The Great Irony
The great irony of Dumas’ life by the third decade of the 21st century is that it took until then—nearly a full half-century after the publication of Ark of Bones—for the book to finally start making inroads into the consciousness of the mainstream. Further intensifying the irony of this delay is that the absurdly long interim between publication and public awareness came not as the result of an organic rediscovery of the book. Instead, this awareness resulted from a purely coincidental series of analysis of cinematic creations which drew strongly enough upon the weird tone and mood of the author’s style of storytelling for the influence to be recognized. In particular, the theatrical film Sorry to Bother You and the television series Atlanta operate within a strange tone and mood that implicitly creates a stylistic parallel between them and Ark of Bones and Other Stories. Online analyses recognizing these parallels began popping up within a short time which stimulated interest in Dumas at a level that the book itself had never managed to accomplish.
Dumas' death
The great tragic irony of the life of Henry Dumas is that he wrote a story titled “Riot or Revolt?” about the aftermath and consequences of a black man being killed by cops. The irony is that Dumas himself would become another name on the seemingly endless list of black men who suffered that very same fate. In 1968, Dumas was shot to death by a transit cop under unclear circumstances.
Meteorite
The opening imagery of this story is of a rock fragment the size of a fist falling from the sky and crashing through the rear window of a car. The imagery is terse and the language economical but for at least a brief moment the tendency is to suspect that this is a description of a meteorite falling to earth from space. Very quickly, however, the perspective shifts to that of the owner of the car who is convinced that the rock was thrown by one of a group of black men he sees running off in the distance. By the end of the story, a sense of irony turns on the possibility that the initial assumption might have been correct, after all. The possibility that it was a space rock after all still lingers by the end of the story, but the truth remains tantalizingly ambiguous.
