, is something quite remarkable because it reminds me of the interior of my mind.
The song begins with a dull but not unpleasant repeating figure in the guitars amplified by a bass line and slow drum punctuation to keep it moving. It is very detached and seems to have no significance. It feels like waiting. It feels like mundane experience.
And then there is a slight figure in the synthesizers which sounds so clear and peaceful, some kind of visitation from another world, like an experience of “the clouds parting” and illumination. There is a feeling of significance, no doubt helped by the low synthesizers which fill in the under-texture of this portion of the song. But it is also strange and seemingly unrelated to things. This lasts for twenty seconds and is gone, returning the listener to the mundane sounds of bass, guitar, and drums which had vanished for the preceding twenty seconds.
After this return to mundanity the vocals begin. The vocals are very weird. If you look at the lyrics printed they seem fairly rational, but they have always seemed otherwise to me. For instance, the printed lyrics at one point say “the boys are worried, girls are shocked,” but I have always heard (and still hear) “the boys are worried, girls are sharp.” Just before the tape rolled, David Byrne apparently ran several times around the Long Island City block where the song was recorded in order to get a breathless, desperate sound to his voice. He is often incomprehensible. He breathes very loudly throughout. You feel you can hear the sweat which has formed all over his face and body. He sounds certifiably insane. The feeling I get is one of human effort, specifically aimed at expressing the experience, and which is not equal to the task. The illuminating keyboards return for twenty more seconds, and the vocals continue throughout, getting more self-explanatory as if convincing himself he is okay “I’m charged up… I feel me… I feel okay.” For the next pass through mundanity, the vocals rise in pitch and desperation, until the keyboards return for a third time, this time for forty seconds. The extra time is felt as great intensity. And the paranoid performance of the vocals makes the illuminating keyboards seem almost frighteningly indifferent.
And then the return to mundanity, which is even something embarrassing. But now there are strange percussive and sampled sounds interjected into the mix, and the song ends with a noisy guitar line whose main purpose seems to be to bring the song to a close.
The three main elements seem to be waiting and mundanity, moments of strange transcendence, and an effort to make some sense of it. This for me is a typical walk in the park, or a drive to the supermarket, or any time when I get to let my brain go through its normal processes alone.
It is interesting to me that this song would be called “drugs,” whereas I consider it normal mental existence. But that does not necessarily surprise me. I have never felt that I needed anything to amplify the strangeness and intensity of experience. I felt the same way when I read Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception.” If this is the drug experience, I said, I have had it more days in my life than not.
Postscript: After writing this piece I went to a diner and was thinking about Aldous Huxley. Suddenly I came up with one of the conclusions found in the Huxley essay – the “at reality” versus “from reality” distinction – and I was staring off at the other side of the diner. In part because this song was so recently on the brain, my mind began playing the mystical keyboard section. It fit perfectly.