It has been over three decades since I last 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 was powerfully built, with a thickness, not a fatness, of four. His voice was deep, with the accents of the South wrapped around each word, sweet and sticky like molasses. His words often tickled his sons, and they tossed them among themselves like prizes found in the depths of Cracker Jack boxes, words that were wondrous in their newness, their rarity, their difference from all others heard. “Boys, cut out that tussling, hear me?” And the boys would stop their wrassling, their bellies near bursting with swallowed, swollen laughter. The word vibrating, sotto voce, barely heard in their throats, “tussling, tussling, tussling, tussling, tussling, tussling.”
For days, for weeks, these silly little boys had a new toy, and with this one word, could reduce the others to teary-eyed fits of fall-on-the-floor laughter, “tussling.” He was a relatively old man when he seeded these sons, and because of his age of over half a century, he was openly affectionate in a way not usual 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. “Dad, I want to ride,” I whined. “It ain’t good for you to ride so much, boy. Walking is good for you, good exercise for you.” Decades later, I would hear that echo in 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 bluish, but there was a perpetual twinkle of joy in them, of love and living. He’d lived just over a decade into this son’s life, and his untimely death from illness left holes in the souls of his sons. Without a tether, I sought and found father figures like Black Panther Captain Reggie Schell, and Black Panther Party Defense Minister Huey P. Newton, and indeed the Black Panther Party itself, which, in this period of utter void, taught me, fed me, and made me a 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: Zaid Malik Shakur, murdered by police when Assata was wounded and taken, Geronimo Ji-Jaga, also known as Pratt, who commanded the L.A. chapter of the BPP with distinction, and defended the party from deadly state attacks, himself a political prisoner, who, because of the state’s frame-up and judicial repression, has been separated from his family and children for a quarter of a century. Here, in this restrictive place of fathers without their children, and men who were fatherless, one senses and sees the social costs of that loss.
Those unloved find it virtually impossible to love, and those who were fatherless find themselves alienated and at war with their own communities and families. My own sons were babies when I was cast into this hell. Neither letters, cards, nor phone calls could heal the wounds that they and their sisters suffered during the long, lonely years of separation. Here, in this man-made hell, I find young men bubbling with bitter hatreds and roiling resentments against absent fathers, several who have taken to the odd habit of calling this writer Papa, certainly high irony, when one notes this writer was himself an absent father, and now absent grandfather. Perhaps conscious of this irony, I resisted the nickname until I could no longer. I realized that I lived amidst a generation of young men drunk, not only with alienation, but also with father hunger. I had the Black Panther Party. Who did they have? Well, here they have Delbert Africa, Geronimo Ji-Jaga, Chucky Africa, Mike, Ed, and Phil Africa, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, and other old heads like myself.
I realized that I resented being Papa to young men I didn’t know, while being denied the opportunity to be a present father to the children of my flesh and my heart, by the state’s banishment. I was also in denial, for who was the old head they were calling? Certainly not I. It took a trip, a trek, to the shiny steel-burnished mirror on the wall, where I found my father’s face staring back at me to recognize the real. I am he, and they are me. From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
