Today is Floyd Dore’s 77th birthday. That’s ‘Floyd Door-ay’, not ’Floyd Door’, but we call him Boo, like most people do.
Boo lives in Camp F at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Angola.
Camp F is the trusty camp. The privileged trusty status is earned through a combination of length of time incarcerated and good behaviour. Trusty’s get the better jobs and a bit more freedom to move around within Angola’s 18,000 acres—that’s about 4,000 acres larger than Manhattan—along with the same bad food (a ‘state tray’) and the same dorms with no air conditioning.
Boo has been in Angola for 47 years. He’ll most likely die there, because he’s serving a life sentence for murder, and in Louisiana, life means life.
Angola is stuffed full with lifers. According to the Louisiana Department of Corrections’ Demographic Dashboard [link], 78.2% of the prison’s 3,837 occupants are serving life terms.
The road to Camp F
From New Orleans, the prison is about a two-and-a-quarter hour drive on a good day. On a bad day, when Baton Rouge has ones of its distressingly regular major traffic jams, it can take four hours or more.
The last 20 minutes of the drive is along a beautiful, winding, two-lane road called Tunica Trace. This bucolic byway comes to a jarring halt at the gates of Angola.
Overhead view of Angola Prison
Visitors usually have to leave their cars at the gate, get processed through security, and then wait for a prison bus to take them to their ultimate destination within the prison: one of the main camps, the hospital, death row.
About 10 years ago, Warden Burl Cain said to Helen, “Sister, if I let you drive your own car into the prison, you won’t try to bust anyone out, will ya?” Helen assured him she had no intention of doing so, and so now when we go, we drive up to the gates, walk through security while officers check the car, and then drive to our destination.
Camp F is about a 10-minute drive from the prison gates. To get there, you drive past the main prison and hospital, past fields of okra and collard greens and beets and corn, worked by men under the withering Southern sun.
Turn right past the okra and the road wends its way past Camp D. Keep on going past the bird conservation area and you’ll finally come to the Death House and then Camp F.
Aerial view of Death Row (top), Camp F (middle), and the Death House and chapel (bottom)
Boo
Helen first got to know Boo when she was visiting Eddie Sonnier, Patrick Sonnier’s younger brother. If you’ve read Dead Man Walking, you’ll recall that Pat was the first man that Helen visited on death row.
Boo and Eddie were great friends, in a place where friendship is a rare thing. The rules, constant monitoring, and hardship breed caution and suspicion; making a true friend in such an environment is a feat.
When Eddie died in 2013, Boo was cast adrift. He tends to keep to himself, spending much of his time in the workshop where he has handled most of the prison’s welding needs for the past 27 years. If you want to refit a prison van, fix a gas line, or order a seriously well-built barbecue pit, Boo’s your man.
Boo knows he is almost certain to die in Angola, as Eddie did. He said to me this visit, “I did a terrible thing that I will carry as a burden to the grave, and probably beyond.”
That knowledge hangs over each of our visits, even as we enjoy the time swapping stories and sharing food (good food—not the usual inmate fare—made by members of a couple of the prison clubs.)
The surreal world of death row
On death row, we visit Manuel Ortiz.
You might expect that our visits with Manuel, who has been on the Row for 30 years for a crime he did not commit, would be even more fraught than our time with Boo, especially since Louisiana’s newly-elected governor has been on a tear to get the execution chamber, long dormant, back into operation. But that’s not the case.
For some years, almost the only thing Manuel could talk about during our visits was his case, and little wonder! His trial was saturated with prosecutorial misdoings; his trial lawyer failed to challenge crucial errors; and, since he received his conviction, he has discovered that the most vulnerable person in the criminal justice system is the one who is truly innocent.
Over time, though, our visits have developed into joyful occasions. We still regularly discuss Manuel’s case, but our conversations also range far and wide, from classic movies—Manuel’s great passion—to US and world politics, to research for Helen’s new book, which will focus on Manuel’s case, to the everyday happenings in our lives. Yesterday, we were in stitches recounting our favourite bits in Mel Brooks’ ‘Young Frankenstein’, recalling each of the characters with relish.
It may seem strange that I call these times with Manuel joyful, given his situation and that we see each other in a tiny room in Death Row’s visiting wing, watched through a one-way mirror by a guard, But in some ways, it is the terribleness of his incarceration and sentence that intensify our delight in one another. Although he rarely mentions it, we are acutely aware that for him, these visits are the only good hours in his existence.
The drive home
I usually park my car just outside the gate, so Helen drops me off there. In the car, I keep a mug of coffee. I’m not a big coffee drinker, but one of the things I learned early on in my visits to Angola, is that the cognitive dissonance of experiencing joyful visits inside a house of death tends to play out on the way home. Even though I leave Manuel delighted, as soon as I step outside Angola I am wrung out. After my first times there, I found myself having microsleeps on the narrow, winding Tunica Trace. That mug of coffee keeps me going until I can collapse at home.