Death Blossoms: Reflections From a Prisoner of Conscience

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Human Beings

NINETY-FIVE PERCENT of the guards I've met are doing their job simply because they need the money. Like cops and sheriffs, they are men, human beings, and their central concerns, needs, and fears are the same as anyone else's - they need money to pay rent, put bread on the table, provide an education for their children. But they have become part of the system because of their fear; they have bought into it because it is built on fear. Remember, the system is not a true reality, but an idea which can be fought and dismantled. People forget that we don't need the system, or the accessories we mistakenly assume are essential for living. We need only the things God gave us: love, family, nature. We must transform the system. That's the challenge. It's do-able, but only if we ourselves do it.

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The Spider

NORMAN CALLED OVER, his voice heavy and strangely conspiratorial. "Hey, Mu. Ya bizzy, man?"

"Naw, Norm. I wuz jus doin' a little readin.' But wussup, man?"

"I been lookin' at this mama spider in my cell. She beautiful, man!"

"Yeah?"

"She tiny, but she so strong, man!"

"Uh huh ... "

"An' ya know what's amazin'?"

"Whut's dat, Norm?"

"Think 'bout how she make her own home -- her web -- out of her own body!"

"That's amazin', man."

And indeed it was amazing, especially to Norman, a man encaged in utter isolation. Here he sat -- would sit for the remainder of his days -- in the antiseptic stillness of a supermaximum-security prison block, yet he was not entirely alone. With a quiet, unwitting bravado that defied the State's most stringent efforts to quarantine him, spiders had moved in and built webs in the dark corner under his sink. Now they shared his cell, and he spent hours watching them spin their miraculous silken thread.



Norman watched them give birth. He watched them stalk those few rare flies who entered his cell, only to be trapped. He watched them suck the life sap from their prey until nothing remained but dry husks. He watched them in a deep and reverent wonder, and his cell became a study.

Norman watched, and whenever something truly remarkable occurred, he quietly tapped on the wall. He'd begin in a deep stage-whisper: "Mu -- Yo, Mu! Ya bizzy, man?"

I was rarely too busy to listen for fifteen or twenty minutes, and it wasn't long before I found myself sharing his fascination and enthusiasm. And in time, lo and behold, a web scaffold appeared in my own sink-corner.

IN ANCIENT AFRICAN and West Indian folklore, the mother spider -- Anansi --looms large. She is a wise and protective being who knows proverbs and possesses the gift of prophecy.

A famous Ghanian tale tells of a fire raging in a forest. As the beasts scamper for safety, an antelope feels a tickling sensation. A small dark spider has alighted on her ear. Before she can toss her head to flick it off, however, the spider whispers, "It is I, Anansi. Take me with you -- I will repay you." The antelope, more concerned with its own survival than the minor inconvenience of a spider, agrees and runs on to safety, her path directed by Anansi.

Once she reaches safety, Anansi climbs off, thanking the antelope and promising her she won't be forgotten. Several seasons later, the antelope finds herself and her offspring threatened again, this time by hunters. Her little one is too young to run, so she instructs it to drop to the ground and hide itself in the shrubbery. Then, leaping from the undergrowth, she distracts the hunters and leads them away from her baby. Arrows whiz through the air, but the antelope is too swift. Finally the hunters give up the chase and leave the forest.

Cautiously, she returns to find her young one, whose faint cry she hears but cannot place. Where is her baby? Try as she might, she can't find her.

Just then, Anansi lets herself down from a tree limb on her slim silken cord, and announces her presence. Whispering to the mother antelope, she directs her to a clump of shrubs where, hidden under a tightly-woven protective net, lies her baby. "I told you I wouldn't forget you," Anansi reminds her.

FOR NORMAN, the target of a hunt no less deadly than that of an antelope in the jungle, Anansi was vital company. In a cell constructed to maximize human loneliness -- a site designed to kill the mind -- Anansi was a source of friendship and wonder. In a concrete tomb erected to smother men to death, she was a tiny, marvelous reflection of life. She brightened a man's day, and made it meaningful. Nature amid the unnatural.

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The Fall



Each year, when summer fades and the air cools, a sense of sadness pervades. Leaf-life readies its swan dive of separation from mother tree in an explosion of color; flowers shrivel, and the sound of insect life dies away; even sweet birdsong pales.

The earth, like an old woman, prepares for death. She covers herself often with snow, and sunfire leaves her face. Her hair, once green and lush, thins and falls; her blood, her blue pulsing blood, slows to a trickle and eventually freezes still. All the markers of death gather around her like a storm.

Who can but grieve? Only the certainty of renewal mitigates the pervasive sense of loss: the knowledge that behind the cold night lies the spring morn; that beneath fallowed earth lies a mighty heart athrob with life; that life lives within life, and goes forever on.

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Children

IN JONATHAN KOZOL'S BOOK Amazing Grace, he demonstrates something of very positive significance: the power of a child's hope. The children whose stories he tells live in the worst possible conditions in the world -- in drug-ridden slums -- yet they still have an innate hope.

There is of course, a negative part to it that remains despite this hope, and that is the reality of the world around them. The children have hope, but they are not blind to the fact that they are often ignored, and sometimes even scorned, by the social order.

There's a little boy, David, in the book, who tells Kozol that he saw the mayor of New York City on TV, and he says, "I don't like him." Kozol asks, "Why do you say that?" And David says, "Because when I look in his eyes, all I see is coldness. He doesn't understand how poor people have to live." That is the way that most politicians in the system, actually most wealthy people, look at poor children. And the children see this; they sense this coldness coming from the people who literally control their circumstances -- the conditions of the neighborhood, the state of their education.

Still, many of these children don't give up. Perhaps the best thing we can do for them is to nurture their hope -- give them reason for new hopes, and feed the hope already within them so it can grow into something strong that will sustain them through life. Elie Wiesel says that the greatest evil in the world is not anger or hatred, but indifference. If that is true, then the opposite is also true: that the greatest love we can show our children is the attention we pay them, the time we take for them. Maybe we serve children best simply by noticing them.

Children do not only have an innate hope; they are hope. And more than that: they are our future. As Kahlil Gibran writes, they are like "living arrows sent forth" into infinity, and their souls" dwell in the house of tomorrow ... " They carry their hope with them to a future we can't see.

Children come to us fresh from the divine source, from what I call "Mama," from life itself, and they lead us to the same: to the God-force within creation. That is why none of us -- no matter our race, creed, religion, or politics -- can look at a child and not feel joy. We look at them, and something thrills us to the depth of our hearts. They are living miracles, and when we see them we know that there is a God, that life itself is a miracle. Children show us, with their innocence and clarity, the very face of God in human form.

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The Creator



People have different names for God, and we can't be offended by that. We have to try and understand what they mean. You call him God. I call him Mama. I see God like you see your Mama. The closest relationship there is on earth is the relationship between child and mother. Mama feeds us. Her sun warms us, and her earth gives us food; she provides air, water, pretty flowers in the fields, trees, forests, little birds -- she is Life. Life gives life to everything in creation. That, for me, is God. Anyone who studies religion to any depth will find that there is a great cultural and traditional breadth in how people perceive the divine personality. Much of it is colored by social mores, some of it even by politics. People are different. But remember, all the thousands of different names we use for the Creator are manmade, and the Creator is One.

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Father Hunger



IT HAS BEEN OVER THREE DECADES since I have looked into his face, but I find him now, sometimes hidden, in the glimpse of a mirror. He was short of stature, shorter than I at ten years, fully, smoothly bald, with a face the color of walnuts. He walked with a slight limp, and smoked cigars, usually Phillies. Although short, he wasn't slight, but powerfully built with a thick, though not fat, form. His voice was deep, with the accents of the South wrapped around each word, sweet and sticky like molasses.

Often his words tickled his sons, and they tossed them among themselves like prizes found in the depths of a Crackerjack box, words wondrous in their newness, their rarity, their difference from all others.

"Boys' Cut out that tusslin', heah me?" And the boys would stop their rasslin', their bellies near bursting with swallowed, swollen laughter, the word vibrating sotta voce in their throats: "Tusslin' -- tusslin' -- tusslin' -- tusslin! Tusslin'!" For days -- for weeks -- these silly little boys had a new toy and, with this one word, reduced each other to teary-eyed fits of fall-on-the-floor laughter. "Tusslin!"

He was a relatively old man when he seeded these sons, over fifty, and because of his age, he was openly affectionate in a way unusual for a man of his time. He kissed them, dressed them, and taught them, by example, that he loved them. He talked with them. And walked and walked and walked with them.

"Daaad! I wanna riiide!," I whined.

"It ain't good for you to ride so much, boy. Walkin' is good for ya. It's good exercise for ya."

Decades later, I would hear that same whine from one of my sons, and my reply would echo my father's.

His eyes were the eyes of age, so discolored by time they seemed blueish, but there was a perpetual twinkle of joy in them, of love and living. He lived just over a decade into this son's life, and his untimely death from illness left holes in the soul.

Without a father, I sought and found father-figures like Black Panther Captain Reggie Schell, Party Defense Minister Huey P. Newton, and indeed, the Party itself, which, in a period of utter void, taught me, fed me, and made me part of a vast and militant family of revolutionaries. Many good men and women became my teachers, my mentors, and my examples of a revolutionary ideal -- Zayd Malik Shakur, murdered by police when Assata was wounded and taken, and Geronimo ji jaga (a.k.a. Pratt) who commanded the Party's LA chapter with distinction and defended it from deadly state attacks until his imprisonment as a victim of frame-up and judicial repression -- Geronimo, torn from his family and children and separated from them for a quarter of a century.

Here in death row, in the confined sub-stratum of a society where every father is childless, and every man fatherless, those of us who have known the bond of father-son love may at least re-live it in our minds, perhaps even draw strength from it. Those who have not -- the unloved -- find it virtually impossible to love. They live alienated from everyone around them, at war even with their own families.

Here in this manmade hell, there are countless young men bubbling with bitter hatreds and roiling resentments against their absent fathers. Several have taken to the odd habit of calling me "Papa," an endearment whose irony escapes them.

It has never escaped me. I realize that I live amidst a generation of young men drunk not only with general loneliness, but with the particular, gnawing anguish of father-hunger. I had my own father; later I had the Party, and Geronimo; Delbert, Chuck, Mike, Ed, and Phil; Sundiata, Mutulu, and other old heads like myself. Who have they had?

Yet for a long time I resisted the nickname. I resented being "Papa" to young men I didn't know, while being denied -- by decree of state banishment -- the opportunity to be a father to the children of my own flesh and heart. My sons were babies when I was cast into this hell, and no number of letters, cards, or phone calls can ever heal the wounds that they and their sisters have suffered over the long, lonely years of separation.

I was also in denial. For who was the old head they were calling? Certainly not me? It took a trip, a trek to the shiny, burnished steel mirror on the wall, where I found my father's face staring back at me, to recognize reality. I am he ... and they are me.

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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.