New Releases: Echo Tree by Henry Dumas
By Henry Dumas, Edited by Eugene B. Redmond, Introduction by John Keene
424 Pages. Coffee House Press. $19.95.
One senses in the life and work of midcentury black authors a restlessness, a desire for re-invention. The most acclaimed figures of this period - Richard Wright in the 40s, Ralph Ellison in the 50s, and James Baldwin in the 60s - all struggled with fame in their later life.
Henry Dumas never received fame or a later life. In 1968, less than two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, a New York City Transit Police officer shot him to death in a Harlem subway station. Had he not met such a terrible fate, it is easy to imagine him having become the representative black author of the 1970s.
But Dumas’s stories bely the idea that a single individual can represent all of the black experience, even as he sought to incorporate so much of African-American history, culture, and folklore into his fiction. His short stories, collected by Eugene B. Redmond in this new edition of Echo Tree, vary so greatly in style, setting, mood, theme, and genre that one can only marvel that they all came from a single author. Naturalistic sketches or rural life are intermixed with entirely otherworldly pieces of speculative fiction. That being said, I didn’t much like Dumas’s stories that were straightforwardly fantastic nor did I like the ones that were straightforwardly realistic. My favorites were a blend of folktale and memory, and they tended to have a very strong sense of place.
In his stories set in the rural south, his characters know, almost instinctively, the demarcations between black territory and white territory, and the physical risk a black person takes by crossing into white territory. But in this environment, there is also a source of chaos and uncertainty: rivers. A border markings which is itself a prized possession, a natural phenomenon which can be manipulated through the labor of humans, rivers can bring surprises and create instability in even the most ordered worlds. In one of Dumas’s stories, a black man escaping from a lynch mob has this imagery applied to him: “As if he were making a river, he ran. As if behind him flowed a river of blood and tears, he ran.”
Rivers are also an important link to BIblical mythology. In “Ark of Bones,” a teenager going fishing along the Mississippi River ends up boarding “the biggest ark in the world” - an ark filled not with live animals, but with human bones scavenged from the river. The old man who oversees this ark calls it “the house of generations.” “Every African who lives in America has part of his soul in this ark,” the man says. The ark, which draws on both the stories of Noah and Ezekiel (both explicitly named in the story), is a potent symbol for the black community’s shared past in America and Africa, but also a melancholy one. A few days after the story’s narrator leaves the Ark, he reports that a local black man is lynched and his body thrown in the Mississippi.
The other great location of Dumas’s fiction is Harlem. Harlem, where the danger of racism is less immediate, is both a locus of black activism and an opportunity for Dumas to explore the dynamics of an autonomous black community. In “Scout,” on the day of a Juneteenth Harlem Parade, a young man of 14 - called only the Scoutmaster - is seduced by a reclusive girl who lives in his apartment. Amid a community celebration, this experience of the private terror and fascination of adolescent sexuality - an experience which the Harlem crowd cannot recognize - makes “Scout” a disconcerting story indeed.
But that’s not all Dumas does in this tale - he adds a revealing sociological element as well. The Scoutmaster comes from a family that’s among the richer in Harlem, which places him at a remove from the majority of the black community (but of course nowhere near the white community). Later in the day, he is mugged and has some money stolen from him. Rushing after the man who apprehended him, his Boy Scout uniform is ruined and his medals are lost. “It could have been a dream, a nightmare, except for that last part,” the Scoutmaster thinks back to himself many years later; our question, at the end of this tale, is not what the meaning of his dream was, but if, once his uniform is in tatters, the Scoutmaster has now woken up.
“Thalia,” one of Dumas’s best stories, is also one of the few where neither racism nor black culture are explicitly evoked, and yet it seems of a piece with another of his best works, titled simply “Harlem,” a story in which the civil rights movement is explicitly confronted. In “Thalia” our protagonist is a man deeply in love and in “Harlem” it is a man deeply involved in political activism, and yet, instead of roaring passion, both men carry an indefinable melancholy with them. At the fulcrum point of both stories, the protagonists encounter speeches given on the very subjects that consume them - a great jeremiad on the condition of the black community in “Harlem” and a philosophical discussion on the nature of love in “Thalia” - but these speeches seem unworthy interpretations of their inner turmoil. The stories reveal how the implications and indirections of the artist can triumph over the confrontational words of a rhetorician. “Harlem” ends with its protagonist turning away from the speech and “looking in at the shops and stores of Harlem, as if he were watching the reflections that moved to and fro in the glass, fading and fleeing like ghosts.”
Echo Tree is divided into three different collections; the final collection, The Metagenesis of Sunra, contains five stories, four of which are almost purely fantastical, and unfortunately these are all great disappointments. While we can occasionally faintly detect in them the style and humor we’ve come to appreciate from Dumas, too often these stories are lost in the minutia of their mythology:
Now the Devil had a secret stable where he kept three special horses. The first horse, named Lightning, was the fastest, being able to travel 100 miles per hour. It is on Lightning that the Devil toured the world and other realms in space, seeking souls and hiding in dark places.
That’s the kind of passage we read again and again in these late-in-the-book fictions. Maybe other readers will find something to enchant them in these sentences, but to me they’re absolutely lifeless.
I wrote earlier in this review that “Dumas’s stories bely the idea that a single individual can represent all of the black experience,” which also means that they bely the idea that a single individual can represent all of the human experience. But when a single individual does create a culture-spanning work of art, we can still admire the attempt: frequently we find more in the ghostlike shadows than in the places fully illuminated.