This work included the poems that would be published posthumously in Poetry for My People (1970) and Play Ebony, Play Ivory (1974), as well as the novel Jonoah and the Green Stone (1976), which Toni Morrison, who described him as “an absolute genius” after Quincy Troupe brought the poems to her attention, ushered into print. Most who encountered Dumas during the years before his death had glimpsed only a small portion of the striking literature he had been working on for nearly a decade. Louis during the summer of 1967, points out in his excellent foreword to a new edition of Dumas’s collected short fiction, Dumas had been in conversation with his peers across the United States, and had been regularly writing the work that would cement his posthumous legacy. Redmond, whom he met while teaching and working at Southern Illinois University’s Experiment in Higher Education in East St. However, as his friend and literary executor Eugene B. The military veteran, young father, and teacher had published only a handful of stories and poems in literary journals, including Black World, before his murder, which occurred not long after the assassination of Dr. Only thirty-three, Dumas was a native of Sweet Home, Arkansas, and a longtime resident of New York, where his family had moved when he was ten.

In the case of Henry Dumas, shot and killed under mysterious circumstances by a rookie police officer in the 125th Street New York City subway station in May 1968, few beyond Dumas’s widow, Loretta, close friends and colleagues, and a few astute readers could have estimated the immense artistic and cultural loss to African American and American literature his death represented. When a writer of rare talent and distinctive vision dies young, fellow authors and readers not only celebrate the work the writer was able to produce, but mourn the lost art that is never to be realized. Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas by Henry Dumas, ed.

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