The Prison Walls Talk, With a Rodeo as a Backdrop

It sounded improbable. Questionable, even. An inmate rodeo at Louisiana’s legendary Angola prison, with murderers, rapists and robbers as the bull riders and broncobusters?

Intrigued, author Dan Bergner and his wife drove the 45 miles from their home in Baton Rouge to the prison, a sprawling plantation of cellblocks, outbuildings and farm fields tucked into an oxbow of the Mississippi River.

Bergner recalls that any beauty of the setting quickly faded against the reality of the rodeo itself. It was, he says, a bizarre display of naked violence, with untrained horses and wild bulls repeatedly trampling and mauling inmate-cowboys who had been drawn by a small cash jackpot and hopes of glory.

“We were pretty amazed and troubled,” Bergner, now in his late 30s, says of that first visit to Angola 10 years ago. “The contrast between the beauty and the sadness left me with a sense of mystery, and a desire to know what place there could be for faith. I wanted to come back in a position to find out more about it.”

He eventually talked Harper’s magazine into commissioning an article on the rodeo, which led to the recently published “God of the Rodeo” (Crown; 297 pages; $24), about his yearlong “search for hope, faith and a six-second ride.”

What emerged from his visits is a portrait of a de facto small town populated by violent criminals, complete with caste system, barter-based economy and a single annual event--the rodeo--to anchor the social calendar.

But Bergner also discovered a sense of resilience and humanity among people whose violent acts--some of them chillingly depraved--had left them segregated from what passes for normal American society.

“For some of those guys,” says Bergner, now a part-time high school literature teacher in New York City, “the struggling to elevate themselves was not only moving, but pretty dramatic.”

Bergner says he is less interested in expose and reform than in the persistence of humanity among people from whom it is not expected, in places where it is not encouraged.

Personal transformations among the inmates, he says, inevitably came from within, and in small incremental steps.

One inmate he followed, armed robber Littell Harris, left prison during the year Bergner was there. “To watch Littell get out of prison with 10 bucks and a bus ticket back to the city of his crime . . . and turn his life around is not just a reminder of how people can transform themselves,” Bergner says, “but that we all have Littell’s rage and also Littell’s goodness somewhere within us.

“So I guess that’s the happy message from a repeat armed robber. He’s an odd role model. But (his) sheer effort alone is in some way inspiring.”

Bergner expected at the outset of the project to find despair within Angola. And he did, in some measure. But he didn’t expect the reservoirs of religious faith he found among men whose crimes had made them demons in the eyes of the world outside.

“Some of them manipulate and try to use it” as a way to get out, Bergner acknowledges. But “for others, it’s really a sincere effort at both survival and clinging to or reclaiming some kind of humanity that they gave up, or lost, in what they did to get (into prison in the first place).”

Still, Bergner is uneasy about his own sympathetic feelings for convicted murderers like Buckkey Lasseigne, who during a PCP-fueled robbery coldly executed an unarmed convenience store clerk.

Lasseigne’s son was a young child at the time, and one of the book’s most compelling undercurrents follows Lasseigne’s futile efforts to regain a relationship with the boy who, as a teenager, has rejected his father.

“I would back away from the closeness (with Lasseigne the inmate), thinking of my own kids, thinking (Lasseigne) ought to be dead,” Bergner says. “But I was totally pulling for him to succeed to see his son. I was very much attached to him. He’s a complicated person who is a kind person in many ways.”

It’s only one example of a dialectic that Bergner sees within the prison that defies easy categorization and pat explanations.

“Many things can be true at once. A place can be beautiful and terrible. A man can have done some irreversible harm, and be compellingly human.”

In prisons, to which the criminals have been consigned for both public protection and individual punishment, a cloak of invisibility slowly drops. The criminals cease to exist for all but the victims’ families, and their own.

Bergner finds that disquieting.

“The oblivion we have staked out is immoral,” he says. “I think we have to know the people we’ve decided to take control of.”