Knowing what we know, having become witnesses, can we continue to live and let die?
DEATH BLOSSOMS raises the issue of the innocence of one man—any man—at the hands of an elitist society that manufactures and projects its guilt upon its citizens in order to enrich itself. I am reminded here of my father’s character, Fred Daniels, in The Man Who Lived Underground. Pursued by the police for a crime he did not commit, Daniels is robbed of his innocence and escapes underground into the city’s sewers to avoid capture. As he tries to survive in hiding by resorting to stealing, he takes to peering through cellar doors and invisibly watches others being robbed of their innocence as they are punished for his thefts. After an old watchman falsely accused on his account commits suicide, Daniels understands from the depths of his netherworld that we are all robbed of our innocence and are therefore all condemned to guilt. He emerges from the sewers with the urge to share this truth with the world:
If he could show them what he had seen, then they would feel what he had felt, and they in turn would show it to others, and those others would feel as they had felt, and soon everybody would be governed by the same impulse of pity.
Similar threads of poignant hope and faith in justice run through Death Blossoms, making visible witnesses of us all. Veronica Jones, a hounded witness in Mumia’s case, was moved by the same impulse when she recently came forward to set a false record straight, but she was arrested at the stand for sticking to the truth of what she saw—a man running away—and for courageously accepting the responsibility that goes with taking the truth out of the “underground.”
Our America, geographically so vast and rich, historically so young and green, has traditionally preferred the materialism of space to the invisible threads time spins through her landscapes and the experience of her restless peoples. Mumia’s writing reconnects us with a much-needed sense of continuity, with the history of our birth as a people on western shores through the Middle Passage, with our ensuing struggle down through time, ongoing, on’a move.
For Mumia, a wholistic struggle—the warp and woof of it—unfolds not only in terms of space-oriented internationalism, but also through the transgenerational glue contained in the web parabole. It is sadly ironical, though, that such an appreciation of the spiritual essence of time should come from a death row inmate who lacks the material wealth that buys life-time in America. But Mumia, with characteristic selflessness, enjoins us to look beyond ourselves at the fragile blooms of our children, and help them “dwell in the house of tomorrow,” where we may not be.
A BLOSSOM IS one of the life forms most bound up with the message of time. The fruit it becomes holds in its flesh the memory of the grand bud that came before it, and the foretaste of its passage through rot. According to the most haunting of blues, sung by the sister with the eternal magnolia in her hair, there were many “strange fruit” hanging from our Southern trees. But do our landscapes remember? According to legend, death flowers (also called “mandragore”) grew under innocent men who had swung high. These blooms held wondrous powers of fertility and continuum in the hands of the damned of the earth.
As I was reading the manuscript of Death Blossoms, I received a deeply moving letter from Mumia recounting his grief at the violent death of Tupac Shakur—a Panther family child, a promising but unfulfilled cub nipped in the bud. “What loss!” Mumia writes. “The son of a Panther who never knew his mother’s glory; who called himself a ‘thug;’ who never realized his truest self, his truest power.” Mumia’s words will strike a deep chord in those of us who have had to teach our children to become mental guerrillas, and to thread their way through the grim statistics of their own mortality. “Every two hours, one of you dies of gunshot wounds,” we force ourselves to teach them.
MUMIA’S INABILITY to touch the grandchildren born to him while on death row is, microcosmically, a double bind experienced by far too many in our decaying “communities:” the intergenerational connections of life are eroded, foreshortened at both ends of our life spans. Targeted by the FBI as a child, Mumia cannot bond with his own children, or theirs—and all have been robbed. My father, Richard Wright, would have met my children and theirs, had he not died in his prime, in unelucidated circumstances. Our generations are torn asunder and brushed aside like cobwebs; they are cut off and isolated—as if on their own death row.
Over half a century after Native Son, Bigger—my paper brother—still haunts America, because in his premature death at the hands of the state, there was a foretaste of coming rot. Tupac? Another real-life native son in the long chain since decimation. We live and breathe this state of recurrent loss! We need to be able to find the right rites to mourn so many thousands gone, if only to prevent the next ones from going. Because those slain in childhood will have no children. . . .
It is a healing strength of this book that Mumia, who lives at such mortal risk, can hand us the connective strands of a net to throw far over the great divide, towards generations of children we may never get to know or see or touch. But as he makes clear, we can love them ahead, preventively. And maybe this bond-net, flung far across time as a Love Supreme, will keep them from going too unfortified, too gentle into the bad night of renewed bondage.
Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol are prime examples of forbidden works written and banned at the end of the nineteenth century, only to become universally loved in the twentieth.
And so here are Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Death Blossoms — timelessly.
Paris October 1996
TO THE READER
Steve Wiser
The corridors leading to death row at SCI Greene, Pennsylvania’s state-of-the-art supermax, are spanking new. Floor tiles gleam like glass; off-white block walls blend with steel blue window frames and hand rails; smells of wax and lemon-scented detergents permeate the hallways. Even the germs are killed. It’s like a hospital—except for one thing: the absence of humanity.
Electronic devices control and monitor every human motion. Cleverly concealed video cameras beam silently from every angle; small speakers crackle in concrete walls. From behind thick glass panels, uniformed guards follow each step. It is enough to make one feel naked, for—literally—the very walls have eyes and ears.
At the end of the long, empty passage is a set of double, remotely controlled doors; beyond them a bleak guard station serves as the command center of L-5. It is the epicenter of this industrial edifice. Yet here one comes face to face with what the system tries hardest to conceal: humanity. Humanity, in all its warmth, richness, and earthiness.
I first met Mumia Abu-Jamal in May, 1995. I had no idea what to expect. I had visited numerous prisons before, from Bastille-like fortresses in Great Britain to Nigerian hell-holes where (instead of razor wire) the walls were lined with vultures, their hideous shriveled heads peering this way and that. But I had never been to a death house.
DEATH ROW WAS A SHOCK. But I was even less prepared to meet the man I had come to visit there: a tall, athletically built African-American whose joie de vivre filled his tiny visiting compartment and seemed to overflow, through the Plexiglas partition separating us, into mine. Sitting there opposite him, I discovered a brilliant, compassionate, hearty, articulate man—a man of rare character, tempered and profoundly deepened by suffering.
From the outset, Mumia and I found ourselves communicating heart to heart. To a passing guard, it must have been a strange sight: two cellmates, as it were—one a bald, white minister from a religious order, the other an African-American inmate whose long dreadlocks and urban savvy betrayed an entirely different background.
