Henry Dumas

Editor's Note: Thirty-seven years have passed since Henry Dumas, one of the brightest lights in the pantheon of American writers was shot down and killed on the streets of East St. Louis, Illinois. He had he lived, he would have been 70 years old this year. Asili through the good graces of Loretta Dumas and Eugene B. Redmond has attempted to keep this great creative spirit alive in these pages. Like his contemporary, Amiri Baraka, who is also 70 this year, Dumas' impact on American and especially African American letters is incalculable. We pay tribute to this great American writer with one of his signature stories. Eugene B. Redmond reprises his tribute to Dumas afterward. Read and enjoy.

Six Days You Shall Labor

The fumes from the solvent can were making me and Big Mo drunk. I wished HyLow would get back with the soda pops we sent him after. Big Mo coughed a•nd went over to the window. He opened it and motioned to me. I stooped down and came around from behind that printing machine. It was a good thing that Big Mo had let me come along with him, be cause I know he couldnt have squeezed in and out from behind that machine and cleaned it as good as I was doing. I am small and never had no trouble squeezing in and out of things.

Big Mo was coughing out the window. I took deep breaths out the window. I looked down the street, and I saw HyLow talking in front of the shoeshine parlor with some people dressed for church. He got the pops in one hand, and he takin somethin from one of the group with the other.

I say, "Here come HyLow."

Big Mo, he coughed and bring in his head. "He been gone half hour." Big Mo sneezed and his whole body shook. I see his muscles shaking, and I think I know why people called him Big Mo, but then I know why he always got mean when somebody called him fat. Big Mo was like that. He didnt mind you callin him Big Me, but you couldnt call him anything else except his name, Morris Haynes. They tell me Big Mo almost killed a man once for calling him a fat nigger. The only one I ever hear mess with Big Mo was HyLow. HyLow was a year ahead of me in school. He was one of the craziest niggers I ever run into. Some people say he's crazy. Some people say he's not.

When he got back with them soda pops we could hear him hollering at us like he didnt know where we were. Like he was bringing back them soda pops, and they werent soda pops but something better than soda pops, and we were suppose to thank him for them.

He came in the door. "Hey! While I'm away the Ink Spots play." He put two pop bottles on the table away from the rags and solvent can, brushed himself off like he didnt want none of the dirt from us to get on him, and then sit down in a chair in the corner, drinking his pop and laughing. That guy is always laughing. No matter what happen to him, he laugh. Big Mo, he just the opposite. HyLow pulled out a pack of cigarettes and pretended he was trying to strike a match. That just about tore Big Mo up. But we kept on working. With me helping him, this job was gonna be cut in half.

"Hey hey hey?" HyLow laughed, bending over with his soda in his hand. Suddenly he laughed so hard that he spilled a little on his suit. "Whoops!" But he keep right on laughing."Now see what you Sabbath breakers done made me do." He finished the bottle. "Now I cant put no money in church with this stuff on me. People think I been out drinkin gasoline from under trucks, stinking with that stuff you boys got over yourself." He pointed to the solvent cans. "Naw," he shook his head. "Think I gonna go into business today." He took something out his pocket and cracked it with his jaw. Big Mo, he let the top down on the machine, and we shined it.

The church bells were ringing again, and we got ready to go. Big Mo, he went over, let the window down, and then sit down in a chair.

"We finish?" I asked him.

"You is, kiddo," he said.

"Hey hey hey, listen to the big boss," said HyLow.

"Shut up' an gimme couple of them pecans," said Big Mo.

HyLow laughed and went into his pocket and then brought it out empty. He winked at me.

"Now listen, kid. I gotta wait here till she call," said Big Mo. "I dont need you no more. I'll stop by your house and pay you."

I didnt say nothin. I aint want to go. I figured it was because of HyLow. But I didnt say nothing about it. When Big Mo drove pass my house early in the morning, I was sitting on the porch doing nothing. I waved him down. I ask him could I go along with him on the job. I knew he must be going out for some job, because that's how Big Mo made his living. He had an old piece of car full of junk and tools. He would haul or do anything for a little piece of money. Everybody used to say that he was eating that money, because he didnt drink, smoke, or waste himself.

He say he going up to the Collier newspaper office to clean a machine. He ask me if I was going to church, and I told him I didnt have to if I could make some money to show Mama when I got back. About halfway through the job, right after Sunday School let out, old crazy HyLow Walker pass by and see Big Mo's car and found us in that building.

"Dont do it, kiddo," said HyLow.

It was about eleven o'clock. We could hear church bells ringing down the street.

HyLow, he sat over in the corner, cracking pecans and tossing the shells into a trash can beside him. Now and then we'd hear shells hit the inside of a barrel or trash can next to uis, and then he bust out laughing again.

"Working on Sunday, same as working on Monday to some people. Yes, sir, you spots got all the money, all the--"

"Gimme some of them pecans."

"You boys know where I got these?" And he took out a handful and shook them like dice. They sounded good, and I could tell that they werent the pea-size kind that tart your mouth.

Big Mo, he raised up, cleaning his hands with the rag, and looked over at HyLow rearing back in that chair, pretending he been sitting there all his life.

He tossed me one and I caught it.

"All right, lii bits, tell your boss what you got." I looked at it, and I could see that it was a big brown nut, shaped like a watermelon. It even had a few snake lines on the ends, left by the shells. That was a sign that it was fresh off the tree. It was thin-shelled and the meat was juicy. We called them papershells. When anybody got them kind of nuts, they knew they had some good eating. The best ones came from Georgia, but there was one place around our town that had trees and that was on the Collier plantation, which been closed off for years.

"Papershell, right?"

I cracked that pecan open. It fell perfect. I halved it trying to keep the solvent on my hands from getting on and then I ate it. Big Mo, he watched me.

"Shore is," I say.

"Hey hey hey, tell my secret, then it be yours; keep my secret, you look for yours."

"He bought them things over at Yancy," Big Mo said to me.

"Now, aint that just like a jealous nigger. He cant get none from there, so he say they didnt come from there. Now, you look and taste that papershell, kiddo, and tell your boss if it aint just come off the tree last night."

I handed the other half to Big Mo.

He waved it off and went on cleaning. "Dont let 'em fool you, kid. He's tryin to be slick."

I chewed and looked. I wondered if them papershells come from the Collier place. "Where you get them?"

And just about that time the phone rang. We was standing near the door. Me and HyLow. Big Mo picked up the phone. He say, "Hello?"

Then he listen. Then he say, "Yes, Mrs. Collier."

Then he dont talk for a little bit. Then he say, "Yes, Mrs. Collier." Then he dont talk for another little bit. Then he say, "All
right, Mrs. Collier. I want it today. I need it today." Then he hung up.

HyLow began to laugh again. Then he looked at Big Mo. "Look at that, wont you." He punched me on the arm to make me pay attention to what he was talking about. "Just look at that. Old big boss talking to Mrs. Collier. Man, I know he gonna get him some of those papershells out there."

Big Mo was paying nobody no mind now. "Yawl git out." Then he went around the side of the machine, turned off the power, and fixed everything right. He turned out the light and came out the door behind us.

When I got out into the air, the sun was bright. Church was about ready to take in. I could see all the people along the street. Everybody in town came that way to go to the Baptist Church. Everybody in the country went to the Baptist Church too. There wasnt no other kind of church around, maybe except the Methodist Church over in Haleton.

"Big Mo, how bout let a Christian ride in your 'chine for the morning service?" said HyLow.

'Tie your tongue up, nigger, and get in."

We all got in the car, me and Big Mo in the front, and HyLow in the back.

"You know, Big Mo," said HyLow as we headed down the small street, "I thought you wanted to make some money."

"What you talkin about?"

"I thought you were smarter than that. Dont you know where these papershells come from?"

Big Mo aint say nothin. Keeps drivin.

"Out at Collier's," I say. HyLow, he wink at me.

"Kiddo, you smart."

"Where you get them papershells, boy?" Big Mo said.

We had to stop for a lot of people crossing the street. I looked away so as the people dont see me. My aunts and uncles in town, if they see me in Big Mo's car and not in church, they be tellin it before I get one dollar of my money. About that time the car is puffing near the corner where the church is. Big Mo slow down and stop. HyLow, he crack a couple more them pecans. "How much you think you gonna get from them for that job, boss?"

Big Mo, he shake his head. "I dont think, I know how much I ask for. I work for my living, like anybody else."

HyLow, he laughed. "Thirty dollars?"

When I heard him say that I almost jump out of the car. I know it aint worth that much, but I was wonderin just how HyLow get such a notion in his big head. Thirty dollars, I know I'd be gettin about five or more.

"None your business, boy. Now get out and go on to church like you ought to."

HyLow, he opened the door and shook some papershells on the ground. A lot of people were looking at the car. They knew Big Mo's car, and some of them were straining to see who it was with Big Mo. "Ah, I cant go in there with the smell of that stuff on me."

HyLow, he lean back and wave Big Mo on like he real mad for having that stuff on him.

"Man, aint nothin on your clothes," said Big Mo.

"How come I can smell it?"

"That's us you smell," I say.

HyLow, he winked at me. He slam the door and set back.

"Well, either you gettin out or you aint," said Big Mo.

"Hell, they think I'm one of you guys, working on Sundays for the white man, like you aint got no respect for Christian upbringing at all."

"Shut up and go on to church."

Just then crossing the street was old Mrs. Rankin. She was hobbling along on her cane with a couple of other women. One of the women was suppose to be some kin to Big Mo, but I never knew how. It didnt make no difference, because soon as Big Mo see them he turn his head and look at HyLow. "You gettin out or not?"

Everybody knew that beat-up old wine-colored Studebaker. It had no shocks, no springs, and would just make thirty-five miles downhill. It couldnt go uphill at all. So, they act like they aint see Big Mo at first. Then, just like that, Mrs. Rankin, she stop, turn around, and look at Big Mo.

"Morris Haynes! I want to talk to you!" She came over to the car. I was sitting there wishing I had a place to hide my
head.

"Yes, mam," Big Mo says respectfullike. Big Mo is very respectful to old folks. I never heard him raise his voice to old
people. But he could cuss you out in a minute if he wanted to.

"Morris Haynes, I been watching you for a long time now. Why dont you do your duty on the Lord's Day?"

Big Mo looked down at something on the steering wheel.

"Your mama and me was good friends when she was living, and when she died I promised myself I'd keep my eyes on that boy of hers. Now, Morris, you been round this town all your life..."

We all knew what was coming. HyLow cracked one of them papershells. I heard him chewing and fidgeting.

"... and you was baptized, as I recall, along with Sister Tinslow's daughter yonder..."

We all knew what was coming, but it didnt do no good. I guess I felt about as bad as Big Mo did. Big Mo never laughed at religion. He might curse out a preacher, but he never talked about the Church like HyLow sometimes would do.

"... you aint got decency and respect enough to set aside one day, the Sabbath, to thank the Lord that He let you live the rest of the week. Son, I been watching you. You know better. That's why I said to myself: 'This time I aint gonna do what others do, pass him by and turn my face. I gonna speak my mind.' Because, Morris, you raised in the Church. Your mother was a Christian woman. She raised you right. Son, you ought to think about your soul."

Big Mo was looking down, nodding his head a little, but he never turned off the engine. HyLow never stopped cracking them papershells. A few people slowed down to listen. I hoped none of my aunts or uncles came by, cause they would jump on me worse than Mrs. Rankin was getting on Big Mo. She looked in at us and called our names. "That goes for you young men too." Then she nodded her head, agreeing with herself like I seen old people do when they know nobody's listenin to them so they got to agree with themselves.

Just before she left she poured it on strong. "I'd be ashamed of myself if I was you. Takin something that dont belong... Six days... but the seventh is the Lord thy God's. Now, I want to see every one of those young faces back in church next Sunday. And I want yawl to come to the Thanksgiving program we having this evenin."

We all said, "Yes, mam," and Big Mo drove off. The people were gathered in front of the church. It was a bad time. Big Mo couldnt turn around. He had to drive right past the church now. People started hollerin at us. It wasnt too bad, but then Mrs. Rankin was right in the middle of the crowd, and she pointed several times, and people turned.

"Man, Big Mo, your people sure make a fuss over church," said HyLow. "Last summer when I was in Memphis, niggers went only if they felt the spirit, and nobody said anything."

"Well," said Big Mo, "that's Memphis. This is Bottomsup, and Negroes like to go to church down here. I got to go back sometime too. That woman is right--"

"Now, listen to this sinner," said HyLow.

Somebody hollered at us to stop. Big Mo kept going. It was Russell Moody. He ran across the street and waved us down. Big Mo pulled over. Russell Moody had a truck. And now and then he did a little hauling and such. Russell Moody always did handyman work like Big Mo, but he had people that called him, just as there was people that called Big Mo. I guess the jobs were about split up between Big Mo and Russell Moody, but Russell had another job cleaning the jail and the law building. Plus he had six kids. He was older than Big Mo.

"Tell me you worked on Collier's press," he said to Big Mo.

"What's on your mind, Moody?" Big Mo never had no likes for Russell Moody.

"How much he pay you?"

"How come you didnt take it?"

"I woulda, I woulda," he said in a hurry.

"You scared of that machine?"

"Naw, naw, Mo, you know me--"

"Yeah, I know," said Big Mo. He took his arm off the door frame, away from where Russell Moody was leaning into the car. Then he did a funny thing. He turned and looked at HyLow. "Man, I see why you always laughin."

Russell Moody said, "Any time you get a job you cant--"

"Moody, what's wrong with you on Sunday morning? There aint no job Mo cant take care of."

"Well, I just want to ask you about what..."

Big Mo started shakin his head. Ididnt figure it out until pretty soon Big Mo and HyLow were laughing. I never seen them laugh together. It looked so funny that I laughed too.

Big Mo drove on out of town. We ate up all the pecans.

HyLow said, "Looky here, kiddo, why dont you and me get out the car before Collier Road, and make it along the wet side of the levee till we come to them pecan trees other side of--"

"Boy, you gonna get us all shot," said Big Mo. He looked at me. "Kid is working with me."

"Listen to this preacher, will you, kiddo? Jack of all trades and that's about it. If you make a little money, you'd have a fit. Big boss, hey hey hey. Mo, you as good as Russell Moody."

"That nigger's a fool and a ass-kisser. He lick the white man's ass so shiny he can see how to grin in it." I had heard HyLow say that in school one day. Big Mo was pickin up things HyLow says.

"Yeah, but at least Russell'll jump at a chance to get thirty dollars' worth of pecans."

"Thirty dollars?" I said.

"That's right, kiddo. Now, if you asked Russell Moody, he would say, 'Naw, naw, they got dogs, dogs.' All I have to say to that is, 'Now, whoever heard of a nigger scared of a dog that's tied up?'

"'Naw, naw, I'm talkin about--'

"'And who's gonna let a dog aloose?'

"'We might run into one of them peckerwoods live out there.'

"'They be doin the same thing we doin.'

"'But them dogs...'

"Then I say to him, 'Listen, Mr. Moody, I guarantee you we'll be safe, because I guarantee you two things.'"

And then HyLow leaned over like he was really talking to Russell Moody.

"'What's them two things?' Russell Moody would ask.

"'Number one, I ain't going to go up to that Collier place and ask them white people to let me turn their dogs aloose...'"

Then he laugh like he knew he was gettin to Russell Moody, and it sounded just like Russell Moody, and I was laughing, and Big Mo, he had to grin.

"'And number two, I know you aint either...'"

And he laughed like Russell Moody, and we all laughed, and then HyLow, he said, "'Right?'

"And Russell Moody, he laughed out loud and said, 'That's right, that's right.'

"So then, what're we waiting for?"

That's how we all got headed to the pecan trees.

At the Delta Switch we pull off the road and drive up to Gary's. Mr. Gary was fixing a fiat tire on his old Buick. He was ressed for church, and all his kids were standing next to the Buick, waiting for him to fix it. His oldest boy, Clint Gary-- he was in my class--was helping him.

We all got out. Big Mo, he ask Mr. Gary if he had any croackersacks. Burlap bags, as some folks call them. Mr. Gary told us to come around to the back, and we went around to the back. He went in his shed, and we go in behind him, and then he turned and say, "I hope yawl aint goin to mess with that man's trees?"

"Just what you think," say Big Mo.

Mr. Gary, he was an old man. Everybody liked him because he spoke his mind and he dont cheat you.

He say, "I'll tell you what I told Russell Moody the other evening. I told him what I know about the Colliers. Just as sure as these bags got dirt on them, they be waiting for you." He handed the bags to Big Mo. "Mr. Collier stopped by here two weeks ago fore he go and say to me, 'Gary, I'll be glad tolet anybody that wants to gather him a few pecans, but they'll have to come up to the house like a man and ask for permission.' But he say if he or his man Fane catch anybody trespassing his land, they'll shoot them."

"We aint going in daylight," said Big Mo.

"I'm just tellin you what the man said," Gary said as he closed the door to his shed and headed back to his car.

"But you know he lyin," said Big Mo.

Mr. Gary, he just looked away. "That's right."

"Well, on Sunday aint no niggers or crackers down in them fields, so we got to make it."

Mr. Gary, he aint say nothing to that. He just half nod his head and walk on. Then he turned and say to us, "That crazy fool Fane, he patrols round on a horse and couple of dogs. But he always do it around lunchtime and late at night. Sometimes the sheriff and him come out to talk with Mrs. Collier. The best time is at dusk. They're eating dinner, and the dogs have to be fed. Save me a few of those papershells. I aint had any since they closed it off."

Then Mr. Gary looked at me. "Boy, you stay close to Big Mo, you hear?"

"Yes, Sir."
I see him get in the car, and I could see Clint Gary in that car. I know that Clint Gary knew what we was doing.

We drive down that Collier road. Their plantation is spread out. But you can see for miles and miles in places. Over to the east was corn and tomatoes. He had a tomato factory at the edge of it. Them pecan trees run along the edge of the cotton, which was in the west, along the river. We could make out the levee pretty soon, and old HyLow, he lit up a cigarette and cursed imaginary niggers and white people out in the cotton fields. "Look at yourselves, stinking and rotten, all weighed down with the white man's cotton."

He kept it up for a long time. "Shet up," say Big Mo, "cause I saw you in that patch once or twice."

"Hey, now!" And then HyLow broke into a laugh. It was something so funny he was just doubled over laughing. He took off his sports jacket and laid it on the seat. Then he raised up. "Did you hear that, kiddo? Did you hear that?"

"Yeah," I said, but I didnt know that I was playing into HyLow's hands. He sure was a trickery nigger himself. I had picked so much cotton myself that I aint think it possible for me ever to lie and say I didnt.

"He saw me in the cotton field. Yes, he did. But Big Mo, you know me good enough to know one thing..."

HyLow, he looked at me. I wanted to ask what it was, but I figured this time I'd keep my mouth shut.

"One thing. And I tell you just like I told Russell Moody the other day. I know, but you dont know what I was doing there. I was in the cotton field, but I didnt pick no cotton. But I sure know what Big Mo was doing whenever I seen him in the field. Old Big Mo got a big, long, strong back, walking in the mud with a cotton sack."

"Shet up, boy. Least I work honest for what I get."

"Except when?"

"Always."

I wanted to laugh myself, cause HyLow had him again.

And Big Mo didnt even see it. We drove the car onto this gravel road that was wide. It led to the pike, which we would take to the center of the plantation.

Big Mo was driving fast and the car was overheating. I looked at the heat gauge. It was broke, but I could feel the heat coming in and hitting my legs. I opened out the vent on the window. The window of the car was broken out, but Big Mo had managed to have a vent. And I guess that was about the only thing on that car that wasnt broken. We reached the plantation. Big Mo, he knew where to drive around to the back. I could just see his old raggedy car, now, parked in front of that big house. We looked over it, and HyLow, he hollered, "Nigger, nigger, in that house, come on out and look for the cat! White folks, white man, nigger sucking louse, why you treat a nigger like that?"

"Dont holler," I say.

"You scared, kiddo?"

"Naw"

HyLow knew I was scared. But I told him I wasnt. I wanted to go.

"Stay close to me, then, kiddo."

"Leave the kid to me," Big Mo said. He pulled the old Studebaker up to an old trough where they water cattle and stock. We hear dogs barkin, and across the road is two parked cars. One looked like the one Mrs. Collier drove sometimes, and the other we knew was Fane Paxton's.

"If you want to get straighten out, kid, you listen to me, hear?"

I say, "Okay."

Big Mo, he get out and walk to the house. Now, this aint the big house. It was down the road. We could see it from where we was. Big Mo, he walk to the house. And me and HyLow, we hear the dogs barking, and then Big Mo, he turn and walk round to the back of the house. We dont see much of him, as he is standing up on the steps of the house. Then we see Big Mo come back to the car. He wave at me to get out.

"Come on, kid."

"What for?"

"Just come on. You helped me, didnt you?"

I got out and went with Big Mo. HyLow, he hollered at us. "Man, you mean I didnt help none?"

Big Mo, he looked at him, and then all he could say was, "Come on."

Big Mo stood on the steps and we stood in the yard behind him. When Mrs. Collier came to the door, I aint expect to see what I see. Big Mo rang the bell about five or six times. We was gettin ready to leave.

She opened the door. "Oh, Morris! I just forgot about you." She laughed a little. Her hair was loose and all around her back, and she was wearing one of those loose see-through dresses. "You know that Mr. Collier is away, and Mr. Fane has your money."

"Yes, mam," said Big Mo. HyLow nudged me. Mrs. Collier was swaying in the doorway. "But there's something I'd like to ask you. Walker and young Neal, they gave me a little hand, and I was wonderin if we could have your permission to pick up a few pecans."

She laughed and waved her hand. Then that redneck Fane came to the door. As soon as we see him pushing her out of the way, we all stiffen. Big Mo, he dont move.

"You Morris Haynes?" He opened the door and came down the steps. He was drunk.

"That's right," said Big Mo. He didnt move none.

"Well, fore I pay you for the job you sposed to have done for me, I want to see it. Now, what you bring all these boys along with you for?"

Big Mo huffed himself. Mrs. Collier was laughing. "Give them the money. Frank does business with Morris all the time, doesnt he, Morris?"

Big Mo said, "He always pay me too, Mrs. Collier."

"Well, I aint got nothing against a nigger. I just want to see the work before I pay him."

"I cleaned up the presses, the ink rollers, that's all. Here's the key."

Big Mo showed the key to Fane, and then dropped his hand. All he was doing was showing Fane that he had the key, but I felt that he had made a mistake. HyLow did too. He nudged me. Big Mo asked Mrs. Collier was there anything else she wanted him to do, and she said no, and Fane, he reached in his pocket, leaning up against the wall. He was very drunk. "I say I want to see the work."

"Frank, you cant see the work," screamed Mrs. Collier. She was not mad, but laughin. I knew she was going to let us get some pecans, then...

Fane gave Big Mo the money. "Three dollars, right?"

"No, Mr. Collier always give me five for the job."

Fane, he squint-eyed at Big Mo. That red-faced white man was so drunk, I bet he thought we all was one nigger. "Day's Sunday, and these niggers dont stop workin."

Mrs. Collier came out. "Please, yall go now."

"I come for my money, Mrs. Collier, like you said."

"Oh, Frank, this is silly. Give them the five dollars."

The drunk man, he just looked out at us, staring from one to the other, trying to make things out, I guess, then he grunt, and start mumbling something about giving us a minute to get out of his sight and letting loose them dogs. And then he took the five out, and he handed it to Big Mo. Big Mo gave him the key.

We turned and went to the car. But we could hear Fane cussing and laughin behind us. Then we heard the dogs barkin.

I could tell. HyLow, he was shakin his head, grinnin.

I couldnt tell what HyLow saw funny. I figure he sometimes lose part of his mind, crack his brain or something, and laugh at anything. Big Mo ask him what he laughin at, but HyLow, he dont hear. He got tears in his eyes. I dont know what made me start laughin, but pretty- soon, I just laugh, and Big Mo, he gettin madder and madder. We all laugh so hard that Big Mo stop the car. Me and HyLow get out and fall on the ground. It was just too much, and I tell you that is one of the first times that I think I found out what make HyLow laugh at everything. I'm tellin you I think I looked at everything different from that day on.

We couldnt wait till dusk, like we said. No. We head for North Bend, where the river turn and straighten out and come along about one quarter of a mile in from the plantation. Cotton grew all along there. Come Monday morning, you still find a few niggers out in some of those fields, pickin the last of it. We head for the bend. Big Mo drivin fast. We meet a car. It looked like somebody going out to the Collier place. Nobody say nothin. We know we had one thing to do. Big Mo wanted to wait till dusk, but HyLow was against it.

"How we gone to frail a tree at night and no lights?"

When we heard that we didnt say nothin. I hadnt figured on frailin a tree, but just picking a few and gettin out. HyLow must know more about it than he told us. We parked the car under a row of trees and headed for the levee. The best way to keep out of sight would be to hit the levee, get on the wet side of it, and then go back downriver, keeping out of sight on the low side. HyLow said by the time we got there it would be dusk anyway. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon then, the sun was far away, but it was hot. We started out. Big Mo, he in the lead, walking with his croakersack over his shoulder. HyLow next, and he always looking back at me, winking. I say to myself, That nigger is crazier than a coon.

We march along for a while. If anybody come along and see Big Mo's car, they'd know. But it would take them to be doing the same thing to see the car. The river was moving along like a big snake. We could just make out the other side good. Twice we saw people on the other side. Nobody say nothing. After a while, Big Mo slow down. He way ahead of us then. He hold up his hand for us to hurry. We get to him, and we see we reach the first of the pecan groves, but it aint papershell.

We pick up a few, crack them and eat them. But Big Mo, he didnt mess with them. They were them pea-size pecans, real hard, and if you get any of the hull in your mouth, your mouth draw up like it was gettin smaller. It was a funny feeling, and we mostly used the pea-size nuts to chunk at people. Nobody would ear 'em. You couldnt sell 'em to storekeepers, and you couldnt make no money yourself. Only poor people and squirrels ate 'em. So as I was cracking one open HyLow say, "Kiddo, you know what happen to you if you mix peas with papershells, dont you?"

I spit out them shells. "Naw," I say.

HyLow, he shake his head. Every time he open his mouth, he either laugh or makin rimes. That's the way he was.

"Man, if you dont know, then I have to school you, cause I dont want nobody to fool you. There's an old saying my mother taught me. It go like this:

Whiteman work him
cause he cant figger.
He run and eat pea-nims
and turn to a nigger.

"Then there's another one:

That's an old story
about an African slave.
Brought 'em to America
but he wouldnt behave.

White man wonder
what's in his gut.
They cut him open.
They find a pecan nut.

Black folks bury 'em
in the middle of the night.
African scare 'em
and the nigger turns white."

Pretty soon we come to the clearing. HyLow, he tell us we can see the papershell trees from there, and he point. They about a quarter mile away, running along the edge of the cotton to our left. Every now and then we hear a dog bark. Big Mo, he steady watching in the direction of the big house.

"If we get spied," said HyLow, "I'm going south along the river. I know a place down there, I can get across. Mo, you take kiddo and make it out."

Big Mo didnt say nothin. He was just ahead of us.

"We stick together," he said.

"Like hell, man," said HyLow. "If them dogs come after us, we split."

Big Mo, he think about it, then he say, "We stick together unless we hear dogs comin."

"Well, if the dogs come, you know where Nadley's cotton gin used to be? Well, I meet you there one hour after we split."

"I think about it," said Big Mo.

"Man, there aint nothin to think about. When somebody spy us, then we dont have no time for thinkin."

So we went on. I was spose to stick with Big Mo. HyLow would go downriver to draw them off us. Nobody said anything, because we hoped we wouldnt have to do anything like that.

One thing in our favor is that we knew what was going on back there at the Collier house. At the big house there probably wasnt nobody there except Mr. Collier's old grandmother and grandfather and their nurse. Maybe one of the sons home from college, but that was all.

When we reached the papershell grove, I could tell that nobody had been picking those pecans. Sticks and limbs, leaves and nuts, were scattered on the ground. We fell into the first tree like crazy men.

For about half hour we filled the sacks, all the time we were gruntin and thankin Jesus for such beautiful nuts. We picked up under five trees, and then Big Mo said we should move on to the next ones.

"Aint no more like these," said HyLow. "That one yonder is stunted this year. Worms in every other nut. Something got them. The other ones down the line are the same. If we want anymore nuts...

Big Mo, he come over to us and examine our sacks.

Now, a croakersack can hold a lot of nuts, and by this time we had filled each of them with about thirty pounds of nuts. HyLow said we ought to get as much as we each could carry. And Big Mo said he could carry two sacks, and with that we just kept on pickin them up. Now, huntin pecans is not as simple as it looks. When there's grass and brush around, you have to know how to look for them. Some people, after they have cleaned from right under the tree, think there aint no more on the ground. But most of the time if there is a little grassy spot right outside of where the tree's shadow falls and when the wind or a storm hits, as one hit the night before, then you can bet your hammer hand that you can pith up a couple of pounds of nuts from there.

So on, it was almost dusk. We looked along the edge of that cotton. HyLow started climbing a tree. He had a long stick, and leaned it against the tree.

When you get ready to frail a tree, then you pick out the one with the biggest and the sweetest nuts and then climb it with a bamboo stick or something, and then just sit out on a limb and knock that tree till all them nuts are on the ground.

Now I saw HyLow get up in that tree. "Man, we better get out of here!" said Big Mo.

"I thought you could carry two sacks," said HyLow.

"Yeah, but if you get shot up in that tree, I might have to carry you too."

"Nigger, you know if I get shot you'd run," and he was knocking down so many pecans that they were raining on us. "Listen to him, kiddo, listen to this big old ink spot, so black that aint nobody know we even out here."

"Well, I aint never seen but one dog climb a tree," said Big Mo. He was laughing himself now and filling his sack.

"Whose dog is that?" I asked, cause I aint never heard of a dog climbing a tree. Big Mo, he laughed.

"That one that's in one now," and he hollered up at HyLow, "Man, you see any possums in that tree?"

HyLow, he was grunting. Then next thing I know, Big Mo was climbing the big tree next to the one HyLow was in, and his big self was sitting out on the first branch, and he was shaking it just like a wind had hit it. I kept looking because the limb sounded like it was cracking. I dont think there was one pecan left. Then he came down and got up in the one HyLow was frailing. "When you do a job," he said to HyLow, who was climbing down, "do a good job."

"Listen to him, kiddo, will you? Braggin. You better hurry up. We cant come out here every night."

We frailed three trees so good there wasnt no pecans left except for stunted ones. Our sacks were loaded. Big Mo had two croakers on his shoulders, and HyLow had one. I carried the two twenty-pound flour sacks.

Just at dusk we heard the dogs barkin. They sounded close. We started back the way we came. We saw a car coming. Looked like the same car that had passed before.When we reached the car, we could still hear dogs barking. They must be loose cause we was a long way from the house.

We loaded the car down. Sweat soaked our backs, but we hadnt stopped for nothing. Big Mo drove. We got back on Collier Road and headed toward town. All the way back we laughin and eatin them papershells.

If you aint never had no pecan nuts right off the tree, then you ought to try some, because when you do, then you dont want no more of the ones that dry out in the store and the ends crack. Fresh pecans got all the good-tastin oil right there in the shell. The best time for papershells is right after they come down out of the tree. The shell is thinner than pea-sizes and the other kinds. If they stay around too long, they dry out.

HyLow, he say we ought to go by the church.

"Them people dont want to see us," said Big Mo. I felt he was right. HyLow, he come to shake his head. He put on his sports jacket.

"Listen, Brother kiddo," he said to me, "I aint got time to mess with thick-headedness. You want to make some money or not? What you make with Mo today? One dollar? I fix it so you can make ten dollars, what you say?"

I didnt know what to say. Big Mo, he driving the car. Pretty soon we in front of the church. The people were having some kind of Thanksgiving program.

"Well, you know damn well we aint gonna eat two hundred pounds of pecans by ourselves. Let's go to that Thanksgiving program," said HyLow.

"You crazy, man, I aint ready for--"

"You promised Mrs. Rankin you be back."

"That be next Sunday," said Big Mo.

"You make your contribution while its still in you, or you wont make none at all. I know what I'm going to do. I going in just before the services are over. I wont have to sit long, and then they'll know I'm there, and I can pass out a few papershells, and then that's it."

"You bout the lowest Negro I know, and--"

"Listen to this big old nigger." HyLow started to laugh. When HyLow laughs, his laugh just make you think, and when you hear him, you know he aint foolin. If there was one thing that never told a lie, that was the way HyLow laughed. He had a slippery tongue, but if he laugh and you listen, you find something there. He was laughin, and then I found myself grinnin. Big Mo he aint say nothin, but I could see him figurin out. Suddenly the car started making a loud noise, and then it jerked. The car suddenly stopped going and steam was popping out of it.

Big Mo jumped out. While me and Big Mo were looking under the hood, HyLow disappeared.

Pretty soon we could hear the people turning out of the church, Big Mo and me, we get back in the car, but the hood was still up. Before we could hide, here come HyLow, bringin some people.

"The best papershells this side of the Mississippi. We sellin for not one hundred for ten pounds, like Yancy do those dried-up things he ship off up North. But we selling them for twenty-five cents a pound."

Russell Moody was there. The Gary kids crowded around the car, and before we knew it we were digging into those sacks, selling the papershells to the whole church.

While we were tryin to shorten the line of kids and people, I see Mrs. Rankin coming along. It was my job to hold onto the money in the front seat and pass out change. This time, Mrs. Rankin with some of the old ladies. I figured she wouldn't stop, but I was wrong.

She come over to the car, look in at me, and watch HyLow and Big Mo sellin the pecans.

"Well, Morris, I can see you worked the whole day. You know the Lord said six days was allotted for work--"

"Yes, mam," Morris said. He was always respectful.

"And on the seventh Thou shalt steal," whispered HyLow to me.

We all knew Mrs. Rankin knew where them papershells come from, because she used to work daywork for the Colliers. She come over to the sacks. "Papershells?"

"Yes, mam."

"Here, try some," said HyLow. He gave her a free sack, but she shoved his hand away, ramblin in her purse. "Those are good pecans," she said. "I cant chew like I used to."

But she handed HyLow a coin, anyway. "I want to see you young men in church next Sunday." She looked at Morris. "Morris, you need to lose a little weight."

"Yes, mam," said Big Mo.

"And you, young man." She pointed at me. "Better stay away from these older boys, you hear?"

"Yes, mam."

Then she came over to HyLow. "And you, I bet you can smell when pecans are ripe... Comin round here, acting like you from somewhere. Why, all of you ought to thank the Lord that man aint shoot you . . . Now, save some of them papershells for your own people."

"Yes, mam," we said. Then she went on down the street.

"Now, how she know where we get them papershells?" asked HyLow.

"That old lady know the day you was born," said Big Mo.

"Hey hey hey," said HyLow. But it was the first time all day I aint heard him laugh. He didnt have to laugh. The truth was the truth anyway it come.

The Ancient and Recent Voices With Henry Dumas

That Henry Dumas felt and thought deeply about his people--and the global flock--is evident in the abundance of sensi-
tivity, love and insight embedded in Goodbye, Sweetwater, a magnetic collection of tales and visions. Dumas's territory--read laboratory-was wherever the imagination could roam free. Within such a limitless sphere of folk and fantasy Dumas projected his powerful fictional universe, an Afro-centered mirrorworld that included fascinating fables and frame states for which he has become--one can't say "famous"-- idolized and emulated by a growing diasporan tribe of storytellers, critics, multiculturalists, Africanists, folklorists, mystics, students of the occult, linguists, songifiers, ethnomusicologists, and poets. In my introduction to Ark of Bones I noted that, "already he is being compared to. . Jean Toomer and Kahlil Gibran."

For some time following his violent death-which occurred deep in a Harlem subway on the night of May 23, 1968, at the hands of a New York City Transit policeman-factual components of Dumas's own life merged with those of his fictional characters, producing a bizarre grapevine of tales ominously immersed in government conspiracies and witch hunts. Indeed, many who knew about Dumas's constructs for ideosound, designed to wage "spiritual" combat against Big Brother, found easy connections or parallels between his death and what was perceived as the counterrevolutionary mission of an oppressive and trigger-happy "system." The fact that this young Black male, then not quite thirty-four years old, was shot by a white policeman, under what still remain unclarified circumstances, was all the more reason why many in the Movement waxed" suspicious." The precedents were all there, had been there-in fact and fiction from the FBI's coven Cointeipro operations to
the CIA-engineered murder of an Afro-American writer in John A. Williams's The Man Who Cried I Am, a best-selling novel of the late 1960s. Given Black people's history of "healthy paranoia," as some scholars put it, and in view of that tension-preg-
nant and anxiety-armed era, one needed very little imagination or coaxing to conclude that Dumas's awesome abilities as a seer- sorcerer had been deemed dangerous enough to destroy.

Dumas himself was ever mindful of this "threat"--so widely believed that it is discussed as "fact" among Black activists, writers and intellectuals. The broader theme of Black male vulnerability, which one hears and reads about everywhere these
days, is one of the vital thread-messages in Dumas's fictional quilt. We see it over and over and over as in "The Waking Dream" (from Jonoah and the Green Stone) where elder Mrs. Haley, mother-admonisher, accosts young Jonoah regarding his role and responsibilities: "We aint got many men these days. They kills em off as fast as we birth em. What you gonna do, young man?... What you gonna do, young man?"

But what of Henry Dumas? Friends and colleagues testify that his electric personality, intellectual energy and creativity drove him at an almost dizzying speed. And yet, ironically, he seemed to have time for those close to him. His widow, Loretta Dumas, recalled that his artistic intensity was so all-consuming that he appeared to be wide-awake even when he was asleep. Another observed that being Black prompted Dumas to "live the way he lived, to become so wide and wise, and certainly it 'helped' him to die the way he died." Hale Chatfield, author of that statement and coeditor of the Southern Illinois University
editions of Ark of Bones and Poetry for My People, also said of Dumas:

He was complex, intricate, variable, wise to innumerable ways of life, eclectic in his interests, and at ease in almost any company. Or at least he had acquired the appearance of these qualities, so that any of us who were his friends had to feel ulti- mately that at best we knew only facets of the entire man, had access, at best, only to those elements of his being that were available to us as individuals somehow more specialized, more restricted, in our perspectives. Nobody I know fails to feel or hesitates to affirm that Henry Dumas exceeded him in the breadth of his experience of human situations.

Jay Wright was also well acquainted with the many-sided Henry Dumas. A gifted poet and thinker, Wright contributed the introduction to Poetry for My People and its republished Random House edition, Play Ebony Play Ivory. His description of Dumas is a picture of order-centered hurriedness, of a disciplined and calculated rush:

Henry Dumas lived very rapidly, and very slowly. We could never seem to keep up with him, or catch him, or hold him when we did. It wasn't that Dumas avoided any of us. There was simply so very much to do. He had so many friends During the time he was an on-again off-again student at Rutgers University, he spent a great deal of time trying to organize informal readings, or starting or promoting small publications, or persuading one or another of his friends to go to a gospel concert. It was very hard to figure out just when he had time to write. But he did write, and quite a bit. Whenever he appeared, he had stacks of new poems, pages of a novel, articles, prose poems, sketches for a play. To conclude that he lived in an absurd swiftness would be a mistake. For Dumas had heavy roots, in his people, in the land...

Although he later speaks about Dumas's poetry, Wright's observations nevertheless provide brilliant insights into the broader cosmos of Henry Dumas, writer, and the Afro-American creative mind in general:

Dumas asserts that the language you speak is a way of defining yourself within a group. The language of the Black community, s with any group, takes its form, its imagery, its vocabulary, because Black people want them that way. Language can protect, exclude, express value, as well as assert identity. That is why Dumas's language is the way it is. In the rhythm of it, is the act, the unique manner of perception of a Black man.

In 1964, Dumas staked out the arena in which he would construct his religious-folkloric-literary frames of references. In a letter to George Hudson, he exclaimed that:

I was born in the south (rural Arkansas) and come quite definitely from the rural elements .... My interest in Gospel music coincides with my interest in folk poetry, and the folk expression. There is a wealth of good things to be developed in our heritage. The Gospel tradition is among a few.

In a biographical note accompanying his contribution to Black Fire, the late- 1960s anthology edited by LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka) and Larry Neal, Dumas admitted: "I am very much concerned about what is happening to my people and what we are doing with our precious tradition." The statement echoes his earlier call for "full-time, devoted scholarship" designed to establish a proper perspective on the Black heritage and simultaneously to create appropriate vehicles for utilizing traditional folk forms in the service of serious literary expression. His research, which represented a major undertaking, had hardly been completed at the time of his premature death. But Dumas had come far enough along that one could easily touch and enjoy with him his wonderful and multi-storied world. For as Jay Wright reminds us, "Dumas is there. The rhythm is the perception. The language is participation in the act."

According to Jay Wright, who brings righteous vision to the greatness of Dumas's craft:

Dumas found this rhythm of perception most readily, as others have, in music. And he brooded a lot about musical structure. The blues and gospel music, particularly, were his life breath. Dumas haunted gospel concerts, photographing, when he could, the singers and the action. For him, the songs and the style of the singers linked him to the land, pinpointed that sense of dispossession that he felt, living in the alien, crass and prejudiced cities, where too many people ignored what he was as a Black man, and too few cared enough to learn or honor him because of it. His singers [and poets-storytellers] have the wisdom of African priests. The music is more than gospel; it is mythic gesture and indicative of a social structure.

Henry Dumas was born into the racially segregated but culturally pluralistic world of Sweet Home, Arkansas, on July 20,
1934. At the impressionable age of ten he was taken to the even more segregated world of Harlem in New York City. There, in the Upsouth, he attended public schools, completing Commerce High School in 1953, and enrolling at City College that same year. Ever the searcher, the adventurer, the inquirer, Dumas broke off his college studies to join the Air Force. He was stationed at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, and later spent one year in the Arabian Peninsula, this latter experience helping to generate his interest in Arabic language, mythology and culture. Selections from Jonoab and the awesome story, "Goodbye, Sweetwater," seem to recall some of the experiences he may have had in the south.

On September 24, 1955, midway through his four years of military service, Dumas married Loretta Ponton. The year fol- lowing his 1957 discharge, Dumas's first son, David, was born. Enrolling at Rutgers University around this same time, Dumas
began a full-time pursuit of courses in etymology and sociology before discovering his natural habitat in English. Two years were apparently all he was able to devote to a full-time college program, having to work, as it were, assume responsibilities of father and husband, write, organize on the little-magazine circuit, and involve himself in America's great sociological practicum--the civil rights movement. A part-time student at Rutgers over the next seven years, Dumas finally quit the university in 1965 without finishing his degree. His second son, Michael, was born in 1962; and homebound responsibilities, coupled with a widening interest/involvement in the civil rights movement, detoured Dumas from his most passionately pursued subject--religion. He juggled his role as a part-time student and husband-father with his job as an operator of printing machines at IBM from 1963 to 1964. In this vortex of student, writer, wage earner, organizer, activist, father and husband, Dumas still managed to find the time and means to cart clothing, food and supplies to inhabitants of tent cities in Mississippi and Tennessee. From Ark of Bones through Jonoab through Rope of Wind through Goodbye, Sweetwater, there exists an oxymoronic constellation of hope and drudgery, pride and dispossession, advancement and setback, Black strength and resilience against omnipresent racism and degradation. It's all there in some phase or form-from racial volcanoes, covered by pretty wavy cotton fields, to Paul Laurence Dunbar's human mask that "grins and lies."

In my introduction to Rope of Wind, I engaged in a debate with certain critics and aestheticians, especially some who had suggested that a particular ideology--say Black nationalism--was the highest state of Afro-American fiction. My response was:

When one considers that mothers, fathers, and children make up a community, however, one must search beyond ideology, contemporaneity, or hysteria. All of these foregoing elements are, of course, a natural part of Black writing, but a reader must be given a full "gulp" in order to savor the entire work of the "cook." Hence, Dumas's preacher in "The Map of Harlem" tells his audience that "the soul of the black man is an unexplored region."

Hence we enter, with Dumas, "the world of. . . surrealism, supernaturalism, gothicism, madness, nightmarism, child-men [girl-women], astrology, death, magic, witchcraft, and science fiction." I personally like the word comfortable when I'm thinking or talking about Dumas's work. Comfortable in the sense that he is not filtering his words and thoughts through some mechanical censor. He is not playing to the tube or the microphone. His is not a Top 40 prime-time rap. Instead he gives us interior songs, stories from the viscera. Therefore, the hippest way to "bop" with Dumas is to let yourself go "down-home"-- to those down-home blues, with funky fictional arias, with low-down fables duffing through infinity. And, yes, this earth language and rhythmized way of seeing reach across the spectrum of these stories.

But while Dumas's fictions may appear to be "new" in the literary sense of that term, they are ancient in origins, archetypes, meanings and structures. This item was particularly arresting in the 1960s when a proliferation of "media"-- conscious artists occurred. For, as Baraka saw and felt:

Dumas's span shows a feeling (again!) for all of our selves or all of our self--the large black majestic one. A truly new writer (in the sense that the nationalistic consciousness all of us need is here) as a true art form not twenty "Hate Whitey's" & a benediction of sweaty artificial flame, but actual black art real, man, and stunning.

Such, too, were the exuberant echoes in Clyde Taylor's searching and unselfish ode to Dumas in "Henry Dumas: Legacy of a Long-Breath Singer," which appeared in the September 1975 issue of Black World (Negro Digest), where Dumas's fiction and poetry had been published in the 1960s. Earlier pithy reports on Dumas's vision and technical virtuosity were confirmed by Taylor who reminded us that:

Dumas aspired to the oldest, most honored version of the poet, that of poet-prophet to his people, to incarnate their culturalidentity, values and mythic visions, but further to codify and even reshape those myths into modalities of a more soulful existence .... The miracle of Dumas's work, worth the name genius, is that he had already successfully integrated the formidable demands of this role when the new concept of Black writing...

Dumas's ambitious and successful undertakings as a 1960s Black writer, according to Taylor, included avoiding the pitfalls of transient hipness, or microphone mentality, and reintegrating Black literature into natural processes-or nature. This observation could not have been truer coming from Dumas himself. Taylor elaborated with his own brilliant Dumas-construct:

As a language, hip is the expression of the modern city. Dumas's voice and vision absorb that part of hipness that preserves an African ontology. But his freedom from the jive and flash superficiality of full-blown urban hipness is exceptional in recent black poetry black writing]. His eye is always on the line of the diaspora, from Africa, across the ocean, the deep rural South and on into the Northern cities. And he weights and scales his perceptions so that the older strata of culture and experience are always the heavier. His South, like Toomer's, is dense African. His North is African still, following the presence of Black folks. The city as background to his people is rendered in a fantastical, opaque, sketchy way, insanely electric and as absurd as his own subterranean death.

In his earth lore, his cultural reclamations and his creative far-reach, Dumas is reminiscent of James Baldwin, Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Sherley Anne Williams and Lance Jeffers. However, there is a mellowed-down "freshness" in Dumas, that one looks hard to find in Black or, for that matter, any current writing. Thus he is both ancient and contemporary.

I first met Dumas in 1967, when he came to Southern Illinois University's Experiment in Higher Education, where I taught, to take a position as teacher-counselor and director of language workshops. EHE was part of an interdisciplinary and experiential consortium that included Katherine Dunham's Performing Arts Training Center. The two institutions frequently presented concerts or performances during which Dumas joined other literary artists in choral readings. Such collaborative rituals usually featured drum, dance and woodwind ensembles.

During the ten months or so that he lived in East St. Louis, Dumas's life continued to be hurried and productive. He vigorously overhauled old things and wrote new ones. He loved to visit the Celebrity Room, a local hangout for activists, poets, dancers, intellectuals and street denizens. The bar featured jazz, great conversation, poetry readings, fashion shows and other cultural events. It was there that Dumas first read his great poem, "Our King Is Dead," an inspiring but frightening elegy to Martin Luther King, Jr. Dumas also spent countless hours walking, driving and talking in East St. Louis and he was especially fond of Naomi's, a soul food restaurant, which he frequented with Sherman Fowler, Joseph Harrison and myself. I took him to the South End and to Rush City, sections of East St. Louis in which I spent my childhood, and he exclaimed about how "southern," "real," and "basic" the people and the land were. That was Henry Dumas: eternally observant, thoughtful, peripatetic. The EHE-PATC-Community fulcrum inspired Dumas and he wrote, in the way that Jay Wright recollects from the earlier 1960s, with a passion and a fury. Whenever we had been away from Dumas for a few days, he never failed, upon his reappearance, to favor us with a reading of fresh work or to give us photocopies of new creations, usually signed and often dedicated to one of us.

Much ideological and intellectual thrashing and winnowing occurred within the healthy crucible of the long days and nights
of 1967-68. Intellectual ferment, electricity and raw energy poured into lectures, horns, drums, debates, dances, performances, concerts, Frantz Fanon staff sessions, curriculum development, the Movement, Black Arts, theories of literature, the notion of the African Continuum, Pan-Africanism. In the midst of it all, Dumas wrote, lectured, lived, shared.

During those electric and trying years of arts and activism, I doubled as an editor of the East St. Louis Monitor, a weekly newspaper owned by the late Clyde C. Jordan. Henry Dumas became a familiar figure around the Monitor offices and when news of his death was received, the staff of the paper expressed grief and shock. The Monitor published a loving obituary and my editorial, entitled simply "Henry Dumas Poet: 1934-- 1968." I drew some loose parallels between Dumas's and Dr. King's death-noting that in "Our King Is Dead," Dumas had ironically and prophetically cried: "I am ready to die." In that same poem, he admonished Blacks for allowing too many of their "kings to be sent to the volcano," even as he himself was headed for that very same fate. The editorial, which appeared in theJune 6, 1968, edition of the Monitor, spoke of Dumas's "in- stinctive communication with the spirit and soul of blackness, his remarkable insight into, and understanding of, the sources of
Afro-American poeticism, his undying love for humanity and his insatiable quest for truth."

Such were the lives and times of Henry Dumas, who picked up his gauntlet, carried it with grace, funk, speed, seed and honor, and then passed it on to us. And what a grandiloquent baton! Dumas always, always insisted that we listen, a request he often followed with the communal exhortation, "Man, let's just tell it!"

Eugene B. Redmond
East St Louis, Illinois
1987/2004

©2004 by Eugene B. Redmond and Loretta Dumas