Death Blossoms: Reflections From a Prisoner of Conscience

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Mother-loss



RELATIVELY TALL, mountainous cheekbones, dimples like doughnuts, and skin the color of Indian corn, she left life in the South for what was then the promised land, "up Nawth." Although she lived, loved, raised a family, and worked over half her life "up Nawth," the soft, lyrical accents of her southern tongue never really left her. Words of a single syllable found a new one in her mouth, often rising on the second syllable: "Keith" became" Key-earth;" "child" became "Chyi'le," and her reedy, lengthy laughter lit up the room like a holiday. She, and her children, lived in the "peejays" (the projects), but it wasn't until years later (when we were grown) that we understood we had lived in poverty, for our mother made sure our needs were met. She was a gentle woman who spoke well, if at all, of most folk, but she was like a lioness when one of her children was attacked.

In the early '60s, when her daughter got caught up in a neighborhood fracas that boiled out of control, she snapped a broomstick in two, whipped open a path down the block to where her daughter stood paralyzed by terror, grabbed her, and whipped her way back home. Only when she was safely back indoors did she realize that she had been slashed while outdoors -- she never noticed, so powerful was her love for her daughter. Deep rivers of loving strength flowed through her.

A mother's love is the foundation of every love: it is the primary relationship of all human love, the first love we experience and, as such, a profound influence on all subsequent and secondary relationships in life. It is a love that surpasses all reason.

Perhaps that's why I thought she would live forever -- that this woman who carried me, my brothers, and my sister, would never know death. For thirty years she smoked Pall Malls and Marlboros, yet still I thought she would live forever. When she died, of emphysema, while I was imprisoned, it was like a lightning bolt to the soul. Never during my entire existence had there been a time when she was not there. Suddenly, on a cold day in February, her breath had ended, and her sweet presence, her wise counsel, was gone forever.

To know one's mother dead, yet remain imprisoned! To imagine her lifeless form while held in shackles! To crush the hope of ever again embracing she who birthed me!

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Meeting with a Killer

In Philadelphia, Hank Fahy's name is mud.

Convicted of the 1981 rape-slaying of a girl-child and subsequently sentenced to death, Fahy has dwelt in a virtual netherworld beneath the "usual" hell that is death row. Marked as a baby-rapist, he has had to withstand the loathing and contempt of the many who regard his crime as an act beneath contempt.

Fahy's odyssey into the underworld has not been an easy one: bouts of suicide attempts have alternated with periods of an almost manic evangelical fervor, a living pendulum swinging between visions of hell and heaven, both just beyond his grasp.

In late June, 1995, while under his second death warrant, and with a date to die in July, Hank would come face-to-face with the living personifications of his demons and his angel.

Even while under an active death warrant, with a date to die within two weeks, Fahy was transferred to a Philadelphia city prison (rather than the state prison at Graterford, as is customary).

When he arrived, he was placed in a cell, where the words "Jamie Fahy -- Rest in Peace" were scrawled across the wall: Jamie Fahy, a beautiful, troubled, love-starved young girl -- beaten, murdered, and allegedly raped -- Hank's eighteen-year-old daughter, who was barely four when he entered Hell.

There is more.

From impish whisperings of those around him, he learned an astonishing thing -- that the man charged with beating, killing, and raping his daughter was there -- not merely in the same prison -- but there -- on that very block!

As if inevitable, Hank met Mark (not his real name), and the hatred kindled over months melted into rare compassion.

"I hated him, Jamal," Fahy confided, "but when I saw this kid, eighteen years old, I realized what a hell he was in for; and also, I thought about the pain I would be causing his mother if I took something and stuck him."

In every prison in America, murder is no mystery. There are men on death row across the nation awaiting execution for killings committed in prison.

Hank had two weeks of life left. What did he have to lose?

"You know, Jamal, I looked at this eighteen-year-old kid, and I remembered the look on my mother's face when she was alive, when she came to visit me; the shame of seeing her son on death row; and I didn't have the heart to tell this kid, but I could see his mother lookin' at him the same way, and it hurt me, Jamal, it really did, man."

"What hurt you, Hank? Whatchu mean?"

"Well, it was two things. First, this was a set-up; I was 'sposed to kill this kid! Why else would they put us on the same block? Come on, man. Second, the same people that put me on death row are gonna put this kid on death row, but he don't know it yet."

"What did you tell Mark, man?"

"I told him 'I forgive ya, man', and I told him to let his lawyer know this, and anything I can do to help him and to keep him off death row, I'll do."

"How did you feel tellin' that boy that, Hank?"

"Ya know, Jamal, I felt good. I felt like the better man, 'cause the same system that plans to kill me, that plans to kill him, that same system that set us both up (for me to kill him and for him to get killed), can't do what I did -- forgive."

"I loved Jamie, Jamal. She was my heart. But me killin' that kid can't bring my daughter back, and ya know what else, Jamal?"

"What's dat, Hank?"

"I wouldn't wish this -- death row -- on my worstest enemy."

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Dialogue



IN OUR COUNTRY alone there are over a million men and women -- not even counting juveniles -- in prisons. There are an estimated three million homeless people. Poverty is widespread, and fear is the national currency. People seek the security of love, yet at the same time they are isolated, alienated -- even from themselves. Isolation and alienation are barriers, forces of division. What shatters these barriers is dialogue.

Even in a free democracy, the State always attempts to control dialogue -- to decide for its own interests the limits of allowable discourse. In order to be heard, one must have wealth, power, influence, rank. It's the same with the media. The media always quotes the same roundtable of "experts." Where are the voices of the poor, the excluded, the powerless? Absent those voices, absent a recognition of their worth, there can be no true dialogue, and thus no true democracy.

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Objectivity and the Media



OBJECTIVITY IN JOURNALISM is an illusion, a hollow word, yet it becomes so real to its perpetrators, who have been poisoned with the lie from the first day of journalism school, that they end up not only believing in it, but letting it form the whole foundation of their profession. It's always been a great ideal, but in reality it's a misguided belief. And they end up using it to justify everything they do.

When you look at the news today -- I'm talking now about national network newscasts -- it is astounding that what used to make the local news, if that, is now considered as having national importance. Local crime stories, especially the most lurid ones, become national news stories not because of anything extraordinary about them, but because that is the stuff that sells. It's the old jingle: "If it bleeds, it leads." They don't feed the public pieces that stimulate intelligent thought, pieces that might make people talk or even ask questions about the fundamental relationships of power, rank, and status in this country. They're more interested in sensation.

It's almost as if the average newscast has been reduced and molded to fit Hard Copy or some other such show like that. The end product is trash, but it is trash that has been carefully designed to attract you emotionally, to touch you sensationally, to get you looking (but not thinking). It doesn't provoke you or encourage you to question the fundamentals. The real issues behind a story are often ignored. They're not considered important enough to be raised. That's why many people -- not only MOVE, but other groups who are misunderstood and misrepresented -- share MOVE's "f.t.p." attitude toward the media: Fuck the press!

By the seventies, people began to admit that the media was in the hip-pocket of big business. Well, today the media is big business. The major media organizations are not just controlled by it -- they are part of it. Many of them are owned by huge multinational corporations. And if you think they don't control what comes over the air, you're in for a surprise. If I control your paycheck, I tell you what to say and what not to say.

When Rizzo was mayor, he was always taking the Philadelphia media to task and -- especially during the time of the 1978 MOVE confrontation -- accusing them of stirring things up with their advocacy journalism. They lacked objectivity, he complained. Well, Rizzo was right on one count, because, as I said earlier, journalistic "objectivity" is non-existent. Who's objective? But as far as the slant of their advocacy goes, I don't know who Rizzo thinks they were advocating. It sure wasn't MOVE.

Neither the brutal police assault on the MOVE compound in August 1978 nor the bombing of their new compound in May 1985 -- in which eleven of their members were killed, and a whole neighborhood was destroyed -- could ever have happened without the media. It was in their interest to create the fires of carnage and hatred, and feed those fires. The media built the scaffolding around the MOVE standoff, and the information they disseminated became the catalyst for the final conflagration. The next step after that was for them to whitewash the whole thing to save face for the "investigative" commission.

The frightening thing is that the press's involvement in the MOVE debacle was in no way unique; it is instructive for the present, the future, and for any number of contexts and loci, not just racist Philadelphia. Don't forget -- two things always define the media's perspective: money and power. And the resulting "blindness" is therefore often willful.

I remember being down in Philadelphia at my petition hearing in the fall of 1995 -- I was being shuttled back to the prison, and the sheriff had turned the radio on. The newscaster was announcing that ABC had just been acquired by the Disney Corporation. I laughed. I was in the back of the van laughing and laughing and thinking to myself that it won't be long before they have Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck on the evening news.

On a deeper level, of course, it's no laughing matter. When the power of the press is exercised in concert with the political machinery that is in place today -- I'm talking about the right wing shift in American politics -- what you have is a dangerous, malevolent concoction. It might sound paranoid, but that's what you have.

Just recently there's been considerable controversy about the planes that were shot down over Cuba. The alternative press is asking some interesting questions, but what about the mainstream media? There's a whole history to this incident that is being withheld by the government and the press. I can't help wondering about the fact that when Cuba was the whorehouse of the Caribbean -- when it was a Mafia safe-haven -- you didn't hear anybody talking about invading Cuba or changing the government. It was only when a government of the Cubans' own choice rose to power and said that they were no longer willing to be our whorehouse -- "We are an independent sovereign country, and we will have the government we want, not the government you want" -- that our government began plotting to kill President Castro and to destroy Cuba through an economic blockade that, according to international law, amounted to an act of war. Has our government, our press, acted on the right side of history? Have they stood on the right side of fundamental justice?

Cuba's only one of many examples. Fundamentally, the United States Government has allied itself for decades with some of the darkest forces in history for the sake of economic gain, for political self-interest, for the protection of the status quo. And it continues to do so, domestically as well. That's why we have the likes of David Duke running for governor and the likes of Pat Buchanan running for President (in spite of having Klansmen on his staff). It's why everybody is talking about welfare queens and slamming the poor. It is also why the safest political platform of the decade is based on promises of "getting tough on crime." Their line is that it's okay to despise the poor, because they have it "too good" anyway. Besides, they claim, it's the poor, the minorities who are causing a rise in violent crime: "What we need is more executions. What we need to do is start chopping people's heads off ... " The level of political discourse in our country is anti-life. And the press is not innocent.

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Violence

Violence violates the self.

Yet that's exactly what the system believes in, what the system preaches, what the system practices: violence. Certainly I believe in the necessity of fighting the system, but one thing I'm not going to do is employ the same tactics and methods the system uses every day. Why replace the system with the same thing?

We need a new system, one where people are free of all violence of the system. I would hope for a day when there are no bombs, no guns -- no weapons whatsoever -- no war, poverty, or other injustices; no social and class hatreds; no crime and no prisons.

I reject the tools and weapons of violence.

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God-talk ON PHASE II

Then Almitra spoke, saying, We would ask now of Death.

And he said:

You would know the secret of death.

But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?

The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.

If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.

For life and death are one, even as river and the sea are one.

-- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

ON DEATH'S BRINK, men begin to see things they've perhaps never seen before. Like those around them, and especially those who share their fate. Men on Phase II -- men whose death warrants have been signed, men with a date to die -- live each day with a clarity and vibrancy they might have lacked in less pressured times. In the state's ice-box, behind the clear plastic shield that separates death row proper from Phase II, sounds from the six death warrant cells are muffled from the rest of the block.

Men on the "Faze" spend their precious hours doing whatever concerns them most, and for many that means talking and learning about each other, their depths, their heights, their human uniqueness.

It is midnight, the end of a long, humid July day, yet conversation continues in earnest:

"You ever think of outer space?"

"Hell, yeah!"

"Really?"

"Yeah, man -- alla time."

"No shit? Like what kinda stuff?"

"All kindsa stuff -- like the vastness of space, black holes, how impossible a lotta that stuff they show on sci-fi movies is; inner space... a lotta stuff, Scott."

"Humph. Well, tell me summa the stuff you be thinkin' of, Mu -- break down what you mean."

"Well, you know how in alla star wars and star trek-type joints, when a ship gets hit, you hear these huge KA-BOOM! explosions, and see fire balls and shit?"

"Uh-huh."

"That's impossible."

"Why you say that?"

"Coz. Dig -- in space, there's a vacuum -- no oxygen -- so how can sound travel? To the extent there'd be an explosion, it would be silent."

"OK. What other stuff?"

"Well, you know how dudes ina movie talk about lightspeed, 'warp factor seven,' and all that?"

"Uh-huh."

"Dig this, Scott. The smallest sub-atomic particle in light is the photon; that's what's movin' atta speed of light, and it moves so quickly 'coz it got no mass. Once you add mass, a ship, provisions, human bodies, you slow everything down -- so all that warp seven, faster-than-light stuff is impossible."

"Damn, Mu -- how'd you get into that shit?"

"I read. Science. Einstein. Stephen Hawking. Science fiction. Asimov. Herbert. Bisson -- alla them dudes."

"No shit, Mu! All right. Here's one for ya: What, or who is God? Whoa! Do you believe in God?"

"Absolutely."

"Well?"

"Each man, based on his own understanding, creates his own gods. Every person in creation has his own idea of God. Now, are they all wrong? Yes -- and no. "Everybody worships somethin'. They might not give it the name 'God,' but what they spend their time, their minds, their consciousness on -- that's their God. It might be money; drugs; sex. The communists in Russia wouldn't say it in those words, but Marx and Lenin were gods to them, even though they claimed to renounce religion.

"God is divine intelligence. God is life. God is the force that keeps this creation in existence."

"But who is God? What's his name?"

"Why his?"

"What you mean, man?"

"I mean -- dig this ... There's hundreds of names for God, right?"

"Yup -- "

"Man gave God these names, based on culture, history, their own perceptions -- so, how dya think 'God' got sex -- a God that created both sexes?"

"You sayin' God's a female?"

"Now, man -- I ain't saying God is a woman; I'm saying God is beyond man or woman -- beyond sex, and therefore as much mother, if not more so, as father."

"How can you say that, man? You just said 'beyond woman.' How can God be beyond woman, and also mother?"

"Well -- I mean, in terms of function. Dig this. In all cultures, among almost all of nature, the mother is she who truly cares, who feeds, cleans, hugs -- y' know? -- for all her children. Think of mother earth: all that we know, that we see, that we eat, that we wear, comes from mother earth. Man might combine things, mix things up, but he don't create nothin.'

Mama -- God -- creates or brings into creation all that is. Think of it this way, Scott ... "

"I'm wicha, Mu ..

"Of all the planets in this entire solar system, why is Earth just right for us? Mars and Venus? Too hot. Jupiter? Too gaseous. Pluto? Too cold. This Earth is just right! That ain't no coincidence, man."

"Hey, man. I was just checkin' you out. I've often thought those exact, same things -- I didn't know you wuz into that, man -- I had no idea!"

"Why not?"

"Well, I knew you was into nature -- but this stuff?"

"Hey -- ain't God 'natural'? Ain't Earth? Ain't all of creation -- all that is?"

"I know that, man -- but -- hey! I'm surprised!"

"Well, to be perfectly honest, I'm surprised too!"

"Yeah? Now don't go off on me, but... "

"I ain't -- why?"

"Well, I thought you wuza bona-fide nut!'' Scott erupts ina fit of laughter --

"I'm serious, man."

His laughter continues ...

"See, down Huntington, guys said you wuza secret squirrel-type dude -- talkin 'bout spies 'n' shit, real crazy stuff ...When you told me 'bout gov'ment files, I looked to my own experience. Y'know, the gov'ment bugged me for years and years, when I was in my young teens -- "

"Oh yeah?"

"Yup -- If I told dudes about it, they'd be whisperin' the same stuff 'bout me -- 'that nigga's crazy; he into some secret squirrel-type shit. .. ' Y'know the rap."

"Yeah, I do."

"Coz they don't know -- unless they hadda experience."

"That's it! Now, let's get into black holes -- you into that?"

"Well, I read some stuff 'bout it -- "

"Do you think a human could survive in it?"

"Nope."

"Why not?"

"Well ... "

The men talk on -- hour after hour, late into the night, early into morn. Days, hours away from a date with death, they finally see each other.

They see the miracles of life, the miracle of each other.

Lawd, Lawd, I look at you and see a man on a cross who don't look like me.

I wonder if you can truly be God of all eternity --

maker of earth, the wind, the sea, maker, even, of lil' old black me?

[admin]

Meditations on the Cross
by Rufus, a slave

Lawd, Lawd, I look at the cross and pray --
Can you hear the words I say?
Can you see the things I do?
Things done by folks
who look like you?
Can you snap these chains offa my feet?
Can you make it so's I don't get beat?
Can you bring my wife,
son, daughter back to me!
Can you bring an end to slavery?
Lawd, O Lawd -- can you truly make us free?

Come to think of it, why am I
asking you?
What I mean to say is --
what can you do?
Your hands is nailed to this here cross --
How could you ever be the Big Boss?

Also nailed is your two feets --
you cain't even walk the streets!
And on your head, that crown
of thorns,
Will it stop new ideas
from being born?

Lawd, I don't mean to sound too smart,
it's just that these things be in my heart;
The last time I thought of you,
was when they lynched my daddy, Lou --
They tied his hands and bound his feet,
lashed him, slashed him like a piece of meat,
cut him, burned him, and just before they let him die,
they hung him from a tree, swingin' high.
How could your people do this, Lawd?
How could you give them the Power of the sword?
How could you let 'em hang Daddy on a tree,
when that's the very same thing they did to thee?
How could you let 'em bring us here as slaves
over roiling miles of ocean waves?
How could you do this, Jesus,
Weren't you king of the Jews --
Weren't they themselves broken and beaten,
battered and abused?

Lawd, O Lawd, I ain't tryin' to be
no big man,
I'm just tryin' to understand.
And if you don't wanna speak to me,
can't you at least let me see?
Ol' preacher say you died for the poor;
Does that mean we won't be poor no more?
I'm not try'na run things in heaven above,
I just wan' freedom, my family, Love.
They say it's compassion
your life demonstrated,
but I wonder, if that's so,
why am I hated?

Well, Lawd, I guess I gotta go,
It's just that I'd like to be more in the know.
Just think of this as my personal letter,
asking how things could be made better --
Finally, Lawd, lemme say I Love You,
'cause you went through the same
hell as we still do.

[admin]

Holiday Thoughts



IN EACH YEAR'S wintry season comes the great festival in the West alleged to celebrate the birth of Jesus of Nazareth some two thousand years ago. To many, however, it is a time of utter hypocrisy. To those many millions mired in poverty, it is a time of bitter cold, a time of no respite from the hours spent huddled in windswept alleys. It is, they say, "the season to be jolly," but for far too many it is a season of need, an hour of aching loneliness.

The faceless millions sing of cheer and charity, but I, who sit among the hopeless and the living dead, among those who populate your prisons and dungeons of death, see neither cheer nor charity, but rather falseness, gaudiness, and empty flash. The only things not empty are the tills of the merchants, because for most, Christmas is celebrated not in remembrance of the Christ, but to fill the coffers. Who remembers that the carols are sung in praise of a prisoner, indeed, a death row prisoner destined to face crucifixion? What mean cheer and charity to those who face more modern methods of execution?

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The Wisdom of John Africa

... You judges are confusing God's right of self-defense with your way of legal destruction because you are confused about the meaning of right, the purpose of defense, the existence of true freedom, the law of God. A person's defense is a God-given power that must not be tampered with; this is God's law ...
-- John Africa, The Judges' Letter

UNTRAINED, UNTAUGHT, AND UNTAMED, John Africa attracted a wide range of people to a small room in West Philadelphia; men and women who had one thing in common: need. Their needs were as various as were their personalities. Some sought a respite from the social storms that raged across America in the late sixties; some, answers to the Great Questions that plagued their minds; others sought the healing of denatured, weakened bodies; still others the security of a family to replace their shattered birth-families. In a sense, all of them sought that most illusive of quarries -- Truth.

All found their various needs addressed, answered, and met in one way or another by this most remarkable of men. For John Africa was a man blessed with shimmering wisdom, enormous patience, and powerful passions.

He did what healers do: he healed. He did what teachers do: he taught. He did what carpenters do: he built. Using neither nails nor lumber, he constructed from the fabric of the heart a tightly knit, cohesive body of brothers and sisters called MOVE. [1]

Bold beyond belief, and so fearless they seemed reckless, these men and women burned with the zeal of a new, rebellious faith, and spread the revolutionary teaching of John Africa far and wide. Living as they did in a land of un-freedom -- in a city whose past may well be marked by a legacy of free thought, but whose present stands on the legs of repression -- it was only natural that they were labeled public enemies even as they fought for freedom. It was predictable that their path should take them into the eye of the storm.

Yet nothing could stop them as they confronted and battled the forces of the State: not broken bones, not police bullets, not jail cells, not government bombs. Not even death -- witness the urban holocaust of May 13, 1985, when Philadelphia police and federal government agents massacred eleven MOVE men, women, and children. Despite this premeditated mass murder, MOVE is still alive and well, still spreading its teaching -- and still doing what its founder-carpenter did: building.

Bombs have not stopped them. Nine hundred years in cages have not stopped them. [2] Repeated acts of police-sponsored terrorism have not intimidated them. After such remarkable resilience, the question must be asked, "How?" Who united this disparate group of people; what inspired these ordinary folks to feats of extraordinary commitment in the face of the most repressive government assaults in contemporary history? The answer can only be, "John Africa." Consider his words:

... It is past time for all poor people to release themselves from the deceptive strangulation of society, realize that society has failed you; for to attempt to ignore this system of deception now is to deny you the need to protest this failure later. The system has failed you yesterday, failed you today, and has created the conditions for failure tomorrow ...

The brave and beautiful men and women of MOVE took these words and translated them into action. They knew them to contain power, wisdom, and a shattering truth.

_______________

Notes:

1. Not an acronym, the name MOVE simply expresses it's members' belief that life is movement; that all things exist "on a move."

2. On August 8, 1978, after a brutal police assault on MOVE during which their home in the Powelton Village section of West Philadelphia was destroyed, nine members of the organization were arrested for allegedly killing James Ramp, a police officer. These "suspects" were in the basement of their home at the time of the shooting; Ramp, who was facing the house on the street above them, was shot from the back. Several MOVE sympathizers were arrested too but released after agreeing to renounce their ties to MOVE. Convicted and sentenced (30-100 years each) in a trial marked by blatant racial and political bias, the "MOVE 9" remain incarcerated in Pennsylvania prisons. They, and growing numbers of supporters across the country, continue to maintain their innocence.

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Untitled

What power governs the stars above,
Which makes them be,
Which pours the sea,
Which stirs the cup of eternity?
What can this force be -- but Love?

Why fight over a name?
For who can win this deadly game?
Why battle over religion,
When we stand on the brink of perdition?

Who rolls the dice?
Who grows the rice?
Who brings us into being twice,
Made earth and water, fire and ice?

Who plants the seed of the flower of life,
Creates and carves with a living knife,
Brings oneness by joining husband and wife
'Mid human turmoil, hatred, strife?
What can this force be -- but Love?