This is not classic autobiography or even “intellectual” biography. It is the narrative of an escape from prison into the liberated territory of the mind, a pacing not of the cage but of the psyche, a jogging not in the pen but in the open space Mumia calls “reaching beyond.” We are privileged that he takes us with him on a liberating tour of his own freedom. Resolutely on’a move within his own spiritual quest, Mumia makes us understand that “free” men and women can imprison and arrest their own revolutions just as “inmates” can set free a boundless revolution of the mind. As Frantz Fanon, the late psychiatrist and freedom fighter, wrote in his Wretched of the Earth, “Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”
Our minds are indeed bombarded with media hype and racial stereotypes. Who does not recall the Disneyland face of a womanchild tearfully describing (for primetime consumption) the black “monster” who murdered her two small boys? Except that this killer turned out to be the figment of her own homicidal imagination. . . . Yet how many Mumia Abu-Jamals were arrested or harassed before the truth was duly established? Who does not remember a Boston-based Italian-American as he testified, convincingly, to witnessing the murder of his wife by a black “thug?” Except that this dark fiend turned out to be a projection straight out of the husband’s criminal mind. . . . But, meanwhile, how many Abu-Jamals? Who can forget a tear-streaked widow telling over and over again how the defendant (Mumia) smiled diabolically as the prosecution showed the jury the blood-stained shirt of her policeman-husband? Except that the minutes of the trial prove that Judge Sabo had barred Mumia from the courtroom that day. . . . And so the pattern repeats itself as we are told that a certain Wesley Cook, a.k.a. Mumia Abu-Jamal, killed a police officer who happened to be brutalizing his brother. But who is the real Mumia beyond these false, cold-blooded projections?
Death Blossoms is a personal and collective answer to this question, a generous and human song of innocence for all the unseen, voiceless men and women imprisoned by guilty stereotypes way before they set foot in a penitentiary.
Predictably, another “invisible man” haunts this case: he was seen running away from the scene of the shooting by at least three witnesses (Dessie Hightower, William Singletary, Veronica Jones), and all have since spoken up concerning the police intimidation they underwent simply for insisting that this man was not a figment of their black folks’ imagination. . . .
ALTHOUGH MUMIA’S LIFE-FORCES are sealed off and preyed upon by a carceral onslaught tantamount to hi-tech slavery, he distills in these pages the ultimate rebuttal of his imprisonment: mental and spiritual autarchy.
Death Blossoms displays a deceptively simple meshing of form and content. In fact, one of the most fascinating figures in Mumia’s “carpet” is quite literally the carpet itself, the weaving of a web of words. Revealingly, towards the end of the book, Norman, an inmate, marvels at a spider’s defiance of prison rules as it spins its web under his sink. Mumia, who soon discovers a spider of his own, weaves anecdote into antidote, and we begin to see that the book we hold in our hands is also a web spun out of the creative threads of a mind-made home; just as Anansi, the spider of ancient African folklore, is the source of a life-web unraveled from within.
As is uncannily the case with much of Mumia’s writing, the psychological truth is also borne out scientifically. Randy Lewis, a molecular biologist who has been studying spiders’ secrets for years, has recently written that “spider silk absorbs more energy before it breaks than any other material on earth.” The writing in Death Blossoms is as prison-proof as the silk for vests, currently derived from imprisoned, anesthetized spiders, is bullet proof. And from his carceral lab, Mumia’s word-threads reach through and beyond prison bars; they are symbols of the essential twine of bonding with those on the outside. Together they form a web which is an almost literal image for those “holes in the soul” he writes of. But the same web also healingly re-creates in prison the reality of “the whole connected web of nature” and holds us all together as a community in spite of the most brutal assaults. As he notes in reference to the bonds that unite his beloved brothers and sisters of MOVE even after numerous sinister, programmed attempts to destroy their community: “Using neither nails nor lumber, John Africa constructed from the fabric of the heart a tightly cohesive body.”
Many of us will not emerge from this book unsnared, for to the extent that we cannot deny the knowledge of what we have read, we are faced with a vital question: 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