Visible Man: The Biographical House of Henry Dumas
By M. Abduh

I ALMOST DIDN’T FIND the house of Henry Dumas. Suffering from insomnia, I was half watching an interview with Toni Morrison discussing one of her novels; Song of Solomon, I believe. Exhausted, I was just about to turn it off, when I saw her eyes widen at the mention of Henry Dumas, who she said “had written some of the most beautiful, moving and profound poetry and fiction” she had ever read. This more than caught my attention (and woke me a bit). After searching his name, I came upon an article in the Los Angeles Times where Morrison again lauded the poet, comparing his work to Jean Toomer’s monumental book Cane; rather, she went on to say that Dumas even surpassed Toomer’s far reaching range:

I don’t know too many young men or young people who could write about old people the way he does, or write about love the way he does, or write about very young black boys the way he does. It’s extraordinary. And that’s why Cane came to mind, because in that one book Gene Toomer was able to run a kind of range, but not as wide as [Dumas’s].

This only increased my desire to find all things Dumas, as there are few works that even approach the beauty and lyricism of Cane.

The next morning I went to the university library and checked out Dumas’s short story collection Goodbye, Sweetwater and a volume of his poetry, Play Ebony Play Ivory, both published posthumously. Forever the poet, I began with Play Ebony. After the first reading of that volume, I felt I had found the poetic voice I had been subconsciously searching for so many years. So many. Even as a child, the music of verse had me spellbound; knee high, I attempted to copy the trochaic tetrameter of Dr. Seuss in my own little rhymes. A decade later, I would come up in the era of some of hip hop’s most legendary lyricists: Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, KRS One, et al, and so I went down into the basement (the lab) with the rest of my generation, scribbling rhymes on brown paper bags, the backs of envelopes, inside marble notebooks. And in those basements, you had to more than just rhyme; you had perform a lyrical miracle with metaphors, similes, puns, double entendres; we knew nothing of the terms, but everything about how to spit them over breaks. Meanwhile, in life above ground, I put my head between my arms on the school desk while Mr. Mann explicated “The Raven” in English class, careful to remind us that this was the best we could become (or never become, to be more accurate). And as important as the basement was, as much as I would aspire to a Poe, it was nothing like what I found in the lines of Henry Dumas:

Once when I was free
African sun woke me up green at dawn
African wind combed the branches of my hair
African rain washed my limbs
African moon watched over me at night

Reading that, I discovered what I always hoped to become. I could never locate it in “The Raven,” for where was the African moon in the “Heaven that bends above us?” And the basement had no windows to let the African wind comb the branches of my hair. So there I was, finally, in “The Knees of a Natural Man.” But then the unnerving thought, if this was me all that time, how could I have been lost out there for so long? How did I not come to myself, to Dumas, earlier? I would learn that one of the reasons for this is that for all his brilliance, his light, like some Bedouin fire, was burning deep in a desolate desert.

Although he has been lauded as a literary genius by the likes of John A. Williams, Amiri Baraka, Quincy Troupe, et al, few are the anthologies that sample his works, even fewer the universities that teach them. And not only is his verse and prose relatively unknown, until as recent as this week, the details of his personal story—specifically his death—have remained an enigma. After reading (and re-reading) everything I could gather from his works, I still could find little more than a few paragraphs that merely sketched the outline of his existence. To fill in the picture, to color it, I sat down with Jeffrey B. Leak’s newly released biography of Dumas, Visible Man. The author, an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, took on the very difficult task of unearthing many long buried and forgotten facts (and artifacts) of Dumas’s life. To this point, he opens the book with something of a disclaimer: “Thanks in part to these resources, I have been able to assist in constructing Dumas’s biographical house. I am reluctant, however, to call this biography a comprehensive study, as certain primary sources no longer exist.”  The disclaimer notwithstanding, Leak has done an admirable job in using what scant materials he had at his disposal to help rebuild an otherwise abandoned house. Along with framing Dumas’s life out of the hardscrabble times and circumstances of his youth, he also shows how the poet was able to transform that upbringing into such brilliant art. Dumas was a natural storyteller, in the tradition of the griot, even as child in his native Sweet Home, Arkansas. This, of course, began as the imaginative tales of a young boy, creating characters and giving them voice in the presence of his family and friends.

At ten, he left Sweet Home for an even sweeter home in Harlem. His storytelling would find its way to the page by the time he reached college. Next came a tour in the US Air Force, including a year in the Arabian Peninsula, marriage, children, and, of course, the usual biographical indiscretions. These are some of the major events of a life that Leak attempts to flesh out, though, at times, the reader is left only with the author’s speculation: what Dumas might have been doing, might have been thinking. One cannot blame the author for these gaps in the story; for as the old Arab saying goes, “The one who is destitute can give no charity.”

In spite of this, the book does a good job of examining his life through the lens of not only his times, but also through the art he produced. Perhaps a good example of what is intended here can be found in Herbert Leibowitz’s biography of William Carlos Williams, “Something Urgent I Have to Say to You.” Leibowitz states in the chapter entitled “Poetry as Biographical Evidence”:

Because he is an artist, [John] Updike can distinguish between a literary biography of superb quality, like Boswell’s Life of Johnson or George D. Painter’s Marcel Proust, and a biography that piles up facts, bales them, stores them, then recounts them in a droning voice of an inventory clerk. We’ve all read and deplored obese biographies that cram facts into their narrative maws as if suffering from a compulsive eating disorder. Thoroughness is commendable, shapelessness deplorable. Herschel Parker’s massive two-volume biography of Melville, however useful as reference, fails as portraiture and interpretation. The artist is suffocated by the weight of facts. Do we need to know how many bottles of bourbon Faulkner, John Berryman, and James Dickey drank? Not really, though how their alcoholism affected their personality, their relationships, and, above all, their work is germane to the biographer’s task.

So the fact that Williams had a number of extramarital affairs is of little consequence to me; however, when I examine those affairs in the light of his poem “Asphodel,” I learn of his remorse, his shame, and deep love of his wife buried beneath the names and dates and infidelities. Likewise, Leak has not “suffocated” Dumas in this biography. Rather, in a number of places, he maps the course of Dumas’s frustrations, loves, and losses through the characters and stories he wrote. Leak writes: “Henry viewed fiction as a means of processing actual events…” This is in relation to Dumas’s short story “A Boll of Roses,” a tale about a group of students who come to a southern town to encourage a group of sharecroppers to sign a voting petition. The author based this story on actual events he witnessed while traveling to Somerville, Tennessee to deliver relief aid for black families who had been unjustly evicted from their homes for standing up to racism and discrimination. Here Leak connects these historical events to the creative forces that moved the writer to weave this tale. These moments in the book are crucial, especially since much of Dumas’s correspondence was lost (his wife burning a bunch of his letters after a separation). So learning more about the man and his thoughts through his creative works becomes all the more important.

With that said, as excited as I was to read this biography, in some respects the end left me disenchanted. More questions than answers. Maybe it is merely art imitating life (or death in this instance), as Henry Dumas’s demise remains shrouded in mystery and supposition. Like that demise, the last portion of the book feels fragmented, a puzzle missing the center pieces. And while I am certain the author did his level best to give the reader some semblance of a conclusion, the ending feels sparse. Perhaps looking through the piles of facts, or lack thereof, simply cannot yield anymore answers than it has in the forty-six years since the poet’s death, as Leak’s final chapter seems to attest. So we continue to look for closure in “Ark of Bones,” “Echo Tree,” and “Son of Msippi.” And although I climbed the stairs from the basement and cut the classroom many years ago, I continue to explore every room of Henry Dumas’s “biographical house” for those missing pieces.

April 15, 2014