Essay Questions

“Ark of Bones” is a short story inspired by what famous biblical passage that reads like a short story itself?

The story by Dumas is itself a kind of revision and repurposing of the Old Testament book of Ezekiel. Specifically, the story revisits Ezekiel 37 which is often given a subtitle like a short story: “The Valley of Dry Bones.” Even those not familiar with the actual biblical text may have some familiarity with the passage due to the spiritual song based upon the story titled “Dem Bones” or “Dem Dry Bones.” This passage in the scripture is a prophetic vision in which Ezekiel sees himself standing in a valley overwhelmed by dry bones which he has been commanded to connect to make the flesh come alive. One of the most startling images in the story by Dumas is when the narrator recounts walking into the “belly of the ark” and finding bones “stacked all the way to the top of the ship.”

How does the author use imagery to open the story “Fon” in a way similar to a magic trick?

The trick begins with the title of the story. “Fon” is basically a meaningless title without context. It isn’t even a word—and it seems unlikely to be a name, though that is what turns out to be—and so lacking any addition information at all, the title could conceivably be a reference to anything. With that in mind comes the opening lines of the story: “From the sky. A fragment of black rock about the size of a fist, sailing, sailing….” This imagery seems to confirm the doubts about the title: this could be a story about anything. Is the rock a meteor? Is it even really a rock or something more sinister? It definitely seems to have the trappings of an experiment in science fiction or science fact. And then the reveal: it wasn’t a rock—or even a rock lobster—but a brick tossed by…somebody, that’s for sure.

Though Henry Dumas was killed by a police officer in 1968, how does the story “Riot or Revolt?” feel like it might have been written in the summer of 2020?

“Riot or Revolt?” tells a story that was all too familiar when Dumas wrote it and is all too familiar today. The only major difference is that it seems familiar to a much larger and disparate segment of the American population. The story opens on the image of police barricades on a Harlem sidewalk on a hot August day. It could be a scene from Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing in the aftermath of the attack on Sal’s pizzeria or it could just as easily be any day in America in any city or town with a segregated population. The barricades are the result of angry protests the night before. The angry protests were the result of a young black American killed by the police.