Lesson 160:
Henry Dumas
An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted on 10/16/2024
"...the people who dwell in the land of dimness, the people who could not see themselves except as formless shadows moving in a mist, the people who had gouged out their own eyes to keep from looking at themselves in the mirror, these people, these glorious people were none other than ourselves: The Americans." --from Jonoah & the Green Stone
A fascinating "What If?" story, today we look at the all-too-brief life and career of Henry Dumas, author and poet. Born in 1934 Arkansas, Dumas's family moved to Harlem when he was ten years old. A lover of Gospel music and an admitted fan of the standup comedy of Moms Mabley (see Lesson #32 in this series), Dumas married Loretta Ponton in 1955 and had two sons, and served in the Air Force until 1957, which included postings in Texas and in the Arabian peninsula (the latter of which would inform a great deal of the underlying mythologies and storytelling narratives of his work). He completed some coursework at Rutgers University but never graduated. By 1967, Dumas had established himself as a teacher and director of language workshops at Southern Illinois University. Some of his earliest works appeared in the Hiram Poetry Review, of which he later himself became editor.
On May 23, 1968, Dumas was shot and killed in the 125th Street/Lenox Avenue station of the New York City subway, by a (white) New York City Transit police officer who claimed that Dumas had been threatening another unidentified person with a knife. Unfortunately there were no witnesses and no testimonies, and the records of the incident itself were unrecoverable in 1995.
With an honest reckoning of events forever out of reach, much of Dumas's work might otherwise have been lost to time, were it not for the resurgence of interest visited upon him by novelist Toni Morrison. Morrison had read and studied several of Dumas's posthumous publications, significantly Ark of Bones and Other Stories, and Poetry for My People, both of which had been published by Southern Illinois University Press in the 1970's. Inspired by Dumas's literary gift, Morrison kicked off a "book launch party" in 1974 to generate fresh interest in Dumas's work.
Much of Dumas's posthumous work is represented in many anthologies, including: Black Fire edited by Imamu Amiri Baraka (1968); the play Play Ebony, Play Ivory (1974), which prompted Julius Lester to name Dumas as "the most original Afro-American poet of the sixties;" Goodbye Sweetwater: New and Selected Stories (1988); and Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas (2003).
"Hate is also creative: it creates more hate." --from Knees of a Natural Man
Read "Henry Dumas Wrote About Black People Killed By Cops. Then He Was Killed By A Cop," an extremely in-depth accounting of Dumas's life and writings from 2015, by Beenish Ahmed
Next page - Lesson 161: Anthony P. Crawford
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