In Front of God and Everybody

Christmas was coming. And so was the pageant. And so was my solo bass-baritone role as Melchior. For I was about to become an Oriental king.

Every evening for two weeks, we were turned out of our cells and taken up to the auditorium. It was all showbiz. Set designers hammered, singers practiced, the narrator tested the mike and rehearsed his lines. The guys in the band tootled a little and banged around, down from their bennies and very low, sheepish, a little embarrassed. There were lumber, sheet music, a hot plate brewing coffee in a tin can. There was also an enlarged choir, new members recruited to expand the ranks. But one of the new ones was Svengali, the creep with the long black hair slicked down flat and greasy and with extremely bulged eyes, which indicated brain tumors or severe schizophrenia or some primordial evil no one could name. His head hung forward as though his neck were broken and those (continued on page 200)In Front of God(continued from page 165) eyes looked up at you from underneath and chilled your very soul. There was no word on what the guy was in for, no word at all.

Svengali's buddy was the ghoul. He was short, skinny, his head swollen to grotesque proportions, his chin pointed, his smile vapid. The word was that he was in for digging up the grave of a freshly buried young girl. He had been caught while masturbating over her corpse.

Protests to Jones brought only shrugs. Jones and the chaplain figured we all needed to be rehabilitated. We were all the children of God.

• • •

(The thing is, man. You gotta join the choir. I mean. Fuck that church-attendance shit. Ain't nobody gonna git no goddamn parole that way. I mean. You gotta git down with it. You gotta git to be one of the chaplain's very own boys. You gotta sing, man. You gotta make with them goddamn sounds clear to Tallahassee. You gotta make 'em all believe it. The chaplain's gotta believe it. The governor's gotta believe it. But most of all, you gotta make that parole board fuckin' well believe it. Man. You say you can sing a little? Why, you jes' gonna hafta git up there in front of God and everybody and sing your ass clean off! And I mean--off!)

And so there I was, shaved, combed, holding my hymnbook, barely able to see when the little black dots went up and down. But the senator sang next to me and could read music very well, switching to baritone occasionally to help me out and then maybe joining the tenors on the other side. The senator was a redhead, thin and nervous and very talkative, with all the mannerisms of a fox squirrel high in an oak tree. He was an old-timer when it came to church choirs, as well as state politics, especially the pork-barrel and cracker varieties. Unfortunately, he got himself sent up for groping a girl. He said it was a political frame to keep him from being re-elected. The girl was eight. He got five years.

Church services always began with a minor squabble right at the head of the stairs. Two convicts sat behind a table taking names for the attendance list, a pushing, jostling crowd very anxious about making absolutely certain that they were being recognized as Keeping a Good Record. The band was wearing its white shirts, its wide, flamboyant neckties, its stiff, starched white trustee pants. All of them chewed gum very rapidly, their eyes snapping, their faces a pale Benzedrex pink from the inhalers they broke open and the saturated cotton strips they swallowed with canteen coffee. The word was that the director of recreation kept them well supplied with inhalers. It maintained a high quality of music.

But the band was bored, too. The Sunday-night movie was where they let themselves go with the wildest of jazz. But now the trumpets, clarinets and saxophones had to behave themselves, the sousaphone the featured instrument, the hymns dutifully played, the sour notes slipped in with such artful deftness that there was almost a counterpoint lurking in the piety, the theme of a barbarian horde camped just behind the cathedral.

The doxology. We lined up at the back of the auditorium, wearing red robes and black robes and white robes salvaged from churches of every denomination and handed down to us by salvation groups and faith workers; ragged, unpressed, either too big or too little. Jones was the leader. He was an alcoholic doing his third jolt for passing bad checks, trying his best to dance his way through the bars and out into parole, cavorting and waving his arms and bending his knees with an enthused devotion, closing his eyes and smiling rapturously. But he always gave himself away. Already dry for over a year, booze was still written in his face. And there was that little step he made with his right foot as he swooped and flapped with his arms in his desperation to be a winged angel, a mincing little something that always happened to his knee, a delicate flutter in the spiral of his ankle. Jones was the only one left in the whole joint who didn't know that he was queer. He still thought he was a drunk.

But we gave it all we had, holding that good old full note when Jones shot his hands up like a traffic cop, his lips pursed, his eyes bulging, picking up the tempo as his fists pistoned up and down, sweetening the tone as his palms and stiffened fingers swooped and spiraled like a flock of doves.

And then it was onward, Christian soldiers. But we were broken up into isolated patrols, infiltrating our way up the aisles instead of marching in a body. The fakers were alone, without support, their voices quavering, weak, scared. An occasional part dominated, a bass sometimes steamboating up the channel all by himself. The chaplain encouraged us from the lectern, singing loud and singing tough, his lips curled, the sacred words coming out of the side of his mouth in that role he always played of the gangster imitating an actor doing an impersonation of James Cagney, who was in a movie about a prison chaplain. The senator and I usually marched together. I never missed if he was singing baritone, but when he joined the tenors, I sometimes forgot myself and went with him. Meanwhile, everyone was out of step and marching at a different speed. Eventually, we made our rendezvous at the pews.

The chaplain growled at us. The sermon came out like Al Capone. "Listen, youse guys. Cut out dat stealin' and all dat udder stuff. Ya got dat?" The chaplain was a Baptist. But he was building an All Saints chapel across from the prison canteen, using state bricks and convict labor, hustling donations everywhere. He was fond of wearing Roman Catholic collars, Episcopal bibs and robes and ribbons of every persuasion, his face bright red on certain inspired Sundays, his expression beatific, his head always bald. Other times he wore a simple business suit. Quite often he wore a clerical collar, tweed jacket, riding breeches and knee-length, polished boots.

So there I was. It was Sunday and I was in church, wondering what a decent, clean-cut atheist like me was doing in a place like this. On both sides of the auditorium, the walls were decorated with very large murals rendered in oil on canvas. The rumor was that the artist had worked on them for years and when he was finished, he got paroled. By the wildest of coincidences, the name of the painter was the same as that of the prison. He had signed them all--Raiford.

But all he had for models were picture postcards. At the same time we were hearing all about those Ten Commandments, we were gawking at the encircling visions of alligators and Seminole Indians, orange groves, flamingos, waves and beaches, tropical moons with silhouetted coconut palms, sunsets just beyond the Spanish moss and the palmettos.

"Youse guys might t'ink you're smart or somethin'. Youse ain't smart. And listen to dis. You better git your minds right. Git yourself rehabilitated. Youse gotta put your faith in the Lord. And, like. Bask in his everlastin' glory. Forever and ever. Ya got dat?"

But all eyes were wavering. The inmates of the women's ward were coming up the stairs. Their uniforms were blue, each dress starched and ironed with bits of embroidery or lace added to collar or cuff. Some had high heels and stockings. One carried a flower.

The freeman in charge was over 70, gaunt, stooped, extremely thin. He had no teeth, no neck, no muscle. He wore a straw hat. His pants were so large he held them up with wide suspenders, several inches of space between his belly and the waistband. His back was crooked and hunched and he used a cane. There were two large center sections of theater seats separated by a wide aisle. The women were brought in and seated in the rear section. They skipped the first row so the seats would provide cover and no one could look up their skirts.

It was strictly forbidden to signal or to communicate by word or gesture. It was even illegal to eyeball. Nevertheless, the very last row of the front (continued on page 265)In Front of God(continued from page 200) section was always filled by the lover boys. Very few of them had ever known any of those women out in the free world, although one of them was married to the second saxophone in the band. She was pregnant. Month after month, the prison population watched her swell and swell, until she was finally paroled just in time. The others knew one another only by sight and by distance. Some managed to write to each other by illegal letters called kites. Most of them only imagined recognition from their paramours. But they all sat there in the back row, pretending to sing, pretending to pray and pretending they were in love. Each one lay his forearm on top of the armrest of the seat. Hidden inside his cupped hand was a small, broken fragment of mirror. Surreptitiously, he could look in the glass and see under his armpit and through the space between the backs of the seats and there catch a dim, fragmentary reflection of his own beloved.

And every Sunday, without fail, right in the middle of the devotions and the dedications and the sermons and the prayers, interrupting the solo hymns, the ogling and the romances, someone would have to go to the john. And it would almost always be a chain man, one of the bad ones, always fighting or running away from a work squad, one of those with his ankles shackled together as a disciplinary action. Very slowly, carefully, pigeon-toed and tippy- toed, he would try to sneak down the far aisle along the wall. Passing the murals of gigantic postcards, he would hold up the center links of his chain with a piece of string while, with the other hand, he would try to keep the tin cup and spoon he wore hooked to his belt from clanging together. Yet there would still be a clink, a squeak, a clatter. All eyes would roll as we piously intoned the proper inflections--who art in heaven--forgive us--fear no evil---

There would be a muffled flush, a momentary loudness as a door opened and closed, a slow and painful clinking of steel links against ankle rings, the clatter of an old soupspoon hitting a tin-can cup. There was the squeak of a seat. The congregation sighed.

• • •

I built my time.

The table of the printing press dug into my thighs as I leaned forward, picking up a blank sheet of paper with my right hand and placing it in the platen pins. At the same time, I took out the printed sheet with my left hand, my index finger covered with a strip of sandpaper fastened by a rubber band. The press banged and rumbled. Bending at the hips, I rocked back and forth, my hands shuffling a fast blur of pages, my mind riffling and dealing, searching among those other rectangles, the drunken walls and rolling bulkheads, the flat faces, billboards and calendars, sifting through the shadows for some trace of substance while the press tried to bite off my hands.

When the last ream was finished, I pushed the button on the wall. I carried the material to a shelf and, with rags and gasoline, I cleaned off the type locked in the chase. I washed off the ink pan and the rollers. And then, at the sink. I scrubbed the heavy black stains off my fingers.

Or I would set type. Sitting on a high stool, I would hold a composing stick in my left hand, my right deftly digging into the small bins of the job case, my fingers picking up those little letters of lead and dropping them into place with a click. Each letter was upside down. Every word was in reverse.

(Em quad) capital O-n-c-e- (space) u-p-o-n (space) a (space) t-i-m-e-

The words were tightened up with smaller spaces. A lead was put on top. Another line was begun. Those words of lead grew heavier and heavier in my hand as silently I tried to sing them, to arrange them into a ballad of my life, some lilting celebration of how it all happened. And why, most especially why.

Then it was beantime. Time to walk around the circle of sand in the yard. Time to get into my hole. Time for lights-out. Time to shake 'em. There was first bell and last bell and the blast of the steam whistle on the power plant exactly at noon. It was time for a shower, a shit, a haircut, a letter. Time to realize that I was hopelessly trapped in that huge square of triple fences, the searchlights glistening on the knitted steel webs that had ensnared a whole tribe of haunted, demented beings.

So the days passed. Some days were of broken glass. Some were of tin foil. Certain days were but extensions of the dream, remaining translucent tulips in which I dawdled, taking my ease.

In order to get out of my cell for a couple of hours in the evening and in order to keep a good record, I attended every meeting of the sea scouts, the Forum of Faith and even Alcoholics Anonymous.

We recited the Lord's Prayer. We saluted the flag. We gave the scout oath and recited the scout law. We discussed those projects we had discussed at the previous meeting: the toy-repair shop for poor kids, the Christmas pageant, the amateur night, the leather class and the Spanish class and the woodworking class. But there were no tools and there were no shops and there were no books and the teachers didn't have time. Then the chaplain told us all about his days as a quarterback on his college team.

After a silent prayer, the meetings were closed while we stood at attention. The chaplain would be in his tweeds and his whipcord and his leather boots. His face and bald head would glow with the redness of a divine warmth. Since we had no bugle with which to blow taps, the chaplain imitated one. With all solemnity, he stood there with the back of his fist against his mouth. Not an eye blinked. Not a lip twitched. Every jaw was knotted tight and hard as we listened to the slow, sentimental phrases of guttural hum spaced with exquisite timing, the mellifluous tones and the soft dimness of a certain echo.

After the Sunday movie in the auditorium, we could sometimes see the women being taken back to their ward in a far corner of the fences, surrounded by yet another fence and a thick hedge. The sun would already have set, the air a thickening blue, the women's figures silhouetted against the plastered white of the hospital wall. Led by the crippled old freeman hunched over and hobbling with his cane, the women slowly sauntered along in a double column, their high heels clicking on the sidewalk. Some of them were swinging lighted cigarettes in their fingers. Others dangled handkerchiefs as a distant signal to some anonymous lover cells and cells away. Another flicked her cigarette lighter on and off, the flame a distant purple against the blue of her uniformed bosom. In front of the rock, several trustees stood in the prison road. One of them flicked his own lighter on and off, the flame dancing in the breeze, nervous, dim and very, very small.

The days were squeezed out. They were chopped, poured, welded. They went by like that squad of Negroes who combed the footprints out of the bed of sand directly in front of the rock. They worked their way backward in a wavering line of iron rakes, small geysers of gray sand sprouting from every prong.

And the nights. The framework of my upper bunk shuddered with a sly vibration in response to my cunning movements. I could hear the snores of thieves, of murderers. I could hear the padding footsteps of the cell walker, the caterwauling of the huge black cat who lived in the Newcock Court below.

And then there was a sudden, fantastic scream that echoed out of the depths of the rock, reverberating from floor to floor, from cell to cell. Abruptly, it stopped. There were pounding heels, rattling keys. Flashlights probed among the bars.

Then Christmas, the most forlorn of prison holidays, the celebration of a birth that only reminded us of our own death, the festivity that brought us little presents of brightly colored, ribbon-decorated misery.

The pageant. A re-enactment of innocence, a pantomime of faith. We performed three times, first for the freemen and their families, then for the white convicts and then for the black convicts. There had never been a dress rehearsal and we were made up at the rear of the auditorium. Only then did the old drapery material become available for fashioning turbans. Glue was smeared on our faces and scratchy excelsior slapped on to simulate beards. Wrinkled, striped bathrobes were issued, vaguely suggesting the deserts of the Middle East, sour with the reminiscences of tooth paste and shaving cream. They came down to our knees, more or less, which left our shoes, our pants legs and our prison stripes fully exposed.

We fiddled and scratched, desperately checking our lines, scared by the lights and the sets and the live audience that kept turning their heads to stare back at the rear of the room. The band was up front, solemn and pious. We white males had never seen them before, but now there had suddenly materialized a large choir of black women singing the Hallelujah Chorus.

It was hallelujah, all right. Those black gals were having a ball, screeching and yowling as loud as they could. The band was as high as the angels, the chaplain standing there in vestments indicating the patriarchy of a supra-Coptic bishop, his face solemn and red, concentrating on something far away and benign.

Then it was quiet. Lights were trained on the stage curtain. The big voice came over the P. A. system. It was the storyteller describing that night in Bethlehem. It was the voice of history and of prophecy. It was the dignified, stentorian voice of the Lord himself. But it was also the tremulous, slightly palsied voice of the judge. He was a nice old guy, a former justice of the peace sent up for obtaining money under false pretenses.

The curtain was drawn to reveal the Nativity scene. And there was the Virgin Mary with the Christ child. The choir in the back of the auditorium cut loose, Jones prancing and cavorting, his expression emoting his fantastic need for a drink.

We three kings of Orient are; Bearing gifts we traverse afar

I was the first king up. With regal dignity, I stepped down the aisle, that baritone of mine really raising hell, those stretch exercises finally paying off, that rapid and exaggerated and silent pronunciation of the letters Q and X, that pulling of my tongue out as far as it would go, grasping it with a wad of toilet paper while relaxing my diaphragm and taking deep sighs. I could feel the vibration of narrow and clever breath striking a disciplined surface of membrane and muscle. The phrasing was right, the vowels open, the consonants clear. A piece of drapery material was dangling loose around my ear. One side of my mustache kept sticking into my mouth. The belt of my bathrobe was up around my lower ribs. But just the same, I was a real copacetic king.

Down the aisle. Faces turned up to look at me, to wonder. Faces turned away, dazzled by that fierce spark of contradiction. Convicts aren't objects of reverence. They don't sing. They don't walk gracefully and they never smile.

Make it to the railing. Turn. Do not stick a finger into the mouth of the clarinet. Do not fart. Keep your head high and shoulders back, but do not trip going up the steps. Kneel in front of the Virgin Mary. This part had never been rehearsed, but play it cool. Oh, man. What a chance to eyeball! It was one of the inmates from the women's ward, one of the hookers, the shills, the molls or the Lesbians. Or one of those who had knocked off her old man. She was dressed in a cloak of recut potato sacks, sitting in a celestial beam of light; the infant Jesus a toy doll, the face cracked and one foot missing. Its wig was gone and I could see the casting hole right in the top of its head. And I could see that Mary was pretty old, her face made up, the wrinkles filled with powder and rouge.

After putting down my empty box with the ribbon around it, I didn't know what to do. My knees got stiff. My own free-world shoes were obvious and awkward, specially shined for the occasion, the heels badly run down. I still had to wait for Gaspar and then for Balthasar to catch up, two ordinary scraps of prison trash suddenly ennobled by their own ponderous song.

Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, Sealed in the stone-cold tomb:

And then the chorus howling behind each one:

O star of wonder, star of night, Star with royal beauty bright,

Trying to assume an expression of adoration, I eyeballed Mary. Mary eyeballed me. As each of us wondered about the other's time, the other's fall and the other's masturbations, something was beginning to come alive under that wrinkled old bathrobe. But then I saw a guard standing behind a backdrop. It was one of the cracker gunracks, the one whose specialty was breaking up weekend crap games and benny parties and putting Satchel Ass out of business; old Peeping Tom himself.

His face was alert, his mouth hard, his lips twitching, his sweaty cowboy hat with the hair-oil stains pulled low over his forehead. I realized that his posture was very tense and prepared and ready to spring at the first sign of any sin. The judge droned on, his voice all echo and dignity, vibrant with implications of the hereafter and the absolute. It was my big chance. In one mad moment of supreme glory, I could have died a martyred king. With the most appropriate musical accompaniment and in full view of the free world, I could have immortalized myself. All I had to do was revolt in the sacred name of reality. All I had to do was lean forward and grab the Virgin Mary right by the tit. Peeping Tom would have beaten me to death with a blackjack then and there, the audience of freemen howling with prayer and triumph as he kicked and trampled my poor, dedicated, mutilated body.

But humility prevented me from designing so grand a fate. I tried to spit the piece of mustache out of my mouth and flip the dangling end of my turban away from my ear. I knelt in the manger and tried to do penance, praying for absolution for being such a loser, such a lonely, miserable, frightened kid. So arrogant, furious, depressed. Rejecter of family, God and country. Unrequited lover. Strangled by ambition. Buried alive in boredom.

Bless me, O Holy Mother. I know not what I did. Sway me so that I might fuck not those who have fucked over me.

But the hymn was coming to an end. The last line was approaching. The Virgin Mary blinked. There was a smile on the painted-porcelain face of the Christ child. The saxophones were cleaning up. Something was dying, in spite of everything. And already I knew that people would forever shrink from me, awed by those many ghosts, all angry and squinting, still vibrating with the intensity of my many former lives.

Westward leading, still proceeding, Guide us to thy perfect light.

The free world:

Faces red, wrinkled, freckled, eyes so blue they imitated bullet holes in a stop sign that shrieked its protest against a clear sky. Kids blond. Women scared. Evil in striped pants was imitating holiness. There was rape in that room. They could smell it.

The nigger rock:

Eyeballs and teeth like the stormy froth on a black sea of nappy wool and shaved heads. A 12-year-old boy sitting in the front row wearing extra-small, custom-made white trustee pants. He lived outside with the family of one of the freemen. He had killed his sister and had been sentenced to the state prison for 20 years.

Each time, the music would die, the curtain was drawn, Mary immediately hustled behind the backdrop by Peeping Tom. But again and again, I knelt before the Virgin, realizing how little I knew of humility, of suffering, of achieving a spirituality that went eons beyond simply knowing that I was a rotten, stupid son of a bitch. Even as a villain, I was a flop. Even most of my punishment had been suspended. And there I was. The bungling burglar. Cracker of 26 safes with nothing in them but petty cash, groveling there on a lighted stage for the mercy of parole. Insomnia? Nightmares? With two years? All around me were men doing 20, 30, men doing All of It, men finally allowed into the rock and out onto the yard after a flat ten years on death row. To them, my pitiful state of imprisonment represented the purest freedom. Two years? I had driven up with a parole in my pocket. I was short the very day I arrived. And yet--I was dying of the black ass.

King forever, ceasing never, Over us all to reign.

• • •

In your hole. Last bell. Lights out. I had built another day. The silhouetted bars on the far window were blessed with an ethereal glow by the spotlights outside. The yellow plastic eye of a radio glared at me from among the double bunks set up frame to frame in the corridor. There was a soft murmur of Christmas carols being broadcast across those wide, dry deserts of belief and belonging that would forever separate me from the free world. A cigarette brightened. A cupped hand and a gaunt criminal mask became shadow-red in the darkness. A slow and steady measure of heels approached up the corridor. The radio was clicked off. The black cat in the Newcock Court sang his litany of anger and sorrow. From the alcove I could hear the peaceful snores of the judge.