"Time," wrote Arna Bontemps in his sixty-sixth year, "is not a river. Time is a pendulum." Certainly this black writer's voluminous contributions in literature and history support that theory and are informed by it. Bontemps's histories of the black experience, his biographies of notable black Americans, his novels and short stories, his children's fiction, his anthologies of works by black writers, and particularly his poetry explore the relationship between the past and present and its bearing on the inheritors of the black experience. In Bontemps's writings the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 is presented as a repetition of the squelching of nineteenth-century slave uprisings. The Harlem of the 1920s echoes the primitivism and freedom of African jungles. All is of a piece.Bontemps's importance as literary artist and historian hinges upon his efforts to show black Americans that their own past is rich and various, and...