Pray, Tell
The story behind this month's cover story.
texasmonthly.com: How did this story come about?
PC: We had followed the Santa Fe case from a distance for quite a while, but by June, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision, the story really seemed to have come to an end. Then this summer, the Nevelows filed suit against the Santa Fe school district. That caught the attention of the magazine's editors. At that point, we were curious about the fact that the fight for school prayer and the verbal attacks on the Nevelow boy had happened in the same tiny town. My initial question going into this story was very straightforward: Were these two things coincidence, or were they somehow connected? I went to the first football game of the Santa Fe season in early September and began setting up interviews then. I wanted to understand why Santa Fe—out of all the towns in Texas—was the place that took its case all the way to the Supreme Court.
texasmonthly.com: What did you learn? In your mind, why was it Santa Fe rather than another town?
PC: I believe it was a combination of things. Some school board members really wanted, I think, to test the law in this area, and so they pushed this case as far as it could go. For some ministers in Santa Fe, it lent a sense of urgency to their work. And, of course, there would have been no case in the first place if the Does hadn't filed suit. Many, many people in Santa Fe—including the mayor, Robert Cheek—expressed their anger toward the Does during the course of interviews, suggesting that they needed to learn how to live in Santa Fe, or leave. There is still a lot of anger in that community toward the Does.
texasmonthly.com: I know you've said that the story was basically already over by the time you started working on it. Did that deter you at first? How were you able to get your story?
PC: People in Santa Fe were tired of media attention by the time I arrived. The local press had covered the case since it was filed in 1995, and by the time the Supreme Court decision was handed down this June, I think the whole town was weary of the media coverage. So it was hard at first to get people to talk. I wrote letters to many of the people I hoped to speak to, and then followed those letters up with many, many phone calls. The hardest interview to get was with the Does, since they must still guard their identities from the public. I ultimately was able to interview one of the Doe daughters, who lent an important voice to this story. And yes, on a superficial level, this story was largely over by the time I arrived. But what became clear after interviewing Ms. Doe, the Masons, and the Nevelows, was that their lives were still profoundly changed on a day-to-day level by what had happened. Their lives will never be the same. So in that sense, the story wasn't over at all.
texasmonthly.com: How did you get all of your information? How do you know where to go next?
PC: To learn the basic progression of the case, I first read through old court records and newspaper clips. Then the bulk of information came from talking to school board members, ministers, attorneys, parents, and teenagers on both sides of the case. One person led to another, who led to another. There are many people I interviewed who I wasn't able to quote—because I wasn't writing a book—but my conversations with them informed the overall piece. I attended a youth group meeting at a local church, and I spent a good amount of time driving around Santa Fe, trying to get a feel for it. The Busy Bee Cafe, which is the town hub, was a terrific place to sit and listen.
texasmonthly.com: When you were at the Busy Bee Cafe, did people try to guard their conversations?
PC: People may have been guarded in their conversations, but I don't think so. There was just a lot of general conversation—about the football team, about horses, about the weather—that gave me a feel for the community. One of the most interesting conversations happened when I attended a youth group meeting at a local church. The teenagers there felt strongly that there should be prayer before football games, but they seemed open to a lot of different ideas, like having a moment of silence before the game in which people could choose to pray. They were willing to engage in a conversation about school prayer, weighing the pluses and minuses of it in a thoughtful way. It was their parents who were much more rigid about it.
texasmonthly.com: Was it hard for you to separate your personal feelings on the subject from this story?
PC: I tried very, very hard to be objective. During the course of writing this story, I thought a lot about a comment that Richard Ownby, the superintendent of the Santa Fe school district, made during our interview about the Doe case. He said, "We've always tried to be neutral. But everyone has a different idea of what neutral is." Everyone does have a different idea of what neutral is, and though I tried hard to include everyone's perspectives in this article, I'm sure that I will be faulted by some for not being neutral enough. Many of these issues are irreconcilable, in the same way that the issues in a much greater holy war—which is currently going on in the Middle East—are irreconcilable. Some feel that prayer should be part of public life, while others don't. I'm not sure there's any middle ground.
And yes, sometimes it was hard to separate my personal feelings from this story. I was deeply bothered by the fact that the school board had limited children's access to books—in particular, books that I grew up reading that gave me a love of writing. I was also deeply disturbed by the fact that some adults in this community seemed relatively unconcerned about the suffering of children like Danielle Mason or Phillip Nevelow.
texasmonthly.com: Was this story more difficult to write than others you have worked on?
