Long walk: Exploring race, society and the great outdoors

We were teeing off at Prison View Golf Course, a 6,000-yard track inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary. The afternoon sun was blazing, but Burl Cain looked relaxed in bright plaid shorts as he waggled over his golf ball. Cain, at the time, was the prison’s warden, and it had taken weeks of pestering to get on his calendar. In penitentiary circles, Burl Cain reigned as a god, beloved for the kinder, gentler image he spun out of a 20,000-acre plot infamously known as Angola, the country’s largest maximum security prison.

Cain’s passion is innovation. At Angola, nestled between the Mississippi River and the western border of the Tunica Hills, he created a museum, a public restaurant known for its po’ boys, eight churches, a television station, a hospice program, you name it. Most popular is the Angola Rodeo, where inmates risk death riding bulls and wrestling steer to cheering crowds from all over the world. He opened the golf course in 2004 as a perk for the prison’s some 600 employees and their families who live within the grounds’ so-called “B-line” residential area.

I stood away as the warden coiled his pudgy frame and whacked the ball off the edge of a steep cliff onto the fairway.

“That’ll work,” he said, in a thick Louisiana drawl.

As I stepped over to the tee, my eyes were drawn to a couple of shiny pieces of metal jutting from opposite sides of the tee box. I leaned in for a closer look: shackles, forged as stylish tee markers. I wanted to shake off the sight as benign, as a work of not-so-clever public art. But it was more than that. It was marketing. Cain’s prison was a business, a global brand, like Pepsi or Mickey Ds. I recalled my entry, passing through a gift shop stocked with Angola-branded coffee cups, hot sauce, baby clothes.

Standing between shackles, I ripped my drive, a bad slice, deep onto the neighboring fairway. The errant drive, I now understand, was a fitting start for my time at Angola.

There are few trips in life that I’ve regretted taking. Playing golf at Angola — even more than a decade ago — is one of them. Till this day, I am not sure why I ever thought playing golf in a prison to be a good idea. The act of golf, in itself, taunts the soul. The sport is white-bred and pretentious and isolated from the world’s real problems. To play the sport in a prison is more cruel than fun. In years since, I have tried to forgive myself, reasoning that, aside from my own morbid curiosity, a pushy P.R. guy with Louisiana’s tourism department played a role in my lapse in judgment. I remember vividly the moment; trim and tanned in polo shirt and khakis, the flack sat in a French Quarter restaurant gushing to a group of journalists about Prison View, “a hidden gem” is how he put it, boasting a panoramic view of the prison, colorful flower beds, pristine greens — all meticulously maintained by Angola’s green-thumbed inmates.

“I’m not sure whether you play golf, but if you do, definitely treat yourself to a round at Angola,” he said, “if only for the novelty of it.”

After a few holes at Prison View, I felt weary from the heat as I rode alongside Burl Cain, whose livelihood was in warehousing Black men, from the fact that, at this moment, we were side by side. Looking out across this former plantation, its namesake inspired by the country raided for human chattel, a sense of grief washed over me. This green space thrives on Black pain; even after Emancipation, a former Confederate army officer bought the property and went on to house prisoners in slave quarters and lease them out to private companies as labor to build levees, roads and harvest crops. Even today, more than two-thirds of Angola’s inmates are Black.

With our golf round finished and the sun descending, Burl Cain sent an underling to transport some inmates over to talk to me about their work beautifying the course. A few minutes later, a flatbed truck pulled up carrying about a dozen Black men. The brothers looked tired, sweaty, suspicious. I walked over and shook each of their hands. I didn’t mention golf. Or flowers. I couldn’t. I just looked at them, and they looked at me. We were a strange sight that day, novelties all of us.