Echo Tree, page 1
Praise for Echo Tree
“Henry Dumas, or Hank Dumas, as Sun Ra called him, balances Black reality and Black myth so well in his language use, in his stories, that what we have here is a record of another world. Dumas’s world is a Black poem. This collection forces us to recognize where we have been interrupted in our knowing that each moment overflows with meaning and magic, and lets us join Henry Dumas in reveling in those formerly stolen moments. Justice for Black people depends on our ability to see and desire pleasure, joy, and attentiveness in our daily lives, to not become incessantly deferred. Dumas restores this in a way similar to Morrison, without focusing on the white gaze, understanding that we are alive and real without its surveillance. Despite having been killed by a New York police officer when he was just thirty-three, Dumas left us a body of work that ensures his place as one of the best writers America has ever known. The literary canon is dishonest without him, and this collection of his stories should be read and cited as widely as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin are—this is our music.”
—Harmony Holiday, author of Hollywood Forever
“Like the Bible and other sacred texts, the fiction of Henry Dumas, gathered here in a new edition of Echo Tree, transcends time and place. Its roots are in the past, present, and future. Who better to explain these roots than John Keene and Eugene B. Redmond? From their insights to Dumas’s deep fictional dive into the meaning of Blackness and thus humanity, Echo Tree arrives at the moment in our culture when we need Dumas’s daring imagination the most.”
—Jeffrey B. Leak, author of Visible Man: The Life of Henry Dumas
“‘I know why the north country / is frozen. / It has been trying to preserve / your memory.’ This verse from Henry Dumas’s poem ‘Love Song’ is also our ode to him. We hold close his memory because Echo Tree reminds us that Black imagination plays a salvific role against the perdition that is white supremacy. Reminds us that Dumas’s Black art is liberation theology.”
— Dr. Michael Datcher, author of Animating Black and Brown Liberation: A Theory of American Literatures
“Dumas’s revolutionary literary form and content bespeak an eclectic, hypermodern sensibility that fuses motifs of Pan-African ancestralism with the futuristic premises of science fiction.”
—John S. Wright
Praise for Henry Dumas
“Dumas was that rarity—a passionately political man with a poet’s eye and ear and tolerance of ambiguity.”
—The New Yorker
“Dumas’s stories are imaginative forays into allegorical fables and otherworldly realms.”
—NPR
“His gift was for combining poetry and prose, sometimes reminiscent of Jean Toomer’s, and for evoking scenes of stark poignancy in language of elevated elegance.”
—The New York Times
“Dumas’s short stories—parables, realist fiction, sci-fi and folklore—contextualize in the African American tradition the attending duty and cost of being a witness to brutality.”
—Ebony
“Had he lived, he would have been recognized as one of the foremost writers of our time…. Dumas’s landscapes are littered with the casualties of relentless racism and poverty, but he burrows beneath the skin of his characters, goes beyond the heart and muscle and into the soul. With a poet’s eye, he peels back layer upon layer to bare the toughness and dignity that sustain the spirit of a people.”
—Los Angeles Times
“A profoundly gifted and intelligent author…. His rhythmic, eloquent style is both arresting and unique in its capacity to drive home the prophetic messages that inform his prose…. Dumas never fails to capture the spirit and collective consciousness of his beloved people.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Dumas had a rich and varied talent, and he was foremost original…. The collection, well-edited by Eugene Redmond, will be around a long time to remind us of who he was, how good he was.”
—The New York Times
“Dumas’s work … patiently diagnosed the violence of everyday life in America and imaginatively searched for a way out of old cycles of revenge and retribution…. By turns droll, poignant, surreal, and unflinching in their examination of the rituals and ordeals of Black life, the stories are united mostly by their refusal to revel in anything except the richness of the imagination.”
—Boston Review
“The range of Dumas’s unflashy expression—from parable to realism to preaching to fine nature writing—is truly impressive.”
—Kirkus
“Dumas had enormous talent and an acute moral vision.”
—Chicago Tribune
“An uncommonly promising writer.”
—The Washington Post
“In 1968, a young Black man, Henry Dumas, entered a New York City subway station. A transit cop shot him in the chest and killed him. Circumstances surrounding his death remain unclear. Before that happened, however, he had written some of the most beautiful, moving, and profound poetry and fiction that I have ever in my life read. He was thirty-three years old when he was killed, but in those thirty-three years, he had completed work, the quality and quantity of which are almost never achieved in several lifetimes. He was brilliant. He was magnetic, and he was an incredible artist.”
—Toni Morrison
“Can you feel the depth of Blackness—color, culture, and consciousness—registered by this work? The language, rhythm, and tension—songified, tripping out the characters’ mouths. Each sentence a revelation of experience.”
—Amiri Baraka
“[Dumas’s] work remains—a testimonial to his own committed love, his own sharp perceptiveness and zeal.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks
“There are three memorable facts about all of Dumas’s works. They are the raw, earthy, bone-bare stuff of true Black experience. The language is as musical as any music we have rendered. And the powerful meaning of all our lives is reflected here in the visual, the auditory, and the feeling/tone of our sacred history.”
—Margaret Walker
“This historian, teacher, guide, poet wants [Black people] to be aware of their traditions and of their power. His lines exude power and energy.”
—Ishmael Reed
“The breadth and richness in his literary vision, the sense of magic and mystery in his use of image and metaphor, and the deep, abiding commitment to African American musical cadences in his antiphonal, poetic language—these qualities in Dumas’s writings helped me to understand possible directions my own poetic voice might take.”
—Quincy Troupe
“Henry Dumas at the piano—we snap our fingers at his rhythms and deep inside we understand exactly what he’s playing. Both poetry and fiction he plays, having firmly wedded each so that one is reflected in the other, enigmatic and imagistic, suggestive and unwinding, with last lines and denouements that melt back into the poem or story.”
—John A. Williams
Echo Tree
THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF HENRY DUMAS
Edited and with a new foreword by Eugene B. Redmond
Introduction by John Keene
Second edition published 2021
First edition published 2003
Copyright © 2003 by the Estate of Henry Dumas
Introduction © 2021 by John Keene
New foreword © 2021 by Eugene B. Redmond
Original foreword © 2003 by Eugene B. Redmond
Cover design by Gail Anderson and Brian E. Smith
Book design by Aaron King
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Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Dumas, Henry, 1934–1968, author. | Redmond, Eugene, editor, writer of foreword. | Keene, John, writer of introduction.
Title: Echo tree : the collected short fiction of Henry Dumas ; edited and with a foreword by Eugene B. Redmond ; introduction by John Keene.
Other titles: Short stories
Description: Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018018481 | ISBN 9781566896078 (trade paperback)
Classification: LCC PS3554 .U43 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018481
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
In memoriam for
DAVID HENRY DUMAS
(1958–1987)
Who Was Stamina.
Who Was Sweetsteel.
A Song Rendered Unto Us.
His Father’s Witness.
&
MICHAEL HASSAN DUMAS
(1962–1994)
Whose accent was
Born on the wings
Of a country
His father loved
&
MAYA ANGELOU
(1928–2014)
MARGARET WALKER ALEXANDER
(1915–1998)
AMIRI BARAKA
(1934–2014)
GWENDOLYN BROOKS
(1917–2000)
TONI MORRISON
(1931–2019)
RAYMOND R. PATTERSON
(1929–2001)
BARBARA ANN TEER
(1937–2008)
DR. LENA J. WEATHERS
(1930–2017)
Pioneer-Navigators of the “Soular System,”
Advisory & Contributing Editors to Drumvoices Revue,
Trustees of the EBR Writers Club,
Contributors to a Special Henry Dumas (Double) Issue of
Black American Literature Forum (Summer–Fall 1988)
Shapers-Bearers of the Legacies Heralded & Extended by HD
This book was originally part of Coffee House Press’s Black Arts Movement Series, with the following editorial panel:
Sandra Adell
Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Alexs D. Pate
Author and Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies, University of Minnesota
John S. Wright
Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies and English, University of Minnesota
Contents
Introduction by John Keene
Foreword to the 2021 edition by Eugene B. Redmond
Foreword to the 2003 edition by Eugene B. Redmond
Take This River!
Ark of Bones
Ark of Bones
Echo Tree
The Crossing
Goodbye, Sweetwater
A Boll of Roses
Double Nigger
A Harlem Game
Will the Circle Be Unbroken?
Strike and Fade
Fon
Rope of Wind
The Marchers
The Eagle the Dove and the Blackbird
Scout
Harlem
The University of Man
Rope of Wind
Children of the Sun
Devil Bird
Invasion
The Lake
The Distributors
Thrust Counter Thrust
Six Days You Shall Labor
The Man Who Could See Through Fog
The Voice
Thalia
The Metagenesis of Sunra
Rain God
The Bewitching Bag
My Brother, My Brother!
The Metagenesis of Sunra
Riot or Revolt?
INTRODUCTION
Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas
When a writer of rare talent and distinctive vision dies young, fellow authors and readers not only celebrate the work the writer was able to produce, but mourn the lost art that is never to be realized. In the case of Henry Dumas, shot and killed under mysterious circumstances by a rookie police officer in the 125th Street New York City subway station in May 1968, few beyond Dumas’s widow, Loretta, close friends and colleagues, and a few astute readers could have estimated the immense artistic and cultural loss to African American and American literature his death represented. Only thirty-three, Dumas was a native of Sweet Home, Arkansas, and a longtime resident of New York, where his family had moved when he was ten. The military veteran, young father, and teacher had published only a handful of stories and poems in literary journals, including Black World, before his untimely murder, which occurred not long after the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As his friend and literary executor Eugene B. Redmond, whom he met while teaching and working at Southern Illinois University’s Experiment in Higher Education in East St. Louis during the summer of 1967, points out in his excellent foreword to this edition, however, Dumas had been in conversation with his peers across the U.S., and had been regularly writing the work that would cement his posthumous legacy.
Most who encountered Dumas during the years before his death had glimpsed only a small portion of the striking literature he had been working on for nearly a decade. This work included the poems that would be published posthumously in Poetry for My People (1970) and Play Ebony, Play Ivory (1974), as well as the novel Jonoah and the Green Stone (1976), which Toni Morrison, who described him as “an absolute genius” after Quincy Troupe brought the poems to her attention, ushered into print. It also included a cache of short fiction, superbly collected and edited by Redmond, that appeared under the titles Ark of Bones and Other Stories (1970) and Rope of Wind and Other Stories (1979), which were later republished together as Goodbye, Sweetwater: New and Selected Stories (1988) and which are gathered together now, with the mini-collection The Metagenesis of Sunra, in this current volume, Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas.
Born in 1934, Henry Dumas came of age during an era of world-changing political and social revolutions for African Americans and people of African descent globally. The U.S. civil rights movement, in its multiple manifestations, was already underway toward the end of his teenage years, decolonization and independence efforts were unfolding across Africa and the Caribbean during this same period, and the American Black Power movement would begin in the mid-1960s, as Dumas entered his thirties. Alongside the political shifts, numerous cultural ones were occurring as well, and had been since the pioneering predecessors, including the Harlem Renaissance writers and artists, successors like Richard Wright and James Baldwin, and Négritude figures such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, strove to center Blackness and African American, African, and African diasporic culture and traditions in their art, creating a new aesthetics that would place their work on the same level with that emanating from Euro-America. Similar shifts were occurring in areas ranging from music to the visual and plastic arts. Heirs to these preceding movements, Dumas and his generation of Black writers both in the U.S. and across the diaspora continued to grapple with fashioning new aesthetic models and forms to record and address the social and political transformations taking place around them, transformations they were participating in and effecting, while also honoring the past and pointing ways forward to an empowered, liberatory future.
While some of Dumas’s African American fiction-writing contemporaries, such as Ronald Fair, Kristin Hunter, Paule Marshall, Julian Mayfield, and John A. Williams primarily pursued the path of realism, and others, including Morrison, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), and William Demby, were writing prose that was experimental at the level of structure, form, and language, Dumas’s fiction, paralleling but distinct from peers like Ishmael Reed, William Melvin Kelley, and Charles Wright in the United States, and Wilson Harris in the United Kingdom, sought to expand the genre’s possibilities by incorporating speculative modes and elements of the fantastic. Dumas drew from a range of traditions, including realist, gothic, horror, and supernatural fiction, yet he also grounded his work in African and African American spirituality, folklore, and myths, drawn from oral and written traditions of storytelling, producing in the process what one might term an authentically Black, politically engaged “magical realism,” while also creating early, signal examples of what would eventually come to be known as “Afrofuturism.” In addition, as his fiction underlines, African American and African diasporic vernacular cultures, including superstition, folk spiritual and religion, and legends and tall tales, should be understood not as opposed to knowledge and reason but as heralds of alternative epistemologies and necessary guides and tools for understanding and processing the complex and contradictory realities around us. Dumas was, in effect, creating a counter-epistemology directly linked to the creativity, born of imagination, improvisation, and resistance, that was and remains crucial for the survival and self-determination of people of African descent in America and across the globe.
Written more than fifty years ago, Dumas’s visionary fiction, with its focus on the social and psychological challenges facing Black boys and men, both in urban northern and rural southern settings, possesses considerable relevance and resonance for today. Its concern for the recurrent threats, two decades into the twenty-first century, that Black Americans face—including the ongoing wave of police killings of unarmed Black people, prefiguring his tragic, untimely death—and for the particularities and expansive cultural and affective dimensions of Black humanity, underpin much of contemporary African American literature and themes central to Black Lives Matter and related movements. In “Ark of Bones,” it is a folk spirituality that the young characters learn to negotiate as they proceed to manhood, while in “Fon,” despite the horrific danger pressing in on the protagonist, he proceeds with preternatural confidence knowing that it is the spiritual protectors themselves who will take on the white supremacists threatening to lynch him. Other stories, like “The Marchers,” unspool almost like fables, the language at times as poetic as Scripture and at others as direct as at the protest rallies seeking justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery, and the countless other Black people killed or injured by state or extrajudicial forces, that have marked the tumultuous summer of 2020. Throughout, it is Dumas’s acute eye, his poetic ear, his assured narrative technique, his often otherworldly sense of humor, and his willingness to push the limits of conventional narrative that cast a spell on readers, leaving them with the twinned feeling of having read work that is both highly novel and yet imbued with something essential and familiar.
