Knees of a Natural Man: Thinking About Henry Dumas

It’s been a long while since I’ve thought about Henry Dumas, though Dumas, or rather his legacy has a great deal to do with my commitment to living a “life of the mind” as some would call it. I was a budding poet and student activist during the mid-1980s when I came across a copy of Dumas’ poem “If I Were Earth” in an issue of Essence Magazine—

Each tear that fell
from the crushed
moons of your face,
stabbed me,
broke and split
into a thousand pains.
But I held out my arms
and no not one did I miss,
No, not one pain.
And if I don’t let
you soak into me
and bring me up,
if I don’t let you seep
deep into me
and teach me,
then you can cry in
the morning to the sun,
and tell him to rise up
and burn me away.
—copyright by Loretta Dumas and Eugene B. Redmond

Damn. It was after reading “If I Were Earth” that I decided that I was never really going to be a poet, because I could never write anything as haunting and beautiful as Dumas’ poem. These were the days when I lived in the E185 section of the campus library, catching up on the Black Arts Revolution that I missed two decades earlier. But who was this Henry Dumas and why hadn’t I heard more about him? And then I came across the answer: Dumas was shot and killed by a New York City cop on May 23, 1968 in a case of mistaken identity at the age of 33. For some time now I’ve thought about Dumas’ murder (and that of Fred Hampton) as a metaphor for the “death of black genius”.

My interest in Dumas only deepened and I can still remember the day I walked into the St. Marks Bookstore in the East Village to pick up a copy of Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas . By that time I was putting in time as a high school instructor at Walton High School in the Bronx (still my most memorable teaching experience) and I can recall vividly reading the book’s intro during one of my breaks. Eugene Redmond’s tribute to Dumas has lived with me for the last 14 years:

***

“He came from the vast somewhere—like the music…he was tuned in. Turned on. Cultural stabilizer. Cultural modulator. Funkadelic verb-gymnast…He was a ‘natural’ man—in the fullest, lightest, brightest, blackest, yet most complex, sense of that word—and by turns playful, brooding-moody, contemplative, histrionic, introspective, gregarious, handsome, solemn, proud, scornful, impatient with a sluggish consciousness, weird, way out, outlandish, meditative, loving, in love, lofty…unkempt, meticulous, studied, paranoid, potent, impotent, deep, indulgent…and high, always, high on language.”

***

Yes, that is the kind of intellectual I want to be—the kind of man I want to be.

The spirit of Henry Dumas must have reached out to me earlier today as I decided to finally shelve some of the books that have been unpacked in my office for 9 months. It’s been some time since I’ve thought about Henry Dumas, but on the 38th anniversary of his death (give on take three days), I’m glad to remember him.