Literary Giant: Henry Dumas

BROWN SOUND

                                                                  brown sound chocolate
                                                                             memories
                                                                        like the first time
                                                                        you saw grapes
                                                                        and tasted them
                                                                     and learned the color
                                                                                  blue
                                                                   brown sound cream milk
                                                                                echoes
                                                                          like the first time
                                                                           you saw bees
                                                                          and tasted gold
                                                                     and learned the honey
                                                                                tongue

                                                                       brown sound africa
                                                                                pulses
                                                                         like the first time
                                                                 you exploded between legs
                                                                         and heard drums
                                                                   and learned the message
                                                                           of rhythm love
                                                                    brown sound america
                                                                      pulses plus pushing
                                                                           down trees
                                                                       like the first time
                                                              you saw that wild crazy horse
                                                              riding through painted deserts
                                                           and you learned the grand canyon
                                                                             red mother
                                                                           brown sound
                                                                            black outline
                                                                        like the first time
                                                                        like the first time
                                                                           the first time
                                                                          is the last time
                                                                              like that

enry Dumas was a brilliant African American poet, seer and short story writer. Henry was born on July 29, 1934, in Sweet Home, Arkansas. During the 1950s, he served in the Air Force and was stationed in Texas and the Middle East. Writing poetry and short stories consumed him during the 1960s. He studied at City College and Rutgers University, and participated in the civil rights and Black Power movements of his time.

He found inspiration in the African and African American experiences. Some of his fiction employs a style of magic realism, innovative for this time but quite common nowadays. In 1976, James Baldwin selected his story "Thalia" for the Black Scholar literary prize. Dumas was closely associated with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, which championed an aesthetic grounded in the black cultural nationalism. But, in the words of Amiri Baraka, Dumas produced a "a true art form, not twenty 'hate whiteys' and a benediction of sweaty artificial flame, but actual art, real, man, and stunning." All that ended when he was killed in April 1968, at the age of 33, at Manhattan's 125th street station by a New York Transit Authority policeman in a case of "mistaken" identity. Dumas had already completed several manuscripts of poetry and prose, the quality and quantity of which are seldom achieved in one short lifetime. 

At the time of his untimely death, he and the founder of Kent State University's Department of Pan-African Studies (formerly the Institute for African American Affairs), Edward W. Crosby, worked together at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville on the faculty of its "Experiment in Higher Education" located in SIU's East St. Louis Center. Prior to joining EHE, Dumas taught in Hiram College's Upward Bound Program in Ohio. Some of his poetry, short stories and novels have been published posthumously by the Southern Illinois University Press, the result of the hard editorial and promotional work of Eugene Redmond and Toni Morrison of Random House, and the original publication impetus provided by Dr. Edward W. Crosby, Director of Education at EHE, 1966-1969. The first two works — Poetry for My People and other Stories and Ark of Bones — were edited in 1970 by the poets Eugene Redmond and the late Hale Chatfield, a published poet and professor of English at Hiram College in Ohio. Eugene Redmond, who also worked with Dumas and Crosby, in East Saint Louis, later edited his Play Ebony, Play Ivory (1970),Jonah and the Green Stone (1976) and Rope of Wind and Other Stories (1979). Redmond also edited Dumas' collection of short stories, Goodbye, Sweetwater(Thunder's Mouth Press, 1988). 

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