WEDNESDAY

THESIS 2

In America, a man is not a man without his confidence. And a man cannot have his confidence without someplace to put his certitude. As Protestant theology stretched to its pluralist, pop-existentialist extreme, the mandate of American religion is quite simple: Thou shalt believe. Believe in one thing, whatever that thing may be.1 This pluralization of legitimate creeds functions as the cornerstone of American religious freedom and, as a derivative, as an engine of tribalism.

Similar to the Land of Canaan, then, and its menu of religious cults, American religion is henotheistic: there are many Gods but you must choose one. In principle, as long as a guy is what chapel regulars call “God conscious,” his belief in some other God needn’t be a threat to me. Far from being a “conversation-stopper,” then, our mutually reinforcing religious certainties offer up endless fodder for dialogue.2

But good fences make good neighbors, and so a hedge is erected. To avoid fraying nerves, “religion,” it is often said, is a topic to avoid. Because across denominational lines, many practice this restraint, religious conversations become largely an intramural pastime. And so, in the fecund field of religious plenty, enclaves sprout. If, from a crane shot, there are at Graterford many religious paths, from the position a man comes to occupy on the ground there is, more often than not, conventionally only one. This path is a narrow path, and error encroaches from all sides.

As a hotbed of religious diversity and personal transformation, if any environment was to be supportive of religious in-between-ness, one might figure that the chapel would be it. But this presumption would be wrong. Religious seeking here is encouraged only if one proves himself willing to find what he is looking for. Indeed, the conviction that one has conclusively found it conventionally becomes a core facet in one’s presentation of self.

There is reason to distrust the force of chapel certitudes. It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to turn the theological confidence of confessedly convicted wrongdoers into a proclamation of spiritual insecurity. Or, to chip away on another façade: If the Lord demanded that I produce from Graterford ten undogmatic souls to keep Him from reducing the place to smoke and ashes, I have zero doubt about my ability to do so.

*   *   *

It was at St. Dismas on one of my first days at Graterford. Exacerbated by the close confines of Classroom A, I was still quite self-conscious, as much from the discomfort of watching as from being watched. Communion commenced. The men offered me grape juice from dosage-sized plastic cups, which I politely refused. I remained unsure of what to do with my body or my eyes. Following the liturgy, the singing, the eating and drinking, everyone traded hugs. At the crescendo of my discomfort, I received an embrace from the enormous man who had joined the group only for Communion. Beyond the man’s sheer size, there was something grounding in his touch that made my anxiety dissipate. I made a note of him. Gradually, over the coming weeks and months, this large man would crystallize into Al.

*   *   *

Now, almost a year later, Al is my primary source for making sense of Graterford’s Christian practices, and is my sparring partner in some of the most thrilling arguments.

By his own lights, Al is an unyielding Biblicist. Everything that happened after Jesus’ death and resurrection—the Church fathers, the Catholic Church, the Protestant Reformation—that’s man’s history. This historical, manmade stuff—that’s religion. Religion is a wrong turn. What matters is one’s relationship with Jesus Christ. For it is through Jesus, and not via any church, that we come to the truth of His Word. In explaining this, Al pointed me to John 14:26, where Jesus assures His followers that His imminent disappearance will prove no obstacle to their ongoing understanding of His Word. As Jesus said: “But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” While Al frequently cites chapter and verse, he also talks about “my Bible”—the highly subjective yet nonetheless objective Truth that the Holy Ghost renders on his behalf transparent. “I don’t need this book,” Al said to me, pointing to his Bible. “It’s only when I’m talking to a nonbeliever that I need this book. Do you think that when we talk amongst ourselves we use this book? Why would we?”

Keita places Al’s anti-intellectualism in cultural context. In their blindness to history and textual complexity, men like Al turn Jesus into a boorish American: jealous, judgmental, individualistic, and not remotely demanding enough of righteous action beyond faith.3 Action, moreover, when it is called for, is rendered by this literalism somewhat perverse—to reconcile after a row, Al and Teddy wash each other’s feet.

Al is unswayed by such criticism. For Al, the Holy Ghost is the ultimate democrat, speaking directly to the heart of the Christian, Jew, or Muslim, the saved or unsaved, the learned or unschooled. In his populist skepticism, Al grants as much credence to Keita’s ministerial appraisals as he gives to the dismissive judgments of the prison psychiatrists. “According to them, I’m ignorant. A psychiatrist says that I have a third-grade education. That’s what they say. That’s why I don’t go by what they say.”

Truly a gigantic presence, Al is magnanimous, charismatic, and, in moments, residually terrifying. In a way unique among the chapel workers, Al remains a dangerous man. At least that’s how he tells it. “Oh, you wouldn’t like Al,” Al responded to my onetime inquiry into how I might square the man before me with the man Al once was. “Al is an animal. The Al you know and like is the Al that loves Jesus.”

“When I was a child I did childish things,” Al cites Corinthians.4 Among the childish things Al did was inflict tremendous cruelty. Now and again, gruesome details bubble up in the office: snatches of breathtaking violence, sometimes lethal, mostly wanton, coldly reported without rationalization or apology. Still more revealing has been Al’s testimony, a genre that favors the prideful recollection by the saved of the consummate sinner he used to be and the still worse sinner he would have been had not God been looking out for him, especially back in his time of overwhelming ignorance.

If through his relationship with Jesus Christ Al overcomes his natural proclivities, and submits instead to what God wants for him, he still struggles. While his years in the hole are long behind him, he struggles with his temper, as he does with overeating, and with the smut mags he recently threw out when he realized that he was hauling them around like a spare tire. Like Baraka, Al cautions against the dangers of having too much latitude, especially in a place like Graterford. He likened man to “a frog on a lily pad in a pot of water. Turn up the heat. The frog will survive. That’s the danger of being in here. A man can adapt to anything.”

As a first-year student in the Education for Ministry program, Al is working on a spiritual biography, which he is preparing to deliver orally. Over the year I’ve picked up some of the defining moments: how as a kid in Macon, Georgia, Al was a Baptist, but how in prison he converted to Islam. Since it was 1970, that meant the Nation, and so from 1975 to 1983 he was a Warith Deen Muhammad Sunni and attended a mosque in West Philly. Back then he was called by his Arabic name, Mumit—the Angel of Death—and he “took care of problems in the mosque.” He thought he was doing right, that he was “eliminating heresies,” but one day in 1983, after he’d dealt with a couple of guys, he was told that he’d just taken out a couple of rival drug dealers. Having thought that he was doing God’s work, Al was shocked to learn that he was just murdering people for criminal gain. Shortly thereafter, Al was on his way to another job when God stopped him dead in his tracks. He was up at Broad and Allegheny, in North Philadelphia, and suddenly he found that he just couldn’t go on. He called his wife, sobbing. She came down and met him and took him straight to Greater Ebenezer Church, where he joined “the right hand of fellowship,” getting involved at once in a range of church activities, including Bible studies and musical groups.

While I doubt I know personally another man as directly responsible for as much physical suffering as Al, the Al I have come to know can be disarmingly loving. One morning he pulled me into the conference room, where a group of guys were concluding the meeting of a self-appointed committee dedicated to “moving the members of the body of Christ at Graterford in the direction that God wants it to go.” He was offering the concluding prayer: “Lord,” Al said in a way that didn’t feel the least bit overbearing, “You plan for everything in such good ways, and Brother Josh came here to learn, but as you’ve seen, he’s also here to teach.” Another time, after noticing that I was walking funny, Al asked me what was wrong. I’d screwed up my back, I told him. “Does it hurt there?” he asked, touching the spot to the right of my spine just above the waist. That was the spot. “Yeah,” he said, “back when I trained fighters they used to get that, too.” In the sort of presumptiveness from which intimacy is fashioned, he instructed me to lie on the floor, where, holding my left shoulder down, he pushed my right knee across my body until something popped, cracking my back into place.

Al can be hilarious, too. On Christmas Day, a day that is, in Al’s view, a pagan holiday, no more special than any other, Al waddled up to me. The choir was singing “Joy to the World.” He said: “When I was a kid, I thought they was saying, ‘And never let a nigger sing.’” In his flat bass, he sang along with the carol, laughing from his belly.

And never let a nigger sing

And never let a nigger sing

And ne-e-ever let a nigger sing.

At other times, I’ve glimpsed the hazardous edge to Al’s attentiveness. One morning, a week after I’d drunk a couple cups of his coffee and casually promised to bring him in a replacement bag, he greeted me with a firm handshake. “Where’s my mud at?” he said. I didn’t understand. “My coffee,” he explained, still shaking my hand. I told him I would bring it in the next time. With a silent smile, he nodded his affirmation, but refused for an uncomfortable duration to release my hand from his grip. Even as the joke I presumed it to be, I took the incident as not unrevealing of Al’s modus operandi, and it was scary.

Back over the summer, after a teenage mugger “fishhooked” me (the term, as I learned in the office, for dragging somebody down from behind by the inside of his mouth) and I showed up with scrapes, cuts, and the story of what had happened, Al and Baraka both were quite unimpressed. Some punk put his fingers in my mouth and walked away with all ten digits still attached? What the hell was wrong with me? Slipping into character, I asked them if they would train me, just as Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau asks his Chinese houseboy, Cato, to jump out and attack him when he least expects it. After sharing a good laugh, I promptly forgot about the joke. A couple of weeks later, though, as a portentous thunderstorm gathered to the north, blackening the sky, Al called me into the Imam’s office. Pointing toward the window, he asked, “Have you seen what’s-her-face?” Not catching what he said, I followed him into the dimly lit office, only to find myself locked in a smothering chokehold. With Al’s forearm pressed against my larynx, I met Baraka’s eyes with inquisitive shock. Three interminable seconds later, Al released me, laughing as he did. Soon I laughed, too. But into the next day, my mortality remained lodged in my throat like the ghost of a fishbone.

But these were moments of play. Where I’ve truly managed to awaken the devil in Al is in arguments about God. One August night, Al and Teddy were pressing me about the strange attitude articulated by the Rabbi and Brian both that God is not an active presence in shaping their day-to-day lives. I owned up to the fact that this, too, was my position. Speaking frankly of a distant God, the only one afforded by my feeble theology, I testified that as I see it, God doesn’t care who wins wars or who scores touchdowns or what exactly I do with my brief time on earth. I explained that after I learned about the Holocaust at age nine or so, I figured that either God doesn’t pay too much attention to what’s going on down here or that he has some serious explaining to do.

“You’re giving God the case!” Teddy yelled at me. That is, I was blaming God for man’s crimes.

Al was less charitable. His face trembling, he tore into me. “Over here we have a worthless piece of mud, a lifeless piece of dirt, a piece of garbage,” he said, and gestured as if shaping clay with his humongous hands, like in Genesis God made man. “And over here, we have the Creator of all that ever was and is! Now, this piece of mud is gonna talk to the creator like HE got some explaining to do?”

Filled with holy rage, Al slipped into testimony. Here he was, on the lam, bare-assed in the South, being dragged out by a bunch of cops with loaded guns after he’d taken a shot at one of them, and they’re about to kill him. And then this one cop, a guy a hundred pounds smaller than Al, grabs him in a bear hug and drags him away from the other cops who are ready to shoot him dead. God saved him that night. He doesn’t know why God saved him. What he knows is that God did save him as part of some plan that God has for him. “Why do you let me see these things?” Al quoted Scripture.5 He doesn’t claim to know the reason why. But in his heart he knows that there is a reason.

By what was at the very least a curious twist of fate, an hour and five miles down the road later, I walked away from a head-on collision that saw both cars totaled. When Al saw me next, again black and blue but this time only half as glib, I met his questioning eyes with: “Now, about that divine plan for me…”

*   *   *

In time, Al will come to hold me personally responsible for his EFM frustrations. “There is no Holy Spirit in there,” he will say, condemning the program. But that time is still a ways off.

Education for Ministry is unique among the chapel’s Bible studies.6 While most of them consist of spontaneous scriptural selections and exchanges of personal testimony, EFM adds critical and historical readings of Scripture, Church history, and Christian ethics. The mixture can be volatile. So while chapel Bible studies are generally conducive to fellowship, on Wednesday mornings Classroom A is prone to acrimony.

Only last week, Al got into a knock-down, drag-out with Charles, the youthful provocateur for whom yesterday I searched in vain. With misty eyes, Charles had confessed feelings of regret and of loss, and the dawning realization that as a young man facing life in prison, the best days of his life were most certainly behind him. He spoke longingly about the summer of ’99, which he spent with his girlfriend and his baby boy. Nothing would ever be that sweet again. It didn’t seem fair. If not for the fact that he hasn’t gotten to be a father to his children, he wouldn’t mind dying and going to heaven right now.

Rather than greeting Charles’s candid confessions with sympathy, the rest of the group berated him for wallowing in the past and cowering before the challenges of the present—for being, as Al put it, a baby in a man. “I think somebody needs a hug,” Al said bitingly. As a rule, the older lifers exhibit little patience for such things. For them, nostalgia is an indulgence to be refused. Al had told Charles to buck up, to stop being a child.

Having offered of his vulnerability, Charles received nothing in return.

*   *   *

I ask Daffy Ball how he’s feeling. After months of asking guys how they’re doing, only to be asked back how I’m feeling, I seem to have finally assimilated the appropriate idiom.

“You know better than to ask me that,” Daffy says. “I’m blessed as always.” And though it was initially a challenge, in time, I’ve come to believe him without hesitation. Literally and figuratively, Daffy Ball is a piece of work, a caricature of what can happen when a fervent temperament turns to spiritual discipline and an exemplar of how some men manage not merely to grow old here, but to grow old with grace. Daffy stands five foot five and weighs a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, maintaining now, a year shy of sixty, the welterweight’s body he fought with forty years ago. His daily exercise regimen consists largely of jumping jacks, up to 11,500 at a time, with 5,000 of them coming religiously between lunch and count. Daffy eats once a day, a whole step toward moderation from his death row days, when for nine years he would reportedly engage in regular forty-day water fasts and eat only once a week. “Fasting is the hardest thing,” he once told me. “If you can do that, you can do anything.”

Daffy has been a lot of things—a juvenile delinquent, a boxer, a junkie, a Fruit of Islam, a notorious gangster, a multiple killer, and a long-term resident of death row. It was on death row, in 1987, that Daffy became a new man. Back on the street he’d done a lot of things—“things that only me and God knew about”—and once on death row he was overtaken by suicidal thoughts. After three years of that, he whittled his choices down to “death or this,” at which point he accepted responsibility for what he’d done and embraced Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior. As he sees it now, the only reason for not giving one’s pain over to Christ in exchange for salvation is “if you like pain.” As the seeming expression of the Holy Spirit that has taken up abode in his Peanuts-character body, Daffy doesn’t walk, he bounces, bearing buoyant witness with each step to the redemptive power of Jesus Christ. These days, in addition to EFM, Daffy serves as the vice president of the Sunday service Usher Board, and is another of the hospice volunteers.

While unflinchingly optimistic, Daffy can still bare his teeth. Charles is especially adept at getting him to bite. Once, Charles was arguing that Daffy’s rhetorical reliance on his own experience of Christ served him poorly in bringing others to the Lord: “You’re beyond reality!” Charles asserted. “If all you’ve got is faith, then you’ve got nothing.”

“I know how you like to stir it up,” Daffy snickered. “You’re lucky I’m older. It wasn’t so long ago that I would’ve come across this table and broken your jaw.”

The question of freedom is another flashpoint. As far as his life arc goes, Charles flirts retrospectively with a fatalism that renders him little more than idle passenger. He talks about “being stereotyped and then blamed for what we are,” and about the consequent feeling of being trapped in the wrong self. “It’s not my fault that I’m here,” he said, “I was raised to be this.” Daffy couldn’t disagree more. As Daffy tells it, he had eleven siblings. His seven sisters all went to college and his four brothers “all did good” (although one of them is currently a blue). The system didn’t turn Daffy into a criminal: “I’m here ’cause of the choices I made.” Even more important are one’s choices here and now.

For a model of how to survive in this place, men like Daffy, Al, and Oscar point to Paul’s self-description (to the Philippians) of how he learned to find contentment whatever his circumstances.7 Contentment means living life productively regardless of where one happens to find oneself. Contentment entails not the denial of the thorniness of one’s predicament but, rather, the adamant refusal to allow one’s state of mind to be determined by it. Contentment allows one to find peace, and even freedom, in spite of one’s material conditions. Consequently, it is not unusual for men like Daffy to claim they possess a greater freedom than that enjoyed by their counterparts out on the street—the coveters and the addicts as well as the garden-variety sleepwalkers. As Santana, the chapel worker, put it, “People out on the street, they’re not in prison, but mentally they are. A lot of guys in here, they’ve been saved by Jesus Christ, and they’re free.”

There is a fine line, however, between the freedom of Pauline contentment and what the chapel’s Christian lifers call “acceptance.” Acceptance is the grubby, vicious habituation born of the total surrender of one’s will and desire to the cultural logic of incarceration. To be “fully institutionalized” in this way is to be dead even as one lives. Resistance to such behaviorist debasement begins with God-given positive thinking and must be enacted daily through practice. To find the sweet spot of contentment, one must read the Bible and cultivate Christian fellowship. More defensively, one must erect barriers before those whose actions might, if one isn’t careful, drag one down: people like Charles, actions like wallowing.

Perhaps more than anything, the dynamic between the older lifers and Charles is a drama of generational struggle, a snapshot of the frictional, glacial process of acculturation to Graterford Prison. Charles is in his twenties; Daffy and Al are in their fifties. Presumably, they, too, were once like him: tormented by anger, regret, and self-loathing; spiritually unmoored. Now, with the zeal of the convert, which is to say the zeal of the cured, they respond to Charles’s undisciplined emotionalism with tough love, if that. In their seasoned perspective, Charles’s denial of responsibility for his past actions and present reality is a tacit embrace of the dependency the system pushes on him, a bad-faith refusal to accept the autonomy naturally afforded him as a child of God. Not merely unmanly, Charles’s willingness to stage a “pity party” is also destructive—a down payment on his own future suffering, and corrosive to those around him, and as such, an abnegation of the ethical demands of the Christlike walk.

As for Charles, it seems to me that he longs for nothing more than the comfort and contentment exhibited by the saved lifers. However, much like Nietzsche’s man gazing upon the untroubled and unpained cows in the field, he wants what they have, but not in the way that they have it.8 For now, he seems too angry and prideful to sell out as they have, at least not yet. Also, he is too intellectually curious, too skeptical by temperament, too insistent on calling the obdurate reality of his world by its proper name.

Some months back, talk had turned to crime and punishment. Richard Kipling—the aging Episcopalian minister who teaches EFM—and I were trying to own the advantages that had made the two of us significantly less likely than the six black men in the room to descend the chute of incarceration. Richard used the phrase “white privilege,” but Daffy objected. To the intimation that he was somehow not privileged, Daffy gently but uncompromisingly demurred. He is the privileged one, he argued. He was on death row and now he has life. And God has shown him so many things! And he praises God every morning for opening his eyes for yet another beautiful day. He doesn’t worry about things that are beyond his control now that he has come to know the world for the illusion that it is. Men kill one another over gold, tits and ass, but when you come to know those things as the illusions they really are, they become less important. He is the privileged one, he said, privileged because he suffered so much and now lives with knowledge of self and peace in his heart.

Daffy’s speech threw me into sudden awareness of the unthought haughtiness of my secular materialist prejudices. It shamed me to think that my commitment to economic justice bound me somehow into a relationship of condescension toward someone like Daffy for the presumed pity of his existence: a life rendered as little more than social consequence. Charles, however, didn’t miss a beat. After a perfectly timed silence, he responded, “That’s funny. I can’t imagine back in slave days a slave saying, Oh massah! I’s is just so privileged to be a slave!”

If exceptionally pointed, in the chapel Charles’s sentiment is hardly unique. Perhaps a mite too unfailing in its enthusiasm, Daffy’s demeanor places him, for some critics, in the realm of the “religiously drunk,” a designation applied to men whose depth and consistency of religious zeal is credited neither to will nor grace, but rather to the addict’s exploitation of religious practice as a substitute narcotic. Most commonly subjected to the charge of religious drunkenness are those thought to have been broken by years on death row, whose “elevators,” it is said, “don’t go all the way to the top floor.” In the eyes of some of the younger guys, as a class, the lifers are not far behind. “If you’ve lived here so long,” Teddy has said, making no effort to exclude his friends from his judgment, “there’s got to be something wrong in your head.”

In Charles’s dig at Daffy’s faith we find showcased the second reductive impulse for cutting down prisoners’ religion. As opposed to, but oddly complementary to, the nefariously dishonest bad man of religion is this: the abject poor man of religion. As a poor man, the religious prisoner is cast in the role of victim, most foundationally as a person (usually a man) with the bad fortune of being born to the wrong social condition (poverty) and in the wrong skin (usually black or brown). Before he was a prisoner and contorted by overwhelming state oppression, he was already the passive object of social neglect, and enlisted through the paltry options made available to him in the process of his own criminalization. Placed in the total and brutal institution of the prison, the prisoner inevitably gets religion.9 He gets religion because, for the sake of his mind, body, and soul, he desperately needs something, and religion is the only thing left for him to get. If the bad man is forged where prisonerness meets the virtue of sincerity, the poor man is manufactured where prisonerness crosses the problem of autonomy.

If bad men can’t possibly mean their avowed religious truth, as poor men, religious prisoners are presumed to mean it, but only in a pathetic, false-consciousness sort of way. Perhaps, that is to say, they mean it, but they probably oughtn’t. So while the bad-man construct negates prisoners’ religion with contempt, the poor man undoes prisoners’ religion with pity.

For Charles, Daffy can deny the fact of his enslavement all he wants, but that won’t make him a free man. It will only make him a slave who is also a fool.

*   *   *

Only a few years Charles’s senior, Ephraim gives every impression of being farther along the path to spiritual contentment.

Last Wednesday, Ephraim recited his testimony, which, like Al, he’s documenting in the form of a spiritual autobiography. (Unlike Al, Ephraim is writing his down.) As Ephraim told it, he was the product of a rape. His mom tried to abort him, so it was a miracle that he ever got to live at all, and that’s why to this day he has so much sympathy for the unborn. Later, after the evil that was his father’s legacy had vanquished the good he inherited from his mom, he had his neck sliced halfway off when, on the run from the police, he and his brother wrecked their car. Though he was pronounced dead on the scene, by another miracle, he survived. His presence before us today, he said, is a testament to the fact that miracles are real.

Richard Kipling compliments Ephraim on his bright smile. “I always smiles, that’s my thing,” Ephraim says. With a guileless shrug he adds, “I don’t know why.”

“I don’t want to put a nigga up,” Daffy scratches at his junior from between crow’s-feet of his own, “but sometimes a man will use a smile as a defense mechanism.”

“That’s the truth,” Al says, his head decisively cocked. Ephraim’s smile doesn’t quiver. The rest of us are sitting in Classroom A’s plastic chairs, whose backs buckle with the slightest pressure, but Al is in the cushioned desk chair he wheels in from the office. Charles is not yet here, and we proceed without him.

Ephraim reports back on what he read—the story of the golden calf. Awkwardly mixing in some newly acquired details about Near Eastern historical anthropology, Ephraim retells the familiar story of Moses’ ascent to Mount Sinai, Aaron’s fashioning of the golden calf, and Israel’s consequent abandonment of God for the idols at hand.

“You can hear the echoes of the Eden story,” Richard says. “How God can disappear for only a second or two before the people will abandon Him.”

Slowly, quietly, assuredly, Al begins to speak. “Yes,” Al says. “With Aaron—just like with Adam—we see how short memory is. I experienced it myself. Finding myself locked up and making a deal with God with sincerity in my heart. But then when I get out,” he chuckles, “I forget all about my sincereness and now I’m doin’ my own thing. So God took ’em out of Egypt, and He said to write it down for their children’s children. And then they quickly forget. Forget their hardship in Egypt. Forget their redemption. And then they go and make a calf. So you can see, the stage they were at with the Lord, they was young. They was childlike”—he drawls the word out into three syllables: chi-ild-like—“but maybe when they grew in their faith with the Lord they wouldn’t so quickly forget as they did when they was immature in the faith. They wouldn’t cry out and soon forget, and if they did turn their backs, they would take responsibility, not make excuses. That’s why a generation had to die off before they could enter the promise land.” Al finishes to a silence that feels like collective agreement.

Officer Watkins wanders through the open door and stands along the wall.

“The problem is,” Ephraim says, “we tend to look for people to follow. You know, leaders, activists, people like that.”

Al disagrees. “Even back then,” he says with a measured tone and regular meter, “you had strong people and you had weak people. The strong people initiate things and the weak people follow. That’s the same conditions you see in this here jail. In ’95 they took away the leaders. And then they brought in new people. And now”—he gestures across the table at me—“we can’t have no communication between us because he don’t know me and I don’t know him. And now people just wanna lie around in their pain.” He lowers his fist. “So that’s the most beautiful thing about the forty days that Moses and Jesus went through.” He pauses. “The transformation. The looking forward. The not looking back. And that’s how it’s got to be in the forty days of each of our lives right here.”

Watkins exits, nodding.

*   *   *

An hour into it—and with Charles still a no-show—Richard brings the conversation around to the topic of leadership. Richard regards EFM as an opportunity to produce for Graterford’s Christian community a leadership class of self-critical men willing to move, in Baumgartner’s words, “beyond the black and white and into the grays.”

“What can we learn about healthy leadership from this?” Richard asks. We are still discussing Sinai and Aaron’s wayward leadership of the Israelites into idolatry. “What exactly is the difference between Aaron and Moses? What allows the good leaders to do it—to not step over that line?”

Al answers. “Everyone who fails fails because they lose focus on the big picture. They lose focus because they see the hardship ahead and they don’t want to go through it.”

Richard nods. “That’s because they focus on themselves,” he says. “They forget who they are and they forget whose they are.”

Ephraim bobs his chin. “Moses even tried to run,” he says, “because he was wanted for murder, too!”

“Yes, that’s right,” Richard agrees about Moses. “There’s something different about the sheepherder who sees the burning bush and the man we find later, the man who went through the ten plagues, the forty days on Sinai. Something happens in his evolution. He becomes something he previously was not.”

Al objects. “But he had it in him from the beginning. Being raised in Pharaoh’s house, he knew something about responsibility, about follow-through.”

“Right,” Richard says. “You must be true to your roots. You cannot try to be something you’re not.”

A pluralist objection has been burning a hole on my tongue, and I try to spit it out: “But isn’t this all a bit easy?” I ask. “To have been an Israelite during those forty days at Sinai—maybe like when somebody finds himself here—he might not yet know who he is and whose he is. We here in the present, we don’t have the luxury of knowing how the story turns out. And in our own experiences, as was the case for the Israelites, we are always somewhere in the middle of the story. And being in the middle, we don’t necessarily know which path represents loyalty and which path represents betrayal. And”—I say, adding a spoonful of heartfelt flattery to help my objection go down—“I’ve learned so much from all of you on this point, because if I found myself in your place, I doubt I would have the courage to make it through.”

Al responds. “What matters back then and in our own day and time is that a man has to be dissatisfied with his condition in order to change. Like me,” he growls. “Instead of coming back into this place, I’d rather live like a bum. I’d rather live like a rat in a sewer than to come back for this here three meals and a cot. They lost focus, the Israelites. In life you’re gonna go through changes, you’re gonna go through trials and tribulations, and periods when you can’t even see your hand in front of your face. Just like when people leave here if they’re stickup men. That’s what they know, so that’s what they go back to. But if they’re in here and make changes, they’re gonna get tested. They’re gonna have to decide. Is they gonna go to their old strength or their new strength?”

My mouth still smoldering, I try again: “But what if”—in making the golden calf—“Aaron is trying to lead them forward? What if it’s not about betraying a truth that is already known? What if they just don’t know who God is yet, or who they are yet?”

Al’s not having it. “Look,” he says. “Let me give you an example. Let’s say you and I plan to break out of this here jail. Right? You tell me we’re gonna break out of prison, and it’s on. You and me, okay? And we makes it out of the blocks and go to the wall, and then our leader say, ‘Wait here.’ Now, you tellin’ me you gonna go back to your cell and lie down?”

“No,” I object. “That’s not a fair analogy. The golden calf isn’t equivalent to going back to your cell. For the prison-break analogy to fit”—as with Moses and Aaron—“we would have to have two leaders. One goes on up ahead to scout it out, but once he’s gone, the other comes back and says, ‘Psssst … it’s this way.’ Now, you don’t know which is the right way out. What do you do?”

This is by no means a new argument between Al and me. Al’s intransigence in discriminating between God’s truth and the falsehoods of men is to me astounding. Not that I take him in this regard to be too far outside the norm. Skepticism of the sort that is to me second nature, which belongs to a particular Enlightenment strain stretching from Descartes to Kierkegaard, in no way represents the human animal’s default setting.10 More often than not, it would seem, whether in Graterford’s chapel, Princeton, New Jersey, or Jesus’ Judaea, people seem to know what they know about the world without too much inner conflict. As I figure it, any slate of truths worth its salt, whether designating who God is or what justice looks like, belongs to a web of other beliefs and practices that enables an adherent to process new experiences in ways that verify his or her preexisting take on the world. For someone like me, then, who was raised to see texts as open and pliant entities, Al’s putatively surface reading of the Bible can’t exclude alternative interpretations, though I simultaneously understand how someone with different expectations of text, reason, and faith would be in no way vexed by any sort of inherent elasticity in the meaning of the Word.

What amazes me more about men like Al and Teddy is their faith’s ability to endure its own verification standard, where to feel is to know. Nothing, in my experience, is more fickle than feeling. In short order a young man who demands from his feelings the proof of his love will soon find that love, for its fluctuations, desperately wanting. As I’m beginning to accept, the heart is a time-share in which covetousness and apathy have their percentages. And yet, by all appearances, the hearts of men like Daffy and Al are constituted differently. “No. I’m all sold out,” Al once said with a chuckle when I asked if he ever experiences doubt. In response to the same query, Daffy went didactic: “The one who doubts,” he said, paraphrasing the Apostle James, “is like one getting tossed on the waves.”

Baumgartner chalks up doubt as yet another indulgence that these men can ill afford. Keita attributes its absence to the men’s steely resolve to believe, their silent bluster of doubtlessness being but the negative expression of their deep-seated guilt and fear of God’s final judgment. While I can’t peer into psyches, what is certain is that to the extent chapel regulars struggle with doubt at all, it is rarely breathed in public. Moreover, the certitude in their convictions and the accompanying gratitude for the salvation that is theirs doesn’t merely define the present and assure the future. Certitude also expunges from the past whatever uncertainty might once have been. When reminiscing about their wicked pasts, it is a common trope that in one’s heart, one always knew who God was and that what one was doing was wrong. While in the arrogance of youth they denied it, in their hearts—or, in the case of Daffy Ball, who, out on his first caper, was gripped by an acute need to take a shit, his gut—they never had any doubt. God has always been who He says He is.

Teddy and Al think me a sophist when I argue that judgments about the true and the good sometimes entail not only the separation of the true from the false but also the discrimination between competing truths, a determination almost always made with partial information and uncertainty as to outcome.11 My position that truth itself might as yet reside in a process of becoming, and that coming to know it might require as much invention as discovery—this they dismiss as the senseless ramblings of the overeducated. As for the uncertainty I profess toward who or what God may be, here Al and Teddy quickly leap from contestation to pastoral care. Of course the ultimate Truth still evades me, they contend with loving condescension. Certainty of that kind will be delivered to my heart only when I take that final step and accept Jesus Christ. They are serious, surely, and as such, both concerned and generous. Given the nature of our relationships, however, they are also joking. As Teddy likes to say, “Converting a Jew counts for two.”

*   *   *

“Look,” Al says, “if you’re a follower and you follow someone wholeheartedly or halfheartedly, it don’t matter. You got to know what are your reasons for following. Do you believe or are you just trying to get out of a situation? If we’re going to do a robbery, and somebody gets killed, you not going to roll on me, is you?”

“Don’t matter if you do,” Daffy says. “They gonna hit you with a conspiracy count either way.”

“Right,” Al says. “If you gonna get a bullet in his head, you gonna get a bullet in his head.” Given the stakes, that is, there’s no reason to half-step.

What is it, Richard presses the men, that allows people not to veer from the path?

In his raspy, lilting way, Daffy begins to speak. “I was talking about this with Moose, right? So, what’s the definition of exodus? It means ‘coming out.’ And we was talking about the hospice program. And he has diabetes and he said, ‘I almost died from diabetes, and they were giving me insulin.’ But now he was going to try to do it without medication, just with diet and exercise. And you know what? My man hasn’t taken an insulin shot in years. He did it by faith alone, and he was successful. Leading is like that. Leaders are those who can endure. We experience lots of things in our own personal Exodus. I was in the dark, you know? I was on death row. But I had faith that I could make it through.”

If for Daffy the essence of leadership is steeliness, Richard sees it in the willingness to be democratic. “Jesus says, ‘Let this cup pass from me.’ You see?” Richard asks. “He doesn’t want it. He’s not after the power. He says not ‘my will’ but rather, ‘let your will be done.’ In Jesus we see a willingness to trust in a radical way.”

“And a willingness to forsake all,” Al adds, fast-forwarding to Calvary.

“That’s right,” Richard says. “Now, to say, ‘I sacrifice my own wants and desires and submit my life to your will.’ Now, that might sound easy in theory, but to do it in the dark, to do it in this state of incarceration…”

Al picks it up. “I thank God that Christ Jesus saw the bigger picture, and said not ‘my will’ but ‘your will be done.’ That’s why He died on the cross. That’s why He denied hisself. But that’s the thing about following. If you’re gonna follow, you’re gonna have to go all the way. In a robbery, other things might happen in that robbery. And you’re making a choice right now: Is you in or is you out?”

“Not just in a robbery,” Richard says, “but in any adventure.”

Again, I feel compelled to go for it. “I fear that this is all too easy,” I say. “In my experience—and, mind you, I don’t know Jesus Christ—it’s not always a matter of being loyal to the Truth versus betraying it. More often than not, it’s a matter of choosing from multiple truths, competing truths. Like, for example, let’s take someone who finds himself in this jail. And he doesn’t know God. And he could choose Christianity, and he could choose Islam. Now, I never want to be in a position that says that there’s only one righteous loyal path, because, in my experience, the righteous path is always, coincidentally, our path and the unrighteous path is always yours, or his. I mean, what’s faithful depends on your perspective. If I was having this conversation back in the community I grew up in, say, it would be the Jews who stayed true to God’s word and the Christians who followed the golden calf.” The fire on my tongue is out.

“Look,” Al says impassively. “It don’t matter. Just believe something. Sell out to it. Have your conviction. Whatever it is.”

“But what about Paul on the road to Damascus?” I ask. “Can’t there be virtue in changing one’s mind?”

“Look here,” Al says. “What matters is my relationship to God. I don’t get caught up in this or that doctrine. You’ve got to have a made-up mind. And then, once your mind is made up you’ve got to continue to make the choice to be obedient, continue to make the choice to be faithful, continue to make the choice to be trustworthy. It doesn’t seem to be in the human being to deny hisself for another, to deny hisself for a cause. But to me, it ain’t hard to do that if you see the bigger picture.”

Daffy says, “When you go back and look at the lives that a lot of us have lived, it almost looks ironic that we’re saying what we’re saying. But the thing that binds us all together is love. In the hospital, I saw an old Muslim brother I used to know back from my Muslim days, and he was dying. And he says, ‘Rahim, is that you? Daffy from Twenty-third? I hear you’s a Christian now.’ So I says, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ And it’s Tito, and Tito and I used to be Muslims together. And Tito says, ‘You know, back when we were going through that whole nationalistic thing, I never judged a person based on whether he believed this or he believed that. I just trusted that he believed whatever he said he believed in.’ And that’s how Tito stayed free all these years. And so that’s why I say that if you’re a Buddhist, and he’s a Jew, and he’s a Christian”—he points sequentially around the table—“it don’t matter. We have to leave all that up to God for later and just love one another while we’re here.

“I was back on the block the other day,” Daffy says, pivoting to another recent encounter, “and this guy, he’s leaning over and he’s smelling the lock on his cell, and when he looks up and sees me, he says, ‘It smells like steel.’ And you know how I am, right? I was going to exploit this to spread the Word. So I says to him, ‘Isn’t it funny that it’s been here all these years and it never lost its smell?’ You know, things remain the same from the past. Me and Al—we’se old heads, and these young bucks, they think we can’t relate, but if you show ’em that the old spirit is the same one that lives today, they see that all we gotta do to be good leaders is to follow what those in the past did. But, look, I’m a good defensive fighter, tall for a welterweight, longer reach. So if I see a good fighter, I’m not going to make him fight like me. His body type might be different. His style might be different. In training him to fight, I’m going to let him use his strengths.”

“That’s exactly right!” Richard proclaims. “A good leader doesn’t try to make clones. A controlling person is always a destructive person. The difference between a healthy leader and a dangerous leader comes down to an issue of control. A dangerous leader emphasizes what separates us. A healthy leader sees that there is something beyond our difference that bonds us all. And that thing is love.”

Ephraim says, “The only leader we should have is God, because any human or man will let us down.”

Richard agrees. “The story of the Israelites would have turned out different had they not looked to Moses as their intercessor, if they had had a direct relationship with God. Followers need to understand that they, too, have a direct relationship with God, and that a leader’s job is to facilitate that relationship.”

“But one can be a conscientious follower,” Daffy says.

“That’s also true,” Richard acknowledges. “Being a conscientious follower doesn’t mean that you have to give over your own responsibilities. Quite the opposite.”

Al speaks: “Like Jesus said, if you want to be a leader, you must be a servant to all. But those in the community, they have an extra responsibility, too. I see a lot of brothers who profess Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, and I can’t look into their heart, but they don’t live it out in their actions, even when they’re down here in the chapel. They don’t live with the gifts. They act like guests. They don’t act like family.” Al drives his head down into his shoulders and juts his bulldog brow toward Ephraim.

Ephraim responds. “But how can you say they’re not using it if you don’t know what God gave them? Your gift is music, but maybe they’re a teacher. You can’t tell them what the proper expression of their gifts is! That’s like Protestants who say you’ve got to speak in tongues. But I gave my life to God on December 11th, 1991, and I ain’t never spoke in tongues yet!”

“Yes,” Richard says, “some do and some don’t. But Al’s point still stands: being a healthy member of the community entails being an active member of the community.”

Ephraim’s already plaintive voice rises in pitch. “Look, there’re only three times in the service you gets to be active.” He counts them on his fingers. “One, when Daffy tells you to say something to your neighbor; two, when you read the Word. And the rest is everybody telling you to stand up and sit down. That’s it. So really it’s just two times.

“We be talking about being active on a deeper level,” Al says.

“That’s right,” Richard says. “Do you know what worship means? It’s old English for ‘to give worth to.’ The most essential act of worship is not to read the Scripture or be in the choir. It’s to give to God that worth, and it needn’t be shown in any other way. That’s what liturgy means; it’s from the Greek for ‘the work of the people.’”

An unfamiliar African-American CO comes to the door of the classroom and holds up five fingers. Meeting his eyes, Richard nods in acknowledgment.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Al says. “Our community is bigger than what happens down here on Sundays. We got Bible studies and counseling on every block. Guys minister on their blocks, in their jobs, everywhere. Your gifts, once you come into the community, it’s just like walking. I’m not talking about who claps their hands on Sundays. They might not show it physically but the inward part is rejoicing. But who am I to say what one is praising?”

“That’s my point exactly!” cries Ephraim.

“No, no, you’re not getting me,” Al says. “Like with music, African-American guys be more expressive. But some will sit there silently during the service, but afterward they’ll come up to me and tell me how they enjoyed themselves and repeat every word back to me. On the other hand, some of the African-American people, they’ll be on the beat”—he snaps his sausage-like fingers—“but then, later, when I ask them, they can’t repeat a word of what I said.”

“Look,” Ephraim says, “some guys, you might not see them participating in counseling or Bible study on the block, but they know who I follow. Like you know, I’m a coach, but if there’s a football game on Sunday, Ephraim won’t be there.”

“And what do your actions show?” Al asks.

“Love,” Ephraim says. “They show that Ephraim gives everything. I be tutoring guys.” Ephraim works in the school as a literacy tutor. “I be teaching them to read, teaching them to write, and teaching them to count.”

Unmoved by Ephraim’s secular contributions, Al flatly asks, “Look, Jesus is your personal savior, right?”

“Yeah,” Ephraim interrupts, “and Jesus was a teacher like I am. Look, I’m active in the activities I’m in.”

“And what are you doing in the body of Christ?”

“Everyone knows I’m a Christian!” Ephraim whines.

“And how do they know?”

“They know ’cause I’m in church on Sunday.”

Al looks at me. “They know he’s a Christian on Sundays,” he says.

Perhaps coming to realize that he’s been backing the wrong dog in this fight, Richard asks Al: “Al, what point are you trying to make?”

“My point is,” Al says, driving his chin up and then slicing it downward, “what is Ephraim doing in the body of the Christ—in the community—to edify the body?”

“I’m changing hearts!” Ephraim says. “Changing minds. I’m doing it with action!”

Rhetorically, Al asks Richard, “Then maybe he might not be aware of the resources that are needed on the block?”

“I’m secretary of the NAACP!” Ephraim pleads.

As time runs out, Daffy seeks to smooth over Al and Ephraim’s dispute about Christian duty. “Ultimately,” Daffy says, “it’s not really about what we do. We ask who’s worshipping when they’re down here, but look, if we’re touched by the Holy Spirit, then we have the power of discernment. So we know what we are. You don’t have to set yourself apart or anything like that. Because when it comes down to it, it’s not what we do, it’s whhhhhhh, whhhhhhh”—he blows twice through a hollow fist—“it’s what we are. And this, whhhhhhh”—he breathes slowly into his unfurling palm—“this is what we are.”

Spirit is what we are.

*   *   *

“Al is something else,” I say. We’re in the vestibule, waiting on Richard’s escort out.

Richard says that people on the outside refuse to believe the sort of spiritual maturity guys in here have.

Some of this, I propose, is a tribute to him.

“No,” Richard says. “The guys who end up with it already have it when they come in.” Shooting for humility, Richard’s words clank fatalistic.

“It’s too bad that Charles wasn’t here,” I say, giving voice to a feeling I’ve had for the past two hours.

Richard sobers up. “Charles is going through something very, very hard. He’s so angry. But at the same time he’s so open about his anger, about his disappointments, about the horrors of his past. And it makes him incredibly vulnerable.”

I ask Richard if he knows anyone else with Charles’s combination of skepticism and biblical literalism.

Richard shakes his head. That’s why he’s so impressed that Charles sticks with it, Richard says, and why he regrets it so profoundly when Charles is a no-show.

Still hawking my pluralist wares, I identify Charles as one who strikes me as standing between competing goods.

“And surrounded by dangers,” Richard adds, “within and without.”

He’s going to have to figure out his own way, I assert.

We share what feels like a weighty silence.

Together we wax paternalistic about the burdens the prisoners carry. Richard firmly believes, he says, that everyone here was a victim before he became an offender. I think back to a story Daffy once told of how he felt, one Christmas morning, when there were presents under the tree for all of his brothers and sisters but nothing for him. Though told with a smile, the story sounded a rare dissonant note in Daffy’s refusal of victimhood.

“When I hear about their childhoods,” Richard says, “I’m struck by the chaos, how the gang was in many cases their first experience of order.”

“And the terrible irony,” I say, “is that many of the guys have more structure, support, and opportunities in here than they ever would have had on the outside.”

Richard says, “To have the poverty and despair that we have in this country, this unbelievably wealthy country. That’s the real crime.”

“Quite literally a disgrace,” I say.

He shakes his head. “And those who support these punitive policies are ninety-seven percent God-fearing people.”

*   *   *

On his morning rounds Baumgartner saw Sayyid. I ask about his spirits.

“He’s Sayyid,” Baumgartner says, meaning that he gave every appearance of optimism. Baumgartner is sitting at Sayyid’s desk and I’m at Al’s.

“What does he know about his charge?”

Baumgartner raises an eyebrow and flops his jowl. “That he’s ‘under investigation for violations of the rules and regulations of the institution,’ meaning not a hell of a lot.” Baumgartner jokes: “I told Sayyid that Kazi set him up because he wants his job.” While the motive is plausible, that Sayyid’s childhood friend would be the culprit is patently absurd. We slide into a discussion of Kaz.

“The chillest, most even-keeled guy,” I say.

“The most institutionalized,” Baumgartner adds, lodging the piteous condemnation. “Just minds his little store”—when Kazi was busted and taken to the hole last spring, the chaplains learned that he was selling commissary goods out of his cell—“essentially content with the fact that he’s going to spend the rest of his life here. Though of course,” Baumgartner observes, “Kaz likely doesn’t know this about himself. That’s why he was so freaked out when he got jumped. More than anything else, it signaled a rupture in his routine.”

Lazily, our office gossip turns to Teddy, who, Baumgartner says, is forever poking and probing and gaming and scheming, doing by tongue and wit in this place what he used to do on the street with polished steel and foot speed. As is common knowledge in the chapel, Teddy was a stickup kid—someone who robbed drug dealers for their drugs and money. “He just loves the chase,” Baumgartner says, “the fact that he can rob you and then outrun you. For him, religion is just another game to be played just like that.” While Teddy likes to play games at least as much as I do, I would hardly characterize Teddy’s religious disposition this way. Neither, I assume, if pressed, would Baumgartner. Still, for the sake of passing the time, the image of Teddy as some sort of religious sportsman makes for a satisfying caricature.

I report in on EFM. The two of us laud Richard Kipling’s efforts in the trenches to forge an appreciation for theological nuance. Baumgartner laments the shallowness of Graterford’s predominant fundamentalism, its “spiritual immaturity” and its insistence on obedience to a very narrow, conservative and, in his view, un-Christian slate of propositions.

After repeatedly failing to make any dent, I’ve stopped voicing my objection to the rhetoric of “immaturity” favored by Baumgartner, Kipling, and others, in which the reputedly judgmental fundamentalists are regarded as spiritually stunted and we, the open-minded liberals, are cast as the grown-ups. While I share many of Baumgartner’s sympathies, any developmental model that presumes us as being further along than them strikes me as inherently suspect. While Christian conservatives do a version of this, too, the liberal version bothers me more. It gets my hackles up because it’s a bigotry common among my intimates, and because when deployed unselfconsciously it gives the lie to liberal pluralism. Indeed, all else being equal, I don’t presume that liberals—whether theological, social, or political—are necessarily any less doctrinaire than our conservative counterparts. Moreover, as I tell Baumgartner now, my deep suspicion is that our preference for our way of reading texts is at root an aesthetic judgment more than an ethical one: as worshippers of the text, we think the text is due respect for its intricacies, and we reject as insufficiently adulatory the restriction of Scripture to the flat, putatively commonsense readings that fundamentalists afford it.

Baumgartner disagrees. His objection, he says, is different. His problem is theological. In his view, the fundamentalists get Jesus totally wrong. Jesus is about loving everyone, your friend as well as your enemy, not about erecting a barrier between the ones inside who are saved and those outside who are damned.

I relate a bit of Al’s argument with Ephraim. Despite my intuitive sympathies with Ephraim’s position, I look to defend Al’s more restrictive sense of where one’s ethical energies ought to be directed. “There are always going to be in-groups and out-groups,” I say, “and, like in a family, folks do—and ought to—have a greater responsibility to those within their own group than they do to those that lie outside.”12 And for men like Al and Daffy, they do genuinely seem to be motivated by a sense of obligation to others.

Again, Baumgartner is more skeptical than I am. “But what form does that take?” he asks. “For a fundamentalist, there’s only one way—and that’s through Jesus Christ.”

I readily concede Baumgartner’s criticism of conservative Protestantism. Nonetheless, I simultaneously wonder if there isn’t some sort of universal sociological fact about the necessary discriminations of love that Al accepts but a humanist like Baumgartner refuses to concede. Baumgartner might plead universalism, but his universalism can’t help but define itself against its other, in this case the Jesus-betraying proponents of the Pauline doctrine that there is but one way to salvation and that way is through Jesus Christ.13

We get to talking about Baumgartner time at Dropsie, the defunct Jewish seminary where he got his Ph.D.

“Wasn’t it alienating to be a sole Lutheran in a sea of Jews?”

“No,” Baumgartner says impishly, “I enjoyed it.”

He relates an anecdote. They were discussing the passage in Exodus where Moses is fighting the Amalekites. One of the more outspoken and talented exegetes in class was arguing vehemently for a most abstruse and far-fetched midrashic position—Baumgartner can’t remember the specifics, exactly—as to why Moses’ raised arms succeeded in keeping the sun from going down. One by one, other classmates proposed alternative interpretations, and one by one, the virtuoso shot them down, sticking to the guns he’d mounted on what, in Baumgartner’s judgment, was a rather rickety hermeneutic garrison.

Baumgartner finally chimed in: “You know what we say, right?” There was no need to identify who the we was. “We say that Moses was able to orchestrate this miracle because he was standing in the shadow of the true cross.” Baumgartner was greeted by silence, but to me his point is clear and true. From his Christian perspective, the execution of a brilliant rabbinic maneuver appeared as arbitrary and unconvincing as a prefigurative Christian reading would appear to a roomful of Jews. Reading Scripture takes place within a wide range of social practices, and there is no Archimedean point from which to distinguish the true readings from the false ones. While from the outside we may discern the contours of a text designated “Scripture,” if it is the text’s meaning that we are after, then we must nudge closer to a particular community that posits it so. Even and especially when such truths are alleged as self-evident, it is within a given tradition of interpretation and debate that a group of religious actors render a purported true. Without these received and defended rules of engagement, there are no truths to live by, just a bunch of words on a page.14

If every set of social norms operates according to rules whose power stems largely from the fact that they go without saying, the conservative Christianity of men like Al strikes me as especially averse to interrogation.15 It is a mode of religious observance that pledges (or aspires to pledge) absolute fealty, and demands the same of one’s fellows. In its rigidness no less so than its bullishness, Al’s religiosity seems curiously well suited to this environment, where strong-arming is law, and the single-minded may thrive while the swayable flounder. And so the old heads preach it to their juniors—though a skeptic could argue that it is not on behalf of their juniors’ spiritual security, but for their own, that they campaign. Thus the Wednesday-morning drama: wise old heads like Al and Daffy schooling undisciplined young bucks like Charles and Ephraim on how to properly be in Christ. As meanwhile, these as-yet-unbroken youngsters defiantly demonstrate to their long-since sold-out elders that, just maybe, there is more than one way for a Christian to live.

*   *   *

Sitting at his desk, Keita works his thumbs over the dining hall orange in search of a seam. We’re waiting on Baumgartner, who, following lunch, broke ranks for the deputy’s complex in search of information on Sayyid.

Seemingly driven by boredom and opportunity more than desire, Gorski unlocks the filing cabinet on which I’m leaning, and we filch a miniature Nestlé Crunch and York Peppermint Pattie apiece from Teddy’s stash. It’s well past 1:00 p.m. and the office remains empty.

Eventually Baumgartner makes his entrance. Without looking, I can sense his eagerness to report in. He lifts the plastic sheeting off the chair by the door and piles it on top of the filing cabinets. He shuts the door and slowly takes his seat. The door cracks open. He gets up, shuts it again, and sits back down with a pronounced exhale.

Facing away from the door, Gorski theatrically turns his head toward Baumgartner, as if, in the language of Baumgartner’s silent melodrama, to say: Well?

“Well,” Baumgartner says with puffed cheeks, “they laughed at me.” The other chaplains remain silent. “Simpson likes to pretend that he holds all the cards, and that you are an idiot, especially if you are a chaplain.” Hard-nosed in countenance and attitude, Simpson—the security captain—is known for the paranoid pessimism that one would expect of a man of his station. “Simpson says that Sayyid is heavy into contraband trafficking and that we need to find a new clerk. When I spoke to Sayyid this morning, I told him that we’d hold his job for him until that time if and when he gets written up for an infraction. I don’t think Simpson has anything, or else he would have rubbed my nose in it. What I wish is that they would just charge Sayyid or let him go. In the interim, though, responsibilities will have to be redistributed.”

Keita speaks. “Whenever something is going on, the jail automatically assumes that it’s got to be coming from the chapel.”

“Why is that?” I ask.

“Because of the history,” Keita responds.

“Well, it is a porous site,” Baumgartner concedes, “with lots of volunteers still coming and going.” Somewhere in the ballpark of seventy volunteers come and go from the chapel every month. Though that’s only a fraction of the pre-raid count, in the new era, the chapel’s relative permeability is hard to miss.

“But volunteers and staff,” Keita objects, “we all have to go through the metal detector. Sometimes they search us. Sometimes they search our cars. Never do we have anything on us. So what exactly are we bringing in, and how? Please … they know that it’s the COs who are bringing the contraband in.” It is the consensus of prisoner, staff, and administrator alike that the lion’s share of smuggling is done by staff.

“When we talk about contraband,” I inquire, “what exactly are we talking about?”

“It could be anything,” Baumgartner says, “from drugs to cell phones at the upper end down to something as simple as too much food from commissary. In this case, Simpson implied that Sayyid’s got his fingers in oil.”

No one is surprised. While oils and perfumes are banned in the jail, prohibited for their ability to mask other smells, they are permitted in the chapel—an accommodation won long ago by members of the Nation for the purpose of pre-prayer purification. The jugs of scented oil, which the groups pay for themselves, are kept under lock and key in Baumgartner’s closet. Prior to Jum’ah and each of the black nationalist Muslim services, an authorized representative transfers, under Baumgartner’s watchful eye, a small amount from the group’s jug to a sample-sized plastic bottle. The deputized congregant, which in the case of the Sunni Muslims happens to be Sayyid, stands by the door and issues each arrival a splash or two. As the Imam and Keita attest, however, what little surplus remains after he has parsimoniously divvied up squirts among the hundreds of men who’ve come to make prayer, Sayyid painstakingly rubs into the community’s blue carpets so that when they are unrolled the next week, they will retain the vague scent of perfume. Nonetheless, from the chapel or from elsewhere, scented oils—the sorts sold on 125th Street in Harlem or on Fifty-second Street in West Philadelphia—find their way to the blocks, where they are sold at a hefty markup to those seeking to smooth their skin or to smell like something other than imprisoned men on those days when their mother, daughter, or sweetheart is visiting.

“Maybe Sayyid is doing something,” Gorski suggests. “I mean, none of us had any idea that Kazi was running a little store out of his cell until he was busted.”

“Of course, anything’s possible,” Baumgartner says, shaking his head. “But I don’t see how Sayyid would even have the time to run contraband when he spends every free second he has doing either his Villanova work or studying the Qur’an.” Baumgartner doesn’t even mention Mubdi’s Wednesday-night Arabic or the time Sayyid spends trading letters in Arabic with Mohammed, another of Mubdi’s students. But to Simpson, these signs of Sayyid’s diligence can only read differently.

“Simpson likes nothing better than to get in my face,” Baumgartner says, “and show me letters or play me phone conversations. But I am not an idiot.” Baumgartner is especially affronted by Simpson’s condescension today, he says, when “just last week I turned the_____over to him on a platter”—Baumgartner drops the name of a famous prison gang.16 This is the first I’ve heard of anything like this. Baumgartner continues: “So the fact that Simpson treats me like a bleeding-heart idiot who has no clue that actual criminal activities are going on here is a real slap in the face.”

Gorski asks, “Is there some way that Crocket’s pickup”—in a move atypical of the chaplains, Gorski refers to Sayyid by his last name—“might be related to Hamed’s transfer to a new job? It’s no secret that there was no love lost between the two of them.”

Once or twice I’d witnessed Sayyid and Hamed, Vic’s predecessor, carp at one another, but hadn’t made much of it. Had Hamed wanted to bring Sayyid trouble, it would require only an anonymous slip to the authorities alleging that Sayyid was in possession of oil, or drugs, or commissary fare in surplus of fifty dollars’ value—any one of which would be sufficient cause for detention. As for motive, as the Muslim’s oilman and the vice president of the Brotherhood Jaycees, Sayyid’s removal could stand to benefit any of a number of would-be rivals.

From the din behind me I can tell the prisoners are back. I turn and through the window in Keita’s door see Vic, who is staring back in my direction. I catch his eye in mine and turn away, embarrassed.

Baumgartner says, “When the prisoners go back at three-thirty we should search through Sayyid’s desk. If anything is to be found down here, it most certainly should be found by us.” The Imam nods. “Oil…” Baumgartner moans. “But none of the chapel oil is missing! Sure, Mac Swan claimed that somebody stole some of the Moors’ oil, but Simpson knows they orchestrated that job themselves.” (Not coincidentally, Mac Swan, a former death row prisoner and Moorish Science Temple heavy, perennially has a breast pocket full of comically thick pens in which, the chaplains assume, he smuggles oil back to the block.) It is commonly alleged, Baumgartner concedes, that Sayyid is an able lock picker, but again, none of the Muslims’ oil is missing, so that’s a red herring. Baumgartner is thinking aloud now, and floundering to make sense. Not merely as a jolt from routine does Sayyid’s detention upset the chaplains. Albeit one of an unusual sort, he is their coworker, after all, and their concern for his welfare is unforced. Simultaneously, Sayyid’s detention sparks an unwelcome resurgence of the sorts of doubts that in Simpson’s mind ought to plague the chaplains the rest of the time, too—doubts that if kept perpetually in mind would make Sayyid much more of a criminal than a man and render the chaplains’ jobs, both as bosses and pastors, impossible. When forced to think about it, though, the chaplains know they would be fools to place even the most trusted worker above suspicion. We talk on.

“I’ll tell the guys only that Sayyid is being held on suspicion and that that’s it,” Baumgartner says. “They’ll surely learn more than that, but the chaplains should not be the vehicles of that knowledge. What’s crucial,” he concludes, looking at each of us in succession, “is that we keep our own ethics aboveboard and make sure that we ourselves are above reproach. If they decide to crack down back here, it’ll make all of our jobs that much harder.”

Baumgartner’s statement is conclusive, but the five of us seem reluctant to leave these four walls. The conversation turns to miscellanea. Unable to stop myself, I report in on the discrimination grievance that had been filed against Watkins.

“I could see that,” Baumgartner says with a blank stare.

“For proselytizing, perhaps, but for discrimination? I doubt it,” I say, mounting Watkins’s defense as if someone else had brought it up. “I assumed you’d all heard.” Apparently not. Keita is talking to the Imam about how he has to send money to Africa for animals to sacrifice. Gorski and the Imam commiserate about the additional challenges of grieving at a distance. I have no referent here. We linger on.

*   *   *

In the back of the chapel, I write:

1. The administrative beauty of having two codes of conduct—the official code of conduct (the formalist) and the code people live by (the realist) is that at any time the administration can bust anyone for anything …

2. I have marveled in the past how oddly loose it feels here compared to what one would expect for a maximum-security prison. But it is precisely in this gap, in the play between the rules (1) and the rules (2) that terror as usual is manufactured—an aperture to be snapped shut at any moment depending on the needs, will, desire, and whimsy of the controllers.17

3. I never felt so not-a-prisoner as when I left that room. Teddy called me over to sit down and I raced on by. The guys in the office all knew that I was privy to something solely by virtue of being free, and that I wasn’t going to tell them solely because they are not.

Under a cover of clouds, the chapel has dimmed. Baumgartner passes me by. Trying to make sense of what Keita and the Imam were talking about, I ask him who died.

“Keita’s brother,” Baumgartner answers. Suddenly I understand all of Keita’s Africa wistfulness over the past couple of days.

Baumgartner leaves me to my notes.

The Wednesday-afternoon activity block is left deliberately vacant, reserved for memorial services to honor prisoners who died during the previous week. For now, a service happens every third week or so. As Graterford’s population ages, that frequency will increase.18 Some of these events are more solemn than others. For popular prisoners, such as a prominent Catholic lifer who died last spring, the occasion was a festive one. The Sunday choir and the Catholic band played, eulogies were recited, reminiscences shared, jokes cracked, and good cheer shared. The memorials for the anonymous prisoners, which are attended by only a handful of new-side regulars and are over in five minutes, are much more upsetting.

On memorial-service Wednesdays, the chapel air is more tetchy than usual. The workers do their jobs, study, conduct their private business, and play around as usual, but in somewhat muted tones. No doubt their quiet shows respect for the dead. Almost as surely, their disquiet betrays the lifers’ knowledge, difficult on memorial Wednesdays to repress, that someday the DOC processing photo taped to the poster board beside the conference room will be theirs.

And yet, in the chapel, men like David the Jewish janitor, who are demonstrably wrapped up in their own mortality, are the exceptions. Like those of us out on the street who joke and love and worry ourselves with nonsense in spite of the fact that someday soon we will be dust, the lifers don’t seem too preoccupied with the fact that they will die here. Inasmuch as the acceptance of this cold fact is the sine qua non of acceptance, the raised white flag declaring that a man’s holy contentedness has turned cancerous and rotted his soul, the taboo guarding this awareness is also cultivated in practice. Teddy has called it “lifers’ disease,” this enabling dementia that allows a man to teeter on the tightrope for decades, as if he doesn’t know how the story ends.

But since nobody died last week, such concerns are, today, no more manifest or latent than usual.

*   *   *

Finding Al in the vestibule, I ask him what he was talking about when he referred to the “counseling” that takes place on the blocks.

Years back, Al explains, he and some other guys asked Baumgartner about providing resources for guys who answer the altar call at the Sunday service to learn “the ABC’s of the faith” rather than simply coming up again and again, week after week. Saying that there were no more slots available for Bible studies, Baumgartner instructed the community to take care of the need itself. So they formed an auxiliary board to the Sunday service that schedules ABC Bible studies, advanced Bible studies, and counseling. When someone comes up to the altar on a Sunday, he fills out a slip with his block and cell number, and after the service, that slip is given to the representative from that guy’s block. Later that day, the block rep stops by the guy’s cell and together they agree on a time when they can get together to study the ABC’s. In addition, each block has a weekly advanced Bible study, and counseling is scheduled as the need arises.

Religious life on the blocks remains to me largely a mystery. When in February 2005 the Graterford Psych Department counselor who doubles as the institution’s research supervisor took me for the first time to the chapel and told me that I’d been granted access to the entire prison, I was flabbergasted.19 If I was unfettered in theory, however, in practice the blocks revealed themselves to be more or less out of bounds. No one told me so expressly. Rather, as part of the acculturation process, I imbibed the chaplains’ attitude—one shared by staff more generally—that unless one has explicit business on the blocks, one doesn’t go there. For the chaplains, it is a place well beyond their comfort zone, a scary, vulgar realm of sweat and stink, catcalls and pinups. More than that, to visit the blocks is to render prisoners wholly visible, to see men through bars where they sleep and where they shit, surrounded by what little they have. It’s an embarrassing encounter for both parties—for the man made a master as well as for the man made a slave.20 Predisposed to stop short of such discomfiting voyeurism (if it wasn’t too late already), I embraced the undeclared rules of engagement.

Modest pushback came from below. When, early on, I would press men at Graterford on what I should write about, a compelling few insisted that I needed to go to the blocks, that that’s where the real story of the jail takes place, and that I had a unique opportunity to bring it to light. From these exhortations, a mixed picture emerged. Some, like Teddy and Sayyid, complained that whatever religious fellowship takes place down here stops at the chapel door. From Al and many others, however, the alternatively regulated religious landscape of the blocks came off as even more vibrant than the chapel itself. By the spring, I was pressing Baumgartner on whether I could go—to the blues’ Bible study specifically, which was meeting on E Block. Baumgartner was vaguely affirmative but deliberately deferring. When subsequent requests were similarly deflected, I understood that if block visits were to happen, I would have to push, which I found myself reluctant to do. Most of the time, backing off as I did strikes me as having been the wise course of action.

“And what exactly is your beef with Ephraim?” I ask Al, blowing on the embers of this morning’s dispute.

“My beef is that Ephraim doesn’t give anything to the community.”

“What about his tutoring, though? Isn’t that giving?”

“Of course that’s giving, but what’s he doing for the body of Christ?” As if anticipating my objection, Al explains that the Bible makes only one defense of prejudice—he can’t remember exactly where right now—and that’s where it says: “Do good to all men but especially to those in the household of faith.”21 “And Ephraim should know that,” he says, “but he don’t. Look, how long has Ephraim been saved?”

I confess that I don’t remember.

“Since 1991,” Al says, stone-faced. “That’s fifteen years. In fifteen years he should know his ABC’s, but he don’t.”

“But he’s in EFM,” I say. “Surely he knows a thing or two.”

“He should, but he don’t. That’s the problem. The studies down here, they all advanced studies. You gotta already know your ABC’s to participate in them. But Ephraim thinks he above that, and now he’s too prideful to go back and learn them.”

“Is it not possible that he knows a different set of ABC’s?” I ask.

“No.”

“Well, what exactly do you mean by ABC’s?” I ask.

“To know the ABC’s,” Al says, “you gotta know the ABC’s of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

“And Ephraim doesn’t know those things?”

“No.”

I offer no counter. I suspect Al for reading as Ephraim’s “ignorance” what are, in fact, profound differences between the two men over what Jesus Christ’s death on the cross means for how a man is to get to heaven and for how he is to live in the interim. And while I’m not afraid to push back harder, for the moment I find myself driven strangely inward by the force of Al’s certainty. Faced with such a concrete formula—and the ways of feeling, doing, and knowing that follow upon Al’s religious program22—my own hodgepodge of convictions and commitments that circle loosely around a humanist’s sense of kindness and a liberal’s ideal of fairness feels suddenly desiccated, secured to the stem of my being, perhaps, but only so long as the breeze doesn’t pick up.

*   *   *

Baraka is pacing his exercise loops through two adjacent rows of pews to the left of the lectern, where I am standing. His vibe is peppy, “chipper,” as Baraka himself might call it, using the sort of white-person talk that riles Teddy. Baraka is singing opera in a scratchy baritone, no longer powerful but still true.

“What is that?” I ask.

“You don’t know?” he asks coyly.

“It’s familiar,” I say, “but I couldn’t name it.”

“It’s Verdi,” he says. “La Traviata.” If amplified sound in the chapel is often dissonant, Baraka’s undoctored voice resonates warmly. I wonder if this impromptu concert is for my benefit.

As if answering my thoughts, Baraka explains, “I’ve been singing it since sixth grade, when I sang it in choir.” He watches me raise an eyebrow. “I’m showing you a little something just to give you a sense that I’m not such a bad guy. People think that we’re all dark and dangerous villains,” he says, “but a good quarter of us in here could be in anybody’s community and you’d never hear a peep out of us.”

“That’s precisely what worries folks,” I say, with a wink.

Reverend Baumgartner comes two-thirds of the way down the center aisle and catches Baraka at the extremity of his orbit. Baraka falls out, and the two men drift together toward the rear of the chapel. When they’re done, Baraka resumes his circuit, and his song.

“So,” he says like we’ve just been talking about it, “tell me—what exactly is theater?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“No, tell me.”

“I don’t know,” I repeat. I don’t feel up to this.

“Are you telling me,” he says, “that with all your fancy education, you can’t tell me what theater is?”

I comply. “I suppose that we might say that theater is a bourgeois art form, a tradition that takes off in the early modern period but that traces itself back to the Greeks.”

Baraka hums along.

“How’s that?” I ask.

“Go on,” he says.

“That’s not enough for you?”

“Twenty years of education, right?” he goads me. “Go on.”

“I don’t know,” I say, “I guess, in the broadest possible terms, we might say that theater is one of the sites where we late capitalists go to squander our surplus.” Baraka is in the waning part of his revolution, with his back to me, but I needn’t see his face to know that he is unimpressed. “In this context,” I continue, “we might consider it alongside sports, celebrity culture, war, and even incarceration as ways that, as a society, we choose to spend down our excess resources, and in the process entertain ourselves and bring meaning to our lives.”

Baraka gives me a cockeyed look as I continue by rote to channel Georges Bataille’s theory of “the general economy.” According to Bataille, human cultures are a series of exercises in targeted wasting. It is an account expansive enough to accommodate phenomena as wide-ranging as human sacrifice, asceticism, and consumer capitalism. As a critical apparatus, Bataille’s is a hammer, one that bludgeons all variety of phenomena down to the same damn thing. That’s why, in spite of its resonances with religion and mass incarceration both, I’m not too tempted to apply the theory of the general economy to the chapel. As I see it, a domineering theory like Bataille’s renders the empirical encounter more or less redundant. I mean, if every thing is one thing, then why suffer the traffic only to prove it so? Nonetheless, Bataille is scrumptious food for thought—food that I continue to serve up to Baraka.23

I can’t tell what Baraka makes of my lecture. While I know that he has no taste for Freud, finding it absurd how “a European who studies only privileged Europeans could think that his observations apply to everyone,” I don’t know if this disfavor extends to theory as such. For my part, I’m aware that I’m clumsily evading a question to which I have no good answer. Or, rather, I’m perpetrating that classic academic sleight of hand of forcing the untamed phenomenon into a well-worn theoretical framework, a framework perhaps more notable for its self-authorizing stylishness than its responsiveness to the phenomenon at hand. Coming to this conclusion, I say to Baraka: “The sage points at the moon, the fool looks at the fingertip.24 Well, that’s me,” I say, “the fool. I haven’t the first clue as to how to answer your question, but I will happily rehearse for you the words of some of those who have failed before me.”

“Do you ever go to the theater?” Baraka asks, keeping his eyes on the prize.

“Not too often,” I confess. He chides me on how often he’d go to the theater if he were on the outside, and that I should really take advantage of the cultural opportunities available to me.

“Thing is,” I say, “for the time being, my standards for drama are really high. I get far more than my recommended daily quotient in here, you see.”

“Try again,” he says, turning the screw. “So what is theater?”

Worn down by the past few days, I don’t think to turn the question around. I try again, this time ratcheting it down a notch with a short Aristotle’s Poetics primer. I talk about the catharsis, the feeling of emptying experienced by the audience member when witnessing the tragic hero’s undoing. After getting waylaid in a couple of associative cul-de-sacs, I circle back to critique Aristotle for artificially delineating dramatic performance from other modes of human practice. Inasmuch as our lives are always already shaped by the narratives that we have imbibed from the theater and its many modern-day counterparts, I can’t reasonably point to the place where theater ends and life begins.

Baraka emits a Holmesian “Aha!” Whatever it is that pleases him, however, he keeps to himself. Again staid, Baraka asks: “So what goes on in theater?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Come on,” he coaxes.

“Fine,” I say. “People play parts.”

“Right. And how do they do that?”

“In costume,” I say.

“Exactly!” He seems authentically pleased. “That’s your answer,” he says. “Theater is a masquerade.”

After all my heavy lifting, the conclusion strikes me as arbitrary. “But life is a masquerade!” I complain.

“Aha!” Baraka claps his hands. “And that is precisely my point.” Dropping the Socratic pretense, Baraka goes didactic. “Look,” he says, “a man is himself only when he wakes up and when he performs his constitution. But as soon as he steps out, he is no longer himself. That’s where the masquerade starts. And it never stops. Most people are like this because they don’t know themselves, or they know but don’t want to know. And so they try by any means available to hide from themselves.”

“Why do they do that?” I ask.

“Because they don’t want to have to be responsible to themselves,” he says. “To make the decisions they would be obligated to make if they were truly cognizant of who they are.”25

“But what does it mean, ‘who they are’?” I ask. “I can only speak for myself, but inasmuch as I’m a being in time, I’m always changing. And even if I stayed the same, inasmuch as the know thyself directive is necessary at all, it’s because we’re largely oblivious to ourselves.”

This is well-trod terrain for Baraka and me. If my theology makes me an oddball around here, my conception of what it is to be a self isn’t much more intelligible. Informed by psychoanalysis and Continental philosophy, I regard myself as a mushy and amorphous entity, one that takes different shapes across time and in it, depending passively on the mood I find myself in, or, strategically, on what the situation calls for.26 To me, this permeable and dynamic version of the self better captures the uneven, sometimes inscrutable behaviors of those I know intimately, myself included. As well, from a political standpoint, this version of the self provides the conceptual leverage to push back against some of the more violent ways we tend to slot people as essentially and incorrigibly this or that. In the chapel, by contrast, the self is insistently described as fixed and unchanging. Or, to the extent that it does change, as was the case for Daffy or Al, it does so once and inalterably.

Baraka vehemently rejects my characterization of the pliable self. As he sees it, there is an essential unchanging self. This essence, moreover, is eminently knowable if one merely takes the time to look. To the degree that a man fails to know himself, he remains incapable of shouldering a man’s responsibility. As Baraka often counsels me (and, surely, others): “Know yourself and let the world figure you out.” Or, as he repudiated the conceit of “criminal rehabilitation”: “People don’t need to change: they need to stay true to themselves.” A man commits a crime not because the man is bad but because he is ignorant of who he is. Educate the man about himself and he won’t do the things he otherwise would’ve done. Self-uplift through self-knowledge: thirty years later, the values Baraka acquired in the Nation remain foundational to his senses of self and duty.

In the way that, in time, one partially embraces the fantasies of those one holds dear, I’ve come to accept—in spite of my philosophical misgivings—Baraka’s image of himself. As best I can tell, Baraka is a fixed, unchanging individual, not merely because he is older than I am but because of his temperamental disposition toward resolve and constancy.

Splitting the difference between nature and nurture, Baraka attributes a man’s unchanging self to the character forged in one’s early experiences of “being born through a family.” A psychoanalytically apt phrase that seems to nail the relevant shaping force, coming out of Baraka’s mouth it nonetheless sends the amateur analyst in me on the hunt for precipitating traumata. There is no shortage of candidates. There was, of course, the decades spent in prison back when even a moderate bout of inconstancy could have gotten him killed. There was his experience, his first time in jail, of weeks in the pitch-black hole, where, after watching his buddy lose his mind, Baraka decided that rather than try to hold on, he had to “release himself into the darkness.” Before prison was Vietnam, and earlier still, in a childhood painted as not wholly devoid of material privilege, there was the “sex” he had with his babysitter between the ages of five and eleven. Which (if any) of these facts is relevant to the purported fixity of Baraka’s self, I’m uncertain. Baraka, for one, refuses any such examination. “You can’t go there if you want to go home,” Baraka said, referring to the psychologist’s office: come parole or commutation time, a guy doesn’t want to look like a mental health case. But there is another reason for Baraka’s refusal. As with Al, that which to Baraka appears a virtue—in this case, his resoluteness—in the counselor’s office reads like psychopathology. As he has said, “The power not to be affected by stuff—that’s what scares the bejesus out of psychologists.”

“I believe you,” I tell Baraka now, “and I understand that the continuity you see in yourself, and that the self-knowledge you describe, are true to your experience. But you must also believe me—they are not true to mine. And furthermore, my gut impulse is that in this case it is you and not me that is the outlier.”

Baraka objects. “So if everyone is forever changing, then how can we hold anyone responsible for their actions?”

“Because it is both socially expedient and necessary,” I say. “However, just because it is expedient and necessary doesn’t make it philosophically or psychologically apt.” Baraka chews on that for a second or two and doesn’t say anything back.

“So, tell me,” I say, “if you are essentially something, what exactly are you?”

“Frustrated,” Baraka says.

“Why?”

“Because I expect more of people than they are willing to give. I want them to use their potential, but that seems to be simply too much to ask.” He laments how rarely people use common sense. I laugh. “What?” he asks.

I tell him that in the presumed obviousness of their referents, “actualizing potential” and “using common sense” strike me as exceedingly male standards. Now it’s his turn to laugh.

“Do you hear that from your lady?” I ask him.

“No,” he says. “From her I hear much, much worse. What you just said I hear from Brian.”

Sensing an opening, I say, “So might we agree that there might be more than one way to live responsibly?” And then, as if to defend the integrity of my dithering nature, I confess: “Look, I’m not a person for whom being alone with his thoughts is easy. If you are correct and one’s true self is the self that one encounters in isolation, then I must conclude that my essential nature is profound discomfort. That being the case, I would prefer to think instead that the individual is social, existing not in isolation but in relation with others, and that I am authentic not necessarily in the discomforts of solitude but in the joyful self-forgetting of social exchange. It is precisely in doing this”—I point back and forth between the two of us—“where rather than knowing myself, I forget myself. And it is in such moments, I suspect, that I maximize my own becoming.”

“That’s because you are essentially an emotional creature,” Baraka says cuttingly.

“And you are an intellectual?” I half ask, half state. I nod in agreement, even though I know on which side of the scale the finger is pressed. “So how is it we get on so well?” I ask.

Baraka explains that I’m “sticky,” by which he means something like infectious. He is rather oblique on the point, and it is precariously personal enough that I’m not inclined to make him define his terms. What I get from him is that I approach encounters with a willingness to be affected and to affect others. Ordinarily, he says, he stays away from such people, but in my case he doesn’t because the payoff is generally quite good.

Again acknowledging Baraka’s self-description, I press at the sources and function of his alleged immobility. I ask him how much his insistence on fixity is an adaptation to prison.

Baraka nods. Some guys, he says, allow themselves to be affected by their experiences. “Like Al. Al is essentially emotional. And he’s always been that way, even way back when we were on the street, on opposite sides, with me growing up on Fifth Street, and Al growing up on Taylor, over south of Washington. Most guys in here won’t let themselves be affected by others because they’re scared of being close. That’s not true in Al’s case. He’s scared of far-off things. Close things make him feel comforted.”

When he’s not singing his friend’s praises, Baraka likes to insist that Al is the scary one, and that while he might have a soul, Al has no conscience. Al maintains the opposite. Recently I watched Al check Baraka’s pulse, touch Baraka’s forehead, and shake his head in a display of concern before pronouncing, “The head is hot but the heart is cold.”

Not for many years have Baraka and Al shared a cell. By preference and privilege, each lives alone now, as the old heads tend to. Whereas the young guys prefer a cellie around as a buffer against loneliness, the old guys would sooner stomach the gnawing silence than the clamor and rancor of having to share with another grown man what is basically a bathroom. Al wasn’t the easiest man to live with, either. Now the stuff of jokes, he had rules his cellies were forced to observe, principal among them being that if one needed to use the toilet, he’d best do it during waking hours.

Not long ago, where we’re currently standing in the front of the chapel, Baraka told me the story of how he first met Al. As the best storytellers do, when Baraka tells a story about the past, he dissociates just a little bit, as if during the span of his yarn he’s once again there. There was South Philly, 1969, a setting that down here is the misty landscape of legends. Baraka was returning to where he’d fought a guy the day before. He’d forgotten something and had to go back. Being in another gang’s territory, he was watching his step, scrutinizing his surroundings. Approaching the schoolyard at Twenty-fourth and Christian, he discovered a giant of a man fighting an entire basketball game, ten guys, all by himself. Baraka watched as the ogre took the guys down, one after another. When the basketball players were all on the ground, the brute lumbered off the court. More than a little bit curious, Baraka approached him and introduced himself. The brute was Al, who had just gotten out of jail and had returned to avenge the murder of one of his homies. In short order generative fascination gave way to friendship.

Al wasn’t afraid of dying? I asked. Back then, as Baraka understands it, death, for Al, was simply out of the question. In fact, it’s that Al felt invulnerable that made him so dangerous. The moral of Baraka’s story? “It’s precisely because of the individual that Al used to be that makes his religious conversion so extraordinary.”

I ask Baraka, “So how did Al get that way?”—meaning emotional, unafraid of intimacy.

“Don’t know,” he says. “Just always has been. So there’s no reason for him to hide. That’s what’s different about me. I’m always present because I don’t care what other people think. Never have.”

“You don’t care, huh?” I say. “Then it’s pure coincidence that I like you so much?”

Baraka looks me in the eye. He’s happy to be misunderstood, he says. Like when people take him to be not as smart as he is. He’s fine with that. Either they figure it out or they don’t. And if they don’t, then the advantage is his.

“Like Kaiser Söze,” I say, referring to the diminutive criminal mastermind from the film The Usual Suspects, who in the end turns out to be everything he appeared incapable of being.27

“Exactly.”

According to Baraka, his advantage accrues not in how he is perceived but in his own ability to perceive—and therefore move. In a recent riff, Baraka affirmatively spun what the onetime sociologist of Philadelphia black folk W.E.B. Du Bois called “double consciousness.” If for Du Bois the Negro’s experience of being forced to move between two radically uneven worlds meant “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity,” in Baraka’s view, that which engenders alienation also endows cunning.28 In making this claim, Baraka extended his index fingers and pantomimed a dance of electricity between them. Folks like himself, he said, in a barrage of mixed metaphor, can “move between the boxes.” They “can drop in” and participate in a “tea and crumpet session” on one side “but then swing way over here.”

I make one final attempt to tie Baraka down. “Philosophically,” I say, “my one issue is with your claim that all acts are masquerades but one. Why stop there? Why not say that all of them are? Perhaps one isn’t—who knows? Maybe in thinking that we know which one it is, we’re just masquerading again. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Ultimately, as you say, it’s just ‘have at it, fellas.’ Meaning, a guy has got to commit himself to a particular masquerade and go with it.”

The two of us are not going to agree, but our variance feels in no way acrimonious. Baraka realizes that it’s almost 3:30 and that he’d better be off. Walking out, he reasserts his lack of fear in being present and real. Like the other day when he was walking the pews and this guy he doesn’t know comes in and asks him what he’s doing. Without thinking twice, Baraka tells him he likes to walk the pews twenty minutes a day for exercise. Kazi, who’d been sitting silently in the chapel, observed the exchange and was duly impressed. “I wouldn’t have told him nothin’,” Kaz told Baraka. “I would’ve said ‘Nunya.’”

“Nunya?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Baraka says. “Nunya business.”

I laugh. If anything, I know from experience, Baraka welcomes the scrutiny.

*   *   *

The invitation to scrutinize was issued most directly to me back in September at the close of a long, riveting, and upsetting day on which I’d pushed Baraka too far. Earlier in the afternoon, in an office crowded with the regular cast, Al and Teddy among them, Baraka had spoken puzzlingly and extensively about a “subject” of his, a figure he would dub in prose years later “the deliberately self-created nebulous man.” Identifying his “subject” as a guy from the block, Baraka described him as a “true natural actor,” a man wholly unselfconscious but simultaneously socially graceful. As Baraka said, oracularly: “This guy doesn’t come up to the surface gasping for the air of why.” Baraka described his subject as extremely talented—what most chapel guys attribute to God, Baraka attributes to “talent”—and self-evidently so.

What, I asked him, made his subject’s talent manifest?

He said: “Because he hasn’t gotten killed yet.”

Baraka continued to describe his “interrogation” of the subject and the man’s strange propensity to disappear into states of psychosis during which he goes someplace else entirely. Neither during nor after does the subject have any awareness of these events; he knows of them only secondhand via the reports of others. Because of his immense talent, however, even in this hypnotic state, the subject retains complete self-control. Baraka speculated these episodes to be “triggered” by certain words.

I hadn’t the flimsiest idea of what Baraka was up to. Who precisely was this subject? Did the man exist? Was Baraka’s clinical report a burlesque of my research? What was going on here? I was provoked.

Without the care befitting such opaque terrain, I steamrolled Baraka on the sources of his subject’s condition, badgering him on whether, in accounting for these spells, talent alone was a sufficient cause. Laying out what I acknowledged to be a Freudian caricature, I described how in looking for the roots of such a curious condition, a psychologist would likely look to the past. For clarity’s sake, I offered the example of someone who was sexually abused as a child and therefore had difficulty with intimacy later on.29 Mid-example I was thrown into an awareness of where I was. Keita had explained to me the men’s disgust for sex criminals as partially rooted in the fact that many were themselves victims. I knew about Baraka’s premature sexual initiation. To whom else in the room, I wondered too late, might this “caricature” be only too real?

Seizing my momentum, Al began to hem Baraka in. Whether the man’s condition was in his blood or from his experiences, either way, Al insisted, the family must have known about it.

Sticking to his story, Baraka continued to emphasize his subject’s immense talent. He stressed the premeditated character of his subject’s actions, and the subject’s access to the same social repertoire available to so-called normal people. He said other things, too, that made increasingly less sense to me.

Coldly, Al said that he knew who the individual was and why he goes through what he goes through.

Why? I pressed on, somehow already knowing the answer.

The man disappears, Al said, because disappearing is his last defense. When he blacks out, he doesn’t give a damn anymore, and when he comes back he has no idea what took place. Al concluded: And the person that we’re talking about is Baraka.

Never before or after have I experienced the office so tense. Shortly thereafter, Baraka was called into the Imam’s office. While he was gone, Al recounted—much in the terms that Baraka would later describe Al—how he saw it once: Baraka taking a battery of punches, kicks, and bruises without slowing down. “It doesn’t matter, he just moves.” It’s fear that drives him into this other state, Al diagnosed. Not fear for himself but fear for the other guy. “He’s gone because he’s not willing to deal with or accept the reality that’s taking place.”

Feeling largely responsible for Baraka’s unmasking, I sought, upon his return to the office, to help Baraka save face. Baraka wasn’t having it. His speech got cryptic and his laughter turned to cackles. “Four and back again,” he kept repeating as if in a riddle. Was this the precipitating trauma? I wondered. Something that happened at age four?

Baraka issued me a caution. “If you watch one train coming from this way,” he said, “you may get hit on the back of the head by a train headed in the other direction.” This, I realized, had been my trespass: the denial to the man of the compartmentalization Baraka saw as his inalienable right.

Teddy validated my fear that the fuck-up had been all mine. On his way out, Teddy mirthfully rubbed his hands together and announced his intention to “get here bright and early tomorrow … in time for court.” Plainly, it was I that was to be on trial.

I was thoroughly unnerved. Dependent as I am on Baraka to be my decoder, the episode was doubly distressing, both for how it threw our bond into doubt and for how his bizarre behavior seemed to call his sanity into question.

That evening, upon finding Baraka in the chapel, I sought to restore our conventional roles. Redirecting the afternoon’s exchange, I asked him to compare guys’ attitudes toward religious practice to their attitudes toward psychiatry. In his experience, I asked, do people ever frame religion, like they do meds and psychiatry, as a mechanism for control? Slipping easily back into mastery, Baraka reflected on the young guys’ lack of discipline and unconscious anger. “Disinherited” is how he described them. From observing the Muslims and Christians around them, in religion they see “a way out for me—not out of the environment but out of this frame of mind.” But, he said, religion and psychopharmacology are opposites. In religion a man is trying to elevate himself, whereas through medication a man is trying to lose himself.

We wandered into other topics. For me, content was secondary to form, and I was increasingly lulled by the familiarity of our rhythms. Late in our exchange, I expressed regret for having earlier “used some very dangerous words.” To demonstrate that his tutelage was not entirely wasted on me, I was uncharacteristically oblique in referring to my careless talk of sexual abuse.

His authority reaffirmed, Baraka again had the room to temper his pedagogical rigor with a modicum of playfulness. “When you decipher, at the end of the day, your encounters,” he said, “I know that the advantage lay with me, because you’re confused, but I am myself. What you’re getting from me is the real me. Most people can’t give you that, because they don’t know what ‘the real me’ is.”

Through silence, I affirmed Baraka’s judgment. Then, as we split, Baraka offered a final tweak, this one without any patina of menace: “I want you to understand first and foremost that what you see is what I am. Now the question for you becomes: What am I?”

*   *   *

I tell Keita I’m sorry to hear about his brother, that I hadn’t realized that he had died. He thanks me. Was this the early-morning Casanova? I ask. No, he says, that is a younger brother. This brother was four years older, and he taught Keita everything he knows.

Keita’s family, which was polygamous, was also religiously diverse. His father, the patriarch of a clan of 30,000, was a Muslim. According to Keita, Christianity arrived via an ancestor who participated in the Amistad rebellion and accepted Jesus Christ in a Boston jail. Others followed what Keita calls “traditional religion.” Keita disparages the category of “animism” as a lie Europeans tell to make Africans look like stupid children—“We don’t pray to trees or rocks or rivers.”30 After struggling in a Qur’anic school, Keita was sent to a Wesleyan missionary school, which started him on a path toward ordination as a Methodist minister.

I ask Keita about the sacrifices. He says he’s going to send money to provide for the animals that have to be slaughtered on the seventh and fortieth days of mourning. And he can’t go? No, not now. Maybe in a couple of years, after he retires with a pension and disability. A few years after that, Social Security kicks in, too. Between it all, he’ll be pulling down like $3,000 a month. In Africa he could live like a king on that much, he says, and he can snap all of the bats out of the air that he wants.

What about the kidnappings? I ask. A rich man like him would be a real prize. Oh, he says, that’s no problem. He would pay people to guard him. But not when he’s hunting for bats. That’s private time.

Keita declares his intention to leave his children with nothing. He gave them an education, an American life, and that’s more than enough. What else do they need? He came to this country with $80 in his pocket, and he’s lived from paycheck to paycheck ever since. I say that while my own background was cushier, I fear I’m headed in that general direction.

“But you’re a rich Jew!” he says, dumbfounded.

We discuss the Jews who run the world.

“Ed Rendell is a Jew, no?” he asks of Pennsylvania’s governor. Brian pokes his head through Keita’s open door to confirm that, yes, Rendell is indeed a Jew, but a nonpracticing one.

“Oh, and what does that matter?” Keita says. As if proper observation of the Mosaic Law would be a prerequisite for the advantages of membership in what Keita calls the “super race.”

Keita brings us back to Africa, and how nice it’ll be when he’s an old man. Playing the rube, I ask if there are monkeys there. Of course, he says. He grew up with them. They would eat out of the same plate. And you could ask them questions, and they would nod their heads. And when he was a boy they would bite one another.

“And no one would get AIDS?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “Of course not. The United States hadn’t invented it yet!” I can’t tell whether or not he’s kidding. There is a short silence.

“Where do you think the AIDS virus is from?” I ask him. Of all the accounts Keita’s read, the most convincing credits a failed U.S. biological-weapons program in Haiti. There’s a secret UN document about it, he says.

“What about you?” he asks. I say that AIDS being a product of U.S. imperial malfeasance strikes me as about as plausible as its stemming from Africans doing something or other revolting with monkeys. At the very least, I say, each presumed source is a reasonable projection of how each locale is configured in the myths of the other.31 Again, always the fingertip, never the moon, I think to myself, which gives me an idea.

“Perhaps the Jews made it,” I suggest.

Keita shakes his head. “No, not enough money in it.”

*   *   *

I fill the kettle from the Imam’s bathroom sink, snag some coffee crystals and a couple of sugar packets from Al’s desk, make a cup of pale coffee, and write.

Back from dinner, the Imam sits down at Sayyid’s desk. Idle conversation turns to Sayyid.

I can’t help myself. Has he searched the desk? I ask him.

Oh, yes, he remembers. He disappears into his office and reemerges, his keys in hand. He tries one, and then another. With his third key the padlock pops open. He lifts it off, swings open the metal bar that runs down the desk’s right edge, and opens the top drawer. Out come coffee, granola bars, sugar packets, papers. Finding nothing out of the ordinary, he returns them to the drawer. Turning to the side drawer, the Imam repeats the process to reveal books, more books, a folded prayer rug, a couple of packets of ramen noodles. Again—to my eyes—nothing.

At a little shy of 6:00 the men return.

“You know,” Teddy says, reclining back in his chair, “it’s like Ecclesiastes says: ‘It’s better to cry than to laugh.’” His mood seems lighter than it’s been all week.

“How’s that?” I ask. Teddy takes a letter out of his breast pocket, unfolds it, and tosses it onto my notes. It’s from the woman whose name he has tattooed from shoulder to shoulder. Typed in a large font, the letter runs a short two pages. In it, Lily reports on her conversation with the attorneys, who confirmed that the $2,200 they’d paid was for the report, which concluded the firm’s contractual obligation.

I shake my head demonstrably.

“I’m just so mad at the lawyers,” Teddy says.

“It’s messed up,” I say.

“Not just them,” he says. “I’m mad at lawyers. All of them.”

“They’re scoundrels,” I agree, “thieves.”

“They’ll get theirs from God,” Teddy says. He lightens. “But God has a way of testing those he loves. That’s what Ecclesiastes is saying when he says it’s better to cry than to laugh.”

Upon hearing this, Bird, who is passing through the office, says, “Yeah, Ecclesiastes … There you go, giving your opinion again,” and walks out. In my quick read, Bird’s sucker punch is part of some ongoing argument with Teddy about what it is to read the Bible, with Teddy professing disinterested literalism and Bird calling attention to the ways that Teddy is shaping his interpretation. But that could be miles off.

Teddy waves away Bird’s comment, but the interjection was enough to break his chain of thought. Then: “Oh yeah. About yesterday, notice that when what’s-his-face came down, I didn’t say nothing, right?”

I’d been awaiting praise for my complicity in yesterday’s minor conspiracy depriving Qasim of seemingly innocuous information as to Sayyid’s whereabouts, and figure that now is my time. But Teddy is done.

“And,” I say. “What about me?”

He scowls. “Yeah, you added something.”

“No I didn’t!” I plead. “I didn’t add anything. All I said was that all we’ve got is rumors.”

I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve been told about “dry snitching,” the social sin of confirming through silence an allegation made about an absent third party. Admittedly, my contribution last night was irrefutably more substantive than that.

“Yeah, that guy talks…” Teddy says, trailing off. “But you know, when I was back in my cell last night, I was thinking over it, about what we was talking about yesterday, how you was saying that you can’t see everything that’s going on in here, right? So when I was thinking over it, it clicked in, what you’d been saying. On stuff like that, there is a lot going on that you don’t understand.”

“Exactly,” I say. “I’m not saying that you guys are bullshitting me. It’s just that I would be a fool to say that I’m getting everything that goes on.” We give one another a pound. It’s not the recognition I thought I had coming, but more gratifying at that.

Papa, who’s been listening in, adds, “Well, you should know, Josh, because we talked about this. You know we’re much realer with you. You know you see things that most people don’t see”—most free people, he means.

“You know how much I appreciate that,” I say, genuinely touched. “This project wouldn’t have been possible without your openness. And, truly, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if it had been the opposite. I don’t begrudge anyone in here who greets me with suspicion. I mean, who the hell am I? And as I’ve said”—and I have, most earnestly at the office Christmas party—“there is a sense of debt that I take seriously, and I will try to repay it through what I write, and by how I choose to live my life from this point onward.”

“Yeah, about that debt…” Teddy says, puncturing the cloud of sentimentality.

“No,” I say, shaking my head, “all proceeds are going to Watkins.”

“And what does that leave for us?” Teddy asks.

“Alas,” I say with open palms.

“You know, Josh,” Teddy says, “when you’re out of here soon and then the next time any of us hear anything about you, you’re on TV, you know how that’s gonna be?”

It’s not going to be like that, I promise.

*   *   *

Vic moves in, talking again about the Ethics of War. He’s pissed off about the professor’s bullshit pacifism. I ask Vic whether any recent American wars have been justified. Dismissively, Vic concedes only one, and it is yet unfought: “A war against the United States government!”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he says, “but academic arguments are just so … well … academic.”

“Meaning what?” I ask.

“Fucking useless,” he says. “War is war. People should shut up and fight.” And if you’re an academic opposed to war, then you should “pick up your big fucking textbook and go beat the war hawks on the head with it.”

I’m of two minds, I say. On the one hand, I want my side to fight as dirty as the other side. On the other, I’m sympathetic to the idea that by sinking to their level we’ve already lost.

“Ah, fuck ’em all,” Vic says.

“Fuck who?” I ask.

“All of ’em,” he says. “But in this case academics especially.”

What’s really bothering him, Vic goes on to explain, isn’t Villanova, but the Inside-Out Program, which stages dialogues between prisoners and outside college students. Tiring of all the hypocrisy, Vic recently dropped out. “According to the mission statement,” he says, “the point is supposed to be to create sustained personal dialogue between insiders and outsiders so as to change perceptions out there about prisoners, one person at a time. But then Katie”—the program’s director—“says that you’re not allowed to have any outside contact with the students who come in. So what’s the point?” He pauses. “I’ll tell you, it’s all about institutional reproduction, that’s it. Changing society? Screw it. We’ve got a program to protect!”

As it can only be, I concur. Reproducing itself is always the first agenda of any institution.

Apparently, there was recently a young woman in the group, and she and Vic hit it off. They’d both wanted to correspond but were prohibited from doing so.

“It’s just bullshit, plain and simple,” he says and continues on about the fucking hypocrisy. Meanwhile, through the door’s wired-glass window three kufied heads bobble chapel-ward, catching my eye.

*   *   *

Even when the cinder-block annex isn’t freezing cold like tonight, Wednesday evenings—like Tuesday afternoons—only draw a handful of Muslims. On the eastern wall, Mamduh and Nasir huddle together, talking and giggling, while in the shoe area by the door, four coatless men study the Arabic language around a table. The only one not fully bearded and kufied—which is to say, not Salafi—is Mubdi.

Raised in nearby Norristown, Mubdi was brought up on murder charges in the weeks prior to Martin Luther King’s assassination. Having taken his Shahadah (declaration of faith) in the Montgomery County Jail in 1969, Mubdi arrived at Graterford a lifer. Once here, he quickly became prominent in the Nation of Islam. While never formally the community’s minister—or, after the group’s 1975 mass conversion to Sunnism, its imam—Mubdi’s steady manner and mastery of the Arabic language, among other traits, made him a natural leader of the Warith Deen Muhammad community, and according to many its moral compass. In the days of the downstairs masjid, he taught classes on economics and politics, as well as on Islamic practice, and would frequently deliver the Friday khutbah (sermon), just as, at the Imam’s behest, he does so once a season to this day.

At sixty-five, the freckle-faced Mubdi still works on a maintenance crew. Many refuse such work, not wishing to maintain the institutional infrastructure of their imprisonment, but Mubdi doesn’t mind, especially because when they’re working on the roof he’s able to see over the wall. Mubdi’s calling is language. In recent years, he’s taught himself Spanish, working his way through Borges and Márquez just as decades ago he plodded his way through Naguib Mahfouz. To help others along, he still keeps up his weekly Arabic class, participation in which, I suspect, would be higher were it not for his dubious allegiance to Warith Deen Muhammad and his ongoing advocacy for Warith Deen’s outdated religious program of social uplift. Mubdi will soon describe to me the frustrating recent experience of trying to coax a young Salafi guy into taking a vocational class. “I was encouraging a guy to learn a trade, but he went on a rampage, asked me when I was going to shut up and speak on din”—religion. “He only wanted to hear about religion!”

While I’m drawn to Mubdi’s seasoned materialist ethos and awed by his autodidact’s discipline, I’m most enamored of his temperament. In a place where rigid orthodoxies are the norm, Mubdi stands out for his reluctance to declare himself to be on the side of the righteous. Yes, he laments the apolitical vibe currently predominant in the jail, not merely among the Salafi but among the vast majority of young guys on the block who just kill time without a thought of productive expenditure. It was different in the old days. Back then there was unity, and people were willing to risk something for a cause. Now they just want to lift weights, or, more likely, just lie in their cells, watching TV. “But maybe I’m not any different,” he’ll say to me with a shrug. “Me lying in my cell, just reading my books.”

It is this quality—Mubdi’s willingness to entertain the possibility that he might be as full of shit as the next guy, not superlatively sinful, just vaguely ineffectual, and as such thoroughly complicit with the rottenness of the stinking system—that makes him a candidate, in my eyes, for righteousness. For to prevail over its hazards, piety, whether to God or otherwise, is strongly served by a willingness to subject even its most vehement commitments to such self-critical irony.32 Rare under any conditions, Mubdi’s capacity for irony is especially remarkable in this place of do-or-die certitude, where men tend to bind themselves to the masts of their convictions and tenaciously hold on to those revolutionary moments in time when they first became what they continue to resolutely become.

*   *   *

On February 25, 1975, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who for forty years had led the Nation of Islam, died.33

The next day was Saviour’s Day, commemorating God’s incarnation in the body of Master Wallace Fard Muhammad, the Nation’s mysterious founder.34 In front of 25,000 men and women, Elijah’s son Wallace—Fard’s namesake—became the Nation’s Supreme Minister. In the months to follow, Wallace would begin to speak of the advent of a new dispensation. If his father’s revelations had constituted for black men and women a First Resurrection out of the false consciousness of slavery and into self-knowledge as a people, then beginning on that day was the Second Resurrection, in which black men and women would transcend racial sectarianism and embrace true Islam. With his father now passed, so, too, Wallace declared, was his doctrine.35 The men in the Nation of Islam were now Sunni Muslims.

For some members of the Nation at Graterford, conversion to Sunni Islam required a fundamental reorientation of self. For others, the shift was experienced as merely a new set of marching orders. Because the Nation of Islam’s organizational structure was more powerful than whatever theological spirit happened to animate it at any given time, the corporate transition was fairly seamless. Many knew Wallace from his two stints as minister at Temple Twelve—the Nation’s Philadelphia division—and felt loyal to him personally. It was Wallace, for example, who had bestowed upon Baraka his Arabic name.

Also named by Wallace was the dignified Warith Deen elder Abdullah Shah. For Abdullah Shah, the shift from the Nation of Islam to Sunni Islam couldn’t have been smoother or more welcome. By age eighteen, when Abdullah Shah joined the Nation, much of his West Philly family were already Orthodox Muslims. From them Abdullah Shah had learned elements of the Sunnah, which he passed on to others. According to Shah, even before 1975, nobody in the Nation gave him any problems for teaching guys Arabic or instructing them in how to properly make prayer.

“The religious aspects were very narrow,” Abdullah Shah says of the Nation, “but the social aspects were great.” The Nation instilled morality, unity, love, and trust, and taught its members “not to smoke, not to drink, not to fornicate”—much of which later proved to be in concordance with Islam. “We were already doing a lot of the Sunnah and didn’t even realize it,” he said. In some cases, they were even going further. Under the Nation, men at Graterford would fast Friday through Sunday, going seventy-two hours without food or water. “After that,” he said, “Ramadan is a breeze.”

In a half step between black nationalism and Sunni universalism, Wallace Muhammad’s followers took to calling themselves “Bilalians” in honor of Bilal ibn Rabah, an ethnically Ethiopian companion to the Prophet and, by tradition, Islam’s first muezzin (caller to prayer).36 Deeming it no longer appropriate as Muslims to pray in the Christian chapel, Graterford’s Bilalians petitioned the superintendent for an alternative space, and were granted the field house.

On August 7, 1976, Graterford’s Bilalians threw their first banquet. Among the hordes of friends and family, the community was joined by one very special guest—Wallace Muhammad, or, as he in the new era would eventually be known, Warith Deen Muhammad. At the banquet it was announced that the Bilalians had been authorized to commence construction on a new basement masjid.

Before they could build the mosque, they would first have to tame the space. To evade the small river that ran through the basement even in the mildest of rains, they would raise the floor. Walls would then be erected from cinder blocks and a ceiling dropped on top. According to a bundle of archival papers that Baraka gave me, by the time they broke ground on April 12, 1977, they’d gathered from their fellow inmates seed money in excess of $30,000.

Some years later, Baraka, the community’s Minister of Information, in a script for an intended video documentary, wrote the first draft of the epic project’s history. The script details how the men worked morning and night, and how, with the support of the “All-knowing and Most Merciful, Allah,” “the best of planners,” and assisted by the chaplains and their fellow prisoners—“Christian, Jew, Bilalian (Black), Caucasian, Puerto Rican” as well as “the other Brotherhood of Muslims”—they triumphed over Satan, who had sought to sabotage their efforts with heavy rains, burst pipes, and a cadre of reprobate correctional officers.

While Baraka’s narrative voice is not to me wholly unrecognizable, his providential emphasis is surprising, reading more like an affectation than a reflex. Perhaps he was merely aping the new party line. Or maybe the God of Baraka’s youth was a more active presence in men’s lives than He would later become. As Baraka notes to himself in his own marginalia: “Reason for Masjid in the first Place: Glorification for Allah.”

On August 12, 1977, construction was completed. The floor was carpeted in green, and the walls were covered with vibrantly colored murals depicting the holy sites of Islam. Printed alongside them in spare but elegant Arabic calligraphy were some of the foundational passages from the Qur’an. In his video script, Baraka has talking points for a public tour: “Explain wall … (vestibule area) … explain offices … explain flags … explain purpose of the shoe room … explain the name: MWDM.”

For so the former members of the Nation had decided to call their new mosque and, by extension, themselves: Masjid Wallace (later Warith) Deen Muhammad.

Twelve short months after his initial visit, in a ceremony in the newly completed masjid, Wallace Deen Muhammad spoke to the congregation that now bore his name. Wallace thanked Allah for His multitudinous bounty, which in addition to the Scriptures and the prophets also included his father, Elijah Muhammad, who employed symbolism and mysticism to bring them to the threshold of al-Islam. Now, in al-Islam, they had a real identity, an affirmative identity, and they could stand up to the many challenges of being black in America.

“So we thank Allah for blessing us, so much, with all of His Truth, Unity, Understanding, and Love between ourselves. We thank Allah for today the mental burden, the psychological burdens, are not so great on earth that we can’t handle them, and make ourselves productive people in the communities of the great cities of the United States. The burden is not too great anymore, because our identity is real now. We are not looking for false identities. We are Muslims! We are human beings! We are Americans! We are Bilalians!”

In the transcript Baraka gave me, Wallace stressed that all thanks and gratitude were due to Allah. But he also showered immodest praise onto the assembled men, men whose epic actions he placed alongside the great accomplishments of Scripture and history: “We are grateful today, and I’m also grateful that I’ve been blessed to come here and visit Graterford Prison, and seen what Muslims … inmates, have been able to do.… I believe if this had been done three thousand years ago … they would go down in Holy Scripture, and the people that followed them would come up and have a new tradition. They would have to visit this Graterford Prison at least once in a lifetime, or once a year, and see what these great men have done.”

Not everyone was quite so bullish. Chief among the detractors were the members of Masjid Sajdah. Sunni Muslims from their inception, the Sajdah guys remained, back then, a minority group, though, suddenly, it was not black nationalist sectarians, but other Sunnis who outnumbered them. As Yunus, who was, in those days, Masjid Sajdah’s imam, told me: “We were asked to become one group, but I rejected it. We feared that we would simply be absorbed. We didn’t want to be subject to their majority. We thought they should follow us because we had been doing it all longer, but there were more of them.… Their power structure was already laid out. They just put a new cloak on it.”

If not reconfigured quite so tectonically, neither was Masjid Sajdah static. Shortly after the Bilalians were bequeathed space for their basement mosque, Sajdah was granted the space across the hall. Downstairs, the growing ranks of Masjid Sajdah—the vast majority of whom were also relatively new to the faith—continued to hammer out what Islam entailed.37

With Sajdah under Yunus’s leadership, and Warith Deen led by Ameen Jabbar—already infamous for being a ranking member of the Temple Twelve hierarchy, his past as Elijah Muhammad’s bodyguard, and his conviction for the infamous 1971 Dubrow furniture store murder-arson—Islamic practice at Graterford flourished. Hardly incidental to this blossoming was the era’s laissez faire administrative mood in which prisoners were afforded unprecedented freedoms of movement and opportunity. Above and beyond the mere fact of their existences, the downstairs masajid were allowed to remain open from 8:30 in the morning till 8:30 at night. Each group was allowed to conduct its own religious services, and to convene banquets with family and outside guests. During Ramadan, Sajdah was even allowed to prepare its own meals and eat on its own. “The only caveat was that we had to clean the kitchen,” Yunus said, “but the institution loved it because we would clean it from top to bottom.”

Dissatisfaction with existing policy gurgled up only at the margin. In 1983, the Bureau of Corrections settled a long-standing suit filed by Sajdah and stipulated a new set of rights—rights soon enshrined in the new “Religious Activities in the Bureau of Corrections Handbook.” Henceforth men were allowed to wear kufis anywhere in the jail; a shower room on each cellblock was kept open throughout Friday morning to allow washing before Jum’ah; every effort was made to provide an alternative protein source when pork was on the menu; and each Muslim community was henceforth entitled to two Eid feasts annually—one on Eid ul-Fitr, the holiday marking the conclusion of Ramadan, and one on Eid al-Adha, the holiday commemorating Ibrahim’s aborted sacrifice of Ismael—which replaced the “banquets.” As Yunus explained, “We didn’t want to call it what it isn’t.”

The two Muslim communities also generated a slew of classes and programs. “Ameen was a good organizer,” Yunus said of his counterpart across the hall, “and he didn’t think young brothers should have any idle time.” Masjid Warith Deen Muhammad ran a range of secular programs geared to engender the tools necessary for economic and social uplift, among them a GED program that cycled through twenty-five new students every six months, and a Stop-the-Violence program run in partnership with the LIFERS organization and the NAACP. Across the hall, meanwhile, on six evenings out of the week, Masjid Sajdah sponsored programs of its own. These programs were, in character, exclusively religious. Offerings included classes in Arabic language, Muslim history, Qur’an recitation, and Adab (Muslim etiquette). Drawing on its extensive library, Sajdah also facilitated advanced study into the Sunnah and Fiqh (Muslim jurisprudence). Crucial in the development of these curricula was Qasim, who in 1986 was elected Sajdah’s new—and as it would prove, final—imam.

Sajdah would continue to evolve, with local shifts of ideology and practice registering global movements. With the integration of Asian and African immigrants into the landscape of American Islam, a vanguard of black American Sunni Muslims were inspired to track the traditions back to their geographic source. Some went to Saudi Arabia. Taking the particular practices they encountered there to be the authoritative ones, these men embraced the mission of spreading this true Islam to their home communities. These men authored translations of influential Salafi scholars—such as the eighteenth-century Arabian Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and the twentieth-century Albanian, Muhammad Nasiruddin al-Albani—and authored treatises of their own. Originating from a flagship mosque in East Orange, New Jersey, by the early nineties, Salafi mosques were popping up throughout the mid-Atlantic region. One of these, Masjid An-Nabawiyyah, was founded in the northwest Philly neighborhood of Germantown.38 Through the pipeline connecting Germantown and Masjid Sajdah, Salafi literature began to enter the prison. Inspired by these authoritatively rendered missives, Masjid Sajdah drifted to the right. By the time the raid came down, many in Sajdah would identify as Salafi.39

For the two decades before everything came to an end, a range of dignitaries visited Graterford from far and wide—just as Warith Deen Muhammad had predicted—to see what these men had done.40 Among the visitors were Afghani mujahideen who’d been brought to Philly for treatment at the Crozer Burn Center. When, over the course of the visit, the Graterford Muslims learned that in order to keep up the fight what these cold war heroes needed more than anything was sneakers, they gladly surrendered theirs. The mujahideen left with hundreds of pairs of Reeboks and Nikes, and members of Warith Deen and Sajdah gladly returned to their cells in only their socks.

*   *   *

When Mubdi has finished correcting his students’ translations, the four men open their textbooks. The book is the third installment (of four) on Arabic grammar authored by Dr. Jochanan Kapliwatsky, formerly of Berlin, published in Jerusalem in 1945, and made affordably available by Halalco, a Muslim superstore in Virginia. By lesson twelve of the third volume, which has taken the current group two years’ worth of Wednesdays to reach, each lesson consists of a five-paragraph vignette on some feature of life in the Arabian Peninsula. This week’s selection is about women.41

At Mubdi’s urging, Mohammed leads us through the first long paragraph. At thirty-five, the preternaturally gracious Mohammed is, excluding myself, the youngest man at the table by a decade. Mohammed’s reading is slow and self-conscious—a far cry from the confidence that Sayyid ordinarily brings to the task. Mubdi prods an older student to help, but he proves to be of little assistance. The subject of the first sentence is proving particularly elusive.

“Al-akil?” Mohammed tries.

“No, not al-akil,” Mubdi sings.

“Adad?” Mohammed tries again.

“No, not adad,” Mubdi coos back at him.

Mubdi urges Mohammed on. “You know,” he says, “you don’t have to read every word, translate every word. You need to go with the flow of it.”

Drawing on my never expert, now rusted, Arabic, I give the translation a shot, but am also in error. Mubdi points out a typographical error in the first sentence and explains that if we swap out a kasra for a dumma—one diacritical mark for another—we should be able to figure it out. With that in mind, I provide the correct translation, much to Mubdi’s affirmation.

By fits and starts, we navigate our way through the passage, which speaks to the formality, chastity, and modesty with which courtship and eventually marriage are regulated in the Arabian Peninsula.

When we read about how men and women are married off young, everyone sees the inherent wisdom. Saves you at both ends, they concur. Keeps you from getting in trouble with sex when you’re young, and locks you into lifelong partnership when you still have the energy for such a taxing undertaking. We read on, learning about how aside from a little bit of Qur’an reading, the women of the landed Bedouin receive little to no education, are prized principally for their housework, and, how aside from occasional visits to relatives or to the sick, are rendered, behind thick veils and household walls, almost entirely invisible.

My Arabic is not strong enough to gather a solid sense of how precisely Kapliwatsky feels about these women’s lot; whether he is unselfconsciously celebrating the authentic folkways of a proud people, or whether he is subtly railing against the backwardness of this alien way of life. Nonetheless, acting as the interpretive machine I have been engineered to be, I try to get at the question by commenting (with rather paltry evidence) on Kapliwatsky’s apparent antiurban bias. My cry of orientalism, however, goes nowhere. Evidencing zero interest in Kapliwatsky’s agenda, Mubdi’s students receive his text as an unclouded window into the utopia where the Sunnah finds its organic, authentic expression. As romantic primitivists themselves, these men find in the Arabia presented a sensible, pastoral world, a world of ultimate significance and local coherence—in short, a world diametrically opposite to that of their own experience. Despite my modest provocations, in Kapliwatsky’s portrait they find nothing but beauty, a world narrowly circumscribed, yet within which is nestled a people so very, very free.42

Mohammed exhales deeply. “So is this how it is among the Bedouin today?” he asks, his eyes wide in wonder and deference. “Is it still just like it was in the days of the Prophet?”

When we are done, Mohammed, forever humble, laments his dawdling progress. As he’ll explain to me on our way out, to date he’s learned his Arabic solely by listening to and memorizing tapes of Qur’anic recitation, and while he did pick up a bit of colloquial speech from an Egyptian guy on his block, and a bit of grammar from a Villanova class, this is the first time he’s doing grammar for real.

Mubdi tells Mohammed, just as he counsels all his students, that the first time he reads anything, he’s got to write it out. “You’ve got to go with the flow,” Mubdi says. “The first time you write it out, does it make sense to you? If not, then you have to go with the flow. Don’t get caught up in each individual word. Try to feel what it’s getting at altogether.” Mubdi also encourages his students to read Arabic visually. If they can get in the habit of assembling the phrases into pictures, he promises, then the seemingly distant world conjured by the text will eventually come into focus.

*   *   *

In the gathering snowfall of the parking lot, I decide that rather than brave the highway I will crash at a local motel. After driving around for a while, calling a number scored from the Internet, getting no answer, and driving around some more, I finally pull up to the place. With no streetlamps to offset them, my headlights are all glare as I turn off into a gravelly cul-de-sac. The motel is dingy and dark. I turn the engine off, but nothing more. A place like this, I know from the movies, and from experience, can offer me only one of two things: death by psycho or a long, sleepless night in anticipation of same. I turn the key. The engine growls and I head for home.

Only a few miles down the road, the silence of the falling snow is unstilled by grumbles of thunder.