RAP AND REDEMPTION ON DEATH ROW

A raw, contemplative account of a death-row inmate’s journey toward redemption through faith, family, and rap.

This unusual memoir, a collaboration between Braxton and Katz, who teaches a course on “Music and Incarceration” at the University of North Carolina, captures wisdom accrued through more than 25 years of incarceration. Braxton contacted Katz in 2019, seeking guidance on how to better record the raps he had been writing. Katz notes that Braxton “accepts his guilt” for three murders he committed as a young man, acknowledging, “I do not want to minimize his crimes or ignore his victims.” He asserts that the detail and originality of Braxton’s writing (many lyrics appear in the book) speak to the potential for personal growth and cultural value despite these crimes, and he casts himself as part of “a self-fashioned ‘Alim team,’ working to share Braxton’s powerful words and music.” Braxton identifies himself as “a prisoner, a writer, and a rapper on North Carolina’s Death Row,” aspiring to both dramatize his rejection of the nihilistic violence of “street” machismo (“I was nineteen years old and fascinated with the idea of being a gangster”) and call attention to the ugly reality of wrongfully convicted individuals sentenced to death. “Since I’ve been here, I’ve seen 35 people executed and 7 people exonerated because they were innocent,” he wrote in one of his letters. In percussive, short chapters, Braxton vividly presents his own background, including documentation of bleak decades behind bars and feelings of guilt and torment, which dedication to Islam helped him address. “There’s no getting around the darkness in this book,” writes Katz, but there is also “joy, hope, and love.” Though the narrative structure is sometimes too disjointed, Braxton’s story is worth discussing.

An unvarnished look at a life reclaimed deep within the edifice of mass incarceration.