"Ark of Bones" and Other Short Stories Literary Elements

Short stories/African American literature/Afro-Surrealism

For the most part, a realistic version of 20th century America that is, however, infused with a mythic sense of the fantastical that results in making most stories both examples of realism and anti-realistic fantasy literature simultaneously.

The stories of Dumas are pretty much equally divided between objective third-person narrators and heavily invested subjective first-person narrators who, nevertheless, tend to be distanced spectators rather than active participants in their stories.

A pervasive tone of what is perhaps not best, but definitely is appropriately termed weirdness haunts the stories of Dumas. Even the stories most firmly grounded within a realistic setting and milieu eventually become subject to a strange intrusion designed to call the whole notion of realistic fiction into question. Perhaps oddest of all is that the overall mood of most of these stories is generally upbeat, often ending on notes of utterly unexpected—and unlikely—optimism. In an Introduction to the most comprehensive collection of the short fiction of Dumas, Eugene B. Redmond coined the term “spectacunatural” to describe the author’s approach to storytelling and it seems to be a dead-on perfect one-word description of the tonal mood of Dumas.

Varies from story to story. Arguably, the most fascinating example of how Dumas introduces weirdness into this particular facet of storytelling occurs in “Devil Bird” in which the protagonist of the story is the narrator’s father who is playing a game of cards against the Devil and the God, both of whom take on the role of the antagonist as they—to the narrator’s shock—work in partnership against the father.

The conflict at the center of almost every story by Dumas—if, indeed, not genuinely every single story—is the big one: Good versus Evil. The good are represented mostly by oppressed members of black society while evil can range from the Devil (and his partner God, on at least one occasion) to the police (of course) to pretentious white jazz enthusiasts.

The climax of the story “Riot or Revolt?” is also the climax of The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas. And it serves as a fitting climax to the life of its author who would eventually go on to be killed himself by a law enforcement officer. The story is all about the aftermath of a Harlem community in the wake of the killing of a young black man by cops under questionable circumstances. The story comes to an appropriately weird combination of myth and realism with the imagery of “all the black voices shouting in blood and sweat, lifting their souls up in a mighty wave” as another potential victim re-emerges from the only business on the block not burned or looted during the rioting sparked by the officer-involved murder: “And Harold walked…They gathered around him and when he shouted, `Freedom!,” they did too.

The opening imagery of “Fon” in which a black rock suddenly falls from the sky and crashes through the rear windshield of a car driven by a racist foreshadows the death of the driver and fellow members of his would-be lynch mob which is the climax of the story.

“Invasion” is a very short piece about what seems to be a military uprising by children in revolution against adults. The protagonist’s son, John, is being referred to as Hannibal by the other kids. It is all imagistic and lacking in precise detail, painted over with thick patina of paranoia made worse for the reader by the lack of detail. Understatement is painfully appropriate for the reiteration of the protagonist’s chilling unvoiced query of wonder which occurs at the end of the first paragraph and then again at the end of the story: “My God…what is going on?”

“Ark of Bones” is heavily dependent throughout on understanding the titular allusion to a story from biblical Book of Ezekiel popularly known as “The Valley of Dry Bones.”

Imagery which paints a more complex and confusing portrait of the Devil as something much more than mere agent of evil recurs in various ways throughout the fiction of Dumas. At one point, a character says to another “I knowed a Christian was livin in that devil heart of yours.” Another replies in response to the assertion that the Devil will get him one day: “Not me. Me ‘n’ the devil’s friends.” “Rain God” is as story featuring specific Devil imagery on every page and, indeed, almost every paragraph. In “Devil Bird” when God and the Devil are playing cards with the narrator’s father, they work in partnership together and even exchange clothes at one point.

For the young narrator of “Devil Bird,” it is the paradox of God and the Devil working as partners in the game of cards against his father that explicitly bewilders the understanding of basic religious tenets he has been taught: “Here were God and Satan, playing against him. It was against everything that I had learned in Sunday School.”

“The Marchers” is a story actually constructed around the use of parallelism. A description of the followers of a great leader is punctuated several times throughout the narrative with various iterations: “And the people cheered…And the people roared…And the people applauded.”

Many of the stories are set in Harlem and the location becomes a kind of metonymic representation of black society in general. “If you want to know what goes on in Harlem, then you got to understand what goes on in the mind of the black people who live in Harlem.”

“He frowned at Layton and Layton passed on through the door, closing it and looking at the darkness spitting out its stars.”