c. 2005 Religion News Service
NEW ORLEANS _ Down a hall in Municipal Auditorium, inside a room about the size of a prison cell and just as drab, things were falling apart for the seven men known as the Voices of Thunder.
First, they were nervous. They had missed their notes during the sound check, and everyone knew it. Second, they were stuck in this room while everyone else was down the hall at the inauguration of their new warden, Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman.
They may be convicts, but they understood that this was a gala, a place to see and be seen. They wanted to be out there _ not in this room, staring at the lone fluorescent light above them, the crumbling ceiling, the walls the color of mustard.
They were on the program, after all, penciled in to sing between “closing remarks” and “reception.” But there was bad news about that as well.
“We’re at the bottom?” one asked.
“Last?” asked another.
It wasn’t exactly what they had pictured all those nights practicing their songs inside Orleans Parish Prison. They may have made a wreck of their lives. On the streets, they may have been drug dealers or drug users, burglars or robbers.
But in jail, they have earned special privileges. They have taken steps to improve themselves, and they are proud of what they have become: Voices of Thunder, members of the inmate gospel choir.
They want people to know that from a life of mistakes, they have made harmony. And everyone knew that Gusman’s inauguration was the biggest show of the season. Hundreds of people would be there, including the mayor, City Council members, legislators and judges. The inmates expected to see their former keeper Charles Foti, who three years ago, before leaving the sheriff’s job and getting elected state attorney general, granted them the chance to sing. And Gusman himself had invited them to perform.
But now, 15 minutes before they were scheduled to take the stage, the choir got the worst news of all.
Their robes weren’t there. Without them, they were informed, they couldn’t sing. The men, having already waited an hour cooped up in the mustard-colored room, hit the ceiling. They paced, hands on their heads, while Lt. Keith Jones, the choir’s founder, got on his cellular phone, trying to save the show.
“Hello … Colonel?” he said, reaching Earl Weaver back at the jail. “Colonel … Nobody told me about no robes. … No. Nobody told me about that. I heard about that when I came over here …”
Jones hung up the phone.
“We’re not singing,” announced Stanley Cushenberry, the oldest of the seven inmates.
“I want to sing,” said Al Sansom, another inmate and the appointed director of the choir. He had prayed for this moment, taking the other inmates’ hands in his. But now it was slipping away.
The inauguration was ending. People were leaving. Their time to sing had come and gone and the choir was silent.
“I want to sing,” Sansom said again. He has a chiseled face and a permanent reminder of his past tattooed on his left cheek: a scorpion.
But at the moment, he didn’t look tough at all. He looked crushed, his big eyes empty, as he craned his neck out the door and down the hall, waiting for the robes to arrive and still wishing for a chance to sing.
From where the choir practices in jail, if you turn your head just so, you can see out a barred window to New Orleans’ Broad Street overpass, the Pontchartrain Expressway and beyond.
It was out there that these men got into trouble: Sansom, 50, was picked up for possession of cocaine and heroin and sentenced to seven years of flat time. Cushenberry, 51, is in jail on a parole violation. The youngest of the men, Val Degree, 27, also is in for a parole violation while Royal Osborne, 48, is the short-timer, the man closest to getting out; he will be released in February after serving 30 months for possession of cocaine. Micheal Noel, 43, is in for robbery and won’t get out until 2006. Tyrone Egana, 34, will follow a short time later, after serving 21/2 years for possession of crack cocaine. He landed in jail last year and joined the choir a month ago.
And then there is John Doty, the baritone. Doty, 38, who is serving a six-year sentence for burglary, was in OPP three years ago serving time for possession of crack when the choir started. He knew Mark Sterling, a former inmate, who has reached something of mythic status around the facility where these men live.
It was Sterling, now 46, who had the voice and the ear to get the choir in tune. But it was Jones who was inspired to get it started.
Hearing Sterling and others singing a Sam Cooke song one night, the lieutenant decided to organize them, teach them gospel standards and send them out into the community. Foti signed off on it _ Jones said the former sheriff told them to never turn down an engagement _ and it happened.
“The thing I try to teach them is they’re brothers here. I try to teach them to come together as one. Because when they get out, they might need each other,” Jones said. “Keep ’em moving. Keep ’em motivated. So when they get out in society, they don’t fall by the wayside.”
The wayside is a place they all know well, and have come to fear. Glenn Wade, a choir member who walked free the day before Gusman’s inauguration, said before his release that he was scared of going back out. “No rush,” he said as the prison van rumbled off to a different show.
Sterling, who was released in August after serving time for possession of cocaine, understood Wade’s concerns. He said he knows at least four former choir members who got out only to get into the same trouble that had landed them in jail. Lydell Decquir, another former inmate and member of the choir who was paroled in May, said it’s hard to avoid.
But it’s not impossible. And for the moment, anyway, he and Sterling are proof. They have jobs, Decquir at a coffee warehouse and Sterling at a repair shop. They come back and sing with the choir when they can, and Sterling is trying to start a band on the outside.
It’s slow going. Sterling said the new band hasn’t landed any gigs yet. The Voices of Thunder choir, meanwhile, has regular engagements. Jones replaces those who leave with others not considered to be a flight risk. When he takes them out, they are not shackled and he does not carry a gun.
Only the letters on their chest _ OPP _ indicate who they are and where they’re from. And that’s exactly what they had planned to wear for Gusman’s inauguration. It was someone else’s idea that those outfits weren’t good enough, that to be a choir they needed robes.
The lieutenant checked his watch. Down the hall, the crowd was leaving. The men began bickering about whether they even wanted to sing at the inauguration anymore, and if they didn’t whether anyone would care. One said they should leave. Others said they had to sing.
Then the robes arrived. They slipped them on, lined up and took the stage.
Those who were there will not remember the holiday performance in December as any Christmas miracle. Most, in fact, were already long gone. Foti had left. So had the mayor. And those who remained were either crowding around the finger sandwiches or waiting to shake Gusman’s hand. Most did not pay attention.
But once the Voices of Thunder began singing, all that melted away and, as usual, they sang their hearts out. Days of practicing with Tonya Boyd Cannon, a new musical director, paid off.
Osborne hit the high note to end “Silent Night.” Sansom remembered to thank both the new sheriff and the old one. He shook his fist in the air, eyes closed, as he told the crowd that the choir was on the right road now, and Doty’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” prompted at least one man to shout, “Y’all are great.”
(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)
Doty accepted the compliment with a smile, but he said nothing about his struggle to get there. He didn’t tell the story he had told 50 juvenile prisoners at a singing engagement in Bridge City the week before: how his 15-year-old nephew had shot Doty’s brother 11 times and killed him, how he received the news in prison, how being there was his own fault.
Degree did not tell the crowd how much it hurt when his 3-year-old daughter asked him recently on the telephone where he was and when he was coming home. And Sansom didn’t talk about how he should be dead, how he had made it to 50 only because he was lucky enough not to overdose or catch a bullet.
“You’ve got a chance right now,” he had told the kids in Bridge City, “not to be like me. This is not where it’s at. I beg of you: Think of what I’m saying. This is not where it’s at.”
On this day, they kept these stories to themselves. They simply walked off the stage, sweating and out of breath, into a stairwell, and then outside to the van waiting to take them back to their tier.
It would have been nice, they agreed, if more people had listened to them. But Doty refused to be negative. What they had done, he said, was beautiful, no matter what. And when they ran into Gusman on their way out the door, it was suddenly all worth it.
He thanked them for coming and they scrambled to thank him, reaching for his hand. Then, before the choir headed back to jail and Gusman back to the party, they all posed for a picture together. And for a moment they weren’t criminals, just ordinary men in long blue robes, smiling ear to ear.
MO/PH END RNS
(Keith O’Brien is a staff writer for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans.)
