The Stories of Dumas by Henry Dumas

First published:Ark of Bones, and Other Stories, 1970; Rope of Wind, and Other Stories, 1979; Goodbye, Sweetwater, 1988

Type of work: Short stories

A Brief but Significant Career

Henry Lee Dumas has become increasingly recognized, in the years following his tragic death in 1968, as one of the most significant voices of the Black Arts movement of the 1960’s. Dumas was born in Sweet Home, Arkansas, on July 20, 1934, the son of Appliance Watson and Henry Joseph Dumas. In the mid-1940’s Dumas moved to Harlem, where he graduated from Commerce High School in 1953. After briefly attending City College, Dumas entered the Air Force. He served until 1957. In 1955, he married Loretta Ponton; together the couple had two sons.

Following his discharge from the Air Force, Dumas enrolled at Rutgers University, attending variously as a full-time and a part-time student before leaving the university altogether in 1965 without completing requirements for a degree. During the early 1960’s, Dumas became deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement, journeying to the Deep South on several occasions to take clothing and supplies to those on the front lines of the struggle. In the meantime, he continued to work, write, study, and provide for a growing family.

Little of Dumas’s work was published during his lifetime, although he had written poetry and short fiction, as well as the draft of a novel, in the years preceding 1968. It has been largely through the efforts of Eugene B. Redmond, who became the executor of Dumas’s literary estate, that the various collections of Dumas’s work have been published. At Redmond’s behest, Southern Illinois University Press published collections of Dumas’s poems and short stories posthumously (Dumas had been associated with the university’s Upward Bound Program shortly before his death); Redmond’s continued efforts resulted in subsequent publication of Dumas’s work by major publishing houses.

Community and Fiction

For the traditional folk artist, value, be it cultural, political, economic, or aesthetic, must be grounded in a preexisting concept of community. In the short stories of Henry Dumas, the concept of community is both a refuge from a hostile world and a microcosm of that hostility; it is both a reservoir for creativity, social activism, and political consciousness and the very embodiment of destructiveness, social stagnation, and moral conservatism. Published posthumously, all of Dumas’s short fiction concerns, to one degree or another, the precarious relation of an individual black male, or black males, to a black community. Some of these communities are rural, others are urban; some are working class and poor, others are middle class and relatively solvent.

Poor or comfortable, the community is never a homogeneous source of support or compassion. Nevertheless, Dumas proffers a higher or transcendent community as an alternative to the real-life community. The implications of the necessity of positing an other community, located outside space and time, outside history, in the ethereal realm of the mythic, underline the central dilemma of all folk artists in general, and black folk artists specifically: How does one valorize community “values” when some of those values call into question or block not only the folk artist’s remedies to community problems but also the folk artist’s individual vision that inspires those remedies? For a black folk artist like Dumas, the dilemma is compounded by the debilitating effects of slavery and racism: How does one valorize community values constituted as both an effect of and a reaction to oppression?

Dumas responds to this problem by invoking myth: More often than not, the heroes of his short fiction (they are exclusively male) find their identity in an idealized ahistorical community of blacks, transcending the contingencies of moment and place. Thus, African magic, supernaturalism, and religion serve as the fulcrum on which many of these short stories teeter, always about to tumble into the caricatures of sentimentality. Since all Dumas’s short fiction was collected after his death, it is not clear if the order of the stories represents Dumas’s vision of his work. Nevertheless, despite the fact that most of the stories from Ark of Bones, and Other Stories can be categorized as “social realism” while the majority of those in Rope of Wind, and Other Stories (both collected in Goodbye, Sweetwater) are highly charged allegories or parables, there is a strong continuity between the early and late stories. In both collections, one finds the overtly mythic (“Ark of Bones” and “Rope of Wind”), the political (“Strike and Fade” and “Harlem”), and the allegorical (“Fon” and “The Marchers”). Naturally, these genres overlap in many of the stories. What gives them their coherence is Dumas’s insistent but varied interrogation of the black community.

Community and History

The title story of the first posthumous collection, “Ark of Bones,” exemplifies the tension between communities set in history and those placed outside history. As in almost all the stories collected in Ark of Bones, the tension between the two communities is represented by two male protagonists—here, Head-eye and Fish-hound. As the narrator, Fish-hound is the voice of convention, spokesman for the community; he is the everyday, normal person. Head-eye, though, is uncommon. As the narrator says, he is “bout the ugliest guy I ever run upon” and “bout the smartest nigger in that raggedy school.” More important, Head-eye follows his mojo to an Ark that majestically and magically rises from the Mississippi River, bearing within its hull all the bones and spirits of enslaved Africans. The allusion to Noah’s Ark is deliberate; in Judaic-Christian theology, Noah’s Ark is an emblem of God’s mercy and grace, an island of life surrounded by a sea of death.

The Ark of Bones is, for Head-eye and, eventually, for Fish-hound, a sign of a promise more radical than the Judaic covenant. For them, the Ark of Bones is an island of life-in-death surrounded by a sea (the community) of death-in-life. Rather than the simple disruptive discontinuity symbolized by the Flood and Noah’s Ark, the Ark of Bones allows Head-eye and Fish-hound to end the isolation of a black community uprooted from the soil of its ancestry. At the story’s end, however, Head-eye leaves the community for parts unknown, while Fish-hound is completely transformed by the experience. Suddenly, people in the community view him as strange, like Head-eye, they say. Fish-hound has severed his ties with the historical living and bound himself to the mythical living dead. The story ends with the implication that Fish-hound, like Head-eye, will soon disappear, perhaps after “converting” yet another community member the way Head-eye converted him. Continuity with the past becomes a possibility for the individual, not a privilege of the community.

The conversion of the skeptic through the intercession of the believer, and their subsequent disappearance, suggests that Dumas may not have always been optimistic about the possibility of community—as opposed to individual—regeneration through the affirmation of heritage. This theme gets repeated in the story that follows “Ark of Bones,” “Echo Tree.” Once again, Dumas deploys the framework of myth to underscore the limits of knowledge. In this brief parable and allegory (it is both), two unnamed young male friends confront their spirituality and mortality in the form of a tree that serves as a kind of border between the worlds of the dead and the living. Indeed, the only character given a name, Leo, the best friend of one of the boys and the brother of the other, is dead. Leo’s brother is the skeptic, the one who doesn’t “believe” in the power of the tree. His friend, however, is a believer, having been taught by Leo to believe in the magical power of the tree. Once again, Dumas demonstrates the power of the mythic community over the historical community, the power of spiritual relations over blood relations: Though the young skeptic is Leo’s brother, he is not as close to Leo as is his best friend. Just as Fish-hound is “awed” into conversion by the spectacle of the Ark of Bones, however, so Leo’s brother is terrified into belief by the natural elements, the howl of the wind through the echo tree. Thus, Dumas links nature and myth, the continuity between the human and nonhuman, life and death. For Dumas, the survival of black communities depends on nature as a channel to an entire history always on the verge of being lost, denied, or forgotten; the mythic community channeled through nature overcomes time and history.

The linking of this mythic community with nature provides the frame for two other Dumas stories, “Fon” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” concerns the attempts of young white jazz lovers to crash a black nightclub to hear a new African horn, despite the warnings from the doorman. Insisting upon their rights, they enter as the musician—a friend of one of the whites—is about to play the new horn for the first time. He puts the horn to his lips, blows, and, in a scene deliberately reminiscent of the biblical story of Jericho, watches as the white patrons crumble to the floor, dead. In “Fon,” white racism, which is linked to the culture of the city, is foiled by a black heritage exemplified by the title character and his “brother.”

In this story, Nillmon, a white man, is driving along a deserted country road when a “fragment of black rock about the size of a fist” crashes through his rear window. Enraged, Nillmon gets out of the car, sees Fon sitting on a billboard, grabs his gun, forces Fon down, and stuffs him into the car. Fon denies throwing the rock. He claims he was simply sitting on the billboard with his brother, though when Nillmon looks, he sees no one else. Fon tells Nillmon he was teaching his brother “how to shoot arrows.” On their way to town, they almost run into a herd of cows crossing the road; Nillmon is so distracted that Fon is able to slip away. Here, the culture of the city (which, for Dumas, is the culture of whites) is opposed to nature, which Dumas links to black culture: car/cows, gun/bow and arrow. The minor triumph of Fon’s temporary escape—he is captured again by Nillmon and two of his buddies—foreshadows the story’s conclusion: Nillmon and his cohorts, about to shoot Fon, are cut down by arrows from above, presumably from Fon’s “brother” (whom the reader never sees). In short, Fon’s brother is the symbol of the mythic, transhistorical community, as opposed to Fon’s own historical community (symbolized by the church congregation), which proves itself helpless and ineffectual when confronted by Nillmon and his comrades.

Against Skepticism

Taken as a whole, Dumas’s fiction links a white, mechanistic racist culture of the city with the black skeptic. Refusing to believe in the magical powers of nature as articulated by African cultures, refusing to see beyond the immediate and tangible world of contingency, the black skeptic implicitly, like the white racist explicitly, denies the validity and interconnections of the natural world, black cultures, and black histories. Thus, even the black urban landscape becomes, for Dumas, the site of intraracial hostility at worst (“A Harlem Game”) and interracial combat at best (“Strike and Fade”). “A Boll of Roses” also deals with this theme, but on a grand scale. Here, black rural life confronts black urban life in the persons of Layton, a young southern sharecropper, and Rosemarie, a Northern Freedom Rider trying to register voters. The story opens with the familiar paradigm: Layton, the young believer who expresses more than a casual interest in this Rosemarie, and Floyd, his cynical friend, who tells him in no uncertain terms, “Man you crazy! That girl ain’t thinkin about no cotton pickin nigger like you!”

Though Layton remains determined to meet Rosemarie with roses, his already shaky self-confidence is systematically broken by his encounters with his mother, Floyd, and the other sharecroppers, who all, to one degree or another, question his worthiness to a girl like Rosemarie. Thus, when Layton finally does get an opportunity to speak with her, he becomes the no-good, foul-mouthed “cotton pickin nigger” everyone has implied he is. At the story’s end, he decides to give the rejected roses to his mother, symbolizing, perhaps, his reconnection to his rural heritage. The urban world of Rosemarie—she is accompanied by a young white woman—is precisely what Layton must shun if he is to remain true to himself, to his community.

While the stories in Ark of Bones are primarily marked by the symbolic, those collected in Rope of Wind are extensive allegories. The opening story, “The Marchers,” sets the tone; it is an excoriating parable about the domination of the group over the person, the facile preference for abstraction and sloganeering over active and difficult struggle. In a white dome, a black prisoner sits, “shackled to inertia by a great chain of years.” Suddenly he hears the roar of a crowd gathering at the great door of the dome. The crowd shouts, “OPEN THE GREAT DOOR OF THIS NATION AND BRING OUT THE PAST.” Eventually, after several such proclamations, the crowd crashes the door, trampling “the sentiments, the truths, the lies, the myths, the legends of the past in a frenzied rush to lay hold of freedom.” They drag the prisoner out, still in chains, and more speeches and slogans follow. The prisoner, barely able to whisper, begs for water, for the loosening of his chains, but the crowd, caught up in its own spectacle, ignores him. For Dumas, the question of individual responsibility in relation to a community is a moot one, since responsibility presumes self-motivation; yet the prisoner is “shackled to inertia by a great chain of years.” The community must shoulder the burden of motivating and inspiring, yet here it fails in its responsibility.

In the four stories that follow “The Marchers,” individuals are abandoned or ignored by a rebelling community (“Harlem”), are forced to abandon the community in order to understand fully wisdom and knowledge (“The University of Man”), and sacrifice their lives for the sake of the community (“Rope of Wind” and “Devil Bird”). What is distinctly absent is any sense of an effective, supportive historical community.

The group of stories that conclude Rope of Wind share a certain attitude toward religion and money. Specifically, these stories reject the lure of traditional Christian explanations of experience as well as traditional American norms for earning money. For Dumas, both American Christianity and capitalism attempt to yoke blacks to systems that are intrinsically antithetical to black, or rather African, values. The problem is that the community has adopted these norms, so individual dissenters are forced to walk a fine line between rejection of the norms (which implies rejection of the community values) and acceptance of the norms (which implies rejection of alternative African values). However, if these stories show the individual attempting to meet the community halfway, they rarely show the opposite: the community attempting to reach out for and understand the peculiar needs and desires of the black iconoclast.

On balance, Dumas appears to endorse iconoclasm over conformity, if what is at stake is a continuity with a mythic, ahistorical community. This is why memory plays such a crucial role in many of his stories. At the same time, Dumas never rejects the historical black community out of hand, since he sees in it, in his best and most optimistic moments, the potential for historical understanding and responsibility. This potential remains, for Dumas, ever present, since even the best that white culture offers blacks is a mechanistic, inhuman value system in which profit and competition are valued at the expense of charity and cooperation. In their own way, the short stories of Henry Dumas presage the antiestablishment critiques of the Black Power movements that would rise from a number of black communities in the 1960’s.

One of Dumas’s last works was an elegy written upon the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April, 1968, “Our King Is Dead.” Ironically, this poem became a prophecy, for some six weeks after King’s death, Dumas himself was dead, killed by a white police officer in a New York subway under suspicious circumstances. The incident was officially described as a case of mistaken identity. Henry Dumas was only two months short of his thirty-fourth birthday.

Bibliography

Baraka, Amiri. “Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist.” Black American Literature Forum 22 (Summer, 1988): 164-166. Explores the connection of Dumas’s work to the Black Arts movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the black liberation movement of the 1960’s.

Baytop, Adrianne. “’Into the dawn light/ the shadow walks behind you’: Henry Dumas.” Black American Literature Forum 22 (Summer, 1988): 171-174. Discusses the importance of blues music and water images as sources of spirituality and comfort in the lives of African Americans.

Collier, Eugenia. “Elemental Wisdom in Goodbye, Sweetwater: Suggestions for Further Study.” Black American Literature Forum 22 (Summer, 1988): 192-199. Focuses on what the author believes are the fundamental structures of Dumas’s fiction: allegory and archetype.

De Jongh, James L. “Notes on Henry Dumas’s Harlem.” Black American Literature Forum 22 (Summer, 1988): 218-220. Examines the multiple rhetorical function of Harlem in Dumas’s fiction.

Halsey, William. “Signify(cant) Correspondences.” Black American Literature Forum 22 (Summer, 1988): 238-240. Explores the African tradition of naming as a method of linking individuals separated by history. Shows how naming-as-link connects Dumas with such other African American writers as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, and Toni Morrison.

Mitchell, Carolyn A. “Henry Dumas and Jean Toomer: One Voice.” Black American Literature Forum 22 (Summer, 1988): 297-309. Argues that Dumas’s fiction descends directly from Jean Toomer’s poetic novel Cane (1923) in terms of both writers’ attempts to establish the basis for a new spirituality for African Americans.

Morrison, Toni. “On Behalf of Henry Dumas.” In What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Tribute to Dumas by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist.

Traylor, Eleanor. “Henry Dumas and the Discourse of Memory.” Black American Literature Forum 22 (Summer, 1988): 365-377. Explores the function of memory in Dumas’s work and its influence on Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987).

Werner, Craig. “Dumas, Nationalism, and Multicultural Mythology.” Black American Literature Forum 22 (Summer, 1988): 394-399. Attempts to construct Dumas as a postmodern descendant of the modernist Langston Hughes by showing how not only Hughes’s but also T. S. Eliot’s, James Joyce’s, and Ezra Pound’s modernism is undermined and revised by Dumas.