Eugene B. Redmond

Editor's Note:

Eugene Redmond and Loretta Dumas are the custodians of the living legacy of Henry Dumas. In light of the recent controversy of radio shock jock Don Imus calling the runner up 2007 Rutger's University Women's Basketball team a bunch of "nappy headed hoes", and the resulting furor which drew in sharp focus the use of demeaning and derogatory language (particularly directed toward African women ) in the press, on the radio and through various artistic and entertainment outlets, Asili is reprising an article by Eugene Redmond on the life and works of Henry Dumas if nothing more than a reminder of the lofty heights attainable by the African creative muse....

Introduction: The Ancient and Recent Voices within Henry Dumas

That Henry Dumas felt and thought deeply about his people and the global flock-is evident in the abundance of sensitivity, 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 and poetic universe, an Afro-centered mirror-world that included fascinating fables and frame-states for which he has become-one can't say "famous"-idolized and emulated by a growing diasporean tribe of storytellers, critics, multiculturalists, Africanists, folklorists, mystics, students of the occults, linguists, sopgifiers, ethnomusicologists, and poets. In my acknowledgments to Ark of Bones (1974),I noted that "already he is being compared to . . . Jean Toomer and Kahlil Gibran" (iv).

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 that many in the Movement waxed "suspicious." The precedents were all there, had been there-in fact and fiction: from the FBI's covert Cointelpro operations to the CIA-engineered murder of an Afro- American writer in John A. Williams's The Man Who Cried I Am, a bestselling novel of the late 1960s. Given Black people's history of "healthy paranoia," as some scholars put it, and in view of that tension-pregnant 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 and poetic quilt. We see it over and over and over, as in "The Waking Dream" (from jonoah and the Green Stone), in which 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 in the world. What you gonna do, young man? . . . What you gonna do, young man?" (146). A real-world question, it is echoed by the popular soul singer Chaka Khan who asks, "Whatcha gonna do for me, boy? Whatcha gonna do for me . . . when the chips are down?"

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, recalls that his artistic intensity was so all-consuming that he appeared to be wide-awake even when he was asleep. Another has 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" (Chatfield vii).Hale Chatfield, author of this statement and co-editor of the Southern Illinois University editions of Ark of Bones (1970)and Poetzy for My People (1970), has 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 Introduction 145 were his friends had to feel ultimately. . . 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. (vii)

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, which Random House republished in 1974 as 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. And he had so many friends, in whose work and persons he took a deep interest, that it seemed as if he didn't want to disappoint any of us, as if he had each day to come to each of us and prod and cajole and reaffirm his belief in whatever tasks we were about. . . . It was very hard to figure 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. (xvii)

Although Wright, speaking later, is referring to Dumas's poetry, his observations provide brilliant insights into the broader cosmos of the writer Henry Dumas and of 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, as with that of any group, takes its form, its imagery, its vocabulary, because Black people want them that way. Langauge can protect, exclude, express value, as well as assert identity. That is why Dumas' language is the way it is. In the rhythm of it, is the act, the unique manner of perception of a Black man. (xx)

Dumas's significant discoveries did not happen by accident or divine intervention. He conducted deep and long excursions into his roots, his history, his culture, his language, and into their correlative structures and temperaments wherever he found them within the world's vast multicultural webbing. 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:

...I was born in the south (rural Arkansas) and come quite definitely from the rural elements. Listening to Moms Mabely, sometimes, brings back a lot. . . . 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. (qtd.)

Later on in that signal piece of correspondence, Dumas discussed his plans to undertake a serious study of the oral aspects of Black culture. Noting that "there is a difference between the Gospel and the Spiritual, Rock and Roll, Jazz, etc.-a difference which is like the difference between dried hay and green grass." He concluded, "I will have to rely on any source I can get, which ultimately will probably be on my own love of good Gospel singing and my own notes and ideas" (qtd. in Ark of Bones xii)

In a biographical note accompanying his contribution to Black Fire, the late 1960s' anthology edited by LeRoi Jones (Amm 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" (661). The statement echoes his earlier call (in the letter to Hudson) 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 not 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.

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

Dumas found this rhythm of perception (let's call it) 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. . . . 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. . . . Music seemed to Dumas to be able to carry the burden of direct participation in the act of living, as no poem, that was not musically structured, could. (xx-xxi)

Wright adds, and this is tellingly evident in~the author's surviving literature, that "Dumas was searching for an analogous structure for poetry" (xxi). Certainly one can easily deduce that this search extended to his wider writing interests: Evidence of conscious songified structurings appear throughout the stories and poems. !n "Rope of Wind," for example, this rhythmized perception is built artfully into a paragraph in which certain ideas and sounds recur in wavy, altered forms:

So he ran and he ran. . . . He saw the moon ahead of him, sitting above the horizon and looking at all that was going on. He wondered if the moon knew. . . . He looked at the moon. A thin cloud of dust was corning at the western edge of it. . . . But the moon was his witness. The moon was his
" witness. (60)

Elsewhere, a variation on the line "And the wind is whipping up a sermon" is played upon to situate the reader in the midst of a storm.

Henry Dumas was born into the racially segregated but culturally pluralistic world of Sweet Home (Sweetwater?), Arkansas, on July 20,1934. At the impressionable age often 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 spent one year in the Arabian Peninsula, which helped to generate his interest in Arabic language, mythology, and culture, and later was stationed at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Selections from jonoah, Play Ebony Play Ivory, and the awesome story "Goodbye, Sweetwater" seem to recall experiences he may have had in the South. However sketchy the actual data on the Southern scene may be, jonoah, in the words of critic Carolyn A. Mitchell, certainly"captures the psychological tenor of the black experience there" (90).

On September 24, 1955, midway through his four years of military service, Dumas married Loretta Ponton. The year following his 1957 discharge, Dumas's first son, David, was born. Enrolling at Rutgers University around this same time, Dumas began 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 before leaving 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. An on-again/off-again student at Rutgers University over the next seven years, Dumas finally quit the University in 1965 without finishing his degree.

Dumas's 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-the study of world religions. He juggled his part-time role as a student and husband/father with his job as an operator of printing machines at IBM from 1963 to 1964. In this vortex, Dumas-student, writer, wage-earner, organizer, activist, father, and husband-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 Play Ebony through jonoah through Rope of Wind through Goodbye, Sweetwater, there exists an oxymoronic constellation of hope and drudgery, pride and dispossession, advancement and setback, Black strength/resilience against omnipresent racism and degradation. It's all there. Triumphantly there. Annoyingly there. Intimidatingly there. Violently there. Racially there. Sexually there. Murderously there. Benignly there. The rhythms of Dumas's diverse perceptions pervade his works-from racial volcanoes covered by pretty wavy cotton fields to the human mask that, in the words of Paul Laurence Dunbar, "grins and lies.

Assessing, or even describing, what Dumas does is no easy task. In an introduction to jonoah and the Green Stone, I remarked:

One will find the world's literary confluence here at the point of Henry Dumas. Some will immediately recognize similarities to Twain or Chesnutt or Dunbar or even some of the less noteworthy users and creators of dialects and stereotypes; but one must look again at these "boys" in Dumas' tales. They love eating watermelon, pecans, persimmons, etc. But in what stories have we seen a giant watermelon transformed into an escape ship? And since when do penknives grow to sword-size when they are taken from pockets? And who is Red Eye? An older version of the mysterious Headeye (of "Ark of Bones")? Or his reincarnated image? Does the green stone (watermelon? ancestral heirloom? Headeye's "mojo bone"? Probe's [from "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?"] "afro-horn"-turned-gem?) really exist? Is it imagined? Conjured up? Clearly, Dumas' system of ideas-for ordering the complex schemata of the Black Experience-had taken some time to develop. (xix )

I pursued this labyrinth of reasoning / feeling, noting that, for fictional purposes, Dumas's odyssey was "experimental" but had demanded study of all facets of the new, as well as ancient, African traditions (including the cross-fertilization of rich African/European/Indian cultures). I noted Dumas's use of conflict, suspense, racial motifs, survival themes, cosmic energy, supernaturalism, and ambiguity but said that love was the most defensible basis for his ritings. Dumas possessed an incredible and enormous ability and power to love Black people, in particular, and the human family. Everyone he knew attests to his giving freely of himself, his time, his encouragement, his wit, his humor, his wisdom, his presence, his prescience, his love. Dumas recognized the tumult and the urban friction in the lives of an essentially rural people. (He spent little time writing about the North.) But, more importantly, he accepted himself as a stem, branch, or leaf on the communal/historical tree. His work is much less about neuroses and pathologies than it is about growing and glowing from a foundation, a root, finally, and about how he/we "got over."

As I have stated in my introduction to Rope of Wind and Other Stories, mothers, fathers, and children are as central to the Black community as ideology is, and the reader must be given a full "gulp" in order to savor the entire work of the "cook" Dumas uses a broad spectrum of converging literary and folk influences to make his statement as a Black American. He permits us to enter, with him, a world of surrealism, supernaturalism, gothicism, madness, nightmarism, child-men and girl-women, astrology, death, magic, witchcraft, and science fiction. I like to use the words comforted comfortable when I'm thinking or talking about Dumas's work, which is comfortable in the sense that Dumas does not filter his words and thoughts through some mechanical censor. He is not playing to the tube or the microphone. His is not a top-40, primetime rap. Instead he gives us interior songs, stories from the viscera.

The hippest way to "bop" with Dumas is to let yourself go down ijome-to those down-home blues, down-home sermons, downhome cookouts, down-home Saturday nights, down-home fears, down-home struggles; that down-home life. But be prepared to boogie down with the way out and the weird and to hear/see lethal light-arrows fired from the bows of space-spirits ("Fon"). Ready yourself to fly on the wings of an extraterrestrial dreamconsciousness (jonoah). For always (in all ways) Dumas gyrates in the cosmic funk shop, returning to the basics via spectacular docu-sermons ("The Map of Harlem") and scaling the celestial Sun-Ra- Rays of Coltrane's quantum choruses in "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" Dumas makes you feel good, like James Brown knew you would ("There was a time"), with funky fictional arias, with lowdown fables duffing through infinity. His earth-language and rhythmized way of seeing reach across the spectrum of his poems, parables, and stories.

Dumas refuses to treat his own people on a full-time-dilemma basis, or to thrust them into a culture of pathology. He has developed various mystical and mythical ambiguities which spine related states of consciousness (Hughes's dreams) to explain and illuminate the genius and staying power of Afro-Americans. One is able to read, reed, rite, sing, dance, dream, or love with Henry Dumas. In "The University of Man," a Zen-influenced fable, a griot tells the young protagonist in search of the "universities" of knowledge that" 'the greatest tool of education is the soul. The truly educated man is like a giant stylus etching in the sands of the earth. As he walks, words and songs flow behind him' " (Rope 45).

Mythology and reality, fantasy and normality merge in Dumas's fictional/real world. The fantastic, after the thinking of the African, is actual, a part of where we are, who we are, and what we are. Having read the landmark works on African and Afro-American cosmology and folklore, Dumas carefully and strenuously applied these theories to his own personal observations in the North American diaspora. Whereas some critics have wondered about the presence of the ark in "Ark of Bones," which appears without introduction or explanation, the answer for Dumas would have been simple-beyond, but inclusive of, the Biblical and the mythical. The boys Headeye and Fish live in a multi-dimensional world in which spirit and flesh unite, "head" and "eye" are one, "fish" and humans are one, water and dry land are one. It is a world in which bloods see and hear and feel things-a world in which the bicultural, bilingual, bipsychical, and bye-and-bye all come together. Small wonder (whew!) that Dumas has been described as "recasting the role of the Black writer."

These and other of Dumas's achievements have not escaped the scrutiny of our finest critics, philosophers, and scholars. Amiri Baraka entitled his 1969 preface to Poetry for My People " The Works of Henry Dumas-A New Blackness." In that poignant commentary (reprinted in this issue of BALF), Baraka, who understood, writes that

Dumas was a just rising star so many didn't know him. He was an underground deity, glowing in ascension into post material recognition. But after the death of his body, his mystical insistence. The spirit glows, speaking in his curious tongue. The ancient black language, African, African-American, the language is broad to include over 250,000 recorded years of experience on this planet. (xiii)

As Baraka sees it, Dumas carved out "mysterious black symbol worlds of shimmering utterance. Deep Blackness. The words take you into feeling, our selves as minds are articulated by them. . . . Rhythm Image. . . . The 'weirdness' of the work is its pure black base. It is seldom euro-literary" (xiii-xiv). Dumas's stories may appear to be "new" in the literary sense of that term, but they are ancient in origins, archetypes, meanings, and structures. This fact was particularly arresting in the 1960swhen media-conscious artists proliferated. According to Baraka,

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 needls] 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 DJ.

Baraka's remarks find exuberant echoes in Clyde Taylor's searching and unselfish ode to Dumas entitled "Henry Dumas: Legacy of a Long-Breath Singer" (originally published in Black World in 1975,the essay is reprinted in this issue of BALF). Taylor confirmed earlier, pithy reports on Dumas's vision and technical virtuosity:

Dumas aspired to the oldest, most honored version of poet, that of poet prophet to his people, to incarnate their cultural identity, values and mythic visions, but further to codify and even reshape those myths into modalities of a more soulful existence. . . . The miracle of Dumas'ls] 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 was just emerging. (5)

Dumas's ambitious and successful undertakings as a 1960s' Black writer, according to Taylor, included avoiding the pitfalls of transient hipness and returning Black literature to harmony with natural processes. Taylor elaborated with his own brilliant Dumas construct:

As a language, hip is the expression of the modem city. Dumas'ls] 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. 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 densely 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. (7)

In his earth-lore, his cultural reclamations, and his creative far reach, Dumas is reminiscent of Hughes, Hurston, Baldwin, Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Sherley Anne Williams, and Lance Jeffers. However, there is a freshness in Dumas's work that one looks hard to find in Black or, for that matter, any contemporary writing. He is both a part of, and apart from, the "tradition"-ancient, as it were, but recent too.

Those of us who had intimate contact with Henry Dumas during the last year or so of his life had a front-row view of this courageous and provocative writer's personality. Following his year with IBM, Dumas served from 1965to 1966 as a social worker for the State of New York, after which he spent one year as assistant director of the Upward Bound program at Hiram College in Ohio. I met Dumas, whose work I knew of from the little magazine/Black Arts circuit when, in 1967,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, based in East St. Louis, was part of an interdisciplinary and experiential consortium that included Katherine Dunham's Performing Arts Training Center. The two organizations frequently presented concerts or performances during which Dumas joined other area literary artists in choral readings. Such collaborative rituals usually featured drum, dance, and woodwind ensembles. A serious student of Astro-ritual forms (as witnessed by his preoccupation with ancient fusion arts and philosophies, and especially within the context of his profound love for Margaret Walker, James Brown, blues and gospel, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, and Malcolm X), Dumas was able to bring all of his "selves" into focus/play during those EHE-PATC happenings.

During the ten months or so that Henry Dumas lived in East St. Louis, his life continued to be hurried and productive. He vigorously overhauled old works and wrote new ones. He loved to visit the Celebrity Room at 2200 Illinois Avenue, 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 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 him, 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 day or two, he never failed, upon his reappearance, to favor us with a reading of fresh work or to give us Xerox copies of new creations, usually signed and often dedicated to one of us.

Much ideological and intellectual thrashing and winnowing took place during those long days and nights in 1967-68. Intellectual ferment. Electricity. The raw energy of mental machines poured into lectures, horns, drums, debates, dances, performances, concerts, the writings of Frantz Fanon, staff sessions, curriculum development, the Movement, Black Arts, theories of literature, the notion of the African Continuum, Pan-Africanism. Dumas was "stretching out": He was always the centrifugal force in some whirlwind-of-a-discussion with great thinkers, artists, scholars painter Oliver Jackson, sociologist Joyce Ladner, scholar/theoreticians Donald Henderson and Edward Crosby, choreographer Katherine Dunham, local radicals, Black nationalist leaders-, and his favorite students, John "Bird" Brooks and Sherman Fowler. In the midst of all this, Dumas wrote, lectured, lived, shared.

Such were the lives and times of Henry Dumas, writer/riter, 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 suggestion, "Man, let's just tell it!" And as poet/prophet, or preacher, he did just that. He had collected and reconstructed the bones of Black-and tribal-life. Henry pumas was one with the land, one with his people, and one with the universe. His senses, in his poems, sermons, and stories, are interchangeable. He feels with his ears and sees with his tongue, like Grandma Bridges in "Goodbye, Sweetwater," who "never had to look at things to recognize them. . . her bones telling her when it was going to rain" (Goodbye 335). The preacher, in all of his wisdom and medicinal histrionics, remains at the center of Dumas's aesthetical universe. Through the vessel of the preacher figure in jonoah there issues forth a hymn of "testimony to the strength of our African fathers" (144). And despite the ravaging floods, there is poetry in the prayer: "'Pray she dont rise no more'n she risin now'" (13).Because the knowing of "place" in life is life-sustaining, "somewhere during those early years," Jonoah moans, "I learned to distinguish between mortal danger and moral danger, between the waters of men and the waters of God" (4).

Within the crucible of 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 he was shot to death on May 23, 1968,the staff of the paper, along with the EHE and PATC faculties and students, expressed grief and shock. The Monitor published a loving obituary and my editorial, entitled simply "Henry Dumas Poet: 1934-1968." In that statement I drew some loose parallels between Dumas's and Dr. King's deaths-noting that in one of his last poems, "Our King Is Dead," the young writer had cried: "I am ready to die." In that same poem, however, Dumas admonished Blacks not to allow too many of their kings to be sent "to the volcano," even as he was headed for it himself. The editorial, which appeared on June 6, 1968,spoke of Dumas's "instinctive communication with the spirit and soul blackness, his remarkable insight into, and understanding of, the sources of Afro-American poeticism, his undying love." Dumas was an upright, soulful, dignified, intense, and caring man-even when he was partying. Yet there were few hints, in the way he looked or moved, that he was who and what he was. This I alluded to at the end of the editorial: "His slight frame and teasing beard indicated in no way his terrific majesty and power. . . . Henry Dumas, poet-prophet-warrior-priest.'

Works Cited

Baraka, Imamu Ameer. "Preface: The Works of Henry Dumas-A New Blackness." Poetry for My People. By Henry Dumas. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1970. xiii-xv. Chatfield, Hale. Preface. Dumas, Ark of Bones. vii-ix.
Dumas, Henry. Ark of Bones and Other Stories. Ed. Eugene B. Redmond. New York: Random, 1974.
-. Contributor's note. Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. Ed. LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal. New York: Morrow, 1968. 660-61.
-. Jonoah and the Green Stone. Arr. Eugene B. Redmond. New York: Random, 1976.
-. Rope of Wind and Other Stories. Ed. and intra. Eugene B. Redmond. New York: Random, 1979.
Mitchell, Carolyn. " Henry Dumas." Afro-American Poets Since 1955.

Ed. Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis. Dictionary of Literary Biography 41. Detroit: Gale, 1985. 89-99.
Taylor, Clyde. "Henry Dumas: Legacy of a Long-Breath Singer." Black World Sept. 1975: 4-16.
Wright, Jay. Introduction. Play Ebony Play Ivory. By Henry Dumas. Ed. Eugene B. Redmond. New York: Random, 1974. xvii-xxiii.

©2005-7 by Eugene B Redmond

Cover Design: Joseph McNair