A Joyless Noise
By M. Abduh

IGNORANCE OF A THING does not make it nonexistent. For years, we have witnessed a bank of talking heads—sportscaster and journalist Stephen A. Smith most recently—ask: “Where is all the noise about black lives mattering when blacks kill other black folks?” A good question is often half the answer, yet here the questioner has started in the negative. To begin, the very concept of “black on black crime” ignores the fact that murder, assault, theft, etc. in the main are crimes of opportunity—and proximity.  Thus, by and large, the rapers of white women are white men. With that, and the fact that white men are statistically far more likely to be mass shooters, there exists nothing in our discourse called “white on white crime.” And as for the claim that blacks do not make noise when their killers are black, then Mr. Smith & Co. need reminding that the devil is a liar.

Noise has been made, in song, in literature, in film. One need look no further than the Stop the Violence Movement of the late 1980’s. After the death of a fan at a concert, artists like KRS One and BDP, along with Stetsasonic, Kool Moe Dee, MC Lyte, Doug E. Fresh, Just Ice, Heavy D, and Public Enemy came together to create the anti-violence anthem “Self-Destruction.” The song spoke specifically to “black on black” violence. Kool Moe Dee (of Busy Bee fame) states,

Back in the 60’s our brothers and sisters were hanged.
How could you gang bang?
I never ever ran from the Ku Klux Klan
And I shouldn’t have to run from a Blackman

Moe Dee’s lyrics are clear. The reader need not refer to Rap Genius for an annotation. Here the violence perpetrated by Amerikkka’s most viscous domestic terrorists, the Klan, who hung, raped, castrated, bombed, and burned black flesh—because it was black flesh—was not his immediate threat; instead, it was the flesh of his flesh chasing him. Also, in the song’s music video, during the late Heavy D’s verse, we see the message: 84% of violent crimes against blacks were committed by black offenders… crawl across the bottom of the screen. And while the numbers are quite similar for whites committing crimes against other whites (83% of white murder victims are killed by other whites), to Mr. Smith’s point, people in the black (and hip hop) community have always made noise.

After those artists came together on the East coast, a number of their peers on the Westside, artists like King Tee, Body & Soul, Def Jef, Michel’le, Tone-Loc, Above The Law, Ice-T, Dr. Dre, MC Ren & Eazy-E, Young MC, JJFad, Oaktowns 3.4.7, Digital Underground, MC Hammer united to create the song “We’re All in the Same Gang.” Addressing the gang bloodshed, and “fratricide” taking place in LA; these artists created a song with a message similar to that of “Self Destruction,” and like “Self Destruction,” “We’re all in the Same Gang” addressed brothers killing other brothers:

Kill a black man?
What?
Yo, what are you retarded?
Tell ‘em Hump
Do you work for the Klan?
Do what ya like
Unless you like gangbangin’
Let’s see how many brothers leave us hangin’

Humpty Hump of Digital Underground reasons that these black killers might as well be the in the same gang as the Ku Klux Klan, and in the song’s video, when reciting the last line, he pantomimes being hanged at the end a rope, likening this black on black lynching to the strange fruit Billie sang of. In the years that followed these two songs and movements, there arose a number of artists who continued to scream us awake, from them, New Rochelle’s Brand Nubian. Their lyrics, samples—their very name—spoke not only to black pride and “knowledge of self,” but self-preservation as well, with songs like “Wake Up” and “I’m Black and I’m Proud. Brand Nubian’s Grand Puba says,

Do the knowledge, Black
Look at the way that we act
Smoking crack,
or each other with the gat.
The only race of people who kill self like that
I deal with actual facts to keep my mind on track

Of course, when we do the knowledge, actual facts show that every race of people kills self like that. Maybe Mr. Smith was not a Brand Nubian fan. Ice Cube, perhaps? In his song “Us,” from his classic album Death Certificate, the voice of the song excoriates the perpetrators of what he deems pathological, self-destructive behavior: “And all y’all dope dealers/you as bad as the police, cause you kill us.” So just as Kool Moe Dee and Humpty made comparisons between “black on black crime” and the terrorist violence of the Klan, Cube here juxtaposes extrajudicial killing at the hands of state agents and proxies, sworn to serve and protect the citizenry and backed by the powers that be, with crimes committed by…us. And so it does not appear that we are stuck in nostalgia, citing verses from hip hop’s “golden era,” we also hear these voices echoed today by artists such as Compton’s own Kendrick Lamar. In his song “The Blacker the Berry,” he says,

So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street,
when gangbanging make me kill a nigga blacker than me?
Hypocrite!

For Lamar, the shedding of tears (perhaps even marching, raising voices, etc.) when a black man is killed by whites, but not doing so (allegedly) when the gunman is black smacks of hypocrisy. On that same note, in an interview with Billboard, Lamar states: “What happened to [Michael Brown] should’ve never happened. Never. But when we don’t have respect for ourselves, how do we expect them to respect us?” It’s all there. Black pathology. Respectability. Hypocrisy. Mr. Smith, holler if you hear him.

Rappers have not been the only artists to speak on it. After the Blaxploitation films of the 70’s, heroes and sheroes like Shaft and Foxy Brown “taking it to the man,” the 80’s gave us black street culture in films like Beat Street, Breakin’, and Wild Style. Then in the 90’s, black filmmakers explored not only the subject of police brutality and the injustices of the criminal justice (just us) system, but “black on black” crime as well. John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood opens with the voices of a group of young men: angry, cursing, Black: “Yo fuck that. Where my strap?” Alarm chirps, car engine starts, revs. “We fin to let these niggers have it.” Guns click, tires peel—more curses—and finally, machine gun funk. The screen fades to black and there appear the words: “One out of every twenty-one Black American males will be murdered in their lifetime. Most will die at the hands of another Black male.” This opening sets the tone: black men die young, they die violently, they die at the hands of other young black men. This theme runs through a number of the films of the decade: Menace to Society, South Central, Clockers, etc. (Today, in 2015, Spike Lee has again focused on crime’s black hand in his latest film Chiraq, repeating in interview after interview that it doesn’t matter to the family of victims what color finger pulled the trigger.) So either Mr. Smith “don’t know or don’t show” what these films are saying.

In 2012, Atlantic Monthly correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates penned an article entitled “Why Don’t Black People Protest ‘Black on Black’ Violence?” The article came as a result of a question posed by some after the death of Trayvon Martin: “But what about all the other young black murder victims?” meaning, at the hands of other black people. In the article, Coates lists a number of anti-violence rallies that had taken place in cities from Chicago to Brooklyn, stories of residents and community leaders—weary of laying their dead to rest, and laying stuffed animals where they died—who organized marches, prayer circles, candle light vigils, and “take back the street” protests. Reading of—and indeed, witnessing—these gatherings year after year in neighborhoods across the country is indisputable proof of the great effort to cry out about the violence. Thus, for Stephen A. Smith to ask where is all the noise about black lives when blacks kill one another is a clear demonstration of his tone deafness, or perhaps he cannot hear due to his constant ranting, which often resembles a child sticking his fingers in his ears when he doesn’t want to hear what’s being said: La-la-la-la-la-la! For him to speak as if these dedicated marchers and organizers, mothers and sisters, husbands and wives, co-workers and classmates have been mute, in some perpetual moment of silence, as opposed to urging and exhorting their children and kinfolk in the streets is contemptuous.

Many Black writers, journalists, & cultural workers remain in the tradition of Ida B. Wells, documenting state violence against black bodies, giving voice to the unheard, speaking truth to power concerning incident after incident of unpunished killings & unindictable killers. They also remain in chorus with the aforementioned organizers and marchers against neighborhood violence. Perhaps if Mr. Smith would hush his ranting, remove the fingers from his ears, and listen, he could hear the noise of protest.

New Poems Published in Spring 2015 Edition of Exit 7.

Ropes Review.

Poetry Reading~Link to Audio.

It Was Something He Said
By M. Abduh

Truth be told, I sometimes wish I could avoid doing readings altogether. What I’m certain comes off as awkward and perhaps even antisocial behavior is simply a writer who has gotten quieter and, inexplicably, shyer in recent years. Moreover, I absolutely do not like to be photographed. But despite such Salingeresque eccentricities— and pleas to audiences—social media and cell phone cameras do not allow anyone who stands in, around, or in front of an audience any such reserve. However, when a fellow poet was sick in the hospital and asked me to read in his stead, I reluctantly agreed. Understand me. No matter my reluctance, I recognize the importance of reading poems aloud. Reading aloud is poetry. An oral art form should never be reduced to mere characters on a page.

When I arrived at the venue, the event’s organizer asked if I could read for at least fifteen minutes. I had brought about six poems: three I had read before audiences, two newer pieces, and one by another poet. One was about my grandfather, a lefty who pitched briefly for the old Negro leagues, a poem about the 1967 North Philadelphia uprising, another about the MOVE bombing of Osage Avenue, and one about my young daughter’s preference for white Barbie dolls. The other piece was new, rough. It needed some reworking, but I wanted to hear it aloud, not just scratch and scribble at it in a notebook.

I leaned into the microphone: “The next poem I want to read is a new piece, “That Nigger’s Crazy.” Audio feedback accompanied the title, and the faces in the audience—mostly white—stiffened like a totem. Shock was not the intent. But it was not unwelcome either. I should mention that I am not from the school of thought that believes the word “nigger” has somehow been transformed from a viscous racial epithet, rooted in a wicked tradition of slavery and Jim Crow, to a term of endearment. As author Maya Angelou articulated to Dave Chappelle, if you take poison out of a bottle marked with a skull and crossbones and pour it into the finest Baccarat crystal, the decanter could never turn poison into wine.

Furthermore, I am not from those who get some sort of pleasure from hearing the word, especially from white folks who other Blacks swear to me are “down by law.” And contrary to the efforts of recent generations, overuse has not diminished its deadliness. But the poem is not about the word “nigger” or how uncomfortable it makes white (or some Black) folks. It is about the artist who most influenced me as a poet and whose work is why I pursued a writer’s life.

Sit with any group of writers, poets, playwrights, and the subject of influences will inevitably come up: “Who’s impacted your work the most?” When asked this question, most poets I know invariably list other poets: Sylvia Plath, Charles Simic, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Brooks. “Since hearing the rhythms of ‘Howl,’” they say, “I haven’t been able to put down the pen.” Years later, I could claim that a line from an Amiri Baraka poem inspired me to write, but my love of language began much earlier. It took root in the basement of my family’s South Philly row house, where, as a kid, I would tiptoe into the basement after my parents went to bed (or when my father dozed off on the couch after a taste or two), fumble with the glass door knob, and creep into the red-bulb-district. A stubbed toe on the washing machine echoed through the house. The boiler in the back room fired up, rumbling like a dump truck. I flipped through the albums in old milk crates, and there it was, between Donny Hathaway and the Ohio Players: That Nigger’s Crazy. On the cover, with a puffy natural and wild eyes, was Richard Pryor. I lowered the volume until I could barely hear the needle scrape under my finger. After the record player’s arm floated over the rotation, it dropped cleanly in the grooves and crackled: Please put your hands together and give a big round of applause. Mr. Richard Pryor! And after the cheers and applause came the voice of a supplicant, “Hope I’m funny.” And for the next thirty-three minutes and thirty-five seconds, his prayers were answered.

Looking back on it now, I cannot understand why our parents hid those albums from us. It couldn’t have been the cursing. My father’s language was harsh enough to make even Pryor say, “That motherfucker needs to watch his mouth.” Cursing was my old man’s way of punctuating his sentences. “Fuck” was an exclamation point, “Shiiiit” a period. It also couldn’t have been the characters Pryor spoke through. My entire neighborhood was on those albums. When Pryor did the routine of a drunk in a bar, it was like watching Uncle Bill stumble on the corner and start a fight in front of the 23^rd St. Lounge. When he performed his routine about police profiling, it was like seeing my father nervously eye the rearview mirror as a squad car’s flashing lights pulled us over on the Atlantic City Expressway. “I-am-reaching-into-my-pocket-for-my-license!” Pryor exclaims to the officers, “Cause I don’t want to be no motherfuckin’ accident.”

As a youngin’, Richard’s blue humor is part of what brought me to the basement, but as I grew, I began to hear something beneath it all, a richness of language, a vocabulary that not only talked shit, but snorted coke, threw fists, cried out for justice, and bled. It has been said that life is comedy on the surface and tragedy underneath, and beneath Pryor’s comedy, there is plenty of tragedy and pain—not just his personal pain, but the pain carried in the dry bones of ancestors. But Richard knew cures. He was a healer who could make you laugh until your belly ached. He was Bowjaws of the bayou (let Bowjaws handle it!), Blackula on the block. He found the wino’s wisdom, the junkie’s humanity, and America’s ironies. His comedy, after all, was forged in the tempest of the struggle. This is why Dr. Cornel West said that Pryor was “the freest black man of the 20^th century.” I found in those albums an insight into the American race problem as profound as any I have read or studied since. I know there are some so devoted to the “canon” that they would laugh harder at my last comment than they might at one of Pryor’s most brilliant routines, and, of course, they would retort that no American has touched the humor and satire of Mark Twain. But as Paul Mooney said, “If Mark Twain is the greatest, then Richard is Dark Twain.”

As a teenager, no longer forced to sneak around basements, I listened to every album I could get my hands on. I traveled to New York to procure the most obscure recordings of Pryor available. I recall one in particular where he satirized the radical poets of the late 60’s and early 70’s. In the routine he took the stage in the personae of a poet who stood before his audience and said, “I want to read a poem for you, it’s a new poem, and I hope you enjoy it.” Pryor pantomimes the poet reaching into his pocket slowly, careful to keep eye contact with his audience. He unfolds the paper deliberately, takes in a deep breath and yells at the top of his lungs, “BLAAAAAAACK! Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.” No doubt he playing on the stereotypical image of poets from the Black Arts movement, but clearly he recognizes not only the power of the word “black,” but also the role of the poet in delivering that word to the masses. And Pryor had something else in common with his character. He, too, was a poet. I don’t mean a poet in the way Baldwin understood it. I mean POET. In an article on some of the questionable choices the comedian made in taking on certain film roles, writer Ishmael Reed states, “He wrote poetry and I asked to publish some, but he was shy about exposing this gift.” That shyness notwithstanding, I was able to find some of Pryor’s poetry; in particular, a radio broadcast he conducted in 1971 on KPFA in Berkeley, California. The broadcast comprised a series of programs addressing the atrocities of the massacre at Attica State Prison in New York that year. During the program, a somber Pryor read a poem he had written in protest of the incident, a thoughtful, intense elegy to the black men who were gunned down in that prison yard:

Murder the dogs!
The mad frothing at the mouth dogs
with expensive capped teeth
and fat bellies full of babies starving.
No, don’t wait until they die, kill them now,
because if you let them live and die a natural death,
you’ll be bitten and left to die in agony,
and the mad dog pack
will then sniff out and search
for your children to eat, eat whole,
flesh, bones and soul.
These beasts will then retard the ones they
have not eaten in their schools of unlearning.
They will teach your children to do their hunting
and capture their own
to bring to them to devour,
and the dog, the mad dog,
will end up patting you
on the head and throwing you a bone.

Oddly, Pryor prefaces his reading of this poem by calling it comedy. Maybe this had something to do with what Reed mentioned in the article. He was too shy to publish his work, or, as it appears, even call it poetry. The mad dog of these lines, no doubt, represents a murderous white supremacist machine. A machine that could not only shoot down those prisoners from the gun towers on high, but also to justify it before the world. So Pryor used his voice here as a poet (later in the program as a comedian) to decry the blood on the walls and grounds of D-yard. This is what poetry does. What Pryor did.

Years later, I would hear another of his poems; this time recited by Yasin Bey aka Mos Def, participating in a documentary on Pryor. The poem, entitled “I See Black People,” was in one of the comedian’s diaries:

I’ve seen all kinds of black people
Light-skinned porters Black-skinned caddies Red bone bus drivers Fat red cooks and maids Shiny brown-skinned doctors Tinnie cigar shaped whiskey sailsman
White-skinned hustlers with gold in their teeth Fine yellow mamas in all girl bands I’ve seen big black dudes cry while sittin on the curb in the rain
Men and Woman spurtin washwords of nothin*
I’ve seen dimple faced dolls with no brains turn their noses at old, black church ladies who washed their floors so these cold-hearted bitches could wear lipstick
I’ve seen preachers eat chicken with both hands with their mouths already full.
I watched men die in gutters and spit on white ambulance drivers
But I Ain’t Dead Yet Muthafuckers

The poem not only shows the diversity of skin tones among black folk, it also shows that while they may be a collective, they are in no way a monolith. In these lines they hurt and heal; they suffer and hustle; they starve and stuff their faces, possessing the same dignity and wretchedness of all people. But he also acknowledges that their triumphs must be honored, having arrived here, without question, at tremendous cost. And this is what resonated with me all those years; he understood the tribe—the American tribe—better than most and peopled his performance with each and every one of them. I think of him and that performance and am reminded of André Breton’s words about poet Aimé Césaire, “And it is a black who is not only a black but all of man, who conveys all of man’s questionings, all of his anguish, all of his hopes and all of his ecstasies…” Thus, he, in the words of Whitman, “contains multitudes.”

So I ended the reading with Pryor’s poem and then mine. When finished, to my joy, the audience gave a heartfelt applause; and at that moment, I was happy to have come and read that night after all. It wound up being a tribute to the artist who was most responsible for my presence there in the first place. On my way out, a young woman came up and introduced herself. She was a knot of nervousness and couldn’t seem to find the words to make her point. After sweeping away the hair falling over her ear, she said, “I still don’t totally get how listening to comedy albums caused you to be a poet. But, I did love the poem.”

“Pryor’s or mine?” I smiled.

“The poems, I mean. All of them.”

We talked for a while and I did my best to explain to her that there’s a cadence and a musicality I hear in the works of Pryor that I can only describe as poetry. I mentioned that even his biographers David Henry & Joe Henry allude to this in their book Furious Cool. In the chapter “Is Stand-up Poetry?” they cite Eddie Tafoya, a professor of English at New Mexico who “makes the case that [Pryor’s] Live on Sunset Strip is a modern American answer to Dante’s Inferno.” Tafoya compares the bits in the stand-up routine with the Inferno’s cantos. Tafoya concludes that perhaps Pryor is “the only person of the last century able to venture into the depths of this particular Hell.” Similarly, editor Audrey Thomas McCluskey in his anthology of essays Richard Pryor: The Life and Legacy of a “Crazy” Black Man, mentions that author James Alan McPherson compared Pryor to the Greek poet Homer, stating that “McPherson believes that like Homer, Pryor drew upon the expressive language of everyday people and found a profundity in their wit and wisdom.”  Or as I like to say, my father’s vernacular and the wit and wisdom of my old South Philly neighborhood, preachers and dope fiends alike. I did, however, admit to her that influences are at times difficult to understand, let alone explain, but what I know with certainty is that those albums continue to rotate in my head with every turn I write.

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

“Barnstormers” Published in Four Way Review

Poem Published in Southern Indiana Review.