Henry Dumas's Soular System: thirty-five years after Dumas's tragic death, a friend remembers the man and the writer behind the cult figure.

The great god Shango in the African sea reached down with palm oil and oozed out me.

--from "Funk" by Henry Dumas 

In 1969, Black Arts leader Amiri Baraka eulogized Henry Dumas as "an underground deity" who, before bullets felled him in 1968, was "glowing in ascension." Dumas was tragically killed by a New York City Transit policeman in a Harlem subway. Toni Morrison, in 1974, noted that "he had written some of the most beautiful, moving, and profound poetry and fiction that I have ever in my life read. He was brilliant, magnetic, an incredible artist." Gwendolyn Brooks recognized the humanist-scholar-artist in him, observing that he "knew the correct history of Blacks, long lines of beautiful, strong, sane, intelligent, loving people of the Afrikan continent with organized subscribers."

Henry Lee Dumas, a.k.a. Hank, "Ankh," "Samud," and I crossed literary and professional paths in 1967 while we were working as counselors at the Experiment in Higher Education, housed with Katherine Dunham's Performing Arts Training Center (EHE-PATC), in East St. Louis, Illinois. Administered by Southern Illinois University, the EHE-PATC faculty also included sociologist Joyce Ladner, artist Oliver Jackson, World Saxophone Quartet founder Julius Hemphill, author Shelby Steele, linguist Edward Crosby, poet Hale Chatfield, and Senegalese master drummer Mor Thiam. Among Dumas's students were filmmaker Warrington Hudlin and poet-photographer Sherman L. Fowler.

Dumas had landed ha "East Boogie" with family (wife, Loretta, and sons, David and Michael), having roots in Sweet Home, Arkansas, Harlem, and Saudi Arabia, and he was active on the "litmag" circuit (Umbra, Negro Digest, Hiram Poetry Review). Like Dunbar, Hughes and Hurston, he was tuned into the twin roots of black culture and racial oppression. His tapes and books showed appreciation for the sounds of James Brown, Coltrane and Sun Ra and the words of Douglass, Malcolm X and Ogotemmeli. Such rootedness, Hank's friend Jay Wright noted, helped Dumas balance racial-political chaos as he searched for a poetic "structure" that was "analogous" to "music."

In just 10 months, thanks to our common "Arkansippi" roots, we bonded as brothers in our classes/workshops, and as poets on the Black Arts scene. Hank was a teaching wizard, sermonizing on James Brown, Otis Redding and Margaret Walker as "cultural stabilizers."

A master-mystical poet, he witnessed "The sun shining arrows" and urban "eyes firebombing July skies"; he placed "A Rainbow around the Neck of Night" and struck "goat-skin" to hear "the god-sound." An Afrocentric, bibliocentric, magical realist-fabulist, Dumas, in one of his stories, pictures "mojo"-wielding "Headeye" being "called" to priesthood by "Noah" aboard an "Ark of Bones" Headeye and "Fishhound" (a "witness") souljourn to the Mississippi River where the "Ark" floats foggily, "almost not touchin water" and with seeming "clouds for sails."

A tallish, thin man with lasers for eyes, a scant goatee, mad the voice of a guitar-tuned drum, Hank's work endures, as he said in "Black Star Line," for "All you golden black children of the sun."

What Morrison calls his "deserved cult" and Jayne Cortez named the Henry Dumas Movement is an everwidening "Soular System." Margaret Walker Alexander: "The first time I read Ark of Bones, I felt the hair rising on my head" Clyde Taylor: "Dumas aspired to the most honored [role] of poet [incarnating] cultural identity, values, and mythic visions. The miracle of Dumas's work, worth the name genius, was that he had successfully integrated demands of this role when the new Black writing was just emerging."

Other members of the Dumas "cult" or "movement" include Barbara Ann Tear, Ralph Cheo Thurmon, Eleanor Traylor, John A. Williams, Ishmael Reed, Maya Angelou, Quincy Troupe, the late June Jordan, Avery Brooks, the late Raymond Patterson and Arnold Rampersad. All have sung the writer's praises in venues ranging from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to the National Black Arts Festival to Howard University and California State University Sacramento's Annual Third World Writers and Thinkers Symposium. Namesake literary prizes from Hiram Poetry Review and Kent State University's Pan African Studies Department library, only hint at the Soular System's un-"lessened love" for Brother Hank. Such love complements his enormous continuing gifts of art, heart and life to us.

The release of Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas, from Coffee House Press (September 2003, $15.95, ISBN 1-566-89149-3), coincides with the 35th anniversary of Dumas's death. Indefatigable lobbying by members of the Dumas "cult" or "movement" led to the release of this eighth book that Eugene B. Redmond has edited by or about Dumas.

Earlier published works include Ark of Bones and Other Stories (Random House, ASIN 0-394-70947-0); Goodbye, Sweetwater: New and Selected Short Stories (Thunder's Mouth Press, September 1988, ASIN 0-938-41058-X); Jonoah and the Green Stone (Random House, April 1976, ASIN 0-394-49791-0); Knees of a Natural Man: Poetry (Thunder's Mouth Press, June 1989, ASIN 0-938-41075-X); Play Ebony: Play Ivory (Random House, August 1974, ASIN 0-394-48970-5); Poetry for My People (Southern Illinois University Press, ASIN 0-80930443-0); and Rope of the Wind (Random House, May 1979, ASIN 0-394-50529-8).

--Eugene B. Redmond is a founding editor of Drumvoices Revue. He has served as editor arm executor of seven collections of Henry Dumas's poetry and prose.

Eugene B. Redmond is a professor of English, founding editor of Drumvoices Revue, and chairman of Creative Writing Committee at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville. He was named Poet Laureate of East Saint Louis (Illinois) in 1976, the same year final Doubleday Publishing Company released his best-selling critical history Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry. He has authored or edited more than 25 volumes of poetry, collections of diverse writings, plays for stage and television. Redmond's TRIBUTE to Henry Dumas is on page 71.