From Publishers Weekly: These excellent short stories will introduce the late Dumas, who was killed in 1968 at the age of 33 by a New York City transit police officer, to a wider audience as a profoundly gifted and intelligent author. His settings range from the small towns of the rural South to the explosive streets of Harlem in the late 1960s. The civil rights activist imbues his stories with myth and folklore, rightful anger and delineations of the inequities that exist for blacks in America. The author's invocation of the ethos of his people lends an honesty to the writings on racial tensions, yet never lapses into narrow-mindedness, and his trenchant rendering of pain, love, religious and family life is universally appealing. His rhythmic, eloquent style is both arresting and unique in its capacity to drive home the prophetic messages that inform his prose. From the young Southern boy named Fish-hound in the eerie "Ark of Bones"who is told by an old Noah-like man, "Son, you are in the house of generations. Every African who lives in America has a part of his soul in this ark"to the teenage narrator of "Strike and Fade"a powerfully sketched glimpse of inner-city turmoil, who proclaims, "I'm hurtin too much. I'm lettin my heat go down into my soul. When it comes up again, I won't be limpin"Dumas never fails to capture the spirit and collective consciousness of his beloved people. Portions of this book were previously published in Ark of Bones, Rope of Wind and Jonoah and the Green Stone. "A cult has grown up around Henry Dumas—a very deserved cult. In 1968, a young Black man, Henry Dumas, [was shot and killed by a policeman in a subway station in a case of "mistaken identity."] Before that happened, however, he had written some of the most beautiful, moving and profound poetry and fiction that I have ever 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 "Dumas affords us one of the purest examples of the kind of American writer whom Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams called for so long ago; a writer whose sense of language and themes are homegrown American products. The best of his stories are masterpieces." —John O'Brien, The Chicago Sun-Times "Dumas had a rich and varied talent, and he was foremost an original." —The New York Times Book Review
Author
In April of 1968, at the age of thirty-three, Henry Dumas was shot and killed by a New York Transit Authority Policeman at 125th Street Station in a case of "mistaken identity." At the time of his death, he had already finished several manuscripts of poetry and short stories. Dumas' poetry, short fiction, and novels have been published posthumously in large part due to the efforts of Eugene Redmond, Toni Morrison, and Quincy Troupe. Poetry for My People first appeared in 1970 and was later published as Play Ebony, Play Ivory. When Play Ebony, Play Ivory appeared in 1974, Julius Lester in the New York Times Book Review called Dumas "the most original Afro-American poet of the sixties." Dumas' first collection of short fiction, Arks of Bones and Other Stories, was first published in 1974. Redmond has also helped to bring out an unfinished novel, Jonah and the Green Stone (1976), as well as the collections Rope of Wind and Other Stories (1979), Goodbye, Sweetwater (1988), and Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas (1989). Authors including James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Maya Angelou have celebrated his writing for its mixture of natural and supernatural phenomena, music, beauty, and revolutionary politics.
