The Re-Emergence of a Singular Voice : Writer Henry Dumas Died 20 Years Ago, but His Penetrating Tales Are Drawing Lavish Praise from a Growing Coterie of Admirers

Henry Dumas, a singular black writer of the ‘60s, was killed in the subterranean night by a transit policeman on a New York City subway platform 20 years ago. He was 33. But in a short life, says Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison, “he had completed work, the quality and quantity of which are almost never achieved in several lifetimes.” His poetry and fiction are among the most “beautiful, moving and profound . . . I have ever in my life read,” she says. “He was brilliant. He was magnetic and he was an incredible artist.”

Dumas was shot the night of May 23, 1968. In the two decades since, a cult has developed around him sustained by other black writers and publication of his work in counterculture journals, says poet Eugene B. Redmond, editor of a new collection of Dumas’ stories, “Goodbye, Sweetwater” (Thunder’s Mouth Press: $9.95), to be released this week.

And in July, a special volume of articles in praise of Dumas will be published by Indiana State University. Redmond is also the editor of that collection, a double issue of “Black American Literature Forum,” which will include critiques of Dumas’ work by 60 writers, including Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Jane Cortez and Ismael Reed.

Redmond hopes that this volume of critical praise and the “Goodbye, Sweetwater” collection--coupled with a savvy promotion strategy he devised aimed at every urban university English department, every black college, every black newspaper and periodical, black sororities and fraternities--will bring Dumas’ work to a wider audience.

The circumstances of his shooting--which occurred in a climate of general social upheaval and urban race riots--have remained painfully vague for his admirers and family.

Widow Works as Secretary

Softly, his widow, Loretta Dumas, says there has never been any satisfactory explanation of his death. She is 54 and works as a secretary in Newark, N.J. “I don’t brood and dwell on it. It’s one of those things that you will never have the answer to. I believe the times . . . had a lot of influence on what happened. That was during the ‘60s when there were a lot of riots.” The officer who shot Dumas was white, and “the tension” of the time “contributed a lot to the incident,” she believes.

Dumas left two sons. The loss of his father--a month after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, a month before Robert Kennedy was killed--became so unbearable for one son, David, that he committed suicide last year, his mother says. He was 28.

While the circumstances surrounding Dumas’ death may be unclear, it is crystalline, according to Redmond, editor of “Goodbye, Sweetwater,” that Dumas was both uniquely gifted and a prototype for today’s much heralded writers--notably Morrison, Alice Walker and, in his later work, the late James Baldwin.

Dumas, says Redmond, wrote “funky, fictional arias,” his work permeated with African spirituality, expressed in the language of myth and with the consciousness of a writer deeply connected to nature.

He was born in Sweet Home, Ark., and moved to Harlem when he was 10. But he “‘carried the South north with him,” Redmond says. “He was also very much in love with black people. But the overriding thing is that he loved black people more than he hated anybody.”

That was unusual in the ‘60s, a decade, Redmond says, that spawned the Black Arts Movement, a flowering of black theater, literature and music, similar to the Harlem Renaissance of the ‘20s, but grounded ideologically in black cultural nationalism.

Then, Redmond says, “if poets said they liked black people, it was at the expense of some other people. Dumas never did that. He was a healer. People are uptight with the race thing, and he wasn’t going to buy into that.”

In the poem “Play Ebony, Play Ivory,” Dumas declares:

so up! you bursting lungs

you spirits of morning breath

up! and make fingers

and play long and play soft

play ebony play ivory.

play my people

all my people who breathe

the breath of earth

all my people who are keys and chords . . .

The “Play Ebony, Play Ivory” collection of poems, published in 1974 but now out of print, prompted writer Julius Lester to praise Dumas as “the most original Afro-American poet of the ‘60s.”

What continues to astound Morrison, however, is Dumas’ tremendous artistic range. She compares his writing to Gene Toomer’s, author of the classic Afro-American novel “Cane.”

Dumas wrote “meditative pieces, and experimental pieces and urban pieces and rural pieces,” she says. “He inhabited the geography of the country in a way I think very few people do. That is to say, his familiarity and his ability to translate an uptown Harlem experience as well as the Mississippi River (experience) as well as his familiarity with . . . those violent civil rights confrontations. He was everywhere. And usually people carve out for themselves narrow, if deep, territory.”

Praise for Dumas

By contrast, Morrison says, Dumas “was able to penetrate, almost like an archeologist, those areas that comprise the extraordinary, varied experiences of black people of all ages. I don’t know too many young men or young people who could write about old people the way he does, or write about love the way he does, or write about very young black boys the way he does. It’s extraordinary. And that’s why ‘Cane’ came to mind, because in that one book Gene Toomer was able to run a kind of range, but not as wide as his (Dumas’).”

His grasp of one aspect of the black, urban landscape is chillingly revealed in the short story “A Harlem Game,” part of the “Goodbye, Sweetwater” collection. It is an artistic transformation of fact that gouges the reader with the seediness and predatory nature of slum life as seen through the eyes of a boy who is victimized by card-playing adults.

“The story is sort of a combination of knowing people in the city playing cards and some of his experiences when he had just come from Arkansas,” says the author’s wife, who typed most of his manuscripts. City boys would confront him on the street and demand money from him. While the story isn’t about that specifically, she says, “it is about those feelings of being taken advantage of.”

The visual image people have of Dumas 20 years after his death is likely to be the one perpetuated by a publicity photo accompanying the release of his book: of a carefully dressed, conservative-looking man.

In reality, says Redmond, Dumas didn’t care much about his appearance. He was tall, thin with a “teasing beard” at his chin. And “he mumbled a lot.” He was immersed in mysticism, recalls Redmond, a former university instructor and currently poet-in-residence for the East St. Louis, Ill., school system. “He lived in the spirit and lived in the flesh . . . after the fashion of our (African) ancestors,” who understood and functioned in the physical and metaphysical worlds.

And “he talked in tongues,” Redmond says. “He literally talked in tongues.”

It took a while “for me to respect him,” Redmond says of his late friend. “Though I came from the same culture--juju women and voodoo men--I had more formal training than Henry. . . . When I met him I was fresh out of graduate school, so I had a lot of stuff extrapolated from my culture and thinking.” He chuckles. “I was into modernity.”

But, according to Redmond, the humility Dumas had “around common black people and the way he worshiped his past and his traditions” profoundly influenced a whole generation of writers. He loved James Brown, for instance. “He said James Brown was an example of enshrining our racial memory. He taught us to revere the folk.” Redmond laughs again, reflecting on the writers of the ‘60s, “we had been revering the folk, but it was more romantic--not as romantic as the (Harlem Renaissance) writers of the ‘20s,” but idealized.

In “Son of Msippi,” a poem stiletto sharp, evoking centuries past, the moment and a still too common future, Dumas paints the reality of the folk.

Up

from Msippi I grew.

(Bare walk and cane stalk

make a hungry belly talk.)

Up

from the river of death.

(Walk bare and stalk cane

make a hungry belly talk.)

Up

from Msippi I grew

Up

from the river of pain . . . .

out of the loins of the leveed lands

muscling its American vein:

the great Father of Waters,

I grew

up,

beside the prickly boll of white,

beside the bone-filled Mississippi

rolling on and on,

breaking over,

cutting off,

ignoring my bleeding fingers.

When in the 1970s Random House released three of Dumas books posthumously, edited by Morrison, they sold 1,200. Redmond thinks the literary climate is more receptive now.

“Black writers have become more popular since 1975. More black writers have won Pulitzer Prizes in the 1980s than in the history of the award--Rita Dove, August Wilson, Alice Walker, Morrison. And a plethora of other awards, too, including the National Book Award,” he says.

Further, he believes the public had been “conditioned” to accept certain kinds of black and Third-World literature, namely the deeply psychological and mystical. Two writers in particular, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Morrison, have cultivated the type of audience that would be receptive to Dumas’ work, he believes. Alice Walker has too, he says “though she is less psychological and mystical” than Morrison, “but nonetheless folkloric and linguistically African.”

Redmond’s devotion to the work and spirit of Dumas is, in part, superliterary. Social reality is part of the territory of any conscious black writer, says Redmond, and Dumas “elevated struggle to the level of fine art.”

In his introduction to “Goodbye, Sweetwater,” he quotes a passage from Dumas’ unfinished novel, “Jonoah and the Green Stone.” Says Mrs. Haley, mother-admonisher, as she accosts young Jonoah regarding his roles and responsibilities: “We ain’t got many men these days. They kill em off as fast as we birth em. What you gonna do, young man? . . . What you gonna do, young man?”

The passage Redmond explains, is one of the “vital thread-messages in Dumas’ fictional quilt, the theme of black male vulnerability, which one hears and reads about everywhere these days.” The black male in America: an endangered species.

The fictional murder of a black writer by the CIA in John A. Williams’ “The Man Who Cried I Am” a year before Dumas was killed was seen as “spurious” by many blacks, Redmond says. Given black people’s history in America, the attitude may reflect a “healthy paranoia,” he writes.

“But there are many ways a people can be snuffed out,” he says. “You don’t have to be gone to be gone,” like Dumas, or his son who could not understand, and finally could not bear, the loss of his father, he says. “One way to lose a generation is to perpetuate the paralysis and amnesia our people are experiencing--that the whole country is experiencing--by not reading our writers. By not reading Henry Dumas.”

Redmond says that he and other writers who admired Dumas often wonder “what would have happened if he lived?

“What would he say about the confusion and paralysis among black men in particular? The conflict that exists between the (perceptions) of the black writer and the black reader? The fact that blacks have not developed their own publishing organs. What would he say about South Africa? What stand would he take on Central America? What would his position be on AIDS? Nationalism now? Pan-Africanism today? How would he have rearranged, modified, updated his positions?

“How,” Redmond asks, “would he write?”