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). 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, Arks of Bones and Other Stories, was first published in 1974. Poetry for My People first appeared in 1970 and was later published as Play Ebony, Play Ivory. This collection resounds with a piercing voice that demands to be heard.In April of 1968, at the age of thirty-three, Henry 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.ĭumas' poetry, short fiction, and novels have been published posthumously in large part due to the efforts of Eugene Redmond, Toni Morrison, and Quincy Troupe. The aural element culminates in “The Metagenesis of Sunra,” a vivid fable about a messiah figure crusading against forces of darkness. In “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” a rare instrument called an “afro-horn” gives a white cultural critic a more intense listening experience than he bargained for. In “Harlem,” a stentorian street preacher maps out the “unexplored territory” of the Black soul, while in the title story, Dumas captures the needling camaraderie of young men fishing on the Mississippi, their laughter accompanied by a keen awareness of the danger of straying beyond circumscribed boundaries.

Set largely in Arkansas and Harlem, the stories’ Black male protagonists negotiate hardscrabble and often mysterious landscapes. Dumas’s work exhibits a wide stylistic range, from realism, allegory, and folklore to trippy supernaturalism. A pair of vigorous introductory essays by Redmond and John Keene cast Dumas as an immensely influential writer, an heir to African and Black arts movements who sought to forge a new, emancipatory aesthetic. This vital collection gathers the thrilling, variegated short fiction of Dumas, who in 1968 was killed by a police officer in New York City at the age of 33.

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