PREFACE

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2006

Baraka warned me against talking to Al about such things. And yet, only weeks later, I arrive in the office to find the two old friends warring over God’s Word and how we come to know it. Al’s enormous frame is hunched behind his desk, disquietingly still. Baraka sits opposite him, riding the desk still referred to as Sayyid’s, though by now everyone pretty much accepts that Sayyid isn’t coming back. Teddy is reclining in his desk chair by the window, exuding impishness. I grab an empty seat and catch myself up.1

In Al’s perspective, because God is a loving God, He wants to be understood and so grants man unmediated access to His Word. For Baraka, by contrast, God’s mind is knowable only via a tenuous chain of custody, one that stretches from the prophets, to the scribes, to the compilers who endowed certain accounts with the seal of authority. For Baraka, then, placing faith in Scripture means trusting other men. For Al, faith requires circumventing man’s machinations and trusting only in God.

To find Baraka and Al at opposite ends of a religious dispute should come as little surprise, but not simply because Baraka is a Muslim and Al is a Christian. In the chapel, as it turns out, such boundaries are far less decisive than I had initially assumed. Rather, if this morning’s clash reveals a chasm between the two men, it is less a matter of creed than of temperament. Baraka is intellectually playful, a lover of ideas and debate, and a great believer in the power of the mind. Nothing riles Baraka like genuflection before orthodoxy, whatever its standard. As one of the politically minded graybeards who came of age in the Nation of Islam before the movement collectively converted to Sunni Islam in 1975, Baraka sees in the Qur’an and the Bible not so much rigid formulae for serving God as catalogs of time-tested strategies for individual and collective improvement. It’s an approach that, in Al’s judgment, can’t possibly yield anything good. For Al, because the human is rotten to the core, the intellect can only lead him astray. Through God’s abundant love, however, the Holy Spirit delivers the truth of the Word directly to the believer’s heart and elevates him to a moral plateau he couldn’t possibly achieve on his own. Mulish in his convictions, and not only in matters of ultimate concern, Al is alternatively capable of unnerving fury and disarming love—a fury that hints at the monster Al says he used to be, and a love I’m tempted to call Christian, though Al would not, since if Jesus wanted His followers to call themselves “Christians,” He would have told them so himself.

Baraka holds up a softbound New Testament that he must have pulled off the bookshelf. “Who put this book together?” he asks Al.

“Man did!” Teddy barks. “I know, because my sister works in a bookshop!”

“The Holy Ghost,” Al says, accustomed to tuning out the noise.

“And what about the Council of Nicaea?” Baraka asks. “What about the process of canonization?”

“That’s what they did,” Al says. The they here is the Roman Catholic Church—a manmade entity, which, for Al, has little overlap with the transhistorical band of Jesus’ true followers he calls “the body of Christ.”

“But didn’t they put it together?” Baraka presses.

“No, not the body of Christ.”

Baraka elevates an eyebrow. “Then where do you get this information from?” He points to the Bible.

“The Holy Ghost,” Al says, still unmoved.

Never one to feign understanding, Baraka doesn’t get it now, either. “So let me get this straight. You recite stuff that’s in their book, but—”

Al cuts him off. “That’s them. I know what the Holy Ghost said.”

“And how do you know?”

“I know because of the Holy Spirit.”

With prosecutorial coyness, Baraka cocks his head to the side. “And yet you read the exact same book.”

“Look. I’m not part of that there. That’s the birth of something else.”

“But you recite verbatim what they wrote!”

“It’s not about what they wrote. It’s inspiration.”

Baraka tries a different tack. “And what about the books that didn’t make it into the canon. They real?”

“No.”

“And how do you know?

“Because the Holy Spirit shows it to me.”

“The Holy Spirit shows you the whole truth?”

“Yes. The whole truth of the Word.”

Teddy sits up, suddenly earnest. “Look,” he explains. “We don’t know everything about God. But we know what the sixty-six books say.”

“But you’ve got it all in English!” Baraka objects.

“I don’t know what language He talks to you in,” Al snaps.

Springing himself off Sayyid’s desk, Baraka crosses the cramped room in two steps, flips open the Bible, turns it over, and places it in front of Al. He points to a line. “What does that say?”

Al reads from what I will later determine to be Isaiah’s vision of Zion’s destruction: “Your country lies desolate, your cities are burned with fire; in your very presence aliens devour your land; it is desolate, as overthrown by foreigners.”2

“Thank you,” Baraka says. He snatches back the Bible and crisply returns to Sayyid’s desk. “Now, what language is that?”

Staring down his old friend, Al answers a different question. “But why does the country lie desolate? Because of man’s disobedience.” That is to say, I take it, because of arrogant inquiries of precisely this sort. At which point, feeling that Al’s indictment is directed as much at me as at Baraka, I break my silence and jump in.

*   *   *

Baraka, Al, and Teddy—these are not their real names, but over time they have come to suit them fine. Each works in the chapel at Pennsylvania’s Graterford Prison: Baraka as a clerk, Al as an audio-video technician and Teddy as a janitor. Baraka is a Muslim, and Al and Teddy are Christians. Each grew up in South Philadelphia, and each was convicted of homicide. Baraka and Al are in their early fifties, while Teddy is a decade their junior. Teddy has been at Graterford since the nineties, Al since the eighties, and Baraka since the seventies. As is true of roughly two-thirds of Graterford’s 3,500 residents, all three men are black.3 Like a quarter, the three men are lifers, which in Pennsylvania means just that.4 Barring a change in the law, a revision to administrative procedure, or a legal miracle, all three will die in prison. As for me, I’m far more transient. By now more or less a secular Jew, I’ve been in the chapel for a year, researching my dissertation—research that, in time, will grow into this book.

This book tells the story of one week’s time in Graterford’s chapel. It recounts seven days during which two prison guards, five chaplains, fifteen prisoner workers, a score of outside volunteers, and hundreds of religious adherents frequent the chapel to work, pray, study, and play. Driven by characters in conversation, this book offers a mosaic of the ritual and banter through which the men at Graterford pass their time, care for their selves, foster relationships, and commune with their makers, among a variety of other activities earnest and absurdist, quotidian and momentous. Inescapably, it is also the story of what happens when an interloper, in the form of a visiting scholar of religion, is thrown into this mix with the hope of making sense of it all. As such, while this book is an exploration of doing time and doing religion in contemporary America, it is simultaneously a chronicle of the tangled process by which one comes to know things through dialogue with other people.

Within and beyond the week at hand, the book struggles with questions of faith and doubt, authority and license, freedom and fidelity, and the demands of the ethical life, whether lived with or without relation to God. Navigating this thicket with my interlocutors at Graterford also requires working through the competing reflexes by which religious prisoners are alternatively scorned as liars or pitied as casualties. By taking these reductive impulses themselves as objects of inquiry, I hope to think through and, fortune permitting, trouble prevalent assumptions about prisoners and religion both—assumptions that are caught up in a host of systemic American injustices.

Like the exchange above, the events that follow are, in their way, wholly ordinary, but no less astonishing for that. Is it not truly bizarre how unremarkable it has become that for so many Americans—black men, especially—the practice of religion takes place in spaces like these?5