Sympathy Sentiments

SHAHAN, Sherry. Death mountain. Peachtree. 202p. c2005. 1-56145-353-6. $15.95. J

Erin has been living with her grandmother since the day her mother walked out of the family. All had been well until her mother wants Erin to spend some time with her, to hear the reasons for the seeming abandonment of her family. Erin doesn’t want to go, and instead she hitchhikes with Mae and her brother Levi. The three stop for a quick swim in a mountain lake and find themselves in the middle of an electrical storm. Mae heads out for safety and Erin quickly follows. When Erin finally catches up to Mae, the two realize they are completely lost in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, with little more than a canteen and a couple of candy bars.

In this survival tale loosely based on a true incident, the two girls must find their own way back to the established trail. They hike up and down and through the wilderness, surviving through their own strength of will. Erin comes to realize how little she knows of her mother and how wrong she was in assigning blame. The end is a bit contrived, but the emotional growth of the girls through their experience rings true. Through her trial in the mountains, Erin develops a hard-earned sense of empathy both for her mother and for her new friend, Mae. Janis Flint-Ferguson, Assoc. Prof., English, Gordon College, Wenham, MA

The great god Shango in the African sea reached down with palm oil and oozed out me.

–from “Funk” by Henry Dumas

In 1969, Black Arts leader Amiri Baraka eulogized Henry Dumas as “an underground deity” who, before bullets felled him in 1968, was “glowing in ascension.” Dumas was tragically killed by a New York City Transit policeman in a Harlem subway. Toni Morrison, in 1974, noted that “he had written some of the most beautiful, moving, and profound poetry and fiction that I have ever in my life read. He was brilliant, magnetic, an incredible artist.” Gwendolyn Brooks recognized the humanist-scholar-artist in him, observing that he “knew the correct history of Blacks, long lines of beautiful, strong, sane, intelligent, loving people of the Afrikan continent with organized subscribers.”

Henry Lee Dumas, a.k.a. Hank, “Ankh,” “Samud,” and I crossed literary and professional paths in 1967 while we were working as counselors at the Experiment in Higher Education, housed with Katherine Dunham’s Performing Arts Training Center (EHE-PATC), in East St. Louis, Illinois. Administered by Southern Illinois University, the EHE-PATC faculty also included sociologist Joyce Ladner, artist Oliver Jackson, World Saxophone Quartet founder Julius Hemphill, author Shelby Steele, linguist Edward Crosby, poet Hale Chatfield, and Senegalese master drummer Mor Thiam. Among Dumas’s students were filmmaker Warrington Hudlin and poet-photographer Sherman L. Fowler.

Dumas had landed ha “East Boogie” with family (wife, Loretta, and sons, David and Michael), having roots in Sweet Home, Arkansas, Harlem, and Saudi Arabia, and he was active on the “litmag” circuit (Umbra, Negro Digest, Hiram Poetry Review). Like Dunbar, Hughes and Hurston, he was tuned into the twin roots of black culture and racial oppression. His tapes and books showed appreciation for the sounds of James Brown, Coltrane and Sun Ra and the words of Douglass, Malcolm X and Ogotemmeli. Such rootedness, Hank’s friend Jay Wright noted, helped Dumas balance racial-political chaos as he searched for a poetic “structure” that was “analogous” to “music.”