History

Throughout the short story collection, Dumas explores the ways in which the black individual’s ancestral past might dictate his life in the present. Although many stories in the collection examine this notion, the reader might refer to the piece “The Marchers,” by way of immediate reference. In this story, a lone prisoner is “shackled to inertia by a great chain of years” (131). Throughout the piece the third person narrator repeats this phrase in various iterations. Each time the narrator describes the prisoner’s shackles or chains, they are depicted as symbolic of history itself. The shackles are also called “the silence of history,” thus underscoring their symbolic significance (132). The dome in which the prisoner is held is depicted as a prison in which “webs floated in the semidarkness like legions of ghost clouds, where echoes from the outside sifted in” (132). The prisoner, therefore, is a...