TUESDAY
Years from now, at a critical stage in this book’s realization, I will cull from this manuscript ten theses about religious life at Graterford Prison. Here’s the first.
THESIS 1
Not only in our prisons are Americans crazy for God. We are a people who talk to God and to whom God frequently talks back. God talks to us through Scripture and through our waking thoughts and dreams. In our judgments about God, we are a remarkably confident people. We are generally confident that God exists, that He is personally invested in our lives, and that He reveals to us signs for discerning His will.1 When and where it sprouts, our disbelief in God tends to reflect this very same self-assurance.2
Religion at Graterford Prison exudes the confidence and creativity that has dominated American religion and spirituality for the last 200 years. Somewhat curiously, confidence often yields claustrophobia. At the shimmering shell of this phenotype, one finds the chaotic genius of confident men like Joseph Smith and Elijah Muhammad, iconoclastic visionaries unafraid to approach God without intermediary.3 At the hardened kernel lies the hermetic regimentation of the Nation of Islam and the Mormon Church. In America (and arguably in religion as such), innovation and authoritarianism go hand in glove.4 Religions at Graterford participate in this contradiction. Through the impulsive religious judgments of each man, idiosyncratic religious forms are emphatically embraced as but the recovery of ancient truths. No sooner are such judgments made, however, than the putatively self-evident character of the resulting truths is marshaled to preclude the sorts of spontaneous discernment through which the individual came by them in the first place.
Their many differences notwithstanding, Graterford’s predominant religious discourses—Salafi Islam and Protestant fundamentalism—share in this regard, too, a family resemblance. If, as a collective, the Salafi keep the Qur’an and hadith at the center of the recovery enterprise and the scholars bury their noses in the text, the rank and file seem contented with predigested doctrine. Ignorance of the tradition need be no obstacle to religious certitude. Similarly, with an interventionist Holy Spirit at work in a Bible believer’s heart, the Bible itself can become more or less redundant. Interiority is endowed with divine authority; common sense becomes law and personal experience its jurisprudence. And, indeed, with so many of one’s former friends and adversaries long since returned to dust, proof of His miracles is as plain as my next breath. As it is said: Because by all rights I should be dead ten times over, I know that God has a special plan for me.5
* * *
In the waiting room, a busload of black women, many draped in voluminous black fabric that covers all but their eyes, clutch their shyer children on their laps while throwing the occasional arm or rebuke in the direction of the more rambunctious ones.
Three steel doors and a long corridor away, meanwhile, the fifteen men gathered for St. Dismas Episcopal services are discussing what it takes to be a man. The brown-clad men fill most of the molded plastic chairs—colored tan, burgundy, and Pepto-Bismol pink—that line Classroom A’s wainscoted perimeter.
At the far end of the cramped classroom, the chalkboard reads as follows:
From the conversation under way, it is clear that contrary to conventional thinking of the vertical characterizations, the rightward column is where the praiseworthy behaviors lie.
Oscar is talking. Oscar is a flat-nosed, dreadlocked lifer, thirty years into his sentence for a homicide committed when he was fifteen. In the free-form exchanges at St. Dismas that precede the homily, in which few who talk come off as reticent, Oscar stands out for his candor.6 In his nasal but commanding voice, and favoring arresting hypotheticals along the lines of “Let’s say I kill you,” Oscar offers savvy testimony to the ways that a guy “gets caught up doing time.”7 With an emphasis on the everyday, Oscar stresses the inured passivity this place breeds; how via fear and prudence a man learns to shoulder petty humiliations and turn a blind eye to brutality.
“Yeah, we’ve got to surrender, like it says in Romans 8:36–39, but at the same time, like it says in Ephesians 6:11–13, we’ve got to be victorious against the devil. We’ve got to go like sheep. We need to die daily for Christ. We need to give ourselves up the way God wants us to give, not how we want to give it. I’ve been in the penitentiary almost thirty years, but it’s not for me to say that I want to be free. It depends on what God wants for me. But, you know, this is the thing that’s hardest for us to accept.” Leaning forward, he gestures at the other seated men. “We’re all warriors in here. I mean, why are the streets all full of women? Because the alpha males are all locked up in Gratersford”—as the old heads tend to, Oscar inserts a gratuitous “s” in the prison’s name. He points at the board. “You see the ‘V’? Well, that’s us: stuck right there in the middle. Trying to be victorious in the way that we want to be victorious. But it’s not about what we want. Cause when you surrender to Him, that’s real victory.”
Waving a rolled-up devotional pamphlet, another regular picks up the thread.8 “Surrendering means surrendering our desires just as He surrendered himself on the cross. You see, what we need is the daily sellout.” Consistent with the inversion of values being extolled, “selling out” here means not capitulation, as used to be said of hip-hop artists who crossed over to pop, but conviction. “Selling out” is the total commitment of self to a particular way of being in the world.
“That’s right,” pipes in the slim brown at the chalkboard. “We need to make an effort moment by moment. Like the moment I told you about earlier. It was eating me up. So I had to surrender, to apologize. I wouldn’t have done that in the past. But now I’m free of it.”
“Submission isn’t just a onetime thing,” a fourth man adds. “We’re going to be tried daily, and we need to deny ourselves daily.”
Paul’s demand to the Corinthians that they need die daily, that they redirect their will and desire away from the ephemera of the world and onto the Lord, carries additional resonance here, where, as Baraka says, serving impulse’s whim will get a guy sent to the hospital, to the hole, or to the morgue. In this light, Paul’s prescription in Romans—“For thy sake we are being killed all day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered”—flips the “code of the streets” and furnishes for the men in this room a practical formula for surviving the abuses and humiliations of prison life. Whereas out on the street, to endure affronts without retaliation marked one as less than a man, here, in Christ, suffering is ennobled and self-sacrifice becomes self-mastery. Not merely a strategy for self-preservation, surrendering is the warrior’s way in the cosmological struggle between God and Satan.
“And the more we struggle,” says the brown at the board, “the more we’re tested by the fire—as it says in First Peter, Seven—the more we honor God. I used to think: ‘Lord, I gave myself to you, so why aren’t things any better?’ But it’s not like that! We must be led like lambs to the slaughter every day. Prosperity isn’t here on earth like they say in some of the churches. It’s waiting for us in heaven. But as long as we’re here, our relationship is between one another. We’ve got to learn to treat one another right. Despite all the nonsense we’ve done, God blesses us and watches over us and that’s how we’re still here. That’s by God’s grace. A lot of guys say, ‘I’m saved.’ But saved for what? You’ve got to be saved every day of your life!”
When the conversation dissipates, I trade discreet nonsense with Neil, who is seated to my right. Despite his thinning mess of cornrows, the wispy ends of which overhang his cloudy eyes, at thirty-five, Neil presents as, in effect, a boy. And so he is treated, by St. Dismas’s minister, Marcus Madison, at least, who frequently arrives with overbearing reports of e-mail exchanges with Neil’s mother. Neil, who speaks with the Pittsburgher’s Appalachian twang that never fails to exhaust the Philly guys’ ridicule, is St. Dismas’s worship coordinator—a position that consists largely of distributing prayer books and providing two of the four hands necessary for carrying in the table for Communion. When not in the chapel, Neil kills his time mostly among the small Dungeons and Dragons subculture on C Block.
Marcus Madison barges through the back door. Madison primarily ministers to St. Dismas’s sister congregation, St. Mary’s, an ailing brick structure in South Philly. Between gigs, Madison—a self-proclaimed bullshitter, so don’t try to bullshit him—drives around in a fir-green Acura with tinted windows and a bumper sticker that reads: REAL MEN LOVE JESUS. As though the topic is already on the table, Madison launches in on the subject of Christmas gifts. It is a selling point for St. Dismas that all congregants and their children receive something for Christmas.
First off, Madison says, he wants to apologize to those who didn’t get their packages.
“I thought that my family forgot me,” says the brown at the board, “but then I found out that the institution just didn’t deliver it.” He looks relieved.
In the future, Madison instructs the men, they need to make sure to print their names rather than writing in cursive. They also need to make clear to their families what is permitted and what is not. The institution simply will not allow in anything decorated with tape, stickers, or glitter.
* * *
A triumphalist-sounding tape-recorded organ track emanates from Classroom B, where the Jehovah’s Witnesses are meeting.9
Standing in the narrow passage between the two classrooms, I peer through the gap in the drawn curtains, but don’t consider joining the half dozen worshippers on the other side of the glass. While men who worship are free to come and go as the spirit moves them, once the door to Classroom B shuts at 9:00 sharp on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, it does not generally reopen until the service is done.
Suddenly, Jack, the Catholic Christian Scientist, is at my shoulder. “Remember what I told you about the Jehovah’s Witnesses?” he asks.
A month ago, in the course of his custodial duties, Jack took me aside and told me in the most serious of tones that something “you need to note in your report” was that in contrast to every other denomination, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were punctilious about cleaning up after themselves.
“Rest easy,” I assure him, “I’ll be sure to indicate that they always clean up after themselves. Not like these…” I wave my hand around the chapel in search of the appropriate term of derision. Jack beats me to it.
“Protestants!” he barks.
* * *
The chapel is bright. Color pours in through the stained glass flanking the altar, projecting watercolor splotches of orange, green, blue, and purple onto the crushed-stone floor. In the front-right corner, where small groups congregate, a blue is preaching the Word.
Known for their navy pants and periwinkle shirts, the “blues” are the twenty percent of Graterford’s population that are here for violating their parole. As classified but conceivably misplaced men, who, upon arrival, might or might not be in substance withdrawal or be nursing an old beef with another Graterford resident, the blues live sequestered on E Block; they don’t work jobs. Until recently, they were barred from all chapel activities too, but after successful lobbying by Baumgartner, they were welcomed to the most popular worship services—the Thursday-night Spanish service, Jum’ah, Catholic mass, and the Sunday Protestant service—venues that furnish their only sanctioned contact with the browns. After further petitioning, the institution also okayed a Bible study, which last month was moved off of E Block and into the chapel.
The preaching blue is young, by chapel standards, soft-spoken, and, like everyone else clustered in the corner of the chapel, black.
“The devil is trying to take away from us, all day long. We need to stand with the bell of truth. Satan fights with lies.”
Behind the blue, a second chalkboard offers another set of clues:
Phil 4:13
John 15:4–5
Luke 17:32
Hebrews 11:25
Ephesians 6:3–17
Phil 4:13
Subject: Ten ways to go into 2006 under God’s supervision
A list of proof texts for some contention left undeclared. Were I among the initiated, I would be able to extract the thrust of these selections just as an avid baseball fan might reconstruct from this morning’s box score the ins and outs of last night’s game. On a snowy night under a desk lamp in my basement apartment, I will crack the code. Philippians 4:13 is the key.
I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me. It is a declaration that creates—or aspires to create—the new man it describes.10 For those who, in John’s language, have been “regrafted to the true vine,” who, as Paul put it to the Ephesians, have “donned the armor of God,” the affirmation divides one’s life into two very unequal parts. There were all the moments prior to one’s rebirth when failure was assured, and there are all the moments from here on out when success is achievable, so long as one keeps his focus on the here and now. Outfitted with the sword of the Spirit, the new man may be confident that he is up to the task.
This, as it is generally called, is “transformation.” Transformation, as many in the chapel will tell you, is the opposite of “rehabilitation.” For whereas state-sponsored rehabilitation can only change a man’s external behavior, transformation—which comes from a man’s own will or via the will of God within him—is said to fundamentally and irrevocably alter a man’s character.11 Arguably the dominant metaphor of evangelical prison ministry, transformation at Graterford comes foremost in a more secular iteration.12 Men like Oscar who repeatedly complete Monday night’s End Violence Program employ the language most influentially and ecumenically.13 And so, while the traditions of Abraham, the Apostle Paul, and the Caliph Omar each furnish an array of men radically reordered, here it is the prisoner Malcolm X, who, for the inner-directedness of his self-refashioning, is transformation’s patron saint.14
At the aisle’s source, John, one of two prominent Protestants deputized to supervise the study, moves in from the rolling cart of Bibles on which he’s been leaning and gestures toward the blue who has been preaching. “How are we looking at him right now?” John leadingly asks the assembled men.
“Like he’s stepping out on faith,” someone says.
“But how would the parole board look at him?”
With suspicion, says the silence. I know from Keita that the last time John was denied parole—it was his ninth rejection, for a sex crime of some sort—he left with the impression that his earnest testimony to the power of the Lord had roundly alienated the board members.
John continues: “But he’s got to see himself as God looks at him. Because God loves us. Because where is truth?”
Silence.
“Where is truth?” John repeats.
“In the Word?” the preacher responds tentatively.
“No,” John corrects him. “It’s in the pudding. The proof is in the pudding.” That is, to one day convince the suspicious, words are only the first step. Actions are what count. Among the oft-cited good news, however, is this: If a guy can live righteously in this crazy place, then he’ll surely be able to do it back on the street.
John commends the guys for coming out this morning and begs them not to give up on their fellow prisoners. He says, “You might hear ‘That’s the white man’s religion!’ or ‘That’s what my grandmother used to tell me!’ But remember for yourself, and remind them as well that ‘God has a purpose for you.’”
* * *
Jack, Papa, Mike Callahan, and Father Gorski are seated in the bowl of the ladle-shaped Catholic office. Like Omar, Papa commonly hangs out over here, making me think of the Catholic office as, among other things, the place where, once they can no longer keep up, the elderly black chapel workers are put out to pasture. Mike is the other Catholic office worker. Rarely venturing outside the Catholic office, Mike sits at his desk with his Daily News, listening to public radio and goading his colleague Jack into states of increasing agitation. Father Gorski is the Catholic chaplain. Mustached and soul-patched, as well as collared, the early-forties Gorski lives in a parish house in nearby Pottstown, his hometown. The youngest of the chaplains, and the most sardonic, Gorski is also the only political conservative among them.
Jack begs me over with a wave.
I congratulate him on yesterday’s confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. In spite of the direct and, one has to assume, unfavorable history many here have with that former Third Circuit judge, I figure a political conservative like Jack should be enthused.
“Oh,” Jack says with a despondent wave of the hand, “it doesn’t make much of a difference as long as the court’s still full of wacko liberals.”
Jack hands me the book he mentioned yesterday and directs my attention to his right where today’s Daily News is opened to a photo of the Philly district attorney Lynne Abraham.
“Look how manly she is,” Jack instructs me. “That reminds me,” he perks up. “I’ve been meaning to ask you: How come Democratic women are so manly-looking?”
“Who else?” I ask.
“Well, Janet Reno,” Father Gorski pipes in. This I concede.
“You know,” Jack says, pursuing his hypothesis, “as a general rule, Democrats are uglier than Republicans. I mean, look at Ted Kennedy.”
The resort to absurdist vitriol suggests that Jack is too lazy to play today for real. Largely, I have only myself to blame for the pattern of shoddy discourse I solicit from the Catholic side. One day, a few months in, I responded to a run-of-the-mill expression of revulsion about gay marriage with an impassioned defense of gay rights as a species of civil rights. The analogy proved little match for the “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” party line, and set an excruciatingly static agenda for weeks to come. While we eventually got over that ideological hump, the news cycle is always good for another.
* * *
Sayyid has his head buried in his translation. Kazi is reading his textbook for this afternoon’s class. A peppering of nosy pokes reveals that Keita, Baumgartner, and the Imam are each engaged in one-on-one counsel in their respective offices. The only office conversation to speak of consists of Brian explaining the implications of Collins to Teddy, though the term conversation is something of a stretch. Engaged with the case’s finer points, Brian is breathlessly coming at Teddy, who, for his part, is listening intently, in search of anything that might possibly be interpreted along the lines of “and so therefore a reversal is in the bag” or “so tell your lady that you’ll be home soon”—sentiments for which Brian finds little precedent in the case law, as he submits to you. When Brian finally takes a breath, Teddy asks him if he’s got an extra copy for him. Brian says he’s on it.
I ask Sayyid what precisely he’s working on. “A tafsir of Al-Asur,” he says. “Al-Asur?” I ask. “Yeah,” he says, “it’s about time.” I perk up, eager to explore the resonances of a Qur’anic commentary on time for one doing time. More than willing to humor me, Sayyid explains that the author Sa’di is emphasizing the indispensable nature of four things to a Muslim. They are: (1) belief in Allah; (2) knowledge; (3) righteous action … at which point I begin to fall behind. I ask Sayyid to slow down, and he starts again, but the list is distractingly full of nuance, and the third and fourth elements each boast a number of dependent clauses that somehow refer back to the first two principles. Finding it too complicated for a quick fix, I tell Sayyid to forget it and let him get back to his work. With a good-natured titter, he promises to break it down for me this afternoon. For now, he needs to get the translation done so he can get the book back to Mubdi—an old Warith Deen head—who’s been grumbling about wanting it back.
In spite of their doctrinal differences ideologically, Sayyid is the star pupil in Mubdi’s Wednesday-night Arabic class.15
* * *
Across the hall, in the ten-square-foot box known as the “conference room,” which is used primarily as a rehearsal space by the chapel’s musical groups, four musicians—Al, Oscar, Santana, and a fourth guy—are discussing the challenges of trying to make it on the street following a lengthy prison sentence. A South Philly black Puerto Rican in his late fifties, Santana works in the chapel, directs the Sunday Choir, and, in Baumgartner’s schooled estimation, possesses the chapel’s most beautiful singing voice. When at the Veterans Day service I finally got to hear him do “Love Lift Us Up Where We Belong,” Baumgartner sidled over to me and said, “I’ve left express instructions for Santana to sing this at my funeral.”16
A gentle-seeming soul, Santana has been, since his return from the hole at summer’s end, irritable and weary. As hearsay has it, the trip to the hole and subsequent foul mood both stem from Santana’s mounting debts, which sent him away for his own protection and forced him to kick his drug habit cold turkey. In flusher days, Santana would offer me insights. “I’ve been told no so many times it just rolls off me like water. I know that if I stop trying, I’ll die.” Sometimes perseverance finds its mark. “This is what you should be writing about!” he shouted in my direction one day from the back of the chapel, waving a wristwatch from his outstretched hand that an erstwhile Catholic regular had just given him, presumably to offset a debt. Santana is of the school that prison is little more than a microcosm of society at large. Just as Mamduh often quotes Dostoyevsky as saying, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons,” Santana observes that “anything you want to know about what’s going on in this jail, just look at your society. You’ll see it. You can’t miss it. The only thing missing is the physical building.”17
From behind the drum kit, the fourth guy, whom I know only by sight, is recalling a time from his childhood when a friend of his mother’s got out of prison and was struggling to make it. From what he remembers, the guy had quite a hard go of it.
Oscar feels what the drummer is talking about. Sometimes, it’s the little things that freak guys out, he says, like seeing dogs and cats.
Santana scoffs at this ridiculous empathy. He’s sorry, he says. While he’s happy to acknowledge the difficulties that go with the territory, he hasn’t got any time for the bellyaching. “Of course it’s hard,” he snaps. “But what I wouldn’t give for a shot! And the guys who do get the shot? They just wanna come back and complain about how hard it is! I mean, please.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Al says. “But it’s like my lady tells me. It ain’t nothing like how it used to be on the street. It’s a different world out there now than the one we used to know, she say. And worse. Meaner. People won’t even cross the street to piss on you if you on fire. And then you supposed to make it out there after being shut in for so long?” After a pause, Al continues. “That’s why you need a real system of halfway houses, whether a guy is getting out on parole or maxing out … to help a guy adjust. It’s like back on the outside when I used to buy fish. When you go to buy a fish at the fish store, they give it to you in a bag of water from out of the tank where it was living. And when you get home, you take the fish in the bag and put the bag in your fish tank. And then the water inside the bag adjusts to the new temperature, gradual-like, and then only after it’s been in there for a while do you open up the bag and let him out into the tank. That gives the fish the chance to adjust to its new environment. If you just open the bag as soon as you get home and drop the fish in, it would die of shock.”
A St. Dismas regular pokes his head in the door to let Al know it’s time for Communion. Al hauls himself up out of his chair and follows the guy across the hall. I stand outside the open classroom door and listen to the song that accompanies the receipt of the sacrament. Few of the voices are particularly refined, or even in key, for that matter. Nonetheless, the song never fails to make the back of my neck tingle.
Let us break bread together on our knees
Let us break bread together on our knees
When I fall down on my knees
With my face to the rising sun
O Lord have mercy on me
I listen in together with an obese Latino dwarf who lives on the new side, floats between various chapel rituals, and who explains, when I ask him why he’s not inside, that he’s not prepared to take Communion yet. Saying that I probably wonder why I haven’t seen him around lately, he explains that he’s fresh from two months in the hole.
“Seems like a long time,” I say.
“No, that ain’t nothing,” he says. Once he spent eleven months in the hole. That was back when he first fell, though. And it had been for his own good, ’cause when he first fell he’d been hearing voices that told him what to do. He’d even gotten to thinking that he was God, if I can believe that.
Let us drink wine together on our knees
Let us drink wine together on our knees
When I fall down on my knees
With my face to the rising sun
O Lord have mercy on me
But they got him on the right meds now.
“That’s good,” I say. As I know from experience, I tell him, meds can save your life.
He hates taking them, he says. This is no surprise. While fifteen percent of Graterford’s prisoners are prescribed psychotropic medication, pharmacology is commonly disparaged as mind control.18 So he just takes little bits of them, to sleep, he explains. You know, if he took everything they prescribed him he’d be a zombie. Plus, he saw in the media how they cause diabetes.
I encourage him to stay with it, that life is hard enough as it is. He knows, he says, and he will. But, he adds, it’s not the meds that saved him. What saved him was this—he pats his Bible.
Let us praise God together on our knees
Let us praise God together on our knees
When I fall down on my knees
With my face to the rising sun
O Lord have mercy on me19
“Can I ask you a question?”
I look up from my notes to find a man whose unkempt appearance and coarse manner suggest shaky mental health.
“Sure,” I say. “But first tell me, who are you?” He gives me his name, explains that he’s been back inside for six months and has been a St. Dismas regular since then. He saw me in there this morning and he’s been dying to ask me a question. Outside, he worked for a caterer. They worked a lot of Jewish functions and he’s been trying to figure something out.
“Shoot,” I say.
“Why is it that Jews drink so much at weddings and bar mitzvahs?”
“Because they find it difficult to deal with their families when they’re sober?” I suggest with the pop-psychoanalytic common sense common to where I’m from. Not translating, he gives me back empty eyes. “How could you tell I was Jewish?”
“I can just tell,” he says, and waits for a better answer.
I shrug off the failure of my first effort and give it another shot, delivering a clipped series of non sequiturs on how there is no prohibition against drinking in Judaism, how there are even certain holidays, Passover, for example, and Purim, on which you read the Book of Esther—he nods in recognition—when one is obligated to drink. His stare remains vacant. I fire off a few overintellectualized nuggets about how Jews aren’t traditionally prone to alcoholism and some nonsense about how “drinking levels are cultural”—whatever the hell that means. Still no register.
Out of tricks, I go Socratic. “Are these bars cash bars or open bars?”
“Open bars,” he says.
“Okay,” I say. “And how do you act when there’s an open bar?”
“I drink,” he says.
“Do you drink a lot?” I ask.
“You bet,” he says with a blustering exhale.
“Well, there you go!” I say, and turn back to my notes.20
* * *
In the back of the chapel, Sal is shelving the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ songbooks on their cart, flattening their tops and pressing their spines flush. I ask him how it went this morning. “Always beautiful,” he says. With his characteristic combination of aggression and concern, Sal makes a crack about how tough it must be for me out on the street. I play along, complaining about what a drag freedom is. Good-naturedly, he pantomimes slitting my throat. I explain what I’m up to this week.
Sal reiterates what he told me one long summer evening in Baumgartner’s office. In jail, he says, there just aren’t too many things a man can choose for himself. So in those few realms where one has any freedom, exercising that freedom becomes very, very important.
Apologizing for my nonattendance this morning, I ask Sal if he’d be willing to detail for me what they did. They did a Watchtower Bible study, he says, and they learned about the workings of the Jehovah’s Witness organization. He says he’ll write me up an outline.
As promised, tomorrow Jack will hand me a sealed envelope, in which I will find a copy of the current Watchtower and a double-sided handwritten page. On the top it will read: “Joshua, Hope this helps. Sal.”
At the heart of the itemized account, Sal will detail how the Witnesses read a Watchtower study article, “Now Is the Time for Decisive Action,” whose title comes from First Kings and which takes as its theme Elijah’s challenge to the Nation of Israel: “How long will you be limping upon two different opinions?”21
Sal’s meticulous précis will capture the tenor of the Witnesses’ meetings, the bureaucratic flavor of their biblical urgency, their catechistic regimentation. Watchtower essays read like grammar school exams in reading comprehension. Every question has a correct answer, which the reader must locate in the article, which has been peppered with scriptural proof. As examples:
Question: “What great apostasy did the Bible foretell, and how has that prophecy been fulfilled?”
Answer: Just as in biblical times, the worshippers of Baal were eradicated, so too will the “false religion” practiced by most Christians today be wiped out in the great tribulation fast approaching.
“What must we do to survive God’s day of judgment?”
We must get off the fence and “act decisively now”! We must “take decisive action and zealously work toward the goal of becoming dedicated, baptized worshippers of Jehovah.”
Back in the summer, I pressed Sal on this brand of scriptural certitude. Don’t biblical passages at times possess multiple possible interpretations? I asked. No, he said, there are multiple translations of the Bible, which reflect the multitude of vantage points born of people’s varied experiences, but there is only one interpretation because interpretation belongs to God. “Let the Bible do it itself,” he counseled. “We cannot interpret God’s Word, because he already did it for us.” And those who believe Scripture to say something different? “They ignore the proof,” Sal said. “They hear what they want to hear.”
It is for me a challenging position. As I was taught back in Jewish day school, those texts that merit studying—the sacred ones, if you like—drive irrepressibly in the direction of openness. The Torah may be the perfect Word of God, but its verbal economy demands earnest interpretive labors. As was true in the Garden then, where man gave names to all the animals, also in the realm of Scripture are humans tasked with completing creation. Which, given the depth ascribed to these texts by the rabbinical tradition, means the obligation to never cease discussion.22 In addition to the vital pleasures afforded, this attitude toward scriptural interpretation yields—I tend to think—at least one crucial ethical principle, that being: Thou shalt presume no monopoly over the Truth.
Which is all well and good, Sal might say, were not the final judgment soon at hand and the fate of humankind teetering in the balance. With such stakes, dillydallying in the wondrousness of the text is a luxury easily sacrificed. Quite simply, an erroneous interpretation will land you on the wrong side of eternity. One must act decisively now.
“Acting decisively now” means spreading the true religion to those who otherwise will be consumed in the fire. It means going cell to cell and passing out literature, even though such proselytizing is a violation of the rules and could, in theory, land you in the hole. It means bearing witness to every soul you come across, a Jewish skeptic no less so than anyone else. It means giving this skeptic, shortly after first making his acquaintance, a seven-page single-spaced letter that you’d sent to all but three of your graduating high school classmates in response to a print of the twenty-fifth-reunion picture that one of them anonymously sent you—a letter in which you apologize for your history of violence, an ugly character trait of which some of them were undoubtedly on the receiving end, and which culminated in your murder of an off-duty cop. But true to the cliché that there are no atheists in foxholes, you will say that in prison you have found a way to live other than selfishly, and though you have little hope of ever getting out, you believe with all your heart that a wonderful future awaits you. But in the meantime, you will say, oversight from God does not come without cost. It involves, rather, the tremendous responsibility of letting each and every one know about the coming Armageddon and reminding them of how in the Sermon on the Mount as it appears in Matthew, Jesus speaks of the broad road and the narrow road, and how on the broad road walk the spiritually indifferent, the misled, and those who do not know Jehovah, and that that broad road leads to everlasting destruction. But there is another road, a narrow road, on which walk only a few. These, you will explain, are the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And you will say how it doesn’t matter who you are or what you have done, for like the prostitute who cries at Jesus’ feet, in the might of Jesus and Jehovah even the greatest of sinners may also find forgiveness.
* * *
Baraka is discussing the ethics of war with Vic the heathen. Yesterday, the professor, a moral philosopher whom they generally speak of with reverence, outed himself as a pacifist. To these two veterans, it is an asinine position. Baraka says something vague about “just blowing them all up.” Then, staring at me for effect, he adds, “Just kidding.”
“What?” I ask. “You think I’m going to submit an unsolicited note to the Clemency Board?”
“Be careful,” Vic cautions. “We’re both lifers”—he nods at Baraka—“both former Marines. It doesn’t get closer than that.”
“But what about our shared whiteness?” I appeal to Vic. “Doesn’t that mean anything anymore?”
“Maybe fifty years ago, when we were wearing sheets,” Vic says, laughing. “Now, not so much.”
A call for Baraka comes from the Imam’s office, and Baraka follows after. Vic points at me, stopping as if trying to remember something he had wanted to tell me. “Oh yeah,” he says, “Princeton came up in class yesterday.”
“Why?” I ask. “Walzer?” I figure that if they’re talking about the ethics of war, they’re probably talking about the political philosopher Michael Walzer, who is at the Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein’s old haunt.
“Yeah, that’s it,” he says.
I explain the difference between the university and the Institute, how the folks at the Institute get paid simply for being who they are and don’t have to do anything for it.
“Like you,” Vic says, “getting paid for nothing.” Vic is referring back to my explanation of how in my department, funding is not dependent on teaching.
“No, better than me,” I say. “They’re not beholden to anyone.” Back from the Imam’s office, Baraka flips out in my general direction.
“No, they’re not beholden to anyone,” he says, cocking his forehead to the right. “They’re just called up now and again by the NSA to produce white papers, which they dutifully provide without having to be asked twice. They’re all patriots, after all.”
At “patriots,” Vic issues forth an impromptu Sieg Heil! We argue about this a while. I say that while I appreciate Baraka’s point about the various levels of beholdenness, if there exists a single bastion of freethinking in this country—where knowledge, though not produced in an ideological vacuum, is, at the very least, produced with minimal procedural fetter—it would be a place like the Institute. Baraka rolls his eyes as if I’m saying that our great nation is a place where everyone is born free and equal and rises and falls solely on the basis of merit. He takes his pad out of his breast pocket and jots something down.
Soon he and Teddy head for the blocks. “Look, all I want to say,” Baraka says, continuing a conversation that I missed, “is that, contrary to what many guys around here say, death is not life, death is death.”
“No,” Teddy objects with equal vehemence. “Death is life because to live you must die every day.”
“No,” Baraka repeats. “Death is the opposite of life. Death is death, and it’s final.”
* * *
After lunch, Father Gorski brings Keita back a couple of staff dining hall apples and the Imam and I follow along. Though Keita’s office, following lunch, is usually a sleepy venue, today things get absurd fast. Gorski berates Keita for having bided his time until his wife, Martha, left for her annual Africa trip before springing into action and putting her cat to sleep. Keita squeals coincidence, but Gorski knows better.
Behind Keita’s desk, a colored-pencil drawing of eighties TV puppet and camp icon Alf spits forth a dialogue box reading “Got cat?”—a reference, if I recall correctly, to the idiosyncratic alien’s preferred cuisine.
I ask Keita whether the cat killers let him take the carcass home so he could eat it.
“Maybe in Africa,” Keita says, “but not here among the white man. Here it is, unfortunately, against the law.”
Passing my eyes to the far wall, I notice that a full year past its expiration date, Keita’s single-paneled Shrek wall calendar has finally been taken down. “What happened to Shrek?” I ask about the animated ogre.
“Yes,” Keita solemnly says, “it was time to retire him.” He will always love Shrek, though, he says, mostly for how he cooks mice rotisserie style. It reminds him of how back in Africa he would eat cave bats in the same way. Adopting a wistful air, Keita recounts how when he was little they would rise before dawn, climb into the hills, and watch the sunrise from the mouth of a big cave. There they would wait. Eventually, the bats would appear, fat from a night out preying on mosquitoes, and the hunters would crack their whips and smack them from the air. Then they would roast them on spits, just like in Shrek.
The Imam is horrified. No, he groans. In his native Nigeria they eat pigeons, but never bats.
Feigning incredulity at such prudishness, Keita reminds the Imam that back when they were wandering in the desert, the Hebrews ate bats as well. He points at me: “Your grandparents, or great-grandparents, or great-great-grandparents—they were bat-eaters too.”
“Says us. But my people only converted with the Khazars.” I’m playing with the trope common among the Black Nationalist religions that the biblical Israelites have no genealogical connection to today’s Jews. “The true Israelites were Africans.”23
Still chewing on the winged rodents’ culinary potential, Gorski muses that bat wings must be light and crispy, an assumption that Keita confirms.
Baumgartner arrives with a stack of mail in hand, which he distributes, piece by piece. Baumgartner points out that he, Keita, and Gorski each received an identically worded communiqué from a freshly blued parole violator, pleading with them to please do something to stop his wife from divorcing him. Their collective response is a cross between bemusement and scorn. They’ve seen it too many times before, and this blue they don’t even know. All they can do is laugh mirthlessly, substituting for their inefficacy the consolation of shared frustration.
The chaplains are in a bind. Because they are trained in a caring profession, they are predisposed to distinguish themselves from the administration’s custody-based approach, in which prisoners alternatively appear as dangerous criminals or as tedious babies, requiring, in either case, the identical regimen of callous discipline. While the chaplain’s aspiration to treat the prisoners as men is generally quite practicable, a conspiracy of factors nonetheless reinforces the prison’s dehumanizing operating logic. From above, they must placate the custody hierarchy for whom accommodation spells weakness and empathy is a slippery slope. From below, they must fend off a population squeezed between infantilization and deprivation, and prone to crisis. In a facility of 3,500, this means a constant flow of tugging, cajoling, game-playing. Exacerbating matters, the chaplains are one of only two classes of employee in the prisoners’ wings of the jail with direct phone lines to the outside, resulting in a parade of men pleading, on account of a family crisis, to please place a call for them, just this one time.24 Periodically burned and, before long, burned out, the chaplains come to deflect, to indulge in gallows humor, and to adopt as a default condition a posture of sardonic remove, which in a roundabout way brings them into proper alignment with—as Father Gorski puts it—“the World of No!” in which the prisoners live, a world antithetical in ethos to the affirmative mode to which the chaplains consider themselves vocationally attuned. But such is the job.
As they commiserate over the letter, the Imam relates a story about a guy who came into his office last week frantic to get married before his child is born. He laughs. From a Muslim perspective, he complains, the child will be considered as born out of wedlock regardless, and anyway, he doesn’t even perform marriages!
The Imam’s anecdote returns Keita to Africa, calling to mind how his brother had so many girlfriends that in their village today, there are dozens of kids running around who look just like him.
“That’s what you tell Martha, anyway,” Baumgartner says.
Keita explains to me that his brother, as the village imam, gets up before dawn to make prayer, and when that’s taken care of, he stops by his girlfriend’s house.
“No!” the Imam hollers.
Surely, I suggest, the predawn tryst can only be a Muslim contribution to illicit sexuality, since without having to get up before the sun to pray, a Jewish or Christian man would surely rather stay in bed.
I excuse myself for Baumgartner’s bathroom. When I emerge the prisoners are back, but Baumgartner pulls me aside.
“There is general concern that when you write your dissertation you’re going to say that the chaplains just sit around and talk about sex.”
* * *
I take up my spot in the back of the chapel and wait for the action to come to me, which it does presently in the form of Gabril, or, as most everybody calls him, Sugar. Gabril is stylish, and not just because of his Italian glasses and the sharp beard that he has pulled to a point with a razor blade. Rather, Gabril’s whole way of being in the world is stylish, a manner heightened since his picture recently appeared in the New York Times in an article about middleweight champion Bernard Hopkins. Hopkins spent half his twenties in Graterford, where, per the old Hollywood formula, Gabril taught him to fight—this back when the jail had a traveling boxing team. According to the new formula, there’s now talk of a movie, a project which, according to Gabril, Hopkins has vowed to postpone until his old mentor is free. Like Oscar, Gabril is serving life for a crime committed as a juvenile.
Gabril peppers his conversation with various sayings of the Prophet, in English mostly. His favorite, which he repeats like a mantra, instructs the Muslim to “Take care of these five before you take care of the other five: health before sickness, youth before old age, wealth before poverty, work before leisure, and living before death.”25 Of late, Gabril has been brokering conversations with some of the more influential yet lower-profile Muslims from the Salafi side.
“What’s up?” Gabril says.
“Same old,” I say.
Gabril is decked out in his browns’ winter wear, featuring a burgundy corduroy coat and an even purpler knit hat, both of which fit as if tailor-made. I compliment him on the coat.
“Yeah, these,” he says, dragging the backs of his fingertips along the wales. “This ain’t nothing compared to what I would wear on the outside. I’d be wearing a fine coat, you can be sure of that, with my car keys in this pocket right here.” He pats his breast. He seems preoccupied and turns to go, but then reconsiders.
Gabril looks at me with his milky fighter’s eyes. “Have you heard the rumor?” he asks.
“What rumor?” I bite.
“Well, not the rumor,” he corrects himself, “but the hearsay. Seventy-five percent of which, in my experience, turns out to be true.”
“What?”
“Sayyid is in detention.”
“What?” I stammer. “What’s going on?”
“Unclear, unclear,” he says. “I was hoping to come down here and find out.”
“Well, let me know what you turn up,” I say. He will, he says, though we both know that for want of opportunity or motive he probably won’t. With an Assalamu alaikum, Gabril leaves me with this troubling revelation.
If Sayyid is in detention, then he is likely headed to what is known to all but the administration as “the hole.” Though men in the chapel can emphasize the hole’s positive aspects, speaking of it as a time apart where one can hone his spiritual discipline, refine his focus, and reemerge recharged, being locked up in a two-man cell for twenty-three hours a day is a profoundly upsetting and arduous undertaking. Depending on what Sayyid is accused of, he could be looking at weeks or even months there. If found guilty of a violation, he could lose his job and his place in the Villanova Program. If things break bad, he could easily find himself shipped to another institution.
Even as I worry about Sayyid’s welfare, I can’t help but feel in Gabril’s probing presence the excitement that accompanies the periodic eruptions of violence here—whether that violence be spontaneous and hot like last winter’s, when a misprocessed new prisoner sent a guard to the hospital via medivac, or brutally clinical like today’s.26
* * *
Teddy bursts in to find Baraka staring down the typewriter from over his lowered lenses.
“I just can’t believe that you don’t believe in the afterlife,” he grumbles.
“Death is death,” Baraka says, his scrunched brow unlifted.
Vic, who was inventorying bottles in the cleaning-supply locker, is thumbing his way through an old New Yorker. He says he’s got a question for me. I tell him I’ve got a question for him.
“You first,” he says.
“Okay,” I say, trying to be an asshole. “Shouldn’t you be cleaning?”
Vic gives me a cock-headed furrow. “No,” he says. “I cleaned up this morning before you even came in.” On his turn, Vic asks me about “the deal with Zionism,” so I deliver a spiel about the movement’s ideological drift from nineteenth-century socialism to twenty-first-century ultraorthodoxy.27
Scowling, Teddy announces that he’s “bringing you both up on charges.”
“For being white?” I say, fighting absurdity with absurdity. “If so, I’m innocent.”
“No, not for being white—that’s not your fault. But for invading the ghetto. Y’all gonna drive the prices up and pretty soon me and Kaz and Al ain’t even gonna be able to afford to sit in here!”
And with that, Teddy leaves.
* * *
Below the chapel floor, pressure slowly builds as an ancient boiler turns water back to steam and pushes it through the closed loop that runs, when it runs, to every last corner of the jail. Absent the hum and clack of this hidden machinery, the chapel is silent. The winter sun casts long shadows from the pews’ leftward edges, and shines on Al, who, alone in the chapel, is priming the PA system for tonight.
In the darkened conference room, meanwhile, four black men are watching a video of celebrity preacher T. D. Jakes.28 Quiet for now, they will periodically erupt with “Yes, sir!” and “Amen,” and when prompted they will lay their hands on one another. I’m looking for Charles, who’s been missing since I’ve been back.
Unlike most of my interlocutors, Charles is slightly my junior. In addition to video ministry, the religiously eclectic Charles is a regular at the Sunday service, a student in Wednesday morning’s Education for Ministry class, and even an occasional presence at the Native American smudging ceremony. Largely unschooled, Charles has a penetrating if not somewhat perverse intellect and does not shy away from provocative positions. He has openly condemned as “delusional” the sort of prayer that enables a guy to sit back and wait for God to intervene. He spoke too of “‘these dudes’ syndrome”: how guys are always talking shit about other people, saying how crazy or pathetic “these dudes” are, whoever these dudes happen to be. But, as Charles sees it, “We are these dudes,” and as such, “failures at life.”
“I don’t want to disillusion you,” Charles said to me once, “but a lot of these dudes just come to the chapel for something to do.” I was in no way disillusioned. For an anthropologist of religion for whom religious ritual, at root, is human activity, Charles’s insight made all the sense in the world. Put simply, a Graterford prisoner who is looking to grow intellectually or spiritually may read in his cell, go to the school, or go to the chapel. The Graterford prisoner who wants to hang out with others may loiter on the block, try the yard, or come down to the chapel. Of course “these dudes” come to the chapel “for something to do.” For Charles’s peers, however, for whom religious sincerity is paramount, observations of this sort can only be taken personally. Consequently, the same live mind that commonly thrills me seems to render Charles a chapel pariah.
If varied, Charles’s attendance in the chapel is also sporadic. As an out-of-state lifer, Charles is doing his time alone, and sometimes—I get the impression—he can’t quite cope. Which is why, peering through the conference room window, I’m disappointed but not entirely surprised to discover that Charles is nowhere to be found.
* * *
Officer Bird’s glasses are still tinted from the outdoor light.
“What’s up with your hair?” he asks me. I pat it down. Solely by virtue of neglect, my frizzy head has grown into something of a spectacle. I marvel with Bird at the madness of last night’s ice storm, which left my Philly neighborhood a fairy tale and the highway a disaster.
“It’s a sign of the times,” Bird says.
A few minutes past 2:00, Al and Santana pass through the vestibule on their way back to the blocks. Apropos of the weather, I ask Santana if he’s been outside today.
“You crazy?” he snipes at me. “Why don’t you go out there?”
Baraka passes through and I pose for him the same question. He shakes his head. “Nah, nah. It’s cold,” he says. He then adds matter-of-factly, “We don’t go outside.”
“When’s the last time you went outside?” I ask.
Another shoulder shrug ends the exchange. I don’t think to ask Baraka who “we” is.
* * *
Half in search of the skinny on Sayyid, I venture back to the annex to check out who’s shown up for Talim class, as it is designated on the weekly activities schedule but by no one else. In practice, Talim (talim is Arabic for “learning”) is little more than unstructured time during which Muslims are allowed to congregate in the annex.
By the chest-high partition of flowered terra-cotta blocks that cordons off the shoe area from the rest of the annex, Mamduh is leading his small Arabic class. Behind these four, along the annex’s eastern wall, two old men sit with books in their laps. Otherwise, the austere cinder-block cube is empty.
Early in my fieldwork, Tuesday afternoon’s sparse attendance posed the chapel’s most manifest mystery: Why, in a 3,500-man facility where a quarter identify as Muslims, does one find, during one of the two weekly windows when they are allowed unstructured time in the chapel, only a handful of men exercising the privilege?
Like today, Mamduh was usually one of the few Muslims around. He had a lot of questions for me back then, about where I’d been, what I’d read, who I knew, and how I knew my Arabic. He wanted my editorial help, too, on a manuscript he was completing for a correspondence degree in Islamic learning, a comprehensive guide to the “customs of nature” (sunan al-fitra) through which the devout Muslim’s body may be restored to the state of purity in which it was created. Expressive of both his puritanical disposition and his encyclopedic scholarly style, the manuscript consisted of three-to-four-page chapters on subjects such as bathing, hair care, beard trimming, cuticle maintenance, and tooth care, findings resourcefully culled from a hodgepodge of sources ranging from medieval commentaries and modern religious tracts to commercial promotional material. A tract for insiders, each chapter concluded with a definitive prescription, or in cases where disputes resisted ironing out, with the humble acknowledgment that Allah knows best.29
In return, what Mamduh had for me was information, clues that pointed me toward the missing Muslims, which in turn helped me piece together Graterford’s history more generally. Mamduh spoke with the affect of discretion—huddling close over the partition, dropping, at critical moments, his hoarse voice to a near whisper—but as time went on, he ceased to mask his partisanships and resentments. Mostly Mamduh was frustrated, frustrated with the intellectual lifelessness of his community, how unserious people had become, and how little support his community received from the Imam—a man whose observance of Islam he saw as deviating wildly from that of the Prophet. While I bristled against Mamduh’s religious absolutism and came to understand his reputation among the chaplains as a malcontent, his facts tended to check out. His general air of lamentation didn’t seem far off, either. For while I’m attuned to the fact that one of the moods that religion tends to foster is the preemptive mourning of its own passing, I took at face value the cataclysmic communal loss Mamduh described, and sensed that his bitterness, though partially misdirected, was in no way disproportionate to the devastation wrought by “the raid.”
* * *
As recently as the summer of 1995, the chapel was awash in Muslim activities, which took place mostly in the basement. The jail had no fewer than ten Muslim-identified sects back then, but the two most prominent were Masjid Warith Deen Muhammad and Masjid Sajdah.30 Both of these downstairs mosques—the more progressive Warith Deen and the more traditionalist Sajdah—were vibrant community centers. Each mosque convened daily for three of the five prayers and for a variety of self-administered programs. The two masajid had expansive libraries, too, where, in an era of residual openness, Graterford residents were allowed, with few restrictions. On Fridays, each mosque’s Jum’ah service would draw hundreds of men, who, for the occasion, were allowed to dress in civilian clothes and invite in family and friends. Intellectually, spiritually, and socially it was a good time to be a Graterford Muslim.
Not all, however, was so wholesome. I’d been in the prison only a couple of weeks when I began to hear tell of a mythic figure—one more out of The Arabian Nights than HBO’s Oz—a giant with humongous hands who used to run the show downstairs back when the Muslims were down there. It was said that his viziers would bring him trays of food, that he had his own phone line with outside access through which he ran his criminal enterprises—prostitutes on the inside, drugs on the outside—and how nobody had a goddamn clue.
Reverend Baumgartner also told me about the former leader of Masjid Warith Deen Muhammad, Ameen Jabaar. Relating a legend that also made it to the news, he described how one day a group of guards had come downstairs to announce an evacuation drill. Everyone was instructed to leave. One hundred men refused to move. The COs cajoled, but the men stood firm. The COs didn’t generally go down there, and they didn’t know what to do. Eventually, Ameen was sent for. In the Philadelphia Inquirer’s version, Ameen is a genie. “He came over and waved his hand, and it was done.”31
Back then the administration’s reliance on prisoner leadership for the maintenance of social order was undisguised. But a decade into the crack epidemic, violent crime was up, conservative social theorists warned of a new generation of super-predators, and even Democratic politicians couldn’t be tough enough on crime.32
Corrections was the new master category, and control its linchpin. In institutions across the country, prisoners’ movements were restricted and surveillance was heightened. Educational and psychological resources were gutted. The nominal purpose of incarceration ceased to be about rehabilitating prisoners. Prisons were now for punishment.33
Meanwhile, as American industry rusted, “the prison industrial complex,” as activist Angela Davis dubbed it, boomed.34 During the 1980s, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania doubled its number of prisons, from five to ten, and in the nineties added eleven more.35 Like the spike in traffic that often follows new highway construction, Pennsylvania’s prison population skyrocketed as legislation and administrative adjustments raised mandatory minimums and restricted parole.36 At Graterford, the new-side cellblocks were constructed.37 A facility that in 1981 had a population of 1,900 men had nearly doubled in size.38
On January 17, 1995, Republican Tom Ridge was sworn in as Pennsylvania’s governor. Responding to a moral panic over the exploding crime rate, Ridge had run a law-and-order campaign, promising as governor tough new policies, like a three-strikes-you’re-out law and a streamlined death penalty process.39 As promised, changes were instituted system-wide and at Graterford in particular: newly sentenced prisoners were shipped as far from home as possible, forced to earn their way closer to their families with good time; and the lifers, some of whom had lived in the Outside Services Unit for a generation, were brought back inside the walls. Neither was the chapel exempt. On February 3, a policy in place since the mid-seventies guaranteeing the right of prisoners to convene their own religious services was revoked.40 Henceforth, no service or instruction would take place without a supervising chaplain or volunteer. And these were merely the tremors.
In his subsequent report to Pennsylvania’s Senate Judiciary Committee, Governor Ridge’s new secretary of corrections, Martin Horn, described the anarchy he had inherited. He explained how, at Graterford in particular, the liberal and humanitarian innovations of the 1970s, left unchecked for a quarter of a century, had festered. And Horn had taken it as his express mission to “sanitize this facility.”41
Yunus, a former Imam of Masjid Sajdah, remembers what happened next. It was a warm night for late October and he was lying in his cell, the 99-cell, which sits at the top step in the front of B Block. It was after the regular 9:00 p.m. lockdown and his window was open. From the main corridor, the sound of hollering, of a commotion, roused him from his bed. And then: “Police is here!” “Raid!”
State troopers and COs from across the system stormed into the jail, 650 men in all. Over the next seventy-two hours, each of the prison’s 3,490 inmates was strip-searched, and each of its 2,750 cells was ransacked.42 When the swarm finally receded, prisoners’ possessions were reportedly piled shoulder-high the full length of the cellblock. Casualties ran low and high. Nine employees were fired on the spot, and twenty-one prisoners, most of them community leaders and power players, were transferred, some across the state, and some, through a measure allowing states to trade their most dangerous, across the country. Among those shipped was Ameen, who, according to legend (and Baraka insists it is only that), was paraded away in nothing but handcuffs and underwear.43
The press trumpeted the size of this game. In its coverage on day two of the raid, the Daily News ran a feature on Ameen, entitled “Inmate Throne for a Loss; Prisoners’ ‘Kingdom’ Toppled.” Drawing no distinctions between Graterford’s various Muslim groups, the piece described how “the Iman [sic], or religious head of Graterford’s Muslim population,” and his battalion used religion as a cover for criminal activity. “As the religious services were going on in one room, a brothel was being run in another.”44
The Muslims’ sway was eminent. “‘If you don’t want no trouble, become a Muslim,’” the Daily News reported a Graterford-bound prisoner being told on the bus. “They’ll protect you ’cause the Muslims run the jail. That’s how come a lot of guys get religion when they go to prison.’” The article concluded on an up note: “But he remained a Christian.”45
When lockdown ended and the Muslims returned to the chapel for Jum’ah, they found the mosques ransacked. Soon thereafter they were informed that their days downstairs were numbered. A new era had dawned. Family and friends were banned, and civilian clothing was prohibited. For nine months following the raid, no volunteers were allowed in the jail. Graterford’s chaplains oversaw the larger services, and the gatherings of the smaller groups were suspended. The Muslims continued to meet downstairs, now under the supervision of the COs and Graterford’s first Muslim chaplain, who was hired on a contract basis.46
Of the two masajid, the traditionalist Masjid Sajdah was the more obstreperous. A lawsuit was filed. Avowing a decentralized democratic sensibility indigenous to American religion and Islam both, Sajdah opposed the DOC’s new concentration of religious authority. “O you who believe!” the Sajdah brief quoted the Qur’an. “Obey God and obey the Apostle, and those charged with authority among you.”47 For Sajdah, “among you” was proof that a DOC appointed imam would not suffice Islamically. Further support for this principle of local autonomy was found in a hadith, a saying of the Prophet: “No man must lead another in prayer where the latter has authority, or sit in his place of honor in his house, without prior permission.”48
The Sajdah plaintiffs made a strong case, but the climate was not what it once was. Relying on the guidelines laid out by the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), the DOC trumped Sajdah’s expansive reading of religious autonomy with an appeal to security. Making explicit mention of the mosques’ raised floors and drop ceilings, the DOC argued that these spaces were “conducive to hiding contraband, which can include weapons, money, and illegal drugs.” The DOC made no explicit claim about criminality on Sajdah’s part. Indeed, it acknowledged the masjid’s two-decade track record of clean behavior. However, because the equal protection clause requires that all groups be treated the same, this record was immaterial. Similarly, because allowing an inmate to occupy a leadership position affords him “a power base” from which to incite violence or conduct illegal activity, such positions were also, for security reasons, to be eliminated.
It is easy to imagine the forked resentment with which members of Masjid Sajdah greeted the DOC’s response brief and the resounding defeat it foretold. As it could only seem to them, the Warith Deen guys stepped out of line, the DOC retaliated, and Sajdah got caught in the crossfire.
Such was the poisonous environment into which the mild-mannered Nigerian émigré Namir Kaduna was thrown. To exacerbate matters, before becoming Graterford’s imam, Namir had provided the DOC an affidavit stating his understanding that there is no prohibition in Islam against being led in prayer by a government chaplain. Inevitably, the hostility only grew once Namir was on the ground. As Mamduh said, “When a chaplain threatens to give you a write-up”—a measure that could mean two additional years come parole time—“you know where he stands.”
While Baumgartner now sees “the Imam”—as most call him—as his “right-hand man,” he too initially presumed Namir to be a plant from the secretary’s office. Three candidates had been up for the job—the current contract chaplain, a second African-American, and Namir. When Baumgartner showed up for the interviews, the assistant secretary of corrections, Jeffrey Beard, pointed to Namir and told Baumgartner, “That’s our guy.”
The conspiracy, as it turned out, was somewhat different. As Baumgartner and other Pennsylvania prison chaplains figure it in retrospect, Namir’s hire was plainly a part of a DOC effort to replace the first wave of African-American contract Muslim chaplains with full-time ones from the Middle East and Africa. Thought of as being both apolitical and devoid of compromising ties to the neighborhood, the foreign chaplains were seen as less dangerous than their African-American counterparts, who, a generation later, still carried the revolutionary odor of Malcolm X. Still years away, of course, was 9/11.
Namir’s marching orders were to take Graterford’s divided Muslim community and make it one. It was a directive Namir wholeheartedly believed in. Why should Muslims who pray to the same God pray separately under the same roof? “Do you believe in Allah?” Namir asks would-be schismatics. “Do you believe in rasul Allah?”—that is, in the messenger of Allah, the Prophet Muhammad? If the answer to both questions is yes, then you are a Muslim and you can pray with all other Muslims the same as they do in Mecca. Or so the Imam continues to insist.
Not all have been equally obstinate. The Warith Deen elders, who tend to be politically savvier than their more absolutist counterparts, knew not to look a gift horse in the mouth. And so, opting for graciousness over contempt, it was Baraka, then a chapel janitor, who ended up the Imam’s clerk, with use of a desk in his office and access to his ear.
Ten years past, the raid is still an object of great passion and frequent discussion. In the ritualized recollections of prisoners as well as staff, it is generally derided as having been a wasteful and capricious exercise. Even the military-styled career DOC employee who began his new staff orientation with a half-hour retelling of the raid attested to the fact that the cache of drugs and knives paraded before the media consisted entirely of items seized beforehand.
Baumgartner isn’t over the raid, either. The chapel’s criminal excesses were a humiliating revelation; the DOC’s brutal response was destabilizing, as intended; and Baumgartner remains equal parts wary and resentful. Nonetheless, if pushed to say one way or another, Baumgartner figures that in aggregate, the net effect of the raid in the chapel has been a positive one, with the increased security and oversight leading to “more authentic” forms of worship.
In Graterford’s institutional memory, the raid is the pivot point between two periods: Before the Raid and After the Raid. Albeit belatedly and imperfectly, the raid yanked Graterford into the era of carceral control. In the ascendant regime of diminished opportunities and heightened restrictions, not all of the new measures seem excessive.49 Whereas prior to the raid, prisoner movements at Graterford consisted of simply throwing open the cellblock doors and flooding the prisoners into the main corridor, nowadays, work lines, activities, and yard are each moved in deliberate sequence. So whereas before the raid, drug deals and contract killings would take place right in the main corridor, such occurrences are now almost unthinkable. In 1995, Graterford had 102 reported inmate assaults, but by 1998 that number had fallen to thirty-two—though the vast majority of assaults still go unreported, just as they did before.50 And while prisoners, staff, and administrators all assert that anything one can get out on the street a guy can also find at Graterford, drugs are allegedly much harder to come by.
Meanwhile, the bygone era, characterized by Mamduh’s protégé, Nasir, as “TVish” for the grotesqueries of its purported realism, has become an object of considerable nostalgia. As one longtime female CO compared the present to those realer days: “Yeah, it’s safer now. More boring, but safer.” It was harder then, it is commonly said, but better. The new era is worse, not in spite of the increased safety, but precisely because of it. Doing time has gotten too easy, many older heads say. As Baraka put it, these days there’s “too much breathing room,” which keeps the young guys from committing themselves wholeheartedly to anything. “Back then,” he said, “there was no gap between what you said and what you did.”
“Then we had men here. We just have children in here now,” Santana said, complaining that the young guys treat their time like a vacation, just lying in their cells and watching TV. In the old days, it is said, the prisoners had a sense of unity, one that they would channel into strikes for better food and health care, but such actions could never take place now. By stick and carrot, the prison population has been broken down and atomized. Whereas once there was a system of block representatives and prisoners would employ the tools of organized labor as a counterweight to the administration, nowadays, according to the youthful president of the Graterford Branch NAACP, “if you try to stand together, they treat you with Thorazine.” Or, more likely, would-be agitators are simply shipped out, losing in the process the few privileges they enjoyed—their jobs, their activities, their stuff, and proximity to their downstate friends and family. Since, as Al put it, “He don’t know me and I don’t know him,” one has little trust his fellow prisoner won’t snitch. Unlike back in the day, now everyone just looks after himself.51
In such an environment, is it any wonder that the religiously inward Salafi Islam common to the former Masjid Sajdah crew has ascended while the activist Warith Deen brand of Islam has increasingly acquired the dull face of a historical artifact?
What was lost in the raid remains palpable in its absence. In Mamduh’s accounting, whereas Jum’ah downstairs used to draw in aggregate between 700 and 1,000 people, it’s now half that. Some guys study on the blocks, but if they try to do so in groups larger than six, the COs are supposed to break them up. According to Mamduh, many of the former Sajdah guys actively boycott the chapel. Everyone comes to Jum’ah because according to the Sunnah it’s obligatory, but that is all the legitimacy they are willing to lend to the man mistakenly honored, in their view, with the title of Imam. Others tell it differently. Chapel attendance is down, they say, not just for the Muslims but for everyone. Before the raid, the chapel provided a precious haven from the insanity common to the rest of the jail. Nowadays, increased security makes the need for a sanctuary somewhat less pressing.
For whatever reason, on Tuesday afternoon, with Talim on the program, I’m not at all surprised to find only five men in the annex. And so, in search of details about Sayyid’s detention, the annex seems unlikely to bare any secrets.
* * *
Teddy ambles up the center aisle and drops down in the front row of pews. I’m standing at the lectern at the foot of the altar, where I’ve been scribbling in the formerly empty chapel. It’s all I can do not to ask about Sayyid.
“You know,” Teddy says to me, “usually when someone starts at a new job, it takes them a while to figure things out, but you come in here, and right away…” Teddy trails off, his flattery unfinished. “What you doing, lurking back there?” he growls past me. I turn and find Baraka, who has materialized on the rear of the stage. He is helicoptering his arms in the widening circles that make up the concluding reps of his daily stretches. Teddy hops to his feet and closes in on Baraka. They trade a few words out of earshot and then wander over in my direction. As they come back into range I make out something about Sayyid being on L Block.
“How do you know?” I ask to blank stares. Thinking the problem to be an unidentified antecedent, I repeat: “How do you know Sayyid is on L?” Again, no answer. “How do you know?” I ask again as Teddy approaches me. Teddy leans into the mic stand at the foot of the stage, amps up his voice, and echoes, “Know? Know? Know?” With evident impatience, he cocks his head toward the security camera.
Baraka adds, “You forget that we are living in a police state here.”
“Shit,” I say. “Oops.” Silence.
Baraka smiles. “You never know if we’re joking, do you?”
“No,” I say, “but”—I echo his words back to him—“I proceed as if everything in here is real, or at the very least it better be treated that way.” Apparently, Teddy is not the only suck-up around here.
Teddy takes off. Meanwhile, as the next phase of his exercise regimen, Baraka starts walking a determined circuit between two rows of pews to my left. He thinks out loud about some projects he might undertake under the auspices of the newly launched Graterford chapter of the Villanova Alumni Association: a video to be shown on the in-house Graterford network, about domestic violence; a facilitation program for kids with incarcerated parents; a resource bulletin to be distributed in the visiting room that will inform family members of their rights. Having recently met a woman who’s offered to help, Baraka asks which option sounds appealing.
I say that she’ll likely be game for whichever. “Given your prominence,” I add, recalling Brian’s teasing from yesterday.
“What are you talking about? I’m not anybody,” Baraka says in the high-pitched tone that might just be his tell.
“That’s not what I hear,” I counter. “I hear that when you go down to the visiting room, four shorties carry you in a litter while a fifth walks alongside, feeding you chocolates.” Baraka indulges me with a wheeze. He continues to walk. I continue to write.
Baraka brings up his case. Last year, he tells me, his wife and daughter found previously undisclosed statements made by the state’s key witness, none of which makes any mention of him.
“So you’re claiming innocence?” I ask him. This I didn’t know.
“Innocence and Brady,” he says, referring to Brady v. Maryland, the 1963 Supreme Court case that established a prosecutor’s willful failure to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence as reversible error.52
In a direct disclosure atypical enough to make me wonder about his motivation, Baraka continues, filling in a number of details I hadn’t known. His 1974 conviction was based on eyewitness testimony alleging not that he was the shooter but only that he participated in a conspiracy to commit murder. And for this, life? It strikes me as odd, but I hold tight to my confusion. “Unfortunately,” Baraka says, “the guy with the hardest time proving his innocence is the guy who doesn’t know anything about the crime.” The first he saw of any of his alleged coconspirators was at his trial.
“Hmm,” I start, “so as easy as it is to allege conspiracy…”
“Is how difficult it is to unprove it,” Baraka finishes.
“So why you, Bar?” I ask. “Why did they put the frame on you?”
“Because a few weeks earlier I shot a cop,” he says. He adds derisively, “That is, according to them, I did.” This Baraka has told me before. As Baraka explains it, the charges were later dropped for lack of evidence. Nevertheless, I am momentarily curious enough to make another social misstep.
I ask: “So am I to believe that despite all your talk about putting something in somebody’s head”—Baraka’s preferred term for retaliatory assassination—“you never put anything in anybody’s head?”
Baraka’s laugh this time is not high-pitched. “You know, there are some things I will not answer.”
Clumsily I cover. “Well, you know, there are some things I won’t ask seriously.” We each let it drop.
Two older Muslims emerge from the annex. Baraka hails them in Arabic and they respond in kind. They turn and slowly edge their way toward the back of the chapel.
Baraka turns to me. “When you’re done here,” he says with assurance, “you can say that you met certain people.”
I don’t understand. “Isn’t that Abdullah Shah?” I ask, referring to a man who though a widely respected Warith Deen elder, is—as far as I’m aware—no more famous than that.
“Nah,” Baraka says, “that’s Rafiq.”
“Rafiq? Who’s that?”
“Rafiq?” he repeats. Nothing is triggered. He tries a Christian name, first and last. The name rings only the vaguest of bells. Baraka looks at me incredulously. Then it clicks. It’s the name of one of the men featured in a recent book that a couple of the younger guys turned me on to, which chronicles the rise and fall of Philadelphia’s Black Mafia. This guy was one of the ringleaders.53
Baraka jumps to a subsequent conclusion. He instructs me: “You have an obligation based on what you’ve seen to tell folks out there that some people are not what they are said to be.”
We watch the two hunched men slowly recede. “You know, those guys were both my lieutenants back in the FOI,” he says, referring to the Fruit of Islam, the Nation of Islam’s paramilitary order. With a look of pride and protectiveness, Baraka watches over the trudging old men as they leave the chapel behind.
From the volume of the quiet, we intuit that it’s time for Baraka to head out, too.
* * *
Teddy is in the process of leaving the chapel. Jutting out of his mesh commissary bag is an ostentatious brick of candy. The candy is surplus stock from Christmastime when the Brotherhood Jaycees, a youth service organization, distributed the sweets in the visiting room as part of their annual fundraiser. Now a month past, Teddy, the Jaycees’ secretary, is in the process of removing the remainder from its storage place in Keita’s office.54
Teddy and Bird are stepping at each other, with Bird making phantom peaks into Teddy’s stash. Teddy pushes him away. Bird thrusts. Teddy parries. Why this is only a game I have no idea.
Once the prisoners are gone, I ask Bird about why Sayyid is on L.
Bird corrects me. He’s not on L yet. They have him in detention on the block.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“Could mean lots of things,” he says. “Could mean that there’s a new guy in jail that’s scared of Sayyid, somebody that knew him fifteen years ago. Could be extortion, could be any number of complicated things they’re trying to piece together.”
“Contraband?” I ask.
“Nah. If it were contraband, he would’ve had it or not, and he would be in the hole already.”
“What’s gonna happen?”
“Too early to say,” Bird answers. “At a minimum, he’ll get ten days for suspicion.”
“Do you think he did anything?”
“Who knows?” Bird shrugs.
“Of course,” I say, push-polling. “From what I can see, though, that guy is super-diligent. Always down here, working on his translations.”
“Who knows?” Bird repeats. “Whatever he might or might not be doing, that doesn’t make his religious activities insincere or anything.”
* * *
The Rabbi shuffles in, carrying a stack of books in one hand and dragging with the other a tote bag with this month’s Graterfriends, the newsletter of the Pennsylvania Prison Society. Retired for the better part of a decade from the pulpit of a Reform New Jersey congregation, the Rabbi works a ten-hour-a-week contract. Refusing my offer of a hand, the Rabbi invites me upstairs, and I follow.
Upstairs, he asks me about my research, and I tell him what I’m up to. Why the experiment? he wants to know. I explain that detailing a week in its entirety should allow me to showcase the chapel’s amazing religious diversity and explore what ecumenism looks like in practice. After all, I add leadingly, its brand of ecumenism is itself a liberal Protestant vision.
The Rabbi puts his palms on the table. What I need to recognize, he says, is how truly extraordinary the chaplaincy staff at Graterford is. “Where else,” he asks, “can you find a Lutheran minister with a Ph.D. from Dropsie, a Jewish institution”—where Baumgartner received his doctorate in Hebrew Bible—“and a rabbi with his Ph.D. from Drew, a Methodist school?”
It’s not that I disagree with the Rabbi’s claim on behalf of the chapel’s ecumenism. It’s just that as I see it, a mode of religious pluralism that aspires to treat all descriptions of God as equally valid does not burden all religionists evenly. It asks much more of a man who believes that Christ’s death on the cross changed everything than it does of someone like me or the Rabbi, for whom what happened on Sinai is one factor among many. Theologically, socially, and politically, the Rabbi is very much a liberal, which often lands him to the left of his small group of parishioners. He is outspoken in his criticism of Israel’s imperial expansion and regards religious orthodoxy as but one of many forms Judaism assumes. He and Brian recently went at it over the 613 commandments (or mitzvot), which Brian passionately framed as the defining obligations of Judaism—whether Jews choose to follow them or not—and which the equally animated Rabbi played down as at root a rabbinic mnemonic.55
On judgments of others’ Jewish observances, the Rabbi throws up his hands. “I’m in sales, not management,” he says, though as goes with the territory, manage he must. So as to protect, for example, against his community being overrun by black nationalist Black Israelites as has happened elsewhere, the Rabbi enforces a rule that to participate in Jewish services one must have at least one Jewish parent. Jailhouse converts need not apply. Or, for the stated reason that incarceration excludes the necessary autonomy, the Rabbi categorically rejects jailhouse conversions to Judaism.
Perhaps sensing some hesitation on my part, the Rabbi states, “Ours is not a shallow ecumenism.”
“How would you typify how Graterford is different from other jails in this regard?” I ask the Rabbi.
“At other jails, religion is undoubtedly framed in more emotional, less intellectual terms,” he says. “Plus, at Graterford we find a true commitment—not a lip service—to the attitude that my religion is the best religion for me, and not necessarily the best religion absolutely.
“You’ve heard of Ramirez, the former Spanish chaplain?”
I nod. “What about him?”
“Well, he needed more. He needed not only that his religion was the best for him, but that his religion was the best, period.”
“And how did that play out in practice?”
“Well,” the Rabbi says with his usual discretion, “let’s just say that he did not regard Islam as a religious equal.” Others have been more pointed. According to David, a Jewish chapel worker, Ramirez had no compunction in declaring Islam to be the devil’s religion and telling the Jews to their faces that they were all going to hell. When he was around, I’m told, the chapel was an exceedingly tense place to be. “If a guy like him were in charge,” Al said to me, putting a flat hand across his chest, “the blood would be flowing up to here in here.”
The Rabbi excuses himself to go make his rounds of J and L blocks, to see the men in the hole and on death row.56 Filling the Rabbi in on the day’s news, I ask him to keep a lookout for Sayyid. The Rabbi apologizes, saying that he’s not so good with names. I say that he’ll know him by sight. We descend the stairs and part ways in the vestibule.
In the office, Gorski and Keita are waiting for the Imam to finish up whatever he’s doing so they can all walk out together. Pressing me for precision, Keita asks me to identify the distinct smell of the white man. I can’t name it, I say, but when he smells ripe, it means that he’s ready to be eaten.
“Mmm,” Keita says. “You smell ready. I think I will eat you.”
Deadpan, Gorski asks Keita, “Albert, when you first saw a white man, did you think he was a god?”
“How could he have?” I say. “What kind of god sits in a big cast-iron pot?”
Which again reminds Keita of his rotisserie-cooked bats. “You eat them with pepper,” he says, smacking his lips. “They are tasty, juicy, and as big as pigeons.”
* * *
Teddy rouses me with a caustic tsk.
“Sleeping in a jail?” he asks. “What are you … crazy?”
I’m twisted in Al’s chair, my feet up on his desk, my head pressed against the wall. Teddy steps around me and falls into his chair. Behind him, glare from the fluorescent lights shines back against the window, beyond which is night. Rolling his desk chair back and forth, Teddy talks about how little sleep he’s been getting. It’s been shallower even than the usual dreamless, one-eye-open stuff Teddy says is the only sleep a prisoner can afford.
“You know,” Teddy says, “guys get so desperate, so pathetic about this law stuff.” He shakes his head side to side. “It makes them lose their cool, you know?” He pauses and looks me down. “Me, I’m stepping out on faith. Because, you know, I can want something with all my heart, but if God doesn’t want it, then it’s not going to happen. But if God is good and everything happens for a reason, then I just need to wait and He’ll take care of it. Because with the courts and with my case and this whole incarceration thing…” He trails off for a time. “It’s like when God hardened Pharaoh’s heart in order to punish the people. But eventually, even Pharaoh had to let His people go. And if Pharaoh was no match for God, then what chance does the Pennsylvania DOC got? Know what I’m saying?” Taking cover in my post-slumber fog, I merely nod.
The door opens and the Rabbi enters. “I saw him on L,” he announces, before seizing up when he notices Teddy in the corner.
“Who did you see?” I ask.
“Sayyid?” Teddy adds excitedly.
Realizing that he’s gone too far to retreat, the Rabbi says, “Yes, I saw Sayyid.” Bird leans in the door as the Rabbi continues with his accidental report. He saw Sayyid on L in the riotproof glass wedge that doubles as visiting room and holding pen. Sayyid told the Rabbi that they have him there while they investigate a possible infraction; what, he has no idea.
“Did he seem okay?” I ask.
“Unnerved,” the Rabbi says, “but none the worse for wear.”
Teddy asks if Sayyid sent any special word. “No,” the Rabbi says, “just that I should tell the guys that he’s okay.” The Rabbi quickly checks his mail, which sits sorted on top of the filing cabinet in front of Baumgartner’s door, and then heads upstairs.
“Thanks for reporting,” Teddy says.
“I didn’t mean to,” the Rabbi says, punctuated by a Yiddish shrug of his shoulders.
Bird props the door open with a chair and lingers in the threshold. Having seemingly overheard Teddy’s sleep talk, he says he’s been fighting with his bed since he changed his habits—started drinking less, stopped taking some dietary supplements. A ringing phone in the vestibule pulls Bird away.
Gesturing at the door, Teddy says, “It’s beautiful, he’s about to testify.”
I look at him without understanding.
“About to reveal something personal,” Teddy clarifies. “We didn’t ask him for it, but he was about to tell us something personal about himself. It’s a beautiful thing.”
Not thinking of Bird as particularly reserved, I listen for some note of irony but don’t catch any.
When Bird returns, Teddy cautions him against taking supplements. “God made us beautifully, in His own image,” Teddy says. “You don’t need to try to improve on what He’s given us. Not that you shouldn’t go to the doctor like some guys say, just that He’s made us how we ought to be already.”
I ask, “So some guys say that going to the doctor messes with God’s plan?”
“Yeah,” Teddy says, “but they’re fools. God doesn’t want you to be stupid. You’ve got to be careful with your body, especially in this place, with the stress and all.”
“And the food,” I say, throwing in a common theme.
Teddy exhales. “If you’re a fool enough to eat the food,” he says.
“You don’t eat it at all?” I ask.
“Nah. You see these dudes that work in the kitchen?” he asks incredulously. “Some of them don’t even wash.”
Bird leaves and Papa takes his place. With sagging jowls and an expression to match, the elderly chapel worker gazes toward the garbage can by the bookcase. “Man,” he says, shaking his head, “I purposely didn’t clear that wastebasket to see if anybody on this side would do it. And nobody did. The new guy has got to learn about his responsibilities.” I’d seen Vic engaged in custodial activities this afternoon, I vouch.
Khalifa slips into the office and sits down at Al’s desk. Though not a chapel worker, the prematurely bald and fully bearded Khalifa kills a fair amount of time down here.
“Did you get your visit?” Papa asks him.
“Yeah,” Khalifa answers, pulling on his beard, “it was good.” He adds, “My mother sends her love, of course.” I’m surprised that Papa, a Christian in his seventies, and Khalifa, a Muslim in his thirties, would have people in common.
“Hold up,” I say, “you two knew each other on the outside?” I’m confused.
“Sure,” Papa says. “I know ’Lifa’s mom real good. We grew up together.”
I register my surprise.
“Why you surprised?” Papa asks. “Don’t you know that all us chapel guys knew one another on the outside?”
“You’re from South Philly, too?” I ask Papa.
“Sure,” Papa says. “All of us is.”
This I hadn’t realized.
I’ve been living in Philly for a year now but I want to make sure: “When you say South Philly, where exactly are you talking about? What are its borders?”
“Pretty much from river to river,” Khalifa says, “and from South Street on south.”
“So you’re all from the same neighborhood,” I press. “That doesn’t automatically mean that you all know each other.”
“Everybody knows each other in South Philly,” Khalifa explains, South Philly being comparatively small.
“Everybody?” I ask.
“Yeah, everybody,” Khalifa says.
“Regardless of race, even?”
“Regardless of race,” Khalifa says.
“Black, Italian, whoever,” Papa adds.
Teddy returns and I press him for confirmation. He looks me over before speaking. “This is not the first time you’re asking about this.” I forgot that the last time we talked neighborhood, Teddy chastised me, explaining that along with politics, religion, and family, people’s backgrounds are “places that you don’t want to go” because “it makes people feel challenged.”
“Why are you so curious about South Philly all of a sudden?” he asks.
“My bosses at the FBI want to know,” I say.
Dead stares.
“Not really,” I say, “but it’s only recently that I’ve started to figure out the importance of neighborhood, and I’m trying to catch up.” This explanation seems not to do much. “You know,” I add, “there’s a lot of stuff going on around here that I don’t see.”
Teddy seems to take offense. “Whaddaya mean?” he shouts. “You see how conversation stops when the cops come in, but we’re real with you. You know that.”
“I’m not saying that you’re not real with me,” I say, “though I’d be a fool to think that you’re real all the time.”
Teddy looks hurt. “Why would you say that?” he says.
“Nobody’s real all the time,” I say. “I know I’m not.” I feel their eyes on me. “But more important than real or fake is how what we say is shaped in part by who we’re talking to. Meaning, I don’t assume that the you I see is the same you the guys on the block see.”
“That’s because I don’t show those guys nothing,” Teddy says. It’s hard for me to reconcile the boisterous Teddy I know from the chapel with the buttoned-up character he describes from the block, but so he consistently claims.
“Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. I have no way of knowing,” I say. “But that’s not my point. All I’m saying is that sometimes y’all will say something to one another, and I don’t understand because I’m not from where you’re from.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Khalifa says.
“Especially when it comes to things that you all take for granted,” I say. “Things that no one will have ever taken the time to clue me in to. Like with this neighborhood thing. It’s all totally obvious to you, so why would you ever suspect that I wouldn’t get it?”
This stokes their incredulity. “Whaddaya mean?” Khalifa says. “Of course neighborhood is important! All of us from South Philly know the same people in common, and we share the same experience and values. Of course that’s gonna mean something.”
“Ah,” I say. “But that’s a slightly different claim than the one you’ve been making. What you’re saying now is that people naturally gravitate toward people they know in common and with whom they share experience. That sounds right to me. Thinking like an anthropologist, I would say that based on our shared experiences and values, we form something like tribes. But neighborhood is only one possible criterion for such tribes. Why should I assume that the key dividing line is North Philly versus South Philly and not Christian versus Muslim?”
“Because,” Khalifa says with growing impatience, “you see us Muslims hanging with Christians every day and you can see that it’s no thing.” Abstracting from this particular case a general rule, Khalifa continues: “But what religion you are is clearly not as important as what your neighborhood is. You know, when I see a couple of dudes acting close, nobody has to tell me that they have a connection that extends beyond these walls. You just don’t get close like that in here. Even with a guy I’ve known for years and years in here, if I never knew him on the outside, I’m never going to drop my guard completely.”
As if to demonstrate Khalifa’s point, the door swings open and in comes Qasim. A wiry man with a wispy gray beard, Qasim was the imam of Masjid Sajdah when the raid came down, and remains, for many, Graterford’s foremost religious authority.
“What’s up with Crocket?” he asks, referring to Sayyid.
“Still don’t know nothing,” Teddy says flatly.
Qasim remains by the door, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
Unable to stomach the silence, I add that while there are rumors that Sayyid’s on L, according to Bird he’s still in detention in his cell. Qasim trades some words with Khalifa. After a few more awkward moments, with his left hand wrapped in his overhung sleeve to ward off the doorknob’s germs, Qasim opens the door and leaves.
The door closes without comment. “You shouldn’t get the wrong idea,” Teddy says. Even though the guys down here tend to be from South Philly, the chapel isn’t some sort of South Philly thing.
I ask Teddy what he means.
He says, “’Cause, you know, these dudes be talking about how the chapel is a South Philly thing and that stuff be going on down here and that’s not true.” Teddy harps on my obliviousness. “Of course, neighborhood is important,” he says. “It’s so natural.”
“But not every neighborhood is like South Philly,” I say. I mention my father, who grew up on Brighton Seventh Street in Brooklyn and how in high school I had a friend whose father was from Brighton Sixth. Since the two men were born a year apart, we each excitedly inquired if they knew one another. Not only was each ignorant of the other, as I recall, but both men found the suggestion that they might have known one another completely absurd.
Khalifa argues: “That’s because your father and your friend’s father were busy taking care of their families. Not just hanging out on the street.” That is, the relevant difference was not geographical but vocational.
Our rhythm is once again broken when the door swings open and Eugene, a Jewish prisoner, arrives with an open dictionary in hand. Eugene navigates the jagged teeth of desks and places the open book in front of my face. He’s pointing to the word bit. He skips down to the third definition: “a small bit of time.” This is to settle a dispute we had on Friday. He was using the word bit to refer to a jail term. I said that I’d thought the term was bid.
“That’s cool,” I say to Eugene. “I was just basing it on a Nas lyric—‘What up kid / I know shit is rough doin’ your bid’—but that might be a New York thing.”57 I catch Teddy’s amused eye. “I don’t know.”
“But guys here say bit,” Eugene says, spitting the “t.”
The second the door closes behind Eugene, Teddy says, “Yeah, some guys say bid.”
Adds Khalifa, “It depends on where you’re from.”
“Thanks for getting my back while Eugene was here,” I say, mildly incredulous.
Teddy snorts through his nose.
“So tell me,” I say, reclaiming our focus, “after Ridge comes in and guys get scattered throughout the system, neighborhood starts to matter less, right?”
“No,” says Khalifa, who spent eleven years in Pittsburgh. “It matters more, the Philly part, anyway.”
Teddy muses: “Maybe it is more a tribal-type thing than a neighborhood-type thing. You see it in here. When Brian comes down here, where does he go? He goes right into Baumgartner’s office. Why? Because he’s more comfortable in there.”
“That’s because they’re both Europeans,” Khalifa says.
“That’s why Brian carries himself like he’s better than us,” Teddy says. “And, you know,” he adds, his voice deepening, “that’s an attitude that don’t play well in here. A guy’ll get victimized for acting that way.”
“Maybe he was victimized,” I say, “and his standoffishness is his way of protecting himself.”
“Yeah, he was!” Teddy says. “But that was a different era back then. Get over it.”
Shit, I think.
“I mean, sheez,” Teddy continues, “even David sits in here with us more than Brian does. And David is down now, but you know that before he was in prison he was just like the rest of them.” Teddy starts in on how exceptional I am for a European, for a Jew, with my hip-hop-lyric-spitting, black-person-fraternizing ways.
“You don’t understand,” I explain. “Where I come from, there were millions of kids just like me, who listened to hip-hop, who wanted to be down, and who probably would have done stupid and dangerous things at an impressionable age if they’d only been real enough to have been given half a chance. Plus,” I shift from confession into lecture, “for somebody like me who grew up identifying with the Exodus narrative as a key episode in his cultural memory, it was impossible not to see the African-American freedom struggle as the critical story of American history, past and present. That’s why among Jews you find such a strong sense of identification with blacks.”
“What?” Teddy objects. “I don’t know what Jewish people you’re talking about.”
In a flash, I see the Jew as Teddy and Khalifa must see him: not as the corny wannabe freedom rider but as the greedy and contemptuous shopkeeper. This is the portrait Teddy now paints, of how the Jews he knew were racists and were all about sucking money out of the ghetto. Khalifa picks up where Teddy leaves off, saying how when the Jews left the ghetto, they made sure to sell their businesses to non-blacks so that black people would remain in poverty.
I concede that while race undoubtedly played an active role in determining which groups had the resources available to buy those businesses, I doubt there was any kind of conscious conspiracy between Jews, Asians, and Latinos to keep the black man down.
“Of course you wouldn’t think so,” Khalifa says.
The figure of the Jew comes up not infrequently, with Teddy and Khalifa especially. Whereas for the African-American men Baraka’s age, the Jew was a neighborhood fixture, for the youngest guys, the bygone Jew—like Shylock for the Elizabethans—is an almost mythological type. For guys like Teddy and Khalifa, in the middle generation, I’m not always certain what exactly a “Jew” is. When, for example, I recently made an empirical objection to Khalifa’s assertion that Jews run the country, Teddy explained to me: “When guys say ‘Jews,’ they mean Caucasians.” Might it be, I wondered, that these men haven’t any notion that WASP blue-bloods even exist?
Despite the murkiness of their ethnic categories, Teddy and Khalifa have, in exchanges like tonight’s, made a series of highly idiosyncratic and yet stunningly apt observations about my background. For example, when they read my affiliation with Princeton as evidence of my wealth and I argued for a demographic distinction between Princeton undergraduates and graduate students, Khalifa was having none of it. He knows I’m rich, he said, because I’m interested in things that rich people are interested in, weird things like religion—which is to say, religion as a matter of scholarly attention.
Not too long ago we had a similarly illuminating exchange about my status as a rich Jew. While, as a point of fact, I did grow up without want on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and consider myself the bearer of all the privilege the world has to offer, I was trying to dislodge Teddy and Khalifa’s tendency to historically overestimate Jewish wealth and power in America. From their perspective, the Jews have always been on top, and their present status is but an expression of that structural constant. My grandfather was an orphan from the Ukraine, I explained, who came to New York by himself at the age of thirteen and eventually opened a furniture store with his brothers. If I was trying to brandish my middle-class cred, Khalifa drew a different conclusion. He responded: “Your grandfather had a furniture store? Oh, so you’re old money”—which, in their world, I suppose I am.
“Man,” Teddy recently declared in frustration when I wasn’t understanding how a guy can break up a pack of cigarettes and sell it for nine times the value. “You must be one rich Jew, because you don’t know shit about money!”
“You know what you need to write about, though?” Teddy says now.
“What?” I ask.
“About how we all need to have them conjugal visits. It’s inhuman to deny us the way they do.” A hug at the beginning of a visit and a hug at the end is all that is allowed.
“Plus, it’s just plain stupid,” Khalifa adds. “It would make administration much easier if we had conjugal visits.”
“As a privilege that could be taken away?”
“Yeah,” he says, “that, but also ’cause there would be much less tension in here, less fussing and fighting if a guy could just go see his lady once in a while.”
“So why don’t they allow it?” I ask. “Just mean-spiritedness?”
“Yeah,” Teddy says. “It’s just hate. Plus, the system wants to turn us all into faggots.”
In Teddy’s view, which seems commonly shared, homosexuality is a result of sexual trauma. These days, it is said, lots of men enter the system ready and willing to play the passive sexual role—a far cry from the old days when men had to be raped into it. But that the system is actively trying to turn Graterford’s prisoners into faggots? This I have not heard before.
My face apparently betrays my skepticism. “Come on, it’s obvious,” Teddy says. “If you get caught kissing your wife in the visiting area, you get ninety days in the hole and no visits for six months. But get caught getting dirty with another dude on the block? Nothing happens. You see? The system is promoting fornication.”
Khalifa says, “They want to stop our procreation.”
And presumably their salvation, too. Still, the conspiracy doesn’t quite make sense. “I don’t get it,” I say. “Do you mean that they need black bodies to fill this place?” That the system would need an ever-expanding crop of black men to fill its prisons, and that the most effective way to get at the sons is to first remove the fathers, would seem to me the paranoia to have were I in their shoes. But Khalifa is saying the opposite.
“Man,” Khalifa says, “do you know how many babies I could have made in the last eleven years?” I get it now.
“You don’t have any children?” I ask.
“Nah, I have four,” he says. “But I could have had so many more, don’t you see?”
Looking at Khalifa’s shiny pate, I do the math. Khalifa is thirty-three and has been in jail for at least thirteen years. Teddy, I know, has seven kids—four boys and three girls—and he fell at twenty-six.
We’ve reached another dead end. For me, the dead end resides in Teddy and Khalifa’s refusal to differentiate between conspiracy and hegemony, between people’s explicit intentions to do evil (as they maintain about the system’s nefarious operators) and the absentminded process by which injustice remakes itself in the interests of some and at the expense of others. In one form or another, this is the argument I ritually have with Vic, Baraka, and Teddy. While we all aver the existence of unjust social structures that prey on certain vulnerable classes, in my view the harmful acts enabled by these structures do not require explicitly malevolent intentions. Wealth is hoarded by the few, and men are placed in inhuman conditions. While there are surely sadists out there, immense harm may also be inflicted with the most virtuous of intentions (to serve God or country, or to protect one’s family), with baser intentions (to earn a paycheck) or without much of any intention at all (because whatever it is, is simply what one does).
To choose a common concern, consider drug-related street crime. As I see it, these eruptions of violence—which often result in the loss of life—commonly take place at the tail end of a host of social and political choices collectively taken and not taken that make violent crimes statistically inevitable. Individuals make terrible choices that destroy worlds, it is true. And because our thinking, talking, and legislating about wrongdoing make a fetish of individual bad actors, relegating those people to places like Graterford comes to seem like a sound strategy for safe streets. With endemic poverty, broken families, underfunded schools, and the circulation of handguns making the corner drug trade what it is, however, the scourge of street crime in cities like Philadelphia requires a legion of malevolently intentioned, irredeemably bad men no more than gross and perpetual income inequality requires a cabal of gleefully racist Shylocks. Malice and avarice certainly play their part. As do fear, desperation, ambition, loyalty, and stupidity. Given the world as we find it, each aggregate outcome foremost requires only enough men unimaginative enough to accept and play the game according to the received rules.58
This is not to reject the importance of personal responsibility. On the contrary. Because it is as much through mindlessness as through calculation that we collectively nurture the civic enterprise that an agitprop poster above my desk (appropriating the language of Catholic worker and cultural icon Dorothy Day) dubs “this filthy rotten system,” it behooves each of us to acknowledge the many roles we play in its maintenance.59 Far from being an omnipotent machine that merely processes those who live under it, without the avid and idle hands of each of us invested with the task of its reproduction, the system is nothing.60 And because the system is little more than our collective agency and inertia, critical dialogue becomes a viable strategy for social repair. By coming together and figuring out what we’re trying to do and what we’re actually getting done, we foster opportunities to generate alternative practices, which, if actualized, might better serve our collective interests.
If such democratic faith is, in Princeton’s Department of Religion, standard orthodoxy, in Graterford’s chapel it comes across as terribly naïve.61 As many here see it, there’s no point discussing any of this as anything more than a pleasant diversion. Malevolent outcomes are never unintended. From the designers on high to the low-level profiteers, the operators knowingly operate the system to do precisely what it does.62
Having had this argument many times, I decide to let it drop, and Teddy and Khalifa seem to have reached the same conclusion. Especially in such close quarters, they are used to holding their tongues. Better to afford me my ignorance than poison the well by insisting on the obvious facts that prison administrators are fiends and the Jews who bled the ghetto knew precisely what they were doing.63
* * *
After the raid, the compromise was that the resident rabbi could keep the upstairs as his study, but that Jewish services would take place in the new annex. When the Rabbi is willing, however, the Jews remain upstairs. And while davening—praying—has been known to happen, more commonly when they gather, the Jews do what the five men upstairs are doing now: drinking coffee from plastic cups and talking loudly, frequently about something derived from the traditions of Judaism.
David is reading aloud from a biography of Maimonides. A chapel janitor with an angular face, a long white beard, and searing eyes, David is the rare regular who wears his rage on his sleeve. David told me the details of his criminal case the first time I met him, about how—as he tells it—his ex-wife’s new husband was molesting his daughter, and when it became clear that neither the police on the Jersey side nor those on the Philly side gave a fuck, he did what he had to.64 He left it to others to supply the critical detail that when he shot up the guy’s car, his wife and daughter were inside it. When, on Passover, the other Jews recite the liturgically inscribed hope that next year they will all be in Jerusalem, David loudly proclaims his aspiration for this year to be his last. Dying isn’t such a big deal, according to David, since as prisoners they’re already dead. “This isn’t life,” he’s said to me, “it’s mere existence.”65 To put it mildly, David’s wallowing does not ingratiate him with his peers.
If David’s mind is a torture chamber, its torments do not inhibit his appetite as a reader. Literature, history, philosophy, politics, Judaica (about the Holocaust and Kabbalah, in particular): David churns through volume after volume, stockpiling knowledge, which he deftly reproduces on command. So while he is quick to shrillness, he is exceedingly shrewd, and when things get heated upstairs, I’m forever surprised to find myself in David’s corner.
If as a Jew David is animated primarily by the tradition’s intellectual resources, Lenny, who sits across the table from him, finds inspiration in its ethics. As a middle-class kid in the late seventies, Lenny became a drug addict. One evening he murdered his girlfriend. At the appropriate time, Lenny told me this story so as to help me make sense of the obligation he feels to give something back. Indeed, if one canvassed the jail for a poster child for rehabilitation, one could do far worse than Lenny Berkowitz. Searches through the Philly papers cough up Lenny’s name every other year or so, always for a different accomplishment. Here’s Lenny running marathons in the yard for charity. Here he is setting records for selling Girl Scout cookies. Here he is graduating summa cum laude from Villanova—a feat that briefly made him a culture-war piñata to be batted at by no less than Rush Limbaugh, for whom Lenny was Exhibit A in how killers are growing fat on your dime. Lenny is one of the busiest people I know: he clerks in the school and is active in the Villanova Program; the Mural Arts Program, through which Graterford residents contribute to public arts in Philadelphia; and in the Inside-Out Program, through which prisoners and college students explore criminal justice alternatives. While Lenny derives no small amount of pleasure from his many activities, they also provide his primary vehicle for tikkun olam—repair of the world—the ethical principle that according to Lenny “is what Judaism is all about.”
Arriving for his weekly Hebrew language session with the Rabbi is Peter. A round-faced, sandy-haired Catholic intellectual, Peter is also exceedingly active both in the chapel and out. Peter fronts the trio that accompanies mass, is a few credits shy of his Villanova degree, and, along with Brian (who tonight is elsewhere), is one of ten opening-round volunteers in Graterford’s hospice pilot program.
As the Rabbi continues with an extended interjection about the social position of both doctors and Jews in medieval Europe and North Africa, David offers Peter and me each a cup of coffee.
* * *
Downstairs, an adolescent citron tree grows beside a second potted plant at the foot of the dais. David grew it from the seeds of last year’s etrog, one of the four species, which along with a palm branch and sprigs of myrtle and willow, are ritually shaken and paraded around by Jews during the fall harvest holiday of Sukkoth. The belle of the desert, the etrog is the object of considerable rabbinic fuss. As a fruit of beautiful taste and scent both, it stands in—I learned in seventh grade—for those Jews possessing both a knowledge of Torah and the practice of good deeds.66
Clustered to the right of the tree, thirty men of color have assembled for Yokefellows, a ministry serving prisoners in Pennsylvania’s county, state, and federal facilities. I’m five rows behind everyone, save for Oscar, who’s in the row behind me.
A brown is reading from a double-sided handout titled “The Will of God: His Plan for You.” The handout, which declares that “every believer should desire to know the will of God in their life,” details seven purported biblical principles, most accompanied by biblical proof texts, for ascertaining His will. The men have already read and affirmed how God will not hide His desires; how He will use several methods to make His will known; how He will provide inner peace concerning His will; and how to know His will you must avoid selfishness, fear, and doubt, and have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
The brown recites the sixth principle: that to know God’s will you must live in obedience to Him. Prompted by the volunteers—a husband-and-wife team of prosperity gospellers—to offer testimony affirming the principle’s truth, the brown talks about the challenges of living with a cellmate who was not God conscious. Frustrated in moments to the brink of violence, through obedience to God he came to realize that what his cellie really needed was love, and that if he could love him in accordance with God’s will, then maybe not today or tomorrow, but someday, that love might one day lead him to Christ.
As I transcribe this testimony, I’m increasingly aware of Oscar’s eyes on my back.
Oscar’s unnerving candor is not limited to the struggles of faith and the humiliations of incarceration. He is also one of the very few men here who voiced reservations about projects like mine where researchers “come in to profit off of our misery.” By the time he told me that, six months into my research, he’d changed his mind about me. The difference with me, he said, was that I participate. Which is why my uncharacteristically ostentatious note taking makes me uneasy now.67 Without provocation, I turn and explain to Oscar what I’m doing this week. He nods. Seeing me without a copy of the handout, he insists on giving me his. These folks, he explains, indicating the visiting couple, are from the North Philly church he grew up at. Although Yokefellows is nondenominational, he explains, their church is Pentecostal. I nod and turn back to the service. After a time, he leans into my ear and asks, “You gonna be here Saturday and Sunday as well?” When I grunt the affirmative, he lays his hand on my shoulder and whispers, “God bless you.”
When the men have finished the final principle, they circle up to pray. I hesitate, uncertain of whether or not to go. Perhaps contrary to Oscar’s impression, while my demeanor in ritual settings is hardly aloof, I’m fairly determined to not try to pass for something I am not. But when Oscar passes me on his way toward the altar, I follow along. The circle is full of familiar faces—Santana, Daffy Ball, Matthew, Young Mike, and Rafael and José. Once again I’m the only white person. I hang my head and close my eyes. With his raspy voice, Daffy Ball prays:
“Thank you, Heavenly Father, for thinking of us. Heavenly Father, thank you for caring for us, for protecting, for comforting us. Heavenly Father, thank you for thinking of, caring and comforting the guys that are in the hole. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for thinking of, and caring and looking out for guys who are in the hospital. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for watching over those of us in the hospice program, patients, staff, and administrators. Heavenly Father, thank you for looking out for guys on death row. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for loving and caring for those guys who did their crime and for those guys who didn’t do their crime. Heavenly Father, thank you for watching over and ensuring the safe passage of our present guests. Heavenly Father, thank you for watching over and protecting the staff here at Gratersford, the COs, and the administers of this here system.”
There are many things to be thankful for, and Daffy does his best not to let a single one pass by unacknowledged. Nor do the assembled men, who respond with calls of “Amen!” “Thank you, Jesus!” and “In the name of Jesus!” at each recognition of the Heavenly Father’s bountifulness.
Toward the conclusion of Daffy’s prayer, having stood with my eyes closed for quite a while, I am gripped by what I’ve long thought of as the evil Shema impulse. As I was taught as a boy, the Shema prayer—“Hear O Israel, the Lord is our Lord, the Lord is One”—is to be recited with one’s eyes covered by a tightly pressed right hand. As I recall, no holy spectacle was alleged from which my eyes required protection, and no divine wrath was promised for peeking. Nonetheless, as happens, custom came to acquire the unspoken suggestion of something more.
In what I sometimes regard as my earliest steps away from the practice of religion in the direction of its study, I was often seized by the impulse to look, a transgression for which I lacked the courage. For, as I somehow even in my yeshiva days intuited, when one does look, one runs a far greater risk than seeing something. Rather, one runs the risk of seeing nothing. One risks seeing not the irruption of God’s presence, but only the dull thud of God’s absence. For if God’s presence is is, and seeing is believing, then the act of looking risks rendering the is isn’t, or at least the maybe not, which slopes off in the same direction. So I never looked. It was only later, as a man, when the not being of God became for me fully manifest, with God reduced not merely to was, but to never was, that I finally surrendered to the temptation to peek—to peek not at God (faith in whom would preclude such sacrilege) but only at my shut-eyed cocongregants, whose clasped lids testified to their sacred fidelity to a Being who for me had become a thundering null set. Nonetheless, even as I’ve traded down from hermeneutics to anthropology, moved with emphatic ambivalence from the practice of religion to the study of other people’s practices, and followed the religious path (as one former day school classmate put it) of “Those who can’t do … teach,” I don’t think I’ve mustered the courage to peek on more than two or three occasions. In the name of empiricist rigor, perhaps, I yield to the urge to do so now. Hyperaware of others’ hands in mine, I lift up a chin and eke open an eye.
Heads are slouched low. Some men are still. Some shake from side to side. Some mouth, “Thank you, Jesus.” Many are crying.
Feeling suddenly scrutinized, I gaze across the circle and find myself caught in the stare of a sunken-cheeked old head whose honest eyes are fixed squarely on mine. I shut my eyes and drop my head, momentarily deafened by my pounding heart.
* * *
When the circle breaks up, I find myself face-to-face with a striking, shaven-headed blue I’m fairly sure I’ve seen before.
“I’m Christopher,” he says, “though everybody calls me Prophet to remind me of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.” His vibe is manic.
“Prophet with a ‘ph’ or an ‘f’?” I ask, angling for small talk.
“‘Ph,’” he confirms. “So you’re Jewish, right?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Well,” he says, “I read something interesting the other day and it said that Jesus was a Jew, and I just wanted to apologize to you because the other day I saw you and I was vilifying you, because I’ve got problems with Jews, but I was thinking that if Jesus was a Jew, then Jews can’t be all bad, so the problem is with me. So, I just wanted to apologize, because there you were, just doing your thing, and there I was, vilifying you.”
I try to be gracious. “We all struggle to see the humanity of others,” I say, “whether that other is a Jew, a prisoner, or whatever he or she is said to be.” I ask him where he’s from.
He’s a technical PV—meaning a parole violator who has merely broken the terms of his parole, rather than having been charged with a new crime. This time, he says, it’s for the last time. He’s got 132 days and a wake-up left, and until then, he’s gonna be in the chapel every day.
I’ll be sure to see him around, then, I say cheerily, and head for the vestibule.
* * *
When the clock reads 8:25, I tell Bird that I’ll see him tomorrow. Despite the slightness of my company, Bird seems crestfallen.
He sighs. “Man, I’m bored.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Usually I’d be looking at the Daily News now ’cause Sayyid gives me his when he’s done with it. But with Sayyid in the hole, I ain’t got jack to read.”