Play Ebony

Ark of Bones (1970) / Poetry for My People (1971) / Play Ebony Play Ivory (1974) / Jonah and the Green Stone (1976)

Rope of Wind and Other Stories (1979) / Goodbye, Sweetwater (1988) / Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas (1989)

Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas

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Henry Dumas was born on July 29, 1934, in Sweet Home, Arkansas, and had completed a Ulyssean journey by the time he was shot to death by a policeman in a New York subway on May 23, 1968. That journey included migration at the age of ten to Harlem, to the north where he attended New York public schools He join the U.S. Air Force in 1953 and was stationed at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas; he also spent a year stationed on the Arabian Peninsula. While in the Air Force, Dumas won creative-writing awards for his contributions to Air Force periodicals.

In 1955, he married Loretta Ponton. The couple had two children, David and Michael. After returning from his tour with the Air Force in 1957, Dumas attended City College and Rutgers University. Known for his work as a publicist and teacher, Dumas helped to develop the "little magazine" circuit. In the early 1960s, Dumas transported food and clothing to protesters in Tennessee and Mississippi. Dumas remained active in the civil rights and Black Power movements for the remainder of his life.

In 1967, he taught at Hiram College in Ohio in the Upward Bound Program (where he served on the staff of the Hiram Poetry Review).

Later that year (1967) Dumas became the director of language workshops at Southern Illinois University's Experiment in Higher Education Program (at the time of his death, was teacher-counselor and director of language workshops).

In April of 1968, at the age of thirty-three, 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.

In 1970 SIU press published limited editions of Dumas' posthumously collected poetry and prose. And since the time of his death, his writings have appeared in numerous anthologies, some of which are Black Out Loud, Open Poetry, The Poetry of Black America, Understanding the New Black Poetry, Words Among America and Brothers and Sisters.

The vulnerability of black children amid the Southern white lynch-mob mentality, a young sharecropper encountering a civil-rights worker, and whites experiencing the mystical force of black music are among the subjects Dumas examined in his short stories, many of which were collected in Ark of Bones (1970) and Rope of Wind (1979). Nature, revolutionary politics, and music are especially frequent subjects of his poetry, which is noted for its faithfulness to the language and cadence of African-American speech.

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.

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. Play Ebony Play Ivory 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, Ark 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).

The Henry Dumas Memorial Library has been established at SIU's experimental college. And the Hiram Poetry Review sponsors an annual poetry contest in Dumas' name. he is survived by his wife, Loretta Dumas, and two sons, David and Michael.

About the Editor (in 1975)

Eugene B. Redmond, poet, essayist and playwright, is professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at California State University, Sacramento. He has taught at several United States colleges and universities, including Southern Illinois University, where he was a colleague of Henry Dumas. Redmond's books of poetry are Sides of the River (1969,) Sentry of the Four Golden Pillars (1970), River of Bones and Flesh and Blood (1971), Songs from an Afro/Phone (1972), Consider Loneliness As These Things, and In a Time of Rain & Desire 1973); his LP recording of poetry, Bloodlinks and Sacred Places, was released by Black River Writers in 1973. He edited Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, A Critical History (1976) and Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas (2003)

During the sixties, Redmond edited Midwestern community newspapers and served for two years as senior consultant to Katherine Dunham at the Performing Arts Training Center in East St. Louis. His writings have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including Black World, Journal of Black Poetry, The Black Scholar, Open Poetry, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Black Orpheus, American Dialog, Discourses on Poetry and The New Black Poetry.