Henry Dumas

Ark of Bones and Other Stories

Andrea Badgley

Ark of Bones and Other Stories is a collection of nine short stories by Henry Dumas, an Arkansas native whose family moved to Harlem, New York when he was ten. These stories, some set in Arkansas and some set in Harlem, are dark and smoky, and are infused with mojo and a deep spirituality. His characters and his ghostly magic were refreshing to me in their differentness: the strong, male, African American voice was not strictly of the here and now; there was an ancientness to it, as if these stories came up from the depths of the earth and through a long line of African-rooted souls. Spirit magic swirls thorughout the stories, as in “Ark of Bones”, when the Mississippi River rises to carry the Ark – Noah’s Ark? our character wonders – to Headeye, a chosen one from Arkansas:

Only river people know how to talk to the river when it’s mad. I watched the light on the waves way upstream where the old Sippi bend, and I could tell that she was movin faster. Risin.

At the same time, in “Boll of Roses” Dumas paints beautiful, earthy scenes of his Arkansas roots:

That little brown girl bout the prettiest thing I ever seen in a cotton field.

He was off the porch, into the sun, passing the garden, when the smell of cotton… then the rose garden, and then wet dew…

Never far from the surface is the struggle of the young black man in the pre-Civil Rights South – the struggle to escape the vicious cycle of servitude, of poverty, of ignorance, and the cotton fields that kept him shackled to all three:

He felt ashamed of staying out of school just to pick cotton.

Ark of Bones and Other Stories reminds us that many Southern blacks were still stuck in the cotton fields as recently as the 1960s, missing school, missing out on education, so that they could eat. Unlike farmers’ children, whose lives look the same during harvest time, pickers do not own the land, they do not own the cotton, they cannot sell the cotton. There aren’t more hours in the day to earn more money, there are not opportunities to get ahead, to educate themselves, to move on to something better. Not until the Civil Rights movement:

“I picked cotton all my life, chopped, planted, cleared land, and I aint got nothin to show for it. You younguns oughta get out of the field and get with them rights people. They got the Lord on their side.”

These are important stories. They are vivid reminders of not just our history, but our recent history, and the effect this history has on a significant portion of the American population.

Ark of Bones and Other Stories

Reviews