English professor’s work sheds light on mysterious Dumas

The newly published “Visible Man: The Life of Henry Dumas” by English professor Jeffrey Leak has been praised for “shining a piercing light” on the elusive Dumas, who has remained a mystery even to his fans.

Leak, through interviews with Dumas’ family and friends, along with writers who knew Dumas, examined the author’s life and writing.

“Leak shines a piercing light on the mystery of the artist who possessed ‘moments of brilliance’; the names and cities, the spiritual and intellectual quests, the poems and short stories, the facts, it all adds up, page by page,” said Yusef Komunyakaa, a Pulitizer Prize-winning author. “The reader, who journeys all the crooked paths side by side with Dumas, isn’t surprised by his violent death. But still we are left saddened and disheartened by the man’s downfall and anguish, his inability to master promise, his demise on that subway platform in New York City, mainly because Leak’s blunt clarity has transported us to a place of reckoning where we are also left gazing into the collective mirror.”

Dumas, born in Sweet Home, Ark., in 1934, moved to New York City at the age of 10. The University of Georgia Press, publisher of “Visible Man: The Life of Henry Dumas,” described Dumas as an individual who “devoted himself to the creation of a black literacy cosmos, one in which black literature and culture were windows into the human condition.”

It wasn’t until after his death that Dumas’ fiction and poetry become well known with the help of his friends and admirers.

In the early 1960s, Dumas transported clothing and food to protesters in Mississippi and Tennessee. In 1967, Dumas taught in Ohio at Hiram College, and shortly after became the director of language workshops for the Experiment in Higher Education program at Southern Illinois University.

In 1968, Dumas was shot and killed in Harlem months before his 34th birthday by a white transit policeman under circumstances never fully explained. After his death, he became a kind of literary legend but one whose full story was unknown.

Toni Morrison championed him as “an absolute genius.” Writer Amiri Baraka claimed that Dumas produced “actual art, real, man and stunning.”

Leak, a native of Charlotte, earned a Ph.D. from Emory University; he completed a bachelor’s degree at Campbell University and a master’s at the University of Delaware. His research interests include 20^th and 21^st century African American novels, gender and cultural studies and biography. He also is director of the Center for the Study of the New South.