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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.

Even more strange was our discovery of the common values and viewpoints shared by our spiritual families—Mumia’s beloved brothers and sisters in the MOVE Organization, and my fellow members of the Bruderhof, a community movement grounded in New Testament teachings. The more we learned about each other, the closer we felt.

As my weekly visits to Mumia continued, all of us at the Bruderhof became increasingly aware of the blatant injustices of his trial—and increasingly active in the international campaign to protest his death sentence. We joined rallies, wrote to government officials and newspaper editors, and printed his writings in our journal, The Plough. Not surprisingly, we were met with plenty of criticism, and many who had previously claimed to be our friends censured us for “meddling” in such radical “politics.” On the other hand, we gained hundreds of new friends, including death row inmates, writers, artists, and rappers, social workers, teachers, activists, and other religious and secular groups who stand in opposition to the death penalty. We have been deeply enriched by our contact with Mumia.

Our involvement, of course, was spurred on by far more than Mumia’s case per se: our church has always spoken out against individual and state-sanctioned violence—from the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany to the bombing of Vietnam and Iraq. Yet even without the historical precedents, we could not have remained silent. Why? Because the life of an innocent man is at stake.

Mumia is, in reality, a prisoner of conscience. Long before his arrest in 1981 —from his teen years in the Black Panther Party to his career as a radio journalist—his commitment to the ideals of honesty and fairness, and his tireless attempts to unmask the lie of governmental “justice,” cost him his freedom. Tragically, they may cost him his life.

Punished most recently for writing a book—his controversial exposé Live from Death Row—Mumia is painfully aware of how quickly the broadest civil liberties in the world are curtailed when political power is at stake. Still, he continues to speak out. And as his fellow human beings—as his brothers and sisters—we have felt it a matter of conscience to assist him in bringing to the printed page his thoughts and feelings. In this way, from out of the sterile steel-and-block walls that isolate him, blossoms have unfolded—blossoms of thought and of spirit. Penned beneath the scribbled symbol of a flower and referred to by the silent gesture of cupped hands—wrists shackled, but palms uplifted to unfurl the fingers—they have now drifted far beyond the confines of the prison fence.

I have visited Mumia as his “spiritual advisor” for eighteen months now. There have been days when I entered the “row” depressed, weighed down with those petty problems that plague all of us at one time or another. Yet I have left again deeply refreshed and strengthened.

How is it that a wellspring of life can arise on death row? That a condemned man can speak—sincerely, even effusively—of the “wonder and joy of Life?” How is it that a despised convict, locked in a cell the size of a bathroom in the most godforsaken spot in Pennsylvania, can imbue with a spirit of freedom those who are “free?”

MUMIA IS SIMPLY A MAN. Writing to me last summer from a sweltering prison block near Philadelphia, thirteen dreadful days before his scheduled (and then suddenly postponed) execution date, his soul cries out:

I would be lying if I told you I’ve not had those nights—dark nights of the soul where death itself seems welcome . . . I sometimes want to shout—“I am not a symbol; I am a man!” But on this my fabled “voice” falters. I am no more, no less, than a man—a human fighting for his breath in a shifting sea of codified hatred. As I seek a safe shore, a harbor, I am buffeted by swells that threaten to drown out my very existence . . . For me, the “law” is not a refuge, but a ravenous great whale circling ever closer, seeking its prey.

And so he sits on death row today, his future uncertain, but his spirit still unfettered. As he writes in another letter:

. . . Loneliness is but an illusion. One man, “living” on one of the most damned sites on earth, is not truly alone. The death chambers of America are not as tightly sealed as many may suspect, for how can Spirit be kept out?

It is often said that when a writer bares his soul in a book, a small part of it travels to every reader. Here, then, from the heart and soul of Mumia Abu-Jamal to yours, are the flowers of his spirit.

New Meadow Run Bruderhof

October 1996