Surviving Justice by Dave Eggers & Dave Eggers

Author:Dave Eggers & Dave Eggers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

I MIGHT AS WELL READ THE BIBLE

When you first go to prison, you have to do fieldwork. You’re called a “New Boot.” You do mostly a lot of flat weeding, which means you go down a row where there’s little weeds growing up around the crops, and you flat weed it. You do that for a really long time, and then you pick vegetables and cotton. Sometimes you go out and chop down trees. A lot of times you like it, because at least you’re getting outside the fence. And then other times you actually cut grass, where you line up, everybody’s got a hoe, and you hit the ground at the same time. They do a counting: “a-one and a-two and a-three and a-four, step.” Sometimes they do a little military singsongy thing.

Traditionally it’s a chain gang, but they don’t chain you together anymore. But they do have a lot of shotguns—a lot of the field officers are dressed as cowboys on horses with guns. Then later you’re offered a job to come inside and work in the kitchen. When you have a long prison sentence, like ten, fifteen, twenty years, you think, “Texas is not paying me to work, so maybe if I work in the kitchen there’s some benefits there, which is the food. You’ll always be able to eat good.”

I was in Ferguson Unit [a prison in Midway, Texas] for eight years. I developed a good relationship with the chaplain. He was new and pretty young, only like thirty-eight. He told me about when he found the Lord. Most of the prison chaplains are Baptists. The Baptist thing for me was interesting, and it was new and it was good in the beginning. But it’s their emphasis on getting saved over and over again, that’s what I didn’t quite reconcile with. The message was that if you believe and if you come to the altar and humble yourself by getting on your knees and saying the sinner’s prayer, then you’re saved. Some people have some kind of emotional lift off their shoulders.

I always thought I was different because I was innocent. I think there are a lot of guys in prison that are having to live with a lot, carrying a lot of guilt around with them. I was interested in finding out why this happened to me. I was interested in the Bible for that reason. In jail, I said, “I might as well read the Bible, I never read it, I might as well,” so I did. And then something started to open up to me and I thought, “Well, wait a minute, look at Joseph.” His brothers sold him into slavery. And then he got put in prison. When he was in prison, he was still a righteous man; God was in his favor. He found out that the king was having bad dreams. Nobody could interpret them, so Joseph interpreted his dreams somehow. One of the dreams was about these cows that were fat and these cows that were really skinny and they represented something about famine.

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