their last breath to the Grim Reaper? It is a forbidding task. A work of venturing to that City of Sighs that should, with a certain cruel justification, bear a legend etched into stone worthy of the inscription in the arch over Dante’s Gate of Hell: “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate”—“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
It has been many long years and almost ten books since I lived in the crisp white pages of Death Blossoms. Around that time, I had come within thirteen days of an execution date, and would soon be given another exact date to die. I handwrote the pages of this book on three-ring-binder paper after meeting members of a remarkable group called the Bruderhof, a community located in the highlands of western Pennsylvania dedicated to the vision that “another life is possible”—a “love your neighbor, share everything” life “where there are no rich or poor. Where everyone is cared for, everyone belongs, and everyone can contribute.” The Bruderhof were, as refugees from Hitler’s Germany, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and deeply opposed to the death penalty. I found them intriguing. We conversed together about their ideas, and out of those conversations—and the sense that I might soon be killed by the state—grew Death Blossoms.
Much has changed since that moment in time; but woefully, much has also remained the same. As of January 2019, 2,664 souls still languish on death row in the United States, 145 of them in Pennsylvania.
Over the years, some who were sentenced to die have made the leap across the moat into real life: Freedom. Most of those have done well, but all have nightmares of their years on death row: its cacophony, its rank smells, its bits of sheer madness, its ever-present threat of violence.
As I write these words, a lawsuit is making its way through the tunnels of the Pennsylvania judiciary seeking the abolition of the House of Death. But as it is now, more than 140 souls still languish in the twilight of death row. One man—Sug—was forced to wait eleven years—eleven years!—for a retrial. When it finally took place, the district attorney continued to argue for Sug’s execution, but a Philadelphia jury refused to send him back to the Row.
Thus, the stories that originally populated the pages of Death Blossoms continue to bloom in dark, dank places. Souls weep, souls spin, souls creep fitfully toward the light. Souls sing, souls keen, and souls soar toward their highest and best selves, despite the obscenity of death row and its political architects.
Death row may have shrunken in size, but it hasn’t lost its social and political significance. Politicians continue to play the Game of Fear that allows them to construct more ways to exercise state terror against the wretched of the earth.
But a new wind may be blowing through the air; the cries of groups like Black Lives Matter and its spirited affiliates nationwide have burst open doors once chained and cemented closed.
Young people, bold as life, have identified these sites of state terror and are calling for their abolition. They have already run repressive district attorneys out of office in a half dozen cities across America.
May this work, now reaching its third life, give fuel and heft to their noble efforts, for only social movements truly change history.
From Life Row,
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Autumn 2019
FOREWORD
Cornel West
The passionate and prophetic voice of Mumia Abu-Jamal challenges us to wrestle with the most distinctive feature of present-day America: the relative erosion of the systems of caring and nurturing. This frightening reality, which renders more and more people unloved and unwanted, results primarily from several fundamental processes. There are, for example, the forces of our unregulated capitalist market, which have yielded not only immoral levels of wealth inequality and economic insecurity but also personal isolation and psychic disorientation. Then there is the legacy of white supremacy, which—in subtle and not-so-subtle ways—continues to produce new forms of geographical segregation, job ceilings, and social tension. We can also see how, in other arenas, oppressive ideologies and persisting bigotries (like patriarchy and homophobia) smother the possibility of healthy and humane relations among men and women. In short, our capitalist “civilization” is killing our minds, bodies, and souls in the name of the American Dream.
As one who has lived on the night-side of this dream—unjustly imprisoned for a crime he did not commit—Mumia Abu-Jamal speaks to us of the institutional injustice and spiritual impoverishment that permeates our culture. He reminds us of things most fellow citizens would rather deny, ignore, or evade. And, like the most powerful critics of our society—from Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, and Nathaniel West to Ann Petry, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and Eugene O’Neill—he forces us to grapple with the most fundamental question facing this country: What does it profit a nation to conquer the whole world and lose its soul? After decades of nightmarish jail conditions, Mumia Abu-Jamal’s soul is not only intact but still flourishing—just as the nation’s soul withers. Will we ever listen to and learn from our bloodstained prophets?
Cambridge, Mass
PREFACE
Julia Wright
Under a government that imprisons any man unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Henry David Thoreau, 1817–1862
Does the silk-worm expend her yellow labours for thee? For thee does she undo herself?
Cyril Tourneur, c. 1575–1626
There are all sorts of silences—as many perhaps as there are textures to our sense of touch or shades of color to the eye. But I will always remember the extraordinary silence that fell over a Pittsburgh courtroom on October 13, 1995, when an African-American journalist and world-known author walked in slow motion, his feet in chains, to present testimony in his own civil suit against his prison (SCI Greene) and Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections for violation of his human rights. His name—Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Ripples of silence froze in his shackled footsteps. As if on’a move waves could be stilled, this was a silence of total paradox: the volatile, scarcely hidden presence of loaded police weapons targeting the reined-in love of members of the family in the courtroom—men, women, and children who have been unable to touch him for fourteen years. I was reminded of Coleridge’s uncannily arrested sea: a spell cast against the forces of life. Having at last reached the stand in hi-tech noiselessness (America now produces silent chains for her prisoners’ feet), a gentle giant spoke and was unbound by his own words.
The defense team for SCI Greene proceeded to interrogate Mumia, asking him repeatedly whether he knew he was violating prison rules when he wrote his book Live From Death Row. “Yes,” quietly. (A tremor through the silence.) Did he know he was violating the same rules when he accepted payment for articles, commentaries, etc. . . ? “Yes,” in soft-spoken, vibrant tones. (The silence stirs.) Did he know that the current punishment for entering into “the illicit business of writing” behind bars was ninety days in the “hole” and a prison investigation justifying the monitoring of his mail and limited access to all categories of visitors including family, paralegals, spiritual counselors, the press? “Yes,” patiently, wearily. (The silence vibrates but congeals again, oily and ominous.)
“Why then, if you knew, did you go ahead and write that book?”
“Because, whatever the cost to me, I knew I had to offer to the world a window
