Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas

by Henry Dumas, John Keene (Introduction), Eugene Redmond (Editor)

Overview

African futurism, gothic romance, ghost story, parable, psychological thriller, inner-space fiction—Dumas’s stories form a vivid, expansive portrait of Black life in America.

Henry Dumas’s fabulist fiction is a masterful synthesis of myth and religion, culture and nature, mask and identity, the present and the ancestral. From the Deep South to the simmering streets of Harlem, his characters embark on real, magical, and mythic quests. Humming with life, Dumas’s stories create a collage of mid-twentieth-century Black experiences, interweaving religious metaphor, African cosmologies, diasporic folklore, and America’s history of slavery and systemic racism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566896078
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	05/04/2021
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Henry Dumas was born in Sweet Home, Arkansas, in 1934 and moved to Harlem at the age of ten. He joined the air force in 1953 and spent a year on the Arabian Peninsula. After returning, Dumas became active in the civil rights movement, married Loretta Ponton, had two sons, attended Rutgers University, worked for IBM, and taught at Hiram College in Ohio and at Southern Illinois University’s Experiment in Higher Education in East St. Louis. In 1968, at the age of thirty-three, he was shot and killed by a New York City Transit Authority police officer.

Eugene B. Redmond was named poet laureate of East St. Louis in 1976, the same year Doubleday published his Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, A Critical History.Redmond taught along-side Henry Dumas at Southern Illinois University, where he is currently an emeritus professor of English. Since 1968, he has edited and helped publish most of Dumas’s poetry and fiction.

John Keene's recent books include the story collection Counternarratives (New Directions, 2016) and several books of poetry. He has also translated the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat Books, 2014) and numerous other authors from Portuguese, French, and Spanish. His recent honors include an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award, a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, and a 2018 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He chairs the department of African American and African Studies and teaches English and creative writing at Rutgers University–Newark.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	ix
	Foreword	xxxix
	Take This River!	1
	Ark of Bones
	Ark of Bones	9
	Echo Tree	23
	The Crossing	31
	Goodbye, Sweetwater	41
	A Boll of Roses	57
	Double Nigger	85
	A Harlem Game	98
	Will the Circle Be Unbroken?	105
	Strike and Fade	111
	Fon	116
	Rope of Wind
	The Marchers	131
	The Eagle the Dove and the Blackbird	137
	Scout	139
	Harlem	162
	The University of Man	176
	Rope of Wind	189
	Children of the Sun	205
	Devil Bird	209
	Invasion	221
	The Lake	225
	The Distributors	229
	Thrust Counter Thrust	242
	Six Days You Shall Labor	255
	The Man Who Could See Through Fog	278
	The Voice	296
	Thalia	310
	The Metagenesis of Sunra
	Rain God	319
	The Bewitching Bag	323
	My Brother, My Brother!	339
	The Metagenesis of Sunra	345
	Riot or Revolt?	362

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Echo Tree

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021
A Kirkus Best Fiction of 2021

“This vital collection gathers the thrilling, variegated short fiction of Dumas. . . . This collection resounds with a piercing voice that demands to be heard.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“This new edition of Echo Tree gives us the fullest sense of Dumas’s stereoscopic vision.” —David Hobbs, Times Literary Supplement

“Every couple of decades or so, we need to be reminded of what made writers like Toni Morrison call Henry Dumas a genius.” —Kirkus, starred review

“Black culture and manhood take center stage in these stories, explored in Dumas’s lyrical, brutal prose, which orients and propels his tales to resonant endings, signaling a mastery of craft. . . . ” —Foreword Reviews, starred review

“Dumas freed himself to experiment with an exuberant hyper-candor that can still strike untruths dead with a lethal vibration.” —Ron Slate, On the Seawall

“[Echo Tree] surely does underscore Dumas’s talent as a writer of fiction, although at the same time reminding us that he was so barbarously prevented from fully harvesting that talent.” —Daniel Green, Full Stop

“[A]ffectingly aching and absolutely arresting. . . . Henry Dumas’ stories are a freedom song and an angry cry.” —Ron Jacobs, CounterPunch

“Trust me, Reader, Dumas is electric, with writing that pulses through the vein, pumping straight for your heart.” —Rasheeda Saka, Literary Hub

“He was doing Lovecraft Country decades before it went viral. If there were such a thing as an Afro-Gothic school of artists, included would be Thelonious Monk, Horace Pippin, Albert Ayler, Betye and Lezley Saar—and Henry Dumas, a legend while living and a legend in the afterlife.” —Ishmael Reed

“Echo Tree arrives at the moment in our culture when we need Dumas’s daring imagination the most.” —Jeffrey B. Leak, author of Visible Man: The Life of Henry Dumas

“Dumas left us a body of work that ensures his place as one of the best writers America has ever known. The literary canon is dishonest without him, and this collection of his stories should be read and cited as widely as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin are—this is our music.” —Harmony Holiday, author of Maafa

From the Publisher