arts & entertainment
Bend Author Ponders Race, Romance
‘Find the Flower that Blossoms’ is inspired by experiences in Central Oregon
By Brian Stimson
of The Skanner News
J
ust last week, when Ahjamu Umi
walked into a restaurant in Bend, it hap-
pened again.
“Hey, it’s Michael Jordan,” said the man
in the cowboy hat.
Without missing a beat, Umi shot back,
“Hey, it’s Garth Brooks.”
Being one of the only Black men in town,
Umi says he’s grown accustomed to such
encounters. But with so few minorities in
Bend, racial tensions are low or not even
talked about. And that got Umi thinking,
“What if a large number of Black people
came here?”
That’s part of what inspired Umi to write
the novel, “Find the Flower That Blossoms”
about the travails of an interracial couple
from a small, elite Central Oregon ski resort
town that soon finds itself home to a hous-
ing project with 800 low-income Blacks
from Los Angeles.
“The point of it is, a town like Bend, and
there are a ton of them all across the coun-
try, they’re fine with things the way they are
where there are not that many people of
color and not many people have to deal with
it,” he said. “But my fictional account, what
if a large number of low-income Blacks
were to come here, what would happen? I
think, even in real life, if something like that
happened, I don’t think the result would be
that different.”
Umi says he’s basing that theory off of his
experience in Central Oregon, as well as
conversations he’s had with a number of
people of color.
“Historically when you raise this, people
don’t want to hear it, they’re upset, they’re
intimidated by it,” he said. “Everybody
always tries to make it like me raising the
issue is the problem, but you wouldn’t get
that upset about something unless there was
something to it, and that’s the whole point
of me raising it.”
Much like the book, Umi is married to a
White woman. In the book, the White
female protagonist, Ashley, finds herself
attracting the attention of the Patriotic Front
when she begins dating a Black man
assigned to manage the low-income hous-
ing project. Mirroring many real-life racial
struggles, extremist violence claims the life
of Ashley’s best friend and the book follows
the couple’s struggles to overcome the
tragedy that has befallen their lives.
“I think Bend is, on the surface, it’s a
wonderful place, everyone gets along, but
underneath, there’s the same kind of poten-
tial for racial problems that exist in
Mississippi or anywhere else for that mat-
ter,” he said.
In the book, Ashley drowns her sorrows in
the bottle. Then she uses sex to ease her
pain. Without revealing too much of the
book’s plot, the couple discovers new ways
to find peace in their lives.
When he was a younger man, Umi says he
was involved in mentoring and gang out-
reach in Los Angeles.
“My experiences as a youth got me into
mentoring, I mentored gang members and
negotiated gang truces in the Bay Area,” he
said. “So as a result of that, I was exposed
to the criminal justice system, and that
motivated me to get a master’s degree in
economics and I wrote my master’s thesis
on the economics of imprisonment in
California.”
For a number of years, he worked in the
banking industry and is now transitioning
into loan modifications.
“The writing has been therapeutic,” he
said. “The banking industry is conservative,
my whole life I’ve been the only Black per-
son working where I work, so you have to
develop a certain personae to exist there,
especially working down in Bend. It’s a
totally different language. If I laugh out
loud, it’s like everybody looks around like
there’s a problem.”
Umi is a speaker on diversity and race for
businesses and groups, and operates a blog,
www.pentopeople.blogspot.com. The book,
published by Publish America, is available
on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
march 23, 2011 The Portland Skanner Page 7