and a white headwrap, but no shoes on his enormous dust-covered feet. (“They run off with the props,” he’d said, explaining the lack of sandals.) I remember the actress who was playing Mary being nearly thrown off the back of the donkey, who it turned out had not been quarantined after all and who was braying with a rich, horn-like call that sounded like a Jewish shofar, only louder. I hadn’t been able to figure out who was blowing a horn until I finally went out to look and saw it was the donkey, bucking and rearing, the actress trying to hold on in her biblical tunic and veil, her posture one of helpless resignation. I remember that after everyone was dressed, there was this poignant vision: a long queue of men in one chute, a long queue of women in another, separated by brown bars, waiting for the sound technicians to fit them with their microphones, while in their outlandish costumes they talked in pairs across the bars all down the line—one-to-one, man-to-woman, without exception—as if involved in some sort of Bible-themed speed dating. It reminded me of Mary Bell at lunch the other day, sending those almost imperceptible smiles to the men behind me. I remember an excitement and focus to those conversations that was reminiscent of high school. I remember all that, but what I missed was some fracas in the distance, a scuffling that was over almost as soon as it began. I learned later what it was. It was two actors, a man and woman, who’d been detained by the guards for embracing each other too long. I heard a rumor later that they were husband and wife.
So you see, I often missed what really happened, even as I was trying my best to assess everything for what it really was.
I found Kendrick two mornings later behind the arena, barefoot and in the hooded robe that was his costume, sipping coffee by himself on a wooden bench. It was not just the monk-like robe that made him look baleful—his mood that day was different, menacing and closed off. It seemed to take him a few seconds to even recognize me. He looked off to one side, down a line of large blue plastic barrels full of bottled water, perhaps ashamed of some things he’d told me earlier. The day before, he’d claimed that he knew who’d really committed the murder he was incarcerated for: it was a young man who was only twenty at the time. He said that he would never divulge the man’s name, that he couldn’t put someone like that in prison, even if it meant getting out himself—he knew too much now about what it was like here, no one deserved to be in a place like this. He shared this with me on a set of crowded bleachers, in everyone’s view (in prison, unless you’re in solitary confinement, there’s almost never any privacy), and he looked straight into my eyes, his own eyes moistening in urgency and embarrassment by the end. He looked straight ahead at nothing for a while, then finally raised his chin at another inmate, not in friendship or greeting but in something like simple acknowledgment. It occurred to me that life there was an unending performance shaped by the constant gazes of other people. It was impossible to know what to believe. Self-deprecation, self-awareness, ironic distance—these traits of sincerity can be faked but can they be faked beyond detection? If Kendrick was a liar, then he practiced the art of lying at a preternaturally subtle level that I’ve seldom seen matched in any other art form, which is to say that the performance contained no trace of artifice.
It was the day of the first performance when I found him on that bench in his robe with his coffee. Along with his costume, he was wearing a wristwatch he liked to wear, its band a braid of white plastic, its thickly bezeled face vaguely nautical. I asked him if his mother was coming—there was a free bus from New Orleans he’d mentioned before—but he said he didn’t think so, he hadn’t heard from her, things were not good for him right now.
“I ain’t seen my daughter in nine years,” he said then. “She’s twelve now. You have kids?”
“No.”
“No kids?”
“We didn’t want any. It was by choice.”
He became scientifically neutral, assessing this. “I was hoping my daughter would come out today,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“I know you can’t do nothing for me. I understand that. You’re not a lawyer. That’s not why you’re here.”
He said he was done with the courts anyway, done with filing briefs—his appeals process had been exhausted years ago. He said that his one hope now was that someday he might get legal asylum in Saint Lucia, his mother’s birth country, where he qualified for citizenship. That was his last chance—if they weren’t going to give him parole, then maybe they’d at least let him go to Saint Lucia, where his family came from.
I said I hoped so. I hope so. I meant it in good faith, but given where we were it was impossible to say it without at least a trace of bad faith.
I wrote down his DOC number in my notebook and said I’d send him a letter when I got back to New Orleans. I didn’t know yet that he wouldn’t be permitted to receive it.
The day of that first performance was bleak, the sky the color of soot, the forecast predicting storms. There were maybe a hundred and fifty of us in the audience, about two thirds of whom were inmates, watching in the cold as a line of actors and actresses in shepherd’s robes, including Kendrick, took their places in the center of the arena. Their garments were sand-colored, with rope belts and hoods that resembled those of desert saints in some early Renaissance painting. They began singing some minor-key phrases, their voices dirgelike and plush, a sound of grief, and before they could finish the first verse the sky erupted in a heavy rain that engulfed them. From my place in the grandstand, the downpour was like a white scrim obscuring everything before me. Beneath the awning, out of the weather, an inmate was doing sign language to a group of fellow inmates who were deaf. The narrator was delivering a prologue, telling us that his name was Luke, that he was there to tell us the story of our dear Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, while across the aisle from me a woman who must have been an inmate’s mother held up a digital camera, as if by continuing to film the play she could prevent it from being canceled. The singers’ voices were beautiful and they were beautiful in their beige and white biblical costumes, but the rain was so strong that you could hardly pay attention to anything else. The Virgin Mary hunkered in her salmon tunic as the archangel Gabriel announced to her that she would soon have a miraculous child. Despite the rain, the actors were staying in character—it was what they were there to demonstrate, their ability to maintain self-discipline—but it seemed almost certain that they would have to call the play off in another minute or two.
As if in response, the Shepherds broke into full-fledged song, a gospel standard in a minor key called “Mary, Did You Know?” They had worked out the harmonies themselves, wide, surprising chords that flirted with the edges of atonality, Kendrick’s deep bass undergirding it all. Mary, did you know, the blind will see, the deaf will hear, the dead will live again. Their singing was almost casual in its flawlessness, even as the rain lashed down on them. The juxtaposition of those two facts seemed to suggest that this situation was not so different from any other day in their unluxurious lives.
I saw the play many times, but in that first performance, begun in the heavy rain, something happened that reason tells me was mere coincidence but that the spirit of the day made seem uncanny. It was still raining. John the Baptist had just been charged with blasphemy, a mob had formed, and at the moment they were about to attack him John looked up and saw Jesus approaching in the distance. It was His first entrance. Suddenly the rain stopped—it didn’t wane, it ceased completely. It was implausible how tranquil the weather became at the moment He appeared. The sudden lull resulted in a chorus of birdsong—so many birds started singing at once that you could barely hear Jesus’ first words over the PA system. John baptized Him in an artificial oasis, then the actor playing Jesus did something I hadn’t seen in rehearsals, so it surprised me. He pulled from beneath his green robe a live dove he’d been hiding in his hand. When he released it, it flew out above the grandstand—all those singing birds and then a live dove escaping from His robe.
I hope so, I’d
