Scenes of Argument

In a crucial moment from Henry Dumas's short story “strike and fade” (C. 1965-68), an unnamed narrator observes what is left of a city in the immediate aftermath of an urban uprising: “The word is out. Cool it. We on the street, see. Me and Big Skin. We watch the cops. They watch us. People comin and goin. That fire truck still wrecked up side the buildin. Papers say we riot, but we didn't riot. We like the VC, the Viet Cong. We strike and fade” (111). The staccato established by the short phrasings, fragments, and use of the vernacular evokes a sense of anxiety, contributing to what Carter Mathes aptly describes as Dumas's “aural portrait of black urban space under siege” (91). Dumas's careful attunement to the rhythmic feelings, or grooves, of the everyday adds texture to that opening pronouncement, “The word is out,” which, in this instance, registers a temperate disposition simultaneously alert and giving off the impression that one is maintaining the order of things. Everything will have changed by the time the phrase returns in the short story's penultimate paragraph, when the narrator and Big Skin are no longer eyeing the police but are instead woven into the collective action of an indeterminate “we.” Dumas writes, “The word is out. Burn, baby, burn. We on the scene. The brothers. Together. Cops and people goin and comin. Some people got good loot, some just hoofin it. A police cordon comin. We shadows on the wall. Light comin towards us. We fade” (115). The political message seems obvious. It's the post-Watts 1960s and disenchantment with the civil rights movement is setting in. For an emerging generation of radical black artists and activists, the time has come for people to . . . confer on the possibility of Blackness and the inevitability of Revolution. (Giovanni)