THURSDAY

THESIS 3

As such things go, places like Graterford do not foster an affinity for nuance. The dictates and rhythms of incarceration enable men to come to know their religious truths with a remarkable fixity of conviction. This economy of certainty is driven by the chaos endemic to the cramped and hostile quarters of the cellblock and to the encaged mind. Cloistered charisma also plays its part. Many sellers (themselves former buyers) push religion not as an ameliorative to the problem of chaos but as the solution, and, as such, one demanding utter fealty. Far from setting off alarm bells, however, this epistemic closure is a reward unto itself. From available evidence, after all, the convict has not to date been judicious in directing his will and desire. The code of the streets, consumer culture, secularism—these have all proven to be false gods, their yields too meager and their sacrifices too exacting. Moreover, one’s bad choices were symptomatic of the problem of choice itself. From the vantage point of fallen men, autonomy has been none but a license for error. Better to surrender all to God, whose exhaustive prescriptions will give shape to the chaos.

This is classic stuff. Fathers of the discipline of religious studies, both Emile Durkheim and Mircea Eliade extol religion for precisely this capacity: how it takes primordial amorphousness—the tohu v’vohu of Genesis 1:2—and delineates darkness and light, water and earth, taxonomies of nature and culture.1 It is unsurprising that in the definitively modern institution of the prison the scholar of religion should find accentuated the romantic solution to the ostensible challenges of modernity. So goes the generative fantasy of the anthropology of religion: unlike us moderns who, socially and metaphysically dislocated, know not what they are for: Who am I? What is this place? What am I for? The primitive man, for whom the world discloses itself seamlessly, suffers from no such insecurity. Which is why the modern man’s anguish begs for old-time religion as its answer.

African-Americans’ uniquely excruciating experience of modernity foments for many Graterford prisoners an additional but no less foundational query: Who are we? What we might call “black religions” are all attempts at answering this question.2

In the chapel, the response to the chaos is often as vehement as the prompt: materialism, debauchery, and lawlessness become asceticism, puritanism, and originalism. And on this ramrod spine, the self, the group, and the cosmos are strung in concentric succession.

And yet, while the controlling will-to-order midwifes an army of narrowly focused hedgehogs, the chapel simultaneously breeds a subculture of men characterized by stunning breadth and catholic curiosity, men with the time and discipline to follow rabbit after rabbit down the hole of intellectual and spiritual inquiry.3 The incarcerated lifer and the tenured professor aside, not too many people in our day and age are built to take advantage of this uncommon latitude.

*   *   *

One of Father Gorski’s former altar boys from the street—a real snot-nosed punk if you take the Father’s word for it—is apparently now a professor at the University of Virginia. Gorski is beside himself at the revelation, beside himself enough to call me into Baumgartner’s office to help him decipher an e-mail he just got. Sitting before Baumgartner’s computer, Gorski wants to know what exactly can be gleaned about the kid’s status from his sign-off. A “visiting professor” could mean a number of things, I say, but in all likelihood, if he’s just finished up his Ph.D., then on the spectrum of privilege and security, he’s likely closer to alienated labor than tenured fat cat. I explain to Gorski the buyer’s market that is the academic marketplace, and how recently minted Ph.D.s must supplicate themselves for whatever employment they can scare up.

Gorski appears relieved and, for whatever ugly reason, I feel the same.

*   *   *

A flurry of major chords glorifying Jehovah emanates from Classroom B, while in the customary corner of the chapel, fifteen men gather for the Nation of Islam. Halfway down the center aisle, Jihad, a chiseled-bodied and stone-faced Fruit of Islam, faces sideways at attention.

This morning’s meager turnout is no aberration. Contrary to the impression given by the deftness of the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan at remaining in the public eye, these days the Nation accounts for only a tiny fraction of African-American Muslims, both inside and outside the prison system. While on far-flung Philadelphia street corners one may still buy from a black-suited and bow-tied man a copy of the Final Call newspaper or, in season, bean pies, the once-dead and only modestly resurrected Nation of Islam is thirty years past its time.

Despite its diminished size and influence, the Nation still draws its special scrutiny. At a chaplaincy conference in central Pennsylvania, I heard the DOC’s diffident chaplaincy director describe his unease when paying a supervisory visit to Nation of Islam services at Graterford. Of course, in striking the militant poses of their predecessors, the latter-day remnants are hardly, in this performance, a passive prop. The originators cut their style for precisely such an intimidating effect.

*   *   *

For the old heads, inquiries into the beginnings of Islam at Graterford take them back to a place closer to home. They speak of Holmesburg, a stone spider of a prison that sits nestled along the train tracks in the city of Philadelphia’s northeastern corner. Holmesburg was—and remained, until its closure in 1996—the city’s largest and most fabled jail, housing criminal defendants through the disposition of their court proceedings.4 In the early 1970s the ranks of this class exploded as a generation of young men, the majority of them black, got caught in a vise of crime and punishment, pressed between the tantalizing coercion of the emergent street-gang culture and the policing procedures of a city administration struggling to dam the bleeding of white wealth into the adjoining suburbs.5 Overseeing this operation was former police chief and law-and-order crusader Mayor Frank Rizzo, whose cops were not above employing the means of terror for the preservation of peace.6 Guys at Graterford tell of getting picked up on a pretext, being driven around, and, when they failed to give the cops the information they were after, being dropped off in another gang’s territory. Innocent, guilty, and in-between, they all ended up in Holmesburg’s bottleneck. By 1973, a facility built to hold 700 men now housed what was deemed to be an unconstitutionally crowded 1,200.7

In stories, Holmesburg comes across as harrowingly TV-ish. Early on in our relationship, Baraka spoke of his shock upon first entering the place, the dearth of light and the glut of sound, the rattling and screaming, the discomfort of eyes on his body. He had already been cautioned to say nothing to anyone, especially not his real name. Then and now, you don’t know who’s a rat, or worse; and if somebody’s gone out of his way to engage you, chances are he has other than your best interests in mind. In recalling his early days at Holmesburg, Baraka’s delivery is short on words and long on cackles. And Baraka was no babe either—only twenty, perhaps, but with a couple of years of enterprising on the street and a year’s tour in Vietnam already behind him. “I woke up every morning surprised to be alive,” Baraka said, his cat eyes wide.

Sooner rather than later Baraka found his way to cellblock D, the prison’s maximum-security tier and home to the vast majority of its Fruit of Islam. In their close-order drills and karate instruction, the FOI displayed to themselves and to others that, as one forlorn CO would put it, “They are calling the shots up there.”8 Already a member of Temple Twelve from the street, Baraka found comradeship on cellblock D, comradeship that made the experience not merely survivable, but—as one can still hear in the wistfulness in his voice—conducive to the intensities and pleasures that one finds in such chaos-encircled enclaves. At Holmesburg, a guy in the Nation was relatively safe, so long as he didn’t step out of line.

By the early seventies, the NOI’s Temple Twelve had become mired in what is euphemistically referred to as “corruption.” According to sources then and now, the Temple Twelve authority structure had become inextricable from a criminal syndicate called the Black Mafia.9 At Temple Twelve, the Nation’s hallmark discipline was redeployed by some from uplift to grift, and petit-bourgeois aspirations traded down for protection rackets, numbers running, and, eventually, the emerging dope trade. These markets were faster and more lucrative than hair salons and grocery stores, and were lumpenproletariat to the core regardless of what the suits and bow ties might have signified. Of all the Nation’s strongholds, Temple Twelve—the “Top of the Clock,” as it was sometimes known—was the most infamous. As one observer writing a hundred miles up the New Jersey Turnpike noted, Temple Twelve was “one temple where the rehabilitation of Muslim converts seems to have failed miserably. Philadelphia gang members, long considered the most vicious gang-bangers in the country, have put an X behind their names and have hidden behind the shield of the Nation while pursuing their former trades.”10

If racketeering was Temple Twelve’s daily bread, its High Mass was Holy War. For in 1973, its most notorious hour, members of Temple Twelve murdered seven Orthodox Hanafi Muslims, five of them children, at the Washington, D.C., home of NOI dissident Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, which had been purchased on his behalf by NBA superstar and Hanafi adherent Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “I teach Islam is for everyone, not just for blacks,” Khaalis explained.11 A year before the massacre, in a polemic posted to fifty-seven NOI temples around the country, Khaalis denounced Elijah Muhammad as a “false prophet,” a “lying deceiver,” who by placing the Nation’s founder Fard Muhammad on par with God, was guilty of the cardinal sin of shirk (idolatry). While seven men from Temple Twelve were arrested for the murders, no connection was successfully made to the temple hierarchy. Nor was the hand of leadership soiled when a suspect turned government witness was found hanging in his cell on Holmesburg’s D Block.

When asked tentatively about Temple Twelve’s darker side, Baraka sighed, “Nobody understood us.”12

*   *   *

Graterford’s institutional memory doesn’t stretch back far enough to recall the beginnings of Islam in Philadelphia. Some remember the original NOI crew as having hailed from South Philly. This would have been back in the forties, sometime before 1954, when in founding Temple Twelve, a fiery minister named Malcolm X formally institutionalized in the City of Brotherly Love “the natural religion for the black man.”13

And so for many black Philadelphia men did Malcolm’s version of Islam resonate. By ingeniously rereading ancient texts, and by drafting reams of new Scriptures when the old ones failed to adequately address their present-day concerns, Elijah Muhammad and his followers made of Islam all they knew it and wished it to be. Painting the world as black and white as their collective experience, the Nation’s Islam, as the quintessential black religion, would proclaim to their oppressors the truth about American racism, and would abrogate their own heretofore internalized white mores with a vociferous NO!14

Whereas the white man’s religion had been a tool used to enslave them in body and in mind, Islam was to bring about their liberation. Slave names would be exchanged for X’s, and the company store for small-business ownership. If, in his deluded consciousness, the Negro’s greatest aspiration was to live high on the hog, then, as Muslims, they would forgo swine. If Christians read the biblical curse of Ham to justify slavery, they would find in the story of Jacob’s engineering of Laban’s livestock the seedling of a tale of how an evil scientist invented the white devil.15 And if the Baptist churches of their youths foretold the coming Armageddon, then the Nation of Islam would, too, albeit one painted starkly in black and white.16

The Nation’s relationship to the traditions of Islam consisted principally of appropriation, but elsewhere at the fringes of black culture, a more substantive bond was being forged. In 1920, a representative of the Ahmadiyya sect, a nineteenth-century Indian messianic movement, had debarked in Philadelphia. Continuing on to the Midwest, this South Asian missionary seeded the first traditionalist African-American Muslim communities. Having left little mark the first time, by the 1940s, black cosmopolitans started bringing the Ahmadiyya version of Islam back around. It was in this way—via Ahmadiyya jazzmen like Yusef Lateef and Art Blakey—that what was to be called “Orthodox” Islam first came to the city of Philadelphia.17

Calling themselves Moslems, the Ahmadiyya vanguard donned beards, kufis, and jalabiyas. People called them beatniks.

“Yeah,” a former Nation old head said with a constricted throat and an invisible joint pinched between his fingertips, “Ahmadiyya—that was some street din” (religion). “They could drop din on you but you could peep them because they were like you.” If the Ahmadi’s West Philly mosque was, in the early fifties, Philadelphia’s only outpost of Muslim Orthodoxy, by the end of the decade to follow Orthodox mosques—both Ahmadiyya and not—were popping up across the city’s north and west.18

Some time prior to 1970, a group of these Moslems began meeting at Holmesburg. Calling themselves Saffat (“the rangers”), after a Qur’anic surah (chapter) of the same name, they solicited volunteers from a North Philly masjid to come instruct them in the tenets and practices of the faith. Holmesburg’s entrenched FOI did not look favorably upon this Orthodox emergence. Violence was traded, more frequently in the currency of fists than that of knives. Without the numbers and influence of their counterparts, the Orthodox nonetheless gave as well as they got. Notably, it was a couple of Orthodox Moslems who scored the most decisive blow when on May 30, 1973, they stabbed to death Holmesburg’s warden and deputy warden at a meeting they requested to protest the administration’s shortening of their Friday prayers. The North Philly imam who instructed Saffat acknowledged the two men’s attendance in his previous week’s class but said they had given no indication of their intentions. Meanwhile, two leaders at a West Philly Muslim center sent a joint telegram to Mayor Rizzo in which they declared unequivocally: “The Quran (Koran) condemns all such as they who use religion as a covering for their misdeeds.”19

Going on a half century later, recollections of Sunni Islam’s birth pangs in Philadelphia are decidedly mixed. As former Nation member Mubdi diagnoses it, the problem was that “the street culture was all mixed up with the religious culture.” Yunus, the West Philadelphian former imam of Masjid Sajdah, has a slightly different take. It wasn’t so much the street culture but the utopian aspirations that brought forth carnage in the guise of Islam. “A lot of this had roots in the black liberation struggle,” Yunus explained. “Everybody was trying to find their way. Christianity wasn’t helping because Christianity says that we ought to be in the position that we are. We were all looking for something socially acceptable to license us to go forward. A lot of us were revolutionaries. We had no religion or anything.” Of the era’s swirling mix of politics, spirituality, and style, Gabril, who, like Yunus, took his Shahadah as a member of Saffat in 1971, said, “The world was alive back then.”20

At Graterford, meanwhile, a new day was dawning. As a part of the Great Society upsurge, scholars and policy makers had begun to address racism and poverty as roots of criminality and to promote rehabilitation as an institutional goal. Changes occurred at every level.21 Under Robert Johnson, the state’s first black prison superintendent, rigid procedures were relaxed. Twenty-three-hour-a-day lockdown was all but abolished and prisoners were granted unprecedented freedom of movement and association. Having been freed of their stripes a decade earlier, prisoners were now allowed civilian clothing and afforded other improvements to conditions and to quality of life. Lower-risk inmates were allowed to work and sleep outside the walls and to take furloughs home. Programs promoting education and citizenship were instituted to supplement the men’s vocational obligations on the factory floors and out on the farm. As part of an effort to reintegrate prisoners back into the community, volunteers were brought in to teach, train, and otherwise engage the prisoners socially and intellectually, making Graterford a cradle for artistic experimentation, cultural production, and religious diversity.22

Not by state largesse alone did this vibrant milieu come into being. More often than not, rights were seized rather than bequeathed, through tactics ranging from organizing to litigating to rioting.23 For religious rights in particular, the Black Muslims were pivotal.24 At Graterford, four members of the Nation spent over four hundred days in the hole following an altercation in the yard. While there, they took to throwing the meals that featured pork or (suspecting the guards of malevolence) that they surmised did. When they returned to the general population, they filed the lawsuit that would culminate in 1969 with the district court decision in Knuckles v. Prasse. Prior to Knuckles, Muslim prisoners at Graterford were barred from congregating and were not allowed to correspond with or bring in outside ministers. Elijah Muhammad’s books and Muhammad Speaks, the Nation’s weekly, were contraband, as was any version of the Qur’an that contained Arabic. In their mail, all allusions to Islam were blacked out. The court order in Knuckles rejected such blanket proscriptions. And while the somewhat wary court awarded the Knuckles plaintiffs only a fraction of what they had asked for, it did require Pennsylvania prison officials across the state to establish Muslim worship services that were “substantially similar” to those convened for Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. At Graterford, that meant time slots in the recently constructed chapel.

First Amendment protection was the round hole through which the Nation successfully drove a square peg. Matter-of-fact as always, Mubdi put it as follows: “We, the Nation of Islam, we was all about the practical. I did not get into the Nation because of religion.… The theological stuff was wacky, but the social stuff was real.” When Mubdi first came to Graterford, the NOI consisted of purely “first-class individuals,” men who were clean, disciplined, and focused on uplifting the race. “In ’70 we had a pure concept, a righteousness, a halo, but after ’71 it became gangsterish” and “a fad.” As the Nation’s integrity waned, its numbers grew. “I always opposed the corruption, and stood out for that reason. They thought I was ‘spooky,’” he says, evoking the Nation’s association of otherworldly piety with the fictitious “spook” God that slavery had lied into existence.25

In recalling these boom years, credit falls on one Clarence Fowler, or as he would come to be called at Graterford, Shamsud-din Ali.26 Following a conviction for homicide in 1973, the charismatic Shamsud-din, who on the street had been a Temple Twelve captain, immediately became the leader of Graterford’s NOI. For their regular Tuesday and Thursday chapel assemblies, where Shamsud-din delivered political sermons and the FOI ran drills, the Nation would draw between 200 and 300 men. At its peak, former adherents and detractors alike estimate, more than half of the jail’s 1,500 residents were affiliated.

For those yearning for something with more of a spiritual aspect, Orthodox Islam was also becoming an option. Within a year of Knuckles, an early adopter at Graterford sent word to the Ahmadi mosque in West Philly, asking the imam if he would be willing to come out. The imam was indeed willing, and after overcoming considerable pushback from Graterford’s administration—“Islam is not a religion,” he remembers being told—the Ahmadi imam became a chapel regular. Under the imam’s tutelage, men at Graterford studied the Qur’an and the Sunnah, the pillars of the faith, and learned of the Mujaddid (the Renewer) and Mahdi (the Promised Messiah) Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Peace Be Upon Him, who a century before had come to earth. Within a couple of years, the Orthodox had doubled in size to thirty men.

In 1972, hoping to purify their Muslim practices of the Ahmadi elements they’d come to regard as heretical (the affirmation, most determinatively, of a prophet subsequent to the Prophet Muhammad), a handful of Orthodox men broke off and formed their own group. To signal their allegiance to the true Islam, these men called themselves Masjid Sajdah—the Mosque of Prostration.

Yunus arrived from Holmesburg a few months later. “Before it became apparent to the authorities that we were sincere … we would make salat”—prayer—“right outside the chapel door, or on the blocks,” the onetime imam recalled. With the support of Father Galleo—the fondly remembered Croatian priest who was Baumgartner’s predecessor—they were eventually allotted a space in the basement. Because they weren’t allowed to meet without an outside volunteer, and the distance to Graterford made one hard to get, Sajdah “took matters into their own hands. By hook or by crook,” as Yunus explained. “We’d come at eleven and slip downstairs. Then the chapel would be shut and we would sit in the dark. When Galleo would come back down at twelve-thirty, we would already be done with Jum’ah. When we could get a volunteer, we would just come down at one. But we spent a number of Fridays locked down there in the dark.”

As guys filtered up from Holmesburg in twos and threes, Sajdah’s ranks grew to thirty-five. With numbers came power, and before long the institution was making unprecedented accommodations—first for Jum’ah, and then for Ramadan. Describing the beginnings of practices that continue to this day, Yunus said, “We were responsible for suhoor, the predawn Ramadan meal. We asked them if we could buy Iraqi dates. Bought 500 pounds of them and issued each Muslim a four-pound bag. The institution let a couple of guys on each block go knock on cells, wake folks up. This was back when the Nation was still in the Nation—they weren’t fasting yet. The deputy superintendent asked if we wanted anything else. That’s how we got the suhoor bag. They put a little fruit in there, cereal. Also, we insisted that we eat together for iftar”—the nightly break of the fast. “So they allowed us to make a little dinner bag and all the fasters went and picked it up.”

How, I asked Yunus, in the era of the Nation’s predominance, were the Sajdah guys able to recognize Sunni Islam as the authentic one? “We knew it through the literature,” which came up from the Islamic Center in D.C. and down from a New York City bookstore. “We had men that relished reading, researching.” In response to the same question, Yunus’s successor, Qasim, drew heavily on tropes from within the tradition. “I always knew it in my heart,” he said. “I naturally believed in God” and “always had a penchant for Qur’an and hadith.” Qasim spoke of fitra, the God-given state of purity into which man is born and thanks to which he is able to move toward the truth; and of tawfiq, the guidance God provides in helping one along. As he also explained, while his innate nature was pulling him toward true Islam, his fellow man was repelling him in the same direction. “The NOI were drug pushers, gangsters,” he said. With so few members, Orthodox Islam attracted only “hard-core quality believers.” Or, as Gabril put it: “When I came to the jail, I didn’t want to be in a gang so I had no interest in joining the Nation.”

And how did the two groups get along? “Everybody pretty much stayed to themselves.” According to Yunus, men in Sajdah would refer to the Nation as “muck mucks.” In return, Qasim says, the Nation would call the men in Sajdah “camel-riders and spirit-worshippers.” Though no one told me about it, on at least one occasion blood was shed.27

Is it true that the NOI ran the jail? I asked Yunus. “They had the numbers,” he laughed. “And if you have the bigger crowd you get to make the most noise.” As of 1975, the Nation at Graterford had 700 adherents and Sajdah only 150. But that ratio would eventually flip.

With Elijah Muhammad’s death and the advent of the Second Resurrection, all at once the Nation of Islam ceased to exist. It was not until several years later that Louis Farrakhan would break away from Wallace Muhammad’s Sunni followers and fashion a new organization under the old name.28

With the traffic of bodies across the system, by the mid-eighties the revived Nation of Islam returned to Graterford. If the Warith Deen minority are these days a residual force, the Nation of Islam is a marginal player, a group, as Reverend Baumgartner puts it, “with many allies but few adherents.” In addition to the Nation’s services, an overlapping cast of characters also participates in the weekly meetings of Muhammad’s Temple, an NOI splinter sect that rejects Farrakhan’s authority, and which won recognition at Graterford (and at Graterford alone) via a 1994 federal court decision.29 During its Ramadan break fasts—for the NOI, Ramadan takes place in December—the Nation pulls upwards of sixty men, among them a surprising number of cornrowed late adolescents. Because cornrows—a rare style at Graterford—are said to be a Pittsburgh thing, I’ve come to suspect that perhaps more than anything, today’s Nation of Islam provides a chapel toehold for out-of-towners and other nonaligned sorts.

*   *   *

Hulking over the lectern, Mason, the Nation’s six-foot-four prisoner minister, speaks downhill to the assembled men. Behind him on the altar, the Nation’s white-on-red crescent-and-star is flanked by four photographs: Elijah Muhammad and Farrakhan on one side, Master Fard Muhammad and Malcolm X on the other.

“Our destination,” Mason is saying, “is to be a free people. That’s why you’ve got to take care of your brother, help him be the best he can be. Everyone is different, and we can’t be nobody other than who we is. That’s what he’s talking about when he says that you’ve got to know thyself. And how are you gonna judge another man when you don’t even know yourself? You gonna be judging him but … but what about you?” He surveys the assembled men from behind his softly tinted glasses. “You in the penitentiary just like the rest of us!”

At the beginning of my fieldwork, when Al and Baraka were still lying low, Mason was front and center. On each visit he would receive me with a firm handshake, an offer of a cup of water, and a declaration of how sincerely invested he was in my project, since folks on the outside need to learn what it’s really like in here. Insistent that all I needed to do was to tell the truth, he would pair me with a preselected member of his community (having, on occasion, to shoo away an unauthorized would-be interlocutor) and usher us into Classroom A. When I told Baumgartner of Mason’s information management, he laughed. Apparently, when sociologist of religion C. Eric Lincoln was researching what would become his landmark Black Muslims in America, Malcolm X would do him the very same way.30

Mason’s choreographed conversations were the first exchanges I had that resembled “interviews”—a method I had not envisaged. Handpicked for their intellect and discipline, Mason’s men recited catechisms, detailed month-long fasts, and explained how the system never changed anyone because only you can change yourself. Scripturally heterogeneous, Mason’s men confidently cited as proof texts not only passages from the works and sermons of Elijah Muhammad, but also verses from the Qur’an and the New Testament, even as they uniformly maintained that our versions of these Scriptures have been doctored. When I asked the prisoner minister of Muhammad’s Temple how he distinguished the clear Word of God from man’s mischievous editing, he said: “Because reality speaks out.”

These men also recited facts and figures about the earth and sun and otherwise exhibited the goofy pseudoscientism that is one of the Nation’s hallmarks. Beyond the bounds of doctrine, they also clued me in to a universe of things that as a newcomer to Graterford I couldn’t have hoped to anticipate. They taught me about the draconian policies of the Ridge/Horn era and, as a consequence, of their time “in the mountains” of central Pennsylvania. Among other conspiracies, they spoke of the high-starch diet laced with saltpeter that they engineered to vanquish libido and engender docility.31 They spoke of enduring long stretches in the hole and how, away from the din and racket, they came to know themselves for the first time. They spoke of the strategies of self-mastery they adopted during those periods—fasting especially—and how when they returned to population, they would find themselves equipped with an extrasensory cognizance of the rhythms of the jail, its at-once chaotic but simultaneously repeating patterns, such that they could intuit with certainty what was going to happen before it took place.

Politically and religiously, these cherry-picked informants evidenced the Nation’s deep-seated conservatism. Not revolutionaries like Nat Turner, or even progressives like W.E.B. Du Bois, these men were the ideological descendants of black incrementalists like Booker T. Washington. They had no utopian illusions, no dreams of radical social reordering, and expected nothing from the government; they merely wanted their fair piece of the American dream.32 They regarded the Nation as a “religion” only to the extent that doing so rendered it sensible within the constitutional rules of the game. For them it was a spiritual discipline, a way of life, whose endgame was as this-worldly as could be, inasmuch as this world is all that there is. Such, in their view, is the mortal misstep of Sunni Islam, whose pie-in-the-sky afterlife and expectation of divine judgment is just an updated version of the white man’s Christianity, which for four hundred years was used to counsel humility and endurance in the name of posthumous reward. Distinguishing themselves further from the Warith Deen guys who once carried their flag, they maintained the homegrown tenets revealed by Elijah Muhammad to represent an Islam authentic to the experience of black people in America. By contrast, the Sunnis’ appropriation of Arabian Islam, a form of Islam appropriate not for here and now but for back then and over there, is symptomatic of the ignorance-of-self forged in the cultural erasure of slavery. To become who they need to become, black people need to remake themselves according to their experience, not according to what others tell them to be. Muhammad’s Temple leader, himself a Mason-approved interlocutor, quoted Malcolm X: “Even if a kitten is born in an oven—that does not make it a biscuit.”

From behind the lectern, Mason says: “We can’t go forward if we be backbiting one another. Sure, you a jailhouse Muslim now”—he invokes the moniker like an honorific—“but what did you do before you entered the Nation of Islam? What we need is love. We need to end the hate toward one another. We’ve got to move away from here, from this hate, from this place.” Amid the standard themes—the need for unity, choosing love over hate, knowledge of self as a prerequisite for liberation—I detect in Mason’s oratory this morning the coiled posture of a man defending his good name.

“There are folks in the Arab world who study their whole lives and who are still in the library, and you gonna judge a man about how little he knows and how much you know? Don’t focus on your brother. Focus on God.”

Mason acknowledges a brown in the second row, who gets up and says that in the twenty-one years he’s been here, he’s never heard anybody talking about Mason behind his back.

Mason nods.

Rising from the second row, a New Yorker named Nashawn obliquely describes an incident of conflict from last week on the block. Nashawn, whose fancy glasses and watch suggest him to be of some means, and whose new-side address and appetite for unpolished provocation imply a mind run amok, was one of the guys that Mason shooed away from me in my early days. One Sunday morning at the Protestant service, he caught up with me nonetheless. As Al’s band played a funky instrumental arrangement of “Wade in the Water,” Nashawn turned around and explained that back in the day, the slaves used music as a vehicle to sneak messages past the slave masters, but over time, the subversive element was drowned out, so by now music like the sort Al was playing is little more than entertainment. Nashawn always has a point to make, whether he’s calling out Education for Ministry as little more than “Hucksterism 101,” critiquing my “Jewish shoes,” or explaining how exactly he knows that Baraka is a dope fiend.

The short of it, Nashawn breaks it down now, was that he stepped to somebody simply because it had to be done. End of story. That is, he’s man enough to deal with conflict directly—in contrast, it would appear, with Mason.

“Look,” Mason redirects. “If somebody wrongs me, I’m gonna speak on it publicly. That’s my job. My job is not to call nobody out. Look at me, I’m not pointing out nobody. I ain’t tryin’ to be the big guy. I’m talking about the big picture. I’m in this for us. I ain’t in this for me. We’re all in the Nation here.

“If we don’t die, we’ll never live again. We’ve got to continue to die, to move on, even with our defects, even with our faults. I’m true to Allah, and that means treating you all like real people.”

A chorus of “That’s right!” … “Um-hmm” … “That’s right!” greets Mason’s assertion.

Jihad, the imposing FOI who has been standing at attention throughout, steps forward and hands Mason a cup of water from which Mason drinks. In the chapel, if somebody hands you a Styrofoam cup of water, then you’re somebody, and if you’re the one doing the handing, then someday you might be somebody, too.

Mason continues: “If you carry yourself right with proper conduct, then people know what you’re about before you even open your mouth. It’s about the day-to-day. That’s where you gotta prove yourself. You prove yourself by not fighting on the block. We gotta start by being brothers to one another, by respecting each other. Whatever is it that’s keeping us from respecting one another? Let’s figure out what it is and stop it! We’ve got to love one another.”

“Yes sir!” … “Respect!” … “Yes sir!”

Mason surveys his flock. “I love you all!” he shouts, and the men applaud.

Malik, Mason’s deputy, marches up to the lectern and executes a ninety-degree turn. The two leaders salute one another, grab each other’s right hand and pull each other close for what might be mistaken for a pair of opposite-cheek kisses.

“Hello, Brothers!” Malik shouts, and the men echo him back.

“The Messenger said that we must be brothers first. Uniting is the key to our salvation.” Malik holds up a book in front of his intelligent horn-rimmed face. “This is the key to our salvation. These are instructions, and we should be disappointed with ourselves because we’re not following the instructions. We are constantly developing ourselves, but at the same time we are disrespecting these teachings, each and every one of us. The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad didn’t instruct us to hate each other. He taught us to love each other. It’s a battle of minds. That’s the War of Armageddon: a war of minds. And we’ve got God on our side, and the devil is on the other. Fard Muhammad told us that we had God within ourselves, that the black man is God. But when are we going to start living like it? When are we going to start talking like it? When are we going to start acting like it?”

*   *   *

Over on the Catholic side, Mike Callahan, Father Gorski’s clerk, is fingering a 2006 calendar, still wrapped in plastic.

“Are you going to open that?” Santana, the downtrodden chapel worker, inquires.

“Why do you want to know if I’m going to open it?” Mike asks.

“I just want to know if you’re going to open that.”

“Why do you want to know?” Mike fingers the seam on the plastic. This goes back and forth for a while, to Santana’s increasing agitation.

Eventually Santana explains. “I just want the cardboard so I can make a card for a correspondent.”

Mike rips open the plastic and hands the cardboard to Santana. The calendar freed, Mike holds up its gridded pages to let the panoramic landscapes on the reverse side dangle free. As he examines each image in succession, Mike lazily harasses Jack, his officemate, about the red, puffy head he got from shaving it this morning without cream. His head looks like a strawberry, Mike says.

Father Gorski attributes the problem to Jack’s tiny hands, one of which he holds up for collective examination. Indeed, they are rather small, I acknowledge.

Jack starts in on how evil liberals are.

“And don’t forget ugly,” I say.

Jack considers this. “Yes, and ugly, too.”

*   *   *

Save for Teddy and Baraka, the office is empty, and a sour vibe hangs palpably in the air. From his uncharacteristic silence, I suspect Teddy to be the source. “So … what’s going on?” I ask.

“I didn’t sleep,” Teddy mutters. “This legal stuff…” He trails off. “I’m just so”—he grunts in lieu of swearing—“just so angry at the lawyers,” he says. “All lawyers.”

Baraka and I feel his pain. “Snakes, devils, scoundrels,” Baraka says.

“Gold diggers,” I say.

“No!” Baraka corrects me. “That’s if you’re lucky. If a guy is doing something for money, then I know he’ll do a good job. But when it’s for some kind of cause, that’s when you really gotta watch out.” Commiseration drains into silence.

Making conversation, I ask Baraka whether a certain guy I saw this morning is a Muslim.

“He’s not,” Baraka says.

“He must be a Christian, then,” I say to no one in particular.

“Why do you say he’s a Christian?” Teddy snaps.

“My bad,” I say, “he’s probably a Jew. We all chill together upstairs on Friday night.”

“You know,” Teddy says, “just ’cause a guy comes down here on Sunday morning don’t make him a Christian.”

“Fair enough,” I say. “I’m not weighing in on the truth inscribed in his heart, I just mean in terms of how he probably identifies himself.”

“Even that you can’t be certain,” Teddy says. “Lots of guys ain’t Christian. Like Al,” Teddy says. “He don’t call hisself a Christian.”

“I know,” I say. Al identifies as “a member of the body of Christ,” or as a “saint.”

As if summoned, this very saint marches through the door, a fishing tackle–sized box in hand.

“Lord have mercy,” Teddy starts in. “I do not want to know what’s in that box. Please, please, please, please don’t tell me that you’ve got your horn in there.”

Baraka runs with Teddy’s riff. “Now there’ll be no peace and quiet in here with all that foul-sounding squawking you’re gonna be making.”

Unfazed by the advance reviews, Al begins to assemble his sax.

Turning to Baraka, he gently says what to my ears sounds like “What that, Baraga”—Al pronounces the “k” like a “g,” leading me to months of uncertainty as to whether Baraka’s name was Baraka or Baraga—“are you saw?” Baraka looks back at Al with a confused look.

“What’s that?” Baraka asks.

Looking to me with a raised brow, Al says, “Oh, Josh, didn’t you put him down?” Now it’s my turn to be confused.

“What do you mean, ‘put him down’?” I ask.

No answer.

“Like, did I dis him?” I ask.

“No,” Al repeats, “did you put him down?”

I apologize, explaining that I don’t understand.

Baraka loses it. “How can you not know what ‘put him down’ means?” he berates me. “How can you be here eleven months already and still not understand half of what is being said? Understanding entails goodwill, and if you don’t understand even half of what’s being said, then a guy must begin to strongly suspect that you’re here for something else. And you should never forget that we could easily turn you over before anyone gets down here!”

It’s a novel threat and a novel tirade. Certainly feeling more confused than imperiled, I argue my case. “But, Bar, I’m the one who perpetually insists that things are more complicated than they appear and that, as a result, I’m surely missing most of what’s going on. You’re the one that says that everything is more simple, not less, than it appears.” And while I certainly think that “missing half of what goes on” is an exaggeration, to prove a point, I plead guilty to his charge. “Learning a language is hard,” I say.

“No,” Baraka says, “learning a language is easy. It’s learning the nuance that’s hard.” With that distinction, I reach for my folder and pad. “Go ahead,” he instructs, “write it down,” which I do, though I suddenly feel like Baraka’s performance is premeditated, to say the least. He repeats himself, “Not the language itself, but the nuances.” Apparently, we are in dictation mode.

“The key thing with learning a language,” he says, “is chimneying.” I look up at him skeptically.

“Chimneying?” I ask. He gets stern again. “Man, if a guy can’t understand what chimneying is I’m certainly not going to be the one to tell him.”

Baumgartner’s door swings open and out walks Ruth Carter, along with an unfamiliar brown who departs the office without acknowledgment. A transplanted New Yorker, Ruth has been at Graterford in various capacities for decades, since the time when she woke up (despicably late in life, if you ask her) to the systemic outrageousness of the criminal justice system. Among her many hats, Ruth is an official visitor for the Pennsylvania Prison Society, in which capacity she meets with prisoners in Keita’s office, or in their cells if they’re in detention, to field grievances.33

On Ruth’s green-barred badge, instead of identifying her as a volunteer, tutor, or official visitor, it reads: “Lifer.” Silver-haired, effortlessly brash, and unsentimental, Ruth’s presence in the office is always a welcome treat.

Ruth sits down on Sayyid’s desk. “Thank God you’re here,” I say. “Look, I’m clueless, so forgive me for enlisting you, but you’ve been here for years upon years, yes?”

“Yes, years upon years,” she says.

“Okay,” I say. “So tell me, what does ‘put down’ mean in the following sentence: ‘Josh, didn’t you put Baraka down?’”

“You mean, like, to dis?” the white lady asks.

“Yes, precisely,” the white guy responds, “to dis. But no, that’s not it. And not only is that not it, but anyone who thinks that that’s it is apparently here under false pretenses.” Al and Baraka seem entertained. Ruth is confused.

I recount how we came to this point, beginning with Al’s still opaque query as to whether Baraka “saw.”

“No, not saw,” Al says. “Saw.”

“Right,” I say, “saw.”

“No, not saw,” he says, “saw. You know? Saw!”

“Right,” I say, “saw.”

“No!” Al says, exasperated. “Saw! Like King Saw.”

“Oh!” I say, suddenly getting it. “Saul!”

Al scrunches up his eyes. “You telling me you been here eleven months and you still don’t understand me?” He delivers the line in his best Baraka.

Once I’ve collected myself, I ask Al, “But why Saul?”

“Because David had to play music to soothe him,” Al says.

Whatever misgivings I may have about how Al reads the Bible, he is indisputably better versed in it than is this scholar of religion.

At least one mystery solved, the conversation floats. Ruth returns to Baumgartner’s office with another brown at her heels. Brian pops through and quickly returns upstairs. I jot some things down. Over my shoulder, Baraka reads my first scratches detailing our recent squabble.

“Oh, I bet you won’t like that!” Baraka says, referring to how idiotic I must look in my notes, and, by extension, how stupid I’ll appear in the resulting manuscript.

“On the contrary,” I say, “I want the reader to entertain the possibility that I’m totally clueless. Opening that possibility up frees me to make critical reads of you people.”

Baraka switches modes. No longer the quick-handed sparring partner, he’s now the sage corner man. Putting a hand on my shoulder, he pulls up a seat next to mine. I continue to scribble without looking up.

“Look,” he says, “the reason that I’m doing this is that a guy needs to be able to read his surroundings so that when he’s got to get out, he can get out before it’s too late. You see, if a bunch of guys can talk about him while he’s there and he doesn’t understand that those guys are talking about him, he will quickly come to harm. So you gotta keep on reading,” he says, “and when it’s time to be out, you’ve got to be out. You can’t risk getting stuck on things.”

Listening in on my training session, Al decides to cut Baraka down to size. “I know why you like Josh,” Al says, and Baraka doesn’t pay him any mind. “Look at you,” Al says. “You with your multiple brain orgasms. That’s why you like Josh, because he gives you so many brain orgasms.” Al turns back to his saxophone, which recommences the earlier game of cat-and-mouse.

“Oh Gawd, put it away!” Teddy wails.

Caressing his instrument, Al speaks faux-dissociatively about how he must clean it, polish it, and get it just right before he can use it. Baraka rubs his head in anticipatory agony.

Keita waddles into the office. As with Ruth’s arrival, the new blood feels like a reprieve.

“Keita,” I say, “I think that the devil is waiting to see you, because he’s been in this room for the past half hour.”

“If that’s true,” Keita shouts back, “then the devil is you, because the devil is a white man!” As Gorski will note, Keita often gets fired up after supervising the Nation of Islam.

*   *   *

When the men are gone I turn to note-taking, but I’m soon interrupted by Father Gorski, who, propping himself up on Sayyid’s desk, boisterously solicits my diversion.

“Uhh,” I whine, “I’m falling behind.”

He asks me, “Have you heard the one about the butcher that backed into his meat grinder?”

“Yeah,” I say, responding by rote to the Borscht Belt gag that my father taught me as a boy. “He got a little behind in his work.”

It pleases Gorski that I know the routine. Gorski explains that he gets all his jokes from an elderly Jewish guy who works at the same summer camp that he does. The guy’s greatest hit, Gorski says, was when one morning he told Gorski that he’d eaten so much fiber that he’d defecated a wicker chair.

Gorski points at me: “Make sure you put that in your notes.”

*   *   *

“How is Sayyid holding up?” I ask the Imam, who since returning from his weekly rounds of the Restricted Housing Units (RHU) has been quietly working at his desk.

“He can’t sleep,” Namir answers. “He’s anxious about his status.” For such an active guy like Sayyid, we agree, the hole must be especially maddening.

“Does he have any books, at least?”

“Not yet,” Namir says. To avoid raising additional suspicion, so long as Sayyid is under investigation, Namir doesn’t want to bring him any, either.

Might Sayyid have been into something? I ask. Namir shrugs. He has no way of knowing, but guys have such little room to maneuver that when they do get a chance to step out, they often step way out. “But guys can be shipped just like that,” he adds, opening his hands like he’s releasing a dove. On Ramadan, for example, he got a call from Albion—a facility out near Pittsburgh—to see if one of his guys had paid to participate in the Eid feast back here. That was the first Namir had heard that the guy had gotten into trouble, let alone that he’d been shipped. They could just as easily decide to do that to Sayyid, and then he’d be gone, his studies would be over, and he wouldn’t see his family anymore.

Does his family know yet? I ask. Namir says that Kazi sent word to Sayyid’s mom to warn her off visiting.

“No visit?” I ask. “Shouldn’t she see him soon in case he gets shipped?”

“The policy is no visits as long as you’re under investigation,” the Imam explains.

“As if the bureaucratic limbo isn’t punishment enough,” I say, but of course that provision is to be expected.

Namir talks about this morning’s rounds, how he goes straight for the person he needs to see and that’s it.

“Hassled too many times?” I ask.

“No,” he explains. “I don’t like to look in guys’ cells on account of the Qur’an’s prohibition against spying. And it’s very awkward.” Namir holds his hand up in front of his eyes, miming how he tries to avert his gaze.

Pointing to the books on his desk, I ask the Imam if he’s working on his khutbah—the Friday sermon. No, he says. In response to a request, he’s providing citations for last week’s khutbah, in which he stressed the need for one to take responsibility for his actions.

“The guys like to blame Shaytan [Satan],” he says, “as if their evil actions have nothing to do with them.” Namir notes this same evasion in guys’ propensity to take on Arabic names. “Do you know what Caliph Umar’s name was in jahaliyya?” he says, referring to the period of ignorance that preceded Islam. “Umar. Do you know what Caliph Abu Bakr’s name was in jahaliyya? Abu Bakr.” Meaning, if those radically transformed men didn’t change their names, why do men here feel the need to? “It says it in the Qur’an: ‘Call them by their father’s name.’ The question is: What have you done with the name your father gave you that you can no longer use it?”

The practice of shucking one’s birth name is hardly limited to the Muslims—Al dropped his the first time he ran afoul of the law—but between this Graterford norm and the Imam is a chasm of cultural difference. “In Nigeria,” Namir has explained, “your birth name is sacred. It connects you to your father, and his father before him. Your name lets people know where you are from and who you are.” Which is why the rampant name changing is, to him, so jarring—it reflects that strange American penchant for reinvention, and, simultaneously, the rootlessness and, often, the fatherlessness, that makes such reinvention thinkable, possible, and, eventually, as the Imam correctly observes, for many here, compulsory.

*   *   *

Watkins’s baseball cap rides low on his brow.

A rapping on steel elicits a grouse, but nothing more. The knocking continues. Abandoning his dreams of a nap, Watkins hauls himself up, extracts a key, and cracks the door.

“What do you need?” he asks the offender, a light-skinned twenty-something brown with a tattooed tear under his left eye and a sheet of paper in his hand.

“Just a signature and a blessing,” the brown reports breathlessly, waving the “green sheet,” which, once inked by the requisite officials, will secure his passage home. Watkins waves the guy in and points him toward the office. When the brown leaves, no more than a minute later, others have taken his place, Baraka among them.

Placing a hand on my shoulder, Baraka takes a supercilious survey of my notes, which licenses me to read back to him, in decreasing volume as others arrive, my account of his tirade from this morning.

Baraka howls.

*   *   *

Keita calls my name. He’s in his office with Wendell, a chapel regular who stops by this time every week for a sit-down prior to the Liberty Ministries Bible Study. When Keita calls my name again, I come.

With a gap where his upper incisors used to be and a week’s worth of gray scruff blanketing his face and sagging neck, Wendell is on the ragged end of the chapel spectrum. Today, to accentuate the effect, his left thumb is wrapped in white plaster and fixed at a ninety-degree angle to his hand. As he explains, when I ask, this morning in the shop he cut it bad.

They’ve called me in to help search for a word, the word that identifies the feeling Wendell had last night when he met a kid on the block who, they pieced together, was the son of a long lost friend. When the kid called his mom last night, Wendell got on the phone. She was someone Wendell had come up with from the time they were just little kids, but they hadn’t spoken in nineteen years. He felt euphoria, Wendell says, but he also felt this other thing—this thing he doesn’t quite have a name for.

“What was this thing like?” I ask.

“Like I was euphoric but I was also checking myself.”

“So you’re looking for the word for this thing that went along with the euphoria?”

“Right,” he says, “because I felt so blessed to talk to her, euphoric even—that’s the word that comes to mind—but at the same time I also felt this … thing…” Wendell squints in search of the word.

“Hesitation?” I ask.

“No, not quite that.”

“How about apprehension?”

“Nah.” Another squint. “That’s kinda it, but at the same time not it. Like, I was checking myself.”

I’m out of ideas.

“Like I was euphoric,” he says, “but I also knew that something was gonna happen.”

“Oh,” I say, “like you had a premonition?”

“Yeah, that’s it,” Wendell says, seemingly satisfied, though I can’t tell whether I nailed the feeling or whether I’d simply swung and missed for the third time. Wendell is going to see her the next time she comes up. As far as I know, Wendell is not married.

“It’s a beautiful thing,” Wendell says, edging toward the door. From the book shelf by Keita’s door Wendell grabs a stack of a dozen red hymnals, which he wedges under his gray stubbled chin.

I ask Wendell if it’s cool for me to join him.

“Of course, Josh,” Wendell says. “You know you’re always welcome with us.”

*   *   *

In Classroom A, where the seated men must shimmy in their chairs to let us pass, the end-to-end tables are mounded in the middle with sundry publications.34 At the perimeter are Bibles, which lie open to reveal dog-eared, skin-slicked pages. In some cases, the exposed text is more highlighted and underlined than not.

Before the Bibles sit eight browns, all but one black and all but one from B Block, which is Wendell’s block. The residential outlier is Prophet, the PV who on Tuesday apologized for vilifying me for being a Jew. At the far end of the table, with his thready hair and plaid shirt, is Jay, one of two evangelical Mennonites who trade off teaching Thursday-afternoon Bible studies for Liberty Ministries. Based in the neighboring town of Skippack, Liberty also runs a thrift store and Bible-based halfway house.35 In his far-away manner, the somewhat dwindling Jay, who after thirty-three years at Graterford last spring was honored as Volunteer of the Year, is recounting a recent Martin Luther King Day trip to Philly where halfway-house residents fed the homeless and spread the word.36

The men are peppering Jay for locations, whose coordinates I fail to catch.

Did you hit such-and-such a place?

Oh, there? Yeah, I know that spot!

Oh, and out so-and-so?

What about X Street?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s where they all live all right!

And the park over by Y?

Whoa! I crashed there myself one time. That place is rough!

And how about under Z Bridge? Did you hit there?

No? Next time you gotta make it there.

When the locations have all been reminisced, we turn to the hymnals.37

Wendell asks me to propose one. I suggest “Praise to the Lord,” but am reminded that they save that one for the finale. I flip the oily pages, searching, but come to nothing. Someone suggests “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” so we do that. Then “Down at the Cross Where My Savior Died.” Loud enough to be polite but not loud enough to give the impression that my soul is in play, I sing along.

“It’s good to have you around,” Wendell says to me when we finish. “It’s been a while.”

“Yeah,” I shake my head, “I’ve been backsliding,” which draws encouraging laughter. We then belt out a couple more nineteenth-century classics: “Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine,” and, after that, “Holy, Holy, Holy: Lord God Almighty.”

Prophet asks me whether I’m a singer. “Only in the shower,” I say, cringing at my own corniness. Invariably, the guys at Liberty try to get me involved, and I’m eager to comply, though not—I can’t help but feel—in the way they might wish. Unsure of how to navigate these invitations, I often end up stuck in between, failing at impromptu prompts and making penance with stock clichés. While Wendell and his crew are unmistakably warmhearted, to me Classroom A never feels quite so constrictive as on Thursday afternoons.

“All right,” young Steve says, gesturing in my direction.

“Oh? Is it my time to shine?” I stupidly ask. And we sing:

Praise to the Lord, who o’er all things so wondrously reigneth

Shelters thee under His wings, yea, so gently sustaineth

Hast thou not seen

How thy desires have been

Granted in what He ordaineth?

Praise to the Lord, who doth prosper thy work and defend thee

Surely His goodness and mercy daily sustain thee

Ponder anew

What the almighty can do

If with His love he befriend Thee

Praise to the Lord! O let all that is in me adore Him!

All that hath life and breath, come now with praises before Him!

Let the Amen

Sound from His people again

Gladly for aye we adore Him.

Chanted gruffly, the song is nonetheless rousing. Especially following the wordy jumble of each stanza’s first two lines, the final three pop with emotion, which, as guided by the lyrics, feels in my belly a lot like gratitude.

When I fail to furnish an Old Testament reading, an elderly brown suggests Genesis 1.

“You know,” Jay says, when the brown is done, “I just don’t see how anyone could believe in evolution like they say they do when verse twenty-six is so plainly clear.” Twenty-six is where God makes man in his image.

“Right,” someone says derisively. “Like we came from a bunch of monkeys.”

Steve wonders if the animals in the garden were all tame and became wild only after the Fall. Yes, this is how it was, the men agree.

“And it’s going to be like that again once Jesus comes,” Wendell says. He mentions Isaiah 11:6, the wolf lying down with the lamb. Squinting his eyes, he flips through his Bible in search of the passage. The men tease Wendell about his diminishing vision. Yeah, Wendell admits, by now he’s pretty much blind, but he’s not gonna do it—get glasses, that is. Eventually he finds the passage and reads aloud about how the wolf will dwell with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the kid, the calf with the young lion, and a little child shall lead them.38

It’s going to be a beautiful thing, they all agree.

From the New Testament, Steve selects and reads from John 4, which details Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman.

No discussion follows. Like most of the Bible studies here, Liberty’s method is less textual than associative, with the selected passage inspiring personal reflection on the miraculous workings of the Holy Spirit in one’s life.39 Between these unscripted solos, conversation will occasionally give way to argument—say, over the metaphysical condition of the dead in this period before Christ’s return or whether a man’s relationship with God impacts his finances. While not a prosperity gospeller per se, Wendell, for one, places no limits on God’s power. “Maybe your God can’t give you a car or a bathrobe,” Wendell once said in response to someone who claimed that God doesn’t answer prayers directly, “but my God can do whatever He pleases.”

The men deliver their testimonies. Interrupted only by Prophet’s abrupt departure, beseeching the men on his way out the door “to pray for him because God takes care of things”—in this case, an outstanding debt to a former landlord whom he needed to call—the men reflect in succession on their failures small and large, their sufferings endured and overcome, and on the Lord who reached down to them in their fallenness and delivered them their salvation.

Eventually it’s Steve’s turn. Youthful and militarily kempt, Steve proceeds deliberately, unafraid of the silences that gather as he assembles his words. He starts. “I just want to thank God that I now have my eyes open. And I’m so conscious of all of His blessings.” His features soften as he describes a visit last Sunday with all his four kids. “And the thing that killed me the most,” Steve says, “is the little one, the three-year-old. He would just follow me around wherever I went. He wouldn’t let me out of his sight, like he wanted nothing more than to just be near me. And it’s the most beautiful thing that he loves me,” Steve pauses, “because I know that it’s nothing that I did, so it’s just got to be God. So I just want to thank God for all that.”

Steve slips into the story of his life. As a kid he’d been a boxing prodigy. He lived with his mom in Camden, across the river in Jersey, but he would fight in a Philly gym. And everything was good. But then he started running with a gang—“a gang that didn’t really stand for nothing”—and started getting into trouble. Then, one night, he was fooling with a handgun and, by accident, he shot and killed his cousin. Apart from the five years he got, that really messed with him on a personal level. But when he got out he was doing really good. He started boxing again. At one point, he was number one in the country, number two in the world at his weight. And he’d travel the world for fights. He fought in Germany and Australia, and he was doing good, real good. But then his mom died and it made him lose his faith in everything, and he fell off and started selling drugs and got back into that whole lifestyle. And one day he came home and his girlfriend told him that because of the drugs, they were being evicted. And that’s when whatever it was happened and he ended up back at Graterford.

“But when you’re down,” Steve says, “that’s when you’re closest to it. It took me being in a place like this for me to find out that the true freedom is the freedom you find in Christ. And the world has nothing to offer me that Christ can’t offer me. And what my experience goes to show is that without Jesus you can’t accomplish nothing out there, but with Jesus you can accomplish anything. And I just want to thank God that I now have my eyes open. And now there’s no excuse for me to do wrong out there because the Lord provided me with guys like these”—he gestures around the room—“to help me learn the words of Jesus.”

Taking Steve’s testimony to be a sort of valedictory address, I’m brought back to harrowing testimony he delivered last spring. His attorney and family were pressing him to accept a plea that would have gotten him home in six months. As if in a fog, Steve described how he couldn’t quite understand what was going on. He’d been about to sign the plan agreement, but the Lord told him to stay put, so he didn’t. At the time, choosing God’s counsel over that of his lawyer sounded to my ear like an act of catastrophic self-sabotage, but given Steve’s allusions to his imminent departure, I’m delighted to have been wrong.

Wendell quibbles slightly with Steve’s conclusion. “Yeah, but the thing is that you must abide in the Word so it can transform you from the inside out. As you’ve discovered, it’s not enough to study it and talk about it. You’ve got to live it. Amen?”

“Yeah, amen,” Steve says. “But I wouldn’t have been able to do it if guys like you hadn’t been here to show me the way.”

“Nah,” Wendell again deflects. “You don’t need us. You’re never really alone, just like I’m never alone, because God is always with me.”

Watching Wendell, I’m struck by the irresistible metaphor of his plastered thumb. As a wound fixed in unwavering affirmation, it emblemizes the tireless optimism of guys like Wendell or Daffy Ball—optimism that in a sadder mood calls to mind Candide’s take on the condition: “the mania for insisting that all is well when all is by no means well.”40

*   *   *

Jay, the aging volunteer, asks the men to turn in their Bibles to the First Letter of John, chapter one.

“Oh yeah, the anointing,” Wendell nods.

Jay reads aloud about those that might seduce you. “But the anointing which you have received of Him stays in you, and you need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teaches you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it has taught you, you shall abide in him.41

“That’s why you all must take care,” Jay says. “God has anointed you with the Holy Spirit so that you may be able to know in your hearts what God wants for you. And that’s what John is talking about here, and that’s why you must take care to listen to the Word of God and to armor yourself against folks with a game who try to turn you into what they’re about. ’Cause, you see, the truth of the world—that which we can see—is only partially true, but God’s truth is one hundred percent true. Based on this passage, you can be sure that Satan will send people to try to take you away from God, to take you away from what you have learned. That’s what Satan does. So you must stay strong in your childlike faith.”

Having watched us through the window, Teddy sidles into the room. Jay smiles at him and continues: “So we need teachers. The Bible is clear about that. And in my experience, it’s the Word that makes all the difference between staying stuck in the same old patterns and being able to turn your life around.” Citing the men’s own testimony, Jay stresses the importance of Bible studies.

Anticipating the proof text to come, Teddy pipes in: “Oh, you talking about Hebrews?”

“No,” Jay chuckles, “we’re just getting to that.” At Jay’s instruction, an elderly brown croaks out three canonical verses from Hebrews 5, about the need for differing kinds of teaching: for babes who need milk, and for the mature—those able to distinguish between good and evil—who require solid food.42

“Without that solid food,” Jay says, “you’re prey for Satan’s temptations. And Satan will throw temptations at you.” In illustration, Jay returns to the MLK Day sandwich expedition to reflect on “a recent disappointment.” “We had one guy in the program,” Jay says, “he was doing really well, but then on Martin Luther King Day we went downtown to give out sandwiches to the homeless.”

“Sandwiches?” Teddy barks excitedly.

“Yeah, sandwiches,” Jay says.

“What kind of sandwiches?” Teddy asks.

“Ham-and-cheese sandwiches,” Jay says.

“Did they have mayonnaise on ’em?” Teddy asks.

“They sure did,” Jay says.

“Good God!” Teddy exclaims, licking his lips.

Poor guy, I think. I guess he hasn’t had mayonnaise in forever.

Undeterred, Jay says that when they were distributing sandwiches, a guy who’d been at Liberty for some time took off. “And he’s had a lot of problems with drugs in the past. So now he’s violated his parole and he’s going back to prison. The world has a lot of attractions that he’s trying to resist. But,” Jay concludes, “God’s not done with him yet!”

Suddenly, it’s time. We rise, clasp hands, and drop heads. Wendell leads us in prayer: “Thank you, Lord, for sending us Jay, who’s been coming to see us and teach us the Word for such a long time.” Amen. “And thank you for sending us Josh today.”

“Thank you,” I declare to them alongside their “Thank you, Father,” and instantly regret what must sound like gratitude stubbornly misdirected.

*   *   *

It’s creeping up on six when Baumgartner returns from his second institutional meal, on this, his late day. While the dining hall generally delivers back Baumgartner in a coma, this evening he’s eager to talk. He asks about Liberty.

I say that while they remain a little narrow for my taste, they were solicitous as ever. I joke that when Jay talks about Satan sending people to derail you, I can’t help but worry that he’s talking about me. “Say what you will, though,” I add vacuously, “they are truly full of love.”

“As long as you toe their line,” Baumgartner objects. “But deviate a fraction from what he perceives as the correct form of Christianity, and see how loving Jay is! Plus, the kind of theology he advocates in there, where everything is subject to God’s will. Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t just a continued evasion of personal responsibility.”

“What Brian calls ‘God the micromanager,’” I say.

“Right,” he says. “It’s just not a fully mature theology. It doesn’t leave any room for the individual. More than that, it barely leaves any room for God! It’s so damn concerned with absolute obedience to God’s will and the dangers that await those who deviate, it doesn’t leave any space for God’s abundant grace.”

He opens the new issue of The Lutheran, which evidently furnished Baumgartner his dinner company. The cover story commemorates the hundredth anniversary of the birth of German theologian and Holocaust martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer. “Listen to this. This is what being a Christian meant to Bonhoeffer: ‘It was about authentically experiencing God’s presence through active discipleship following Jesus Christ here and now. Bonhoeffer believed living a Christian life wasn’t essentially assenting to established dogmas, nor believing particular doctrines, nor only trusting a Risen Savior in one’s life and death. Rather, Christian discipleship involves actively following after a living Lord.’” Baumgartner continues: “Although Bonhoeffer believed this life question, Who really is Jesus Christ for us today?, was to be actively lived—not once and for all answered—he did offer some helpful insights.” For Bonhoeffer, “Jesus Christ is the incarnate, crucified, and resurrected presence of God, personified in the church and existing for others in the world.” 43

Baumgartner riffs on what he read: “Actively present, nondogmatic, inspiring people to exist for others … now this is my kind of God. The God Bonhoeffer describes is a being driven by grace, not a God who wants for you something that is diametrically opposed to what you want for yourself. It’s a God that wants to connect with you, not to punish you. And that is what religion is all about: God’s effort, by means of grace, to reconnect with you. That’s where we get the word religion, from the Latin re-ligio, meaning to retie the individual to God, and then by extension to retie ourselves through Him to one another.” 44

With a preacher’s ease, Baumgartner segues into a series of reflections about the condition of fatherhood. He speaks of his son, now in his twenties. He describes watching with frustration and amusement as his son makes the same idiotic mistakes he once made. He sometimes veers close to overbearingness or condemnation, but he always stops himself short. As he knows full well, trial and error is the only way for his son to learn. “You know,” Baumgartner says, “I like to think that God feels about me roughly the way I feel about my son—frustrated that I still haven’t gotten it, but driven by a willingness to allow me to figure it out on my own.”

*   *   *

When stars align, Thursday night is the chapel’s busiest activity block, with the headlining Spanish service complemented in the conference room by Al’s band rehearsal, in the annex (in biannual six-week spurts) by Sister Georgina’s interfaith dialogue group, and in the courtyard outside Keita’s window (on roughly one Thursday in four) by the “Indians.”

The Indians, as they generally call themselves, or the Natives, as they are known in the office, are relative newcomers. The Native American prisoners’ rights movement began in the 1980s, adopting tactics developed by the Muslims a generation earlier, but Native American religion didn’t come to Pennsylvania’s prison system until a decade later.45

In the early nineties, the first convocation of what would become the Pennsylvania DOC’s Religious Accommodation Committee was convened for the express purpose of determining the parameters for authentic Native American religious worship. Tribal and spiritual leaders were summoned to Camp Hill to present what, in their view, their religion entailed. At that meeting, as Reverend Baumgartner understated it in a subsequent affidavit, he “learned of the difficulties in providing for Native American inmates with diverse beliefs.”46 Miles from consensus, in Baumgartner’s telling, the meeting quickly turned rancorous, with the gathered panelists failing to agree on even a baseline for beginning a dialogue.

When, in 1994, the DOC approved an accommodation for Native American prisoners to possess prayer feathers, medicine bags, and simple headbands, only one Graterford resident took advantage. A year later, two new arrivals to Graterford, James Hunt Warcloud, who traced his lineage to the Cherokee and the Lumbee, and Lucas Sparrowhawk Flying Gibson, whose paternal grandmother was Cherokee, founded the Brotherhood of United Tribes (BOUT). As BOUT, the two were authorized to solicit an outside volunteer. In the interim, Baumgartner took to hosting the smudging ritual and the ritual of the pipe in his office on Thursdays, his late night. While the raid put a temporary halt to the search, Baumgartner eventually found BOUT a volunteer to supervise its rites. By then, Warcloud and Sparrowhawk had successfully pushed for and won accommodations for additional ceremonial objects, including dream catchers, smudging shells, and tree bark. The pugnacious Warcloud, however, was unsatisfied. Impugning the authenticity of both the volunteer (whom they presumed to be a DOC operative) and their “polluted” fellow ritual participants (whose growing ranks they saw as a bunch of poseurs), Warcloud and Sparrowhawk boycotted the rituals they themselves had spearheaded.

So Baumgartner found Bobby Hawk, a member of the Lenape tribe, who remains the Native American volunteer to this day. In the gruffly magnetic Hawk, Warcloud smelled another rat. “Enough is enough!!!!!” Warcloud wrote to Baumgartner. “Either he is for ensuring the Native Americans’ religious and cultural freedom or he is a part of the administration wearing the false face of an alleged legitimate Native American Representative. I have spoken!”47

Warcloud filed suit, demanding that Native American prisoners be allowed to meet with the same frequency as other religious groups; have a space of their own like the Jews; have the right to engage in the practice of gifting; be able to smudge in their cells; and, foremost, to have a sweat lodge like the one up at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg. Playing the security trump card afforded by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which allowed restrictions to First Amendment rights “in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest” provided that the means adopted were the “least restrictive” ones, the DOC stood fast.48 The federal court agreed, and shortly thereafter Warcloud was shipped to another institution. Years later, with Baumgartner and Bobby Hawk’s support, the institution allowed the Natives to build, in the corner yard, wedged between E Block, the main corridor, and the newly expanded chapel offices, a Cherokee prayer circle. While for years they met weekly, that frequency recently dropped when Bobby Hawk left Montgomery County, returning to the mountains of his boyhood.

*   *   *

Baumgartner, who has been administering to Jefferson the Moorish Scientist a solid dressing-down in his office, is interrupted by the three Indian leaders, here to fetch their ritual paraphernalia. When they reemerge, eagle wing, turtle shell, and worn trash bag in hand, I exchange curt hellos with Claw.

As always, Claw presents as sharp-tempered and cagey. These days, because he is mourning his mother, except for a long tress in the back his head is shaved to the skin. A former biker and a lifer, Claw is one of the men that one comes across when doing newspaper searches on Graterford, in his case, for the time when, while grazing the jail’s 300 head of cattle in a ravine, he stumbled upon a set of dinosaur fossil footprints. This was back in ’94, when the agricultural program was still operational, lifers still ventured beyond the walls, and the theory of evolution was not yet in Pennsylvania the hot-button issue it has more recently become.49

Due to their tough-guy appearance and their alien ritual setting, of the chapel’s many groups I was most timid in approaching the Natives. Not until midsummer, when on a Sunday morning I saw them assembled through the window of the main corridor, did I venture outside and introduce myself. Bobby Hawk and Gram—whom I took to be the Natives’ leader—knew who I was, and welcomed me back anytime. When next they met, I joined them along E Block’s yellow-brick façade. The men, mostly long-haired and decked out in headbands, beads, and feathers, loitered along the wall in small groups, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and talking. It was a sunny day.

Eventually, Gram, who exudes latent power and could pass for Metallica’s James Hetfield from back in his longhair days, took his position beside Chipmunk, his second. Standing side by side between the clustered men and the prayer circle, the two men mounded the mixture of sage, sweetgrass, and tobacco into their overturned turtle shells. Each of the firekeepers lit his mixture, fanned it with an eagle wing to a quick flame, and then snuffed it out to a smolder. From the top of two jagged queues, the men then presented themselves for smudging.

The ritual, which takes perhaps forty-five seconds per person to perform, goes like this: One stands with one’s arms outstretched. Moving from feet to head in a sequence vaguely reminiscent of a thorough pat-down, the firekeeper fans smoke toward each of one’s extremities. When he eventually arrives at one’s face, the firekeeper pauses, at which point, with cupped hands, the recipient wafts the smoke into his nose and mouth. One then rotates clockwise 180 degrees, and the firekeeper slowly works his way back down to the ground. The smudging is finished when the firekeeper drags the eagle wing down to the small of the recipient’s back.

Afterward, moving clockwise, each man took a seat in the prayer circle, which is delineated by red stones ringing a wooden pole—the Tree of Life that connects the earth to the heavens. When everyone was on the ground, Bobby Hawk asked the spirits to remember the four-leggers, the two-leggers, the ones that crawl on the ground. He asked the great eagle to take the smoke up to the spirits, bearing with it the memory of those who are sick, those who are in the hole, and those who are currently suffering. Following his prayer, Bobby Hawk delivered an ecological lamentation in which he preemptively mourned the world seven generations hence, by which time the bears will have been exterminated, sons will not learn to hunt and forage from their fathers, and the woods will have been wholly conquered by the strip malls and subdivisions that the European man brings with him when he comes.

One bright fall morning, so as to draw connections between imperial conquest, ecological devastation, and the sorts of violent crimes for which the assembled men were being punished, Bobby Hawk told an allegory: Man finds a bear. The bear is where nature has put it, but man moves in, and he doesn’t want the bear there anymore. So he shoots the bear with a tranquilizer dart, loads it into a truck, and hauls it off. The bear wakes up in a new place. While in its natural state the bear posed little danger, in its unfamiliar new environment, it feels threatened and confused. Rendered vulnerable, the bear attacks, and man shoots and kills the bear. Now the bear is dead when what man should have done was merely leave it alone in its natural place. Elegantly, Hawk offered no translation.

My first time with the Indians, I was especially self-conscious since a day earlier the New York Times had run a piece detailing a visit to a prison sweat lodge. Seeking a journalistic middle-of-the-road tenor, the piece nonetheless took as its subject matter—in the manner that such things are unselfconsciously presumed—bad men. “Worship, Dark and Steamy, for Murderers and Rapists,” it was titled. After recounting the ritual, and the Native community’s successful campaign to overcome the state’s foot-dragging, the piece reported the men’s claims of the ritual’s therapeutic value, its offerings of feelings of rebirth and forgiveness. It then stated flatly: “Still, at prayer circle one day, all those gathered were asked to mention whom they were praying for. Not one mentioned a victim of his crime.” To me, the intimation was clear. To the extent that the Indians’ religious rituals felt therapeutic, such feelings were undeserved. Through their religion, these men were not properly atoning for their sins; they were merely papering them over.50

Peering through the steam and sweat, the Times reporter saw less men than their unrepented crimes, and I presumed that Graterford’s Indians would see in me little more than the impulse to do the same. As I should have by then expected, however, the Natives greeted me warmly. Having come only to observe, I was besieged by nonchalant outreach. I was taught the Indians’ special handshake, instructed in the ritual forms, and at once invited to be smudged and to join the prayer circle.

The next time went the same way. As it goes, I began to trade hellos and small talk with the Indians when I saw them around. It was during the hang-and-smoke of my third visit that Gram and Claw pulled me aside and informed me that it had been decided that the circle was for Indians only. It had been Claw’s decision. Gram explained that while as a Lakota he was in charge of the smudging, the prayer circle was a Cherokee ritual, and hence Claw’s call.

“It’s just for Indians,” Claw explained. “It’s bad juju to open it up to just any curiosity seeker.” He quickly added, “Not that you’re one of them.”

“But I most certainly am!” I assured him. Moreover, I explained, perhaps a bit too apologetically, that as a Jew I understood the imperative to draw ritual boundaries between insiders and outsiders. The decision had nothing to do with me, Claw insisted. It was about reserving the prayer circle for those in the “proper frame of mind.” Perhaps to help me get there, or perhaps to change the subject, Claw went on to detail a thing or two about the Great Mystery and about the three kinds of spirit. At conversation’s end, I couldn’t tell whether the exclusion was personal—directed perhaps at my position as a scholar, as a free person, or as a white man—or whether I was simply collateral damage, a demonstration to those of dubious lineage or conviction that they weren’t particularly welcome, either.

The Indians are nothing if not an eclectic bunch. Of the minority who were brought up around traditional practices, the bulk identify as Lakota. The rest are a hodgepodge of bikers, hippies, perhaps a Nazi or two, and, increasingly, Puerto Ricans who trace their ancestry to the Taino, or Arawak, Indians, and who connect Indian religion back to the Santería practices of their mothers and grandmothers.51 As such, to find a self-identified native-born Indian like Claw policing boundaries made perfect sense. This is especially so because in the case of Graterford’s Indians, ulterior motives above and beyond religious sincerity have an obvious material purpose: a coveted hair exemption.

While other routes to long hair exist—some identify as Rastafarians and others proclaim Nazirite vows (the ascetic discipline detailed in Numbers that was responsible for Samson’s long locks)—recognition as a Native American carries an automatic exemption. This presumed motive for trying to pass as an Indian extends not only to white guys thought to be hippies, bikers, and metalheads, and now to Puerto Ricans, but also—I realized one day when discovering in the prayer circle the religiously eclectic Charles of EFM, his cornrows unleashed into a frizzy afro—to black guys, too.52 While Charles credited his attendance to spiritual curiosity, for a purist like Claw, it would appear, the earnestness of the curiosity seeker versus the cynicism of the fraud is largely a distinction without a difference.

A number of men were visibly upset by my exclusion. As the prayer circle filled out, two men persistently tried to wave me in, not grasping why I was sitting against the wall. When I explained it afterward, one guy told me it was total bullshit. Another said he would boycott. A third promised to take it to Claw. I thanked these dissidents profusely, but defended the legitimacy of Claw’s proscription and insisted that I took no offense.

The event would have a conciliatory dénouement. A couple of days later, Baraka handed me a blank envelope, its flap folded in, in which I found a typed, two-page document titled “Analytical Concepts of Lakota Beliefs.” Though it was unsigned and Baraka wouldn’t tell me who gave it to him, its authorship was unambiguous. The document explained the Great Mystery “represented in the embodiment of all supernatural beings and powers in the universe” and broke down the three spirits inside us: Ni, our breath, which is immortal; Sicun, a spirit not limited to the animate that comes into being with us and serves as our guardian spirit; and Nagi, our shadow, or shade.

When next I saw him, Claw shrugged off my thanks. He’d just wanted to make sure I’d understood it wasn’t anything personal. Plus, with so much misinformation out there about Indian beliefs and practices, he wanted me to get the straight dope. There are limits, though, he quickly added. Some things shouldn’t be spoken of, not just to an outsider, but to anyone.

“Some intimacies ought to be shared with God alone,” he said. “It’s like bragging to your friends about how good your wife’s pussy is. It’s just not something you do.”

*   *   *

Stepping out of fluorescence and into the bracing darkness, I join the twenty Indians milling about in the nighttime shadow of the E Block wall. Beside the wall lies a mound of coats. Some of the men have retained their corduroy shells, but more are in only their burgundy fleece sweatshirts or white thermal undershirts. Only a few are wearing their knit DOC hats. Back in the summer’s heat there was much talk about how as Indians they prefer the cold. Inasmuch as it’s thirty degrees outside, now, it would appear, is the time to prove it. Lucas Sparrowhawk—a Vietnam vet, a lifer, and the remaining founding member of BOUT—is talking quietly with Rico, the Puerto Rican cohort’s self-appointed spokesman. Rubbing his hands together to reclaim their feeling, Sparrowhawk rolls a cigarette, lights it, and cradles it in his hand for heat.

Beyond the softly talking men are the E Block yards, enclosed in chain link and barbed wire, their basketball hoops swaying in the icy wind. Higher up, where the matte black of the wall gives way to the grayer black of the sky, the earth coughs up a modest rise where the peaks of two bare maples are all the tree that most here ever see.

Ordinarily I chat with Rico, who is generally up for a telling anecdote or a mildly mournful complaint. Last time we discussed his Villanova course, where he is struggling with Sister Barkley’s exacting but somewhat unspecified standards. Years later, in a similar setting, Rico will articulate his deep skepticism of the anthropologist, whose mere presence, as he sees it, inescapably affects the behavior of his subjects—most insidiously by seducing the observed into vainly protesting, on behalf of his or her people, their heart-wrenching victimhood.53 But tonight Rico is preoccupied, so I listen instead to a silver-haired wraith of a man reminisce about Graterford’s once vibrant, but since terminated, music program.54

The wind picks up, chilling my spine. Sooner than normal, Gram and a second man (not the usual Chipmunk) mound their turtle shells with tobacco, sage, and sweetgrass, assume their spots, and set the contents aflame. At a tempo double that of a languorous summer Sunday, the men are smudged, and, moving over to the prayer circle, they take fidgety seats on the frozen ground.

When my turn arrives, the smudging is strong as always. The feel of the sweet smoke on my body and in my lungs is calming. Oddly assuring, too, is the suspension of the normal order under which standing, eyes closed, exposed, is in this place an act of madness. Not to be overlooked either are the simple pleasures: being outside, the feeling of the driven air, and the lush tones—the ritual’s heightened awareness allows me to notice—of sound not penned in by concrete.

When the wing drags down my back, I turn and head for a corner spot beyond the prayer circle, along the wall, where I sit, then kneel, then balance on my heels with my back against the wall, and then kneel again, as the brick proves no less frigid than the ground. I thank the Lord above for my outsider-hood that leaves me little stake in displaying my fortitude. The more I squirm, I console myself, the more Indian I allow the men in the circle to become. Among the pale-skinned longhairs tonight are a couple of dreamy older black guys and an equal number of Latino kids, one of whose bulging braids peek out from under a fishing hat that canopies, too, the unlit stogie jammed between his lips. One man gestures for me to join them, and I stoically return a thank-you-but-no-thank-you hand. Glancing to my right, I inadvertently catch, in the office window, Teddy and Vic, who are looking out at me, making faces. I can only hope they didn’t see me getting smudged.

Gram thanks the Great Spirit for the cold. Referring to last night’s storm, he welcomes the thunder people, but notes their arrival in winter as an alarming sign. He comments how crazy the weather has been until now, how balmy for winter.

“Yeah,” Rico interrupts, “I like it like that.” Rico is the only man standing.

“Not me,” Gram says, “I like it cold.” Hearing the thunder people in January removes for Gram any doubt that something is way out of whack. Gram asks the spirits to take care of everyone’s families, especially Chipmunk, who’s in the hole, and two others who got shipped. For many in the circle, the latter comes as news, with surprise leading to bitter commentary on the connection between totalitarian policies and environmental destruction. Such, in the collective judgment, is the white man’s way. With squinty terseness, Lucas Sparrowhawk reports the harassment he endured this week. It was above and beyond the usual pestering about his hair and his beads that has led him to carry at all times, laminated in Scotch tape, a copy of his approved religious accommodation form. Sparrowhawk relates how somebody sent a couple of emptied packets of barbeque sauce in his name to the deputy’s secretary, making it look like blood, and how he got hauled off. “But it’s not me!” he says. “They should DNA it and they’ll see it’s not me. My fingerprints aren’t on it.” Murmurings attest to comparable intimidations. There are complaints about the “random” urine tests that, in fact, aren’t. Being an Indian in a European land is not easy, the men agree. Claw sums it up: “They say that we’re the heathens but they’re the ones with the abortion clinics!”

Conversation is sparer than usual. Never reluctant to hold forth, Rico introduces a topic for discussion. He knows it’s early to begin thinking about September’s Green Corn Feast but he just wants to get on the record now that he doesn’t want non–Native Americans preparing it. “That’s how the Muslims and Jews have it,” he says, “and that’s how we should have it, too.” And while he agrees that leftovers shouldn’t be thrown out, and while it’s fine for the helpers to have the leftovers, they shouldn’t take food before the feast takes place. “The feast is real sacrilegious to us,” Rico says. (I take him to mean sacred.) What matters most, though, is that all the food should be prepared by Native Americans, at least that’s how he feels about it, and that’s how he thinks they should do it next time around.

“Even bean pies?” Gram asks in his muscular baritone, referring to the dish once heralded by Elijah Muhammad for its health value and which remains, to this day, a chapel feast staple across the denominational spectrum. “Bean pies aren’t gonna get made by us, so either we buy theirs or we don’t have them at all.”

Even more than hair exemptions, feasts are magnets for charges of religious insincerity. During the era of prisoners’ power and institutional largesse, a feast became the cherry on top of religious accommodation. The Nation had Saviours’ Day, the Sunnis got the two Eid feasts, the Jews got Yom Kippur break-fast and a Passover seder, and the Protestants got Christmas and Easter. As for the Catholics, under the rubric of the Holy Name Society, they would feast on up to seven saints’ days throughout the liturgical calendar, with the surplus unexhausted ingredients ending up on the blocks, where the mob guys would allegedly employ personal chefs to dine Goodfellas-style.55 The confraternity came to be known by the mocking moniker the Hoagie Name Society, after the common Philly designation for a submarine sandwich. After the raid, the feasts were scaled back considerably, as even the religion-friendly Religious Freedom Restoration Act afforded First Amendment protection only to those observances deemed to be “central” to a given religion’s practice. While the Jews and Muslims retained their accommodations, the Protestants and Catholics lost everything. As the DOC argued, successfully, in court, with support from Father Gorski’s predecessor, such feasts were in kind more cultural than religious, and peripheral to the core practices of Catholicism.56

Among the chaplains’ more obnoxious tasks is ensuring that all feast participants have paid their ten-dollar fee, and making sure that no one annually partakes in feasts of more than one religious group. In this year’s cycle, additional rancor lingers around the newly instituted administrative proscription against “carrying.” Carrying was a practice through which faith communities were allowed to cover collectively the fees of their leaders and of the indigent. For many religious prisoners, carrying presented the opportunity to enact in their immediate communities an important charitable principle. From the administration’s perspective, though, the practice was one that simply begged for abuse.

With his bean pie objection, Gram quietly reassumes control over the gathered men, more than a few of whom have begun, following Rico’s lead, to stand. Most are smoking. My two pairs of woolen socks are proving no match for the frozen earth.

“I love the cold,” Gram declares, breaking the silence. Turning to his left, he commends his co-firekeeper on his job filling in for Chipmunk.

“I was a nervous wreck,” the guy says matter-of-factly.

“Yup,” Gram says. “You never get over it, either.”

Gram juts out his jaw and glances dramatically at the watch on the fill-in’s wrist. While in summer the Natives will sit for an hour at least, fifteen freezing minutes already feels like forever. Gram, the avowed lover of the cold, remains silent. Fortunately for everyone, as a tropical Indian, Rico’s sense of self is in no way tied to the same professed predilection.

“Warm it up!” Rico calls out, and Gram begins the closing prayer.

*   *   *

Bass and drums throb from the conference room where Al’s band is rehearsing. The Catholic side remains as dark as it’s been since the afternoon, and except for Baumgartner and Vic, who are chatting in Baumgartner’s office, the suite is quiet. As expected, Vic rags me mercilessly. He says he never appreciated just how tough my job was until he saw me sitting on the ground, shivering my ass off. I assure him that what he doesn’t understand—as a non-scholar—is the essential role my discomfort played in the ritual’s performance. Vic tells me that I’m full of shit, and points out, correctly, that I’m still shivering.

The chapel is no warmer. Forty to fifty Latino guys are scattered throughout the pews, everywhere but in the final five rows, which have been blocked off with police tape for density’s sake. To a spare crowd divided between burgundies and powder blues, the outside preacher spews forth a verbal frenzy, whose tempo would thwart my meager Spanish even were it not distorted by the PA system and the chapel’s acoustics into a slush of feedback and echo.

In Classroom A, two of the lower-ranking members of the Sunday Service Usher Board are sorting Valentine’s Day cards to be distributed at this Sunday’s service, while in the vestibule, two uncommonly natty white-skinned and -shirted COs are shooting the shit over Bird’s desk. The officers are musing on the smell of the smudging smoke, which a good half hour later still permeates the room. They can’t get over how much it smells like weed.

“More like angel dust,” Bird contends.

“No, weed,” insists one.

“I think it is weed,” says the other.

If so, I say, then burning it up in the open air wouldn’t make for a terribly efficient delivery device.

“Not if they were getting it from the street,” Bird says.

“That would be the way to do it.”

“Like hiding an elephant in plain sight.”

The COs are giving the conspiracy only half of their mind, the other half dedicated to Al’s band practice, which is rattling the vestibule. They take turns watching through the square window in the conference room door. When they’ve both lost interest, I take their place.

The Keepers of the Faith, as Al’s band is called, is one of five Gospel bands that trade off Sunday services, with three performing every week. If belonging to the same tradition, the music they all play has little relation to the Liberty Ministries repertoire. If those numbers evoke Methodist camp meetings, the Sunday bands channel the last forty years of black popular music, yielding a pastiche of Motown and soul, funk and gospel, R&B and hip-hop.

Nine men are packed into the ten-foot-square conference room, most all of whom I know by face if not by name. Al is seated on the left, his brow tense in concentration, his massive body stuffed behind his tiny guitar like some sort of funk-era Schroeder. Wild Mustache is on the bass, reliably on time, while shaved-head Baby Face is on keys, seemingly as tentative as ever. Smedley, a Muslim who moonlights with a number of the groups, is behind the drum kit—the latest contestant for the position vacated when Al’s previous drummer maxed out in early fall. A steady drummer is especially important at Graterford where most rehearsing is done solo, in one’s cell, and consequently, according to Al, guys tend to have trouble keeping time. Confident that God will send him the drummer he needs, Al is leaving no stone unturned, even going so far as auditioning Mac Swan of the Moorish Science Temple who, according to Bird, who listened in on the audition, is quite possibly the world’s worst drummer. “Straight up romper room,” Al judged his performance.

In the corner, Stringy Braids Long Face awaits his turn next to Wire Rim Specs, who bops his head to the beat. To the right of the door, standing mic in hand, is none other than the suddenly ubiquitous Prophet. Opposite Prophet, in the far corner, two upper I Block guys slide in and out of key, with High Forehead holding the mic and Doughy Face hanging on his arm. In his own band, as well as in his recent stint as choir director, Al has made a concerted effort to include the mentally disabled men who live in the new side’s specially designated upper I Block. If not for the music’s sake, by including them Al hopes to lure them closer to Jesus. To help them along, he lays out conditions for their participation, like that they abstain from homosexual acts. “You can’t do that while you’re in the choir,” Al tells them. While Baumgartner is impressed with Al’s outreach, not everyone is so certain. Telling me that Al “is not who he says he is,” Charles obliquely referred to a recent incident where Al threatened to kill one of the upper I Block guys. Al, for one, would be the first to admit that he’s not always the easiest guy to work with. “You can’t work with Al,” he says. “You’ve got to work with the Al that loves Jesus.”

I, for one, can’t get enough of Al in his bandleader mode. It’s something that Al has always done—even back in his Muslim years—and never does Al seem fuller in his being than when he’s arranging music. Best is his ability to deliver criticism as encouragement. “That’s good!” I’ve heard him shout to a meandering keyboardist. “You’ve got your time. Now why don’t you pick up the drummer’s time?”

Upon meeting my eyes through the window, Al smiles and signals I should enter. Cracking the door open, I’m engulfed by the cloying heat of crammed bodies at play. Without modulating his metronomic upbeat head bobs, Al shouts, “Hey, Josh! Come in here and get some of this here heeeeeeat!”

The room is steam-room warm. I lean against the wall with eyes closed and open myself to its atmosphere, which despite its density of men doesn’t feel the least bit claustrophobic.

Giving myself over to the music, I make little effort to catalogue what comes. Without break, a contemporary-sounding track gives way to a traditional gospel number. When that one ends, Stringy Braids takes over on keys. Al cues Wild Mustache on bass, who sets the tone with a walking bass line. After a couple of free measures, Prophet starts rhyming some lyrics, but Al cuts him off. He asks Mustache to take it from the top, and then, one by one, he brings the rest of the band members in. After a couple of aborted efforts they manage to get all the pieces together, but when Prophet jumps in with the lyric, their fragile communion again crumbles apart.

“Stop,” Al says. “Say what I’m saying.” Al recites the words and Prophet repeats after. Expectation builds as they get it going a second time, but once again Prophet falls off the beat.

“Don’t look at me like that there!” Al says. “You got to hit it in the groove. If you miss it, just wait to the next time around. And don’t look at me. And don’t look at me on Sunday, either.”

Prophet agrees, and soon the gears are meshing. When Al trusts that his concerted maintenance is expendable, he drops in a spacey guitar lick. After a couple of nonfatal missteps, they come to a steady groove. They hit a change in rhythm and then, as one, everyone starts to shout:

You’ve got the Holy Ghost!… Ahh!

You’ve got the Holy Ghost!… Ahh!

Everybody shouts the refrain. And then it gets personal.

Mark’s got the Holy Ghost!… Ahh!

Mark’s got the Holy Ghost!… Ahh!

For the duration of the eight repetitions of his name, Mark does a little dance. Then it’s my turn:

Josh’s got the Holy Ghost!… Ahh!

Josh’s got the Holy Ghost!… Ahh!

And my head bops in time. The Holy Ghost moves through the band, one by one, before finally coming to rest in Al’s guitar. The freaky lick returns, and Al’s head jabs up and down, side to side.

Al’s lick deteriorates into a dissonant scratch, which issues forth on the one and three. Then, with Al bellowing its passage, the Spirit moves sometimes smoothly, sometimes in a stutter, to the keys, the bass, and then the drums, before coming home to Al’s guitar, Al’s hands and arms, his shoulders, neck, and head. A couple more barks and they’re done.

The band reshuffles to play one that Al has been working up for months. Finding myself on the far side of enraptured, I have no trouble catching the lyrics, which cast salvation’s bounty in sharp relief against worldly suffering. Adopting the vantage point of a homeless person, the lyrics speak of being stuck out on the streets. “That’s my life,” the singers bemoan; “ain’t got nowhere else I could go.” For this wretched condition, the chorus brings the answer:

I’m just a nobody

So I gotta tell everybody

About somebody

Who can save anybody.

Cracking the door, Bird gives Al five fingers, and Al nods. The musicians play on and the vocalists sing on—souls once lost, now found, vowing to testify to God’s salvific power.57

“Heavenly Father,” Al prays when they finish. “I just want to thank You for allowing us to come together like this to sing Your praises. Please take care of Josh when he drives back to his level, just like you watch over us on this here level in the shadow of the valley of death. In the name of Jesus, amen.”

*   *   *

The COs are gone, the offices are locked, and the classrooms are dark. In the dull chapel light, the Spanish service is still going on; and from the rolling of the preacher’s words, one on top of the next, it’s plain that the Holy Spirit has moved in there. The congregation sways in silence, many arms outstretched.

Bird is reading the Daily News.

I ask him where he got it.

“Kaz,” he says. “I had to outsource.”

Bird and I discuss the suddenly omnipresent Prophet—we’re debating, ungenerously, whether, as Bird thinks, he’s a “bullshit artist,” or whether, as I argue, he’s quite insane—until the chapel clogs with Spanish speakers. Amid the hubbub, Rafael, a puffy and pockmarked Puerto Rican with an Abraham Lincoln beard, makes a point of introducing me to tonight’s volunteer. The petite but fierce woman, dressed in black, introduces herself as Rita. Gesturing at Rita, Rafael explains that she’s the Spanish-language chaplain from the Philadelphia County Jail.

“Y el,” he says to her, pointing at me, “el es un judío”—a Jew.

Having grown up in what he characterized as an Apostolic Christian community that observed the Sabbath and Mosaic dietary restrictions, Rafael seems to see in me a kindred spirit. For that reason, among others, Rafael perennially encourages me to attend Spanish services, and generously insists on translating when I do. Rafael tells me to come Saturday when a man from his church will be preaching. I promise him I will.

Shyly, Rafael’s frequent companion, the shorter, quieter José, tells me he has a book he’d like for me to have, which he presents to me. Called The Last Lap, it’s a first-person testimonial by a Jew who embraced Christ.58

Thanking José for his generosity, I slip the book inside my folder.