Down in the Chapel: Religious Life in an American Prison by Dubler Joshua

Author:Dubler, Joshua [Dubler, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2013-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

FRIDAY

THESIS 4

The order observed by men at Graterford conforms as a rule to a Manichaean logic: the self wars for sovereignty with its baser inclinations, a dynamic that recapitulates the agony of a universe torn between God and the Adversary. Between the psyche and its cosmic mirror, we find a social realm similarly divided. Indeed, it may well be the social world of the Philly ghetto and its epic history of tribal warfare that furnishes the template. Much blood was spilled. With each man sacrificed, the once arbitrary boundary between gang and gang, neighborhood and neighborhood, was reinforced. And for every man left standing today, another, at least, lies underground.

While the aging lifers no longer swear allegiance to the degraded symbols those men died for, the habits of rancor persevere. Here acculturation to the prison plays a regenerative role: If I didn’t know a guy on the outside, I sure as hell ain’t gonna get to know him in this place! While this doctrine isn’t always lived in practice, it is lived enough to preserve, in the chapel’s religious subgroups, the trenches of gang and neighborhood along which men died and killed. Before the stakes of existence became eternal life and death, the vicissitudes of life and death were already too real. Before a man came to assiduously police himself against the deviations and innovations of men who would lead him off God’s path, he already policed street corners and back alleys for men who wished him harm. If a man is a lifer, then on at least one of those occasions another life (or lives) ended and his own was destroyed. As long as the exiled lifer wanders in this desert, the umbrella he has jerry-rigged to provide him just a little bit of shade will recast the shadow of the Angel of Death. In this shadow grows resentment.

Here, too, exceptions prove an opposing rule. In spite of the psychic, social, and cosmic forces driving toward war, men labor concertedly to impede such percolating tribulations. Rancor seethes, but wiser heads prevail.

* * *

Vic is mopping the vestibule floor. Baraka and the Imam are in the Imam’s office, quietly talking. Teddy is at his desk, looking shell-shocked.

“Did you sleep?” I ask him.

He shakes his head no. Kazi arrives with a “What’s going on?” and sits down at Sayyid’s desk. Baraka closes the door to the Imam’s office. Across the hall on the Catholic side, Mike sits at his desk, reading the paper. In the chapel, Santana and Muti—the lowest-profile chapel worker—are lining up mics along the front of the stage. Al walks the center aisle in my direction, a coil of stereo wire draped over his shoulder. “Josh’s got the Holy Ghost,” he sings at me, as if only to himself, inducing in me a head bop for the same audience.

“So, that Prophet,” I say, “he’s sure got a lot of energy, that guy.”

“Sure does,” Al says. “Him and the other three people that live in his head. That’s why

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