CZM Book Club: "Ark of Bones," by Henry Dumas with Dr. Treasure Shields Redmond (Part 2)

0:02 Hello, and welcome to Cool Zone Media Book Club, the only book club introduced by asynchronous chanting, and the only book club where you don't have to do the reading because I, or sometimes Dr.

0:23 Treasure Shields Redmond, does it for you. And our guest this week, much like last week, is Dr.

0:30 Treasure.

0:31 Hi, how are you doing?

0:33 I am doing quite well indeed, again. Happy to be here. Happy to talk, you know, all things ancestral.

0:44 We're happy to have you.

0:47 We also have our producer Hazel here. Hi, Hazel.

0:50 Hi.

0:52 So last week, Dr. Treasure read us all a story that Well, of course, it's still sitting with me. It was only five minutes ago for me, but honestly is going to be sitting with me. This is genuinely one of the most evocative stories I think we've ever had on this show. The story, Arc of Bones by Henry Dumas.

1:09 And well, actually, the first thing I wanted to talk about a little bit because we on break, we were cheating and started talking about the story ahead of time and started talking about connections with the Mississippi River and started talking about maybe like you had some thoughts on like the indigenous understandings of the river and the Gulf that obviously should not be called the Gulf of America.

1:30 Yes.

1:31 Yes. You know, I also have continued to live in river towns, even though I was raised mostly in landlocked Mississippi, water was still important to us in the form of ponds and lakes and creeks and the Pearl River that was fairly near us. But I later moved near the Mississippi to to Memphis and lived there for about a decade.

1:58 And now I've lived in the St. Louis metropolitan near the river for about 13 years. And it's such a powerful, magical entity. The river is alive and it doesn't mind letting you know that I'll take all this shit out If I want to. You're only here because I'm sparing you. But, you know, there was this moment when our current president decided that the Gulf of Mexico should be called the Gulf of America. And it made me curious as to what were some of the names that indigenous people had for the Gulf. And one of them was Chautauquilicu. And Child to Wheatley Q is a jade skirted deity. Sometimes a woman, sometimes a giant ethereal snake. But that is what the Mississippi River was to the people who lived

3:03 around the Gulf. And I just think, you know, they've always known, we've always known how important the river is.

3:13 I think in Ark of Bones, before the Ark itself appears, before the protagonist understands what he's looking at, doesn't it refer to it as like looking like a snake for a moment? Like there's something in the river, you know? And I love that it becomes all of these things, including like things that are sort of impossible, right? Like this paddle boat, but it has sails and it's as high as the clouds. Like, I don't know, all of these things at once in the Mississippi, like It's, I don't know, it's just such a good image. And I love, sorry, just to keep thinking about things I love about that story before we get into its meaning. Multiple times, this idea that like the wind was the sermon, right? Because

3:57 the whole story obviously has very direct religious, not undertones, overtones, but they're not the like one for one way that one would normally in a traditional biblical sense understand the stories that it's talking about.

4:13 Right.

4:14 And instead it's saying like, no, this is going to be our own version of it. Down to even just the like arguing about how many black people are in the Bible, you know, like starts off with. Anyway, I just the image of the sermon is nature.

4:30 Yes. I mean, well, you're on to something. You're on to something because I mean, this is a surrealist story. It could qualify as a YA story because we can tell that these are youthful. speakers. Of course, it's fiction. We could say it's Afrofuturism because it has a year in it that the writer never got to see.

4:55 1977.

4:56 The writer never saw 1977, but it is also a hoodoo or conjure story. And hoodoo is what African spirituality transformed itself into here in on this part of the North American continent. And there was about a hundred years where there wasn't a lot of direct contact with the Bible, but after the second kind of great awakening, there was a lot of proselytizing to Black people. And slavers finally figured out the serviceability of Christianity. But there was about a hundred years where they thought, no, because we kind of understand that Christianity has something about humanity in it.

5:43 And if we make them, if we make them Christian, you know, it was a chess game for two centuries. Yeah, we might have to treat them like people or think of them as people. But then they figured out, well, we can give them Bibles that remove the liberatory elements, thus the slave Bible that's in the Smithsonian. Or we can, you know, just teach them a theology that says slaves obey your master. So after that second kind of great awakening, that second period of when Christianity made like a real big evangelical push on the North American continent, hoodoo became amalgamated with Christianity. So you had people who believed in things like John the Conqueror, which comes up in here kind of slightly slanted. or who believed in mojo, which

6:41 is a Central and West African word, juju, which is a Central and West African word. But they also would collapse it with stories from the Bible. So, of course, Ezekiel and the Dry Bones, which comes up so often, is about Hebrew people, is about the proto-Jewish folk. But because... you know, a human is going to have some unspoiled part of themselves that always wants to be free, no matter how debased, no matter how degraded. There's something in you that wants to be free. So even though the Bible was used as kind of a whip and sometimes a carrot, sometimes a stick, Black people were able to absorb it and alchemize it into those African ways where nature is a sermon, nature is the teacher. So it's

7:44 an interesting study in hoodoo and conjure as well.

7:49 When I like, I want to know more about, I'm sure someone knows, actually, you might know. I know a little bit more about, and I'm going to pronounce it wrong, but voodoo in Haiti, and it's how it was related to the revolution there. And I know that's related to hoodoo. and both coming from like West African religions. And what's interesting to me is that it almost feels like it syncretizes in the other direction too, because the Catholic idea of saints feels so much like the idea of I think the Loa, the idea of like spirits that will ride you, that will take control of you, right? And so it almost just looks like the Catholics were taking notes looking over the shoulders of West Africans, like rather

8:33 than just the other way around, you know?

8:35 Well, you just became an old school Hotep right before my eyes. You just became one. No, Hotep refines its, you know, animus. In some truth, it just goes toward, you know, we was kings. It just veers toward a bad place. But it finds its animus in truth, which is the first humans were African. The first people to conceptualize the divine were African. And if we look at the timeline of where Christianity came from, then we do know that there were these foundational beliefs. beliefs and religions and spiritualities, and they started to split off in different ways, but some things are, they're not coincidences. Yeah. Some similar Jesus and Zeus, some of the similarities between Vishnu and West African and Central African deities. And so we can

9:38 tell kind of like when you listen to romance languages, like we might not understand Romanian and, But every now and then a word peeks in like, wait a minute. How do I understand that? So, yes, yes, yes, yes. I do believe that Catholicism shares a root as all of the major religions.

10:00 Do.

10:00 Yeah.

10:01 Yeah.

10:02 No one's ever called me a hoot tip before.

10:05 Look at you.

10:10 No, but yeah, I think what you're saying about how it's this story is this syncretic understanding of it. And I also keep coming back to this like being introduced into the secret society, that, you know, you are now part of the secret society. Your will shall be my hand when I strike, you strike. My eyes shall see only thee. I shall set my brother free. Like, that's so cool. Like, it's such a cool way of, which makes me want to ask about the author, right? Like, we know that the author was killed by a policeman, but like, I'm under the impression that he was also involved in like political radical stuff or like, you know, like Black Power movements. Or what was going on there that he's writing this story about joining a secret society

10:58 to set each other free?

11:02 Well, you know, it's so fascinating. Henry Dumas was a native Southerner who got to see the world because he joined the military, like so many Black men. He understood that this was one way to kind of open up your worldview, get to travel, get a decent income. So he joined the military and he was able to go to the Middle East in the military. When he came back, he took classes at Rutgers in New Jersey, and he would go to New York and hang out with all of the kind of avant-garde Black folk. including Sun Ra.

11:46 You can look up a conversation between him and Sun Ra on YouTube, and it's a trip. Dumas enjoyed psychedelia as well. He would bend his mind every now and then with a little added medicine. And he also went and studied with Baba Laos in Brooklyn, in New York City. So there were Black people and Africans in New York City who were still practicing traditional African religion, the Yoruba religion, which shares a lot with Vodun, you know. And some of the deities from Yoruba are absorbed into Haitian Vodun.

12:36 He studied with them And he thought a lot about mysticism. He thought a lot about the occult. And he, of course, as we can see by the words that showed up and the ways that showed up in this story, he thought a lot about hoodoo.

12:55 Well, I think a lot about products and services that support our show. No, that's not a very good transition. But here's an ad transition anyway. And we're back. You talked about the story being a story about memory when we ended the first episode. And I'm curious what you meant by that.

13:27 Well, you know, I think it's about memory and I think it's about memories we want to create. So, you know, Black people lost rites de passage, rites of passage, which are such a big deal in Central and West Africa. And all over the globe, you know, young men are taken off, women are taken off and given these essential lessons so that they know what it is to be an accountable member of the community as an adult. And so those rights were taken from us. We weren't able to be given those important rights. So it's about reconstructing those in a way, reconstructing But I also think it's about wishful, wishing for a memory because 1977 shows up.

14:23 So he's projecting into the future that this sort of recovery of our bones, so our essential self, will continue and become standard. Like this isn't a one-off trip. That boat is going to show up. Yeah. Over and over again. So fascinating.

14:48 I love the image of how delicately the bones are handled. Because I guess I'd say like normally, like the average story you might read where there's like, and then there's a ship made out of bones.

15:01 Right?

15:02 It's not going to be about pulling people's soul up out of the river. You know? And like, that is such a, oh, I really like this as a rite of passage story. I hadn't even really, I mean, obviously you have the like initiation, but like, I like that. I don't have a question there. I just, I think it's cool.

15:23 Yeah. I was also thinking about, I don't know if you all came across this on social media, snippets of articles about how the trajectory of sharks changed because of the transatlantic slave trade.

15:37 Oh my God, no.

15:38 Because- Curious. Oh yeah. So- I mean, of course, there's lots of death because human beings aren't meant to be cooped up for months, skin to skin, surviving off gruel and living in our own refuse. So there was lots of death. There was lots of suicide, people just jumping off. You can read that in slave narratives like Oladai Equiano's.

16:05 There are people who tried to just end it and who successfully ended it. But because of this, the patterns of sharks were changed. And we're not going to know how widespread that impact in their feeding patterns and their migration patterns was. But when you have ship after ship dropping off bodies, it is going to, of course, cause a feeding frenzy. And then animals pass down knowledge. That's going to become good hunting ground for them. So when I read Ark of Bones, I often think about all the people inside of the Atlantic, inside of the Mississippi River.

16:57 You know, they mention a lynching later on, which also makes the reader wonder, was Hedai even alive? Did you guys, did that cross your mind?

17:10 It's interesting because I came into it knowing it was a ghost story. And the way that Hedeye is described includes like things about how he looks different out of the corner of your eye than he does head on, you know? So I was like sort of thought Hedeye was the ghost at the beginning. But I didn't put it together until you say just now that there is kind of a like Hedeye is the, like maybe the transition was a very different one. What about you, Hazel?

17:38 No, I hadn't put that together. But, you know, reflecting on how it's described that like his eyes are bulging and his head is enlarged.

17:46 Oh, my God.

17:47 Yeah, that would be consistent.

17:49 And that's haunting.

17:51 Yeah.

17:52 It's making me go back and look at the placement of the lynching and them asking where he is.

17:57 Yeah, because I know that they asked about the lynching because they were like, hey, you all didn't come home till late. We were worried someone got lynched down by the river.

18:08 Mm-hmm.

18:08 You know, and disappearing off with the dog that don't hunt.

18:11 Right.

18:12 Which I just, I love a dog. I'm glad a dog got to.

18:17 And, you know, that to me is also a nod to indigeneity. Part of Mississippi I'm from is where Choctaw people used to own the whole state, used to steward the whole state, of course. But one foundational part of their origin story has to do with a white dog who led them to Mississippi. And that dog, every now and then, will appear. It comes out of fires. If you set a fire in the woods, it'll come and lay by the fire. And sometimes it just comes out of the fire, phoenix-like. It just emerges. So when I saw this mystical comrade, I thought, oh, that makes sense.

19:01 This is the part of the country where, yeah, that spirit dog....

19:09 I think as we're sort of talking about haunting and ghosts, I think that I probably read this of one of the articles that you'd written about the piece earlier, but talking about the kind of way of looking at this piece of Dumas, you know, transcending and becoming an ancestor and your father taking up the legacy of remembering him and keeping, you know, his work alive, keeping his work in print and continuing to tell a story. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about kind of that aspect of, you know, our literal ghosts that are with us.

19:44 Yeah, and someone writing this story, I think, kind of shortly before himself. being killed.

19:52 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, you know, it is a blessed burden to kind of steward the legacy of Henry Dumas. And my father talks about Being a young professor with him, he met Henry Dumas when they were both teaching for Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, here in the region that we now live. And he was teaching for this kind of special program called EHE, Experiment in Higher Education, which supposed that you could get more first-generation students and students of color to persist and graduate if the curriculum were like, interesting.

20:43 What if it was interesting? And so, right. So they shook up the entire general education curriculum, like what you take the first year, first year and a half of a bachelor's degree, you know, like that, that first psychology class, that first science class, that first sociology class. And they changed them, not just the psychology, but psychology of the black family. not just to U.S. history, but history of the region, history of labor, history of unions, history of the Rust Belt. And it had amazing results, as you can imagine. So Dumas threw himself into educating Black young people along with my dad. And it was a total shock to hear that he had gone to New York to go to a friend's wedding and was killed.

21:41 And what year was this?

21:42 This was 1968, I believe.

21:44 Okay.

21:45 Check me on that.

21:47 So he didn't even leave in the city where he got killed.

21:50 No, he was just there to go. Like any young man, you're at that stage of life where your friends are getting married. So you go up there to, you know, support them and witness something. And he was killed in the subway by a subway cop. And my dad talks about the intense mourning because you can imagine like we're talking about a boutique program that has this small, tight knit, really loved on group of students. You know, none of them have been to college, but they are so bright eyed.

22:31 They are so ready. to change their family story. They know how much this degree is going to mean. And, you know, my dad and Henry Dumas are from where they're from, you know, up South, you know, Black men, not just a few years older than them, proving the worth of this endeavor. And then to hear that your beloved teacher has been murdered, he talks about Everyone crying and them not being able to have classes, of course, and how everybody took up money for him to go and attend Dumas' funeral. And he talks about showing up at the airport with a suitcase full of cash, like a bank robber, to give to Dumas' family because they just threw money at him. Everybody, they just fundraised and threw so much money at him. Because he left behind

23:31 two young sons. He left behind two sons under the age of five. So my dad struck up a friendship with his widow and she gave him permission to get the work published. And one day, his good friend, Quincy Troop, the poet from St.

23:57 Louis.

23:58 My dad's from East St.

23:58 Louis.

23:59 His good friend, Quincy Troop, is from St. Louis, right across the river. Was in his apartment in New York. And this person named Toni Morrison came by. She was a young editor at Random House. And she asked Quincy Troop, what are you reading? She was always looking for new Black people to put on. And she had, you know, edited Angela Davis's autobiography. She was very, you know... Not hiding the mission with her publishing choices.

24:30 Yeah, I like that way of putting it.

24:32 And Quincy Truth was like, there's this guy named Henry Dumas. He's amazing. He was just killed a couple years ago. You should check him out. And from Quincy's view, he said that she just sat down cross-legged and read until the sun went down. And that's how it moved from a university press to Random House. Wow. So it's just been a wonderful journey to watch and then to join onto as my dad has shown me how to, you know, best take care of the work out here in the world.

25:10 Yeah. I also love that you do it with your father and, you know, we're kind of tying in this other aspect of legacy and lineage too. Like I first emailed you and you were like, Let me ask my dad because I still run everything past him and we're having breakfast tomorrow.

25:24 That's so amazing and special.

25:28 Could you tell us a little bit more about what it's like to be mentored by your father?

25:33 Well, you know, it has been a blessing. And I think, I mean, you know, we have these Western kids. ghosties in our head that have something to do with Oedipal complexes and I don't have a problem with that maybe because we're different genders but you know it's so fascinating to be the daughter of someone who has such a great reputation so everywhere I go people like wait a minute I know somebody named Redmond. I know Eugene Redmond.

26:05 And I go, yeah, that's my dad.

26:06 What?

26:07 I love him.

26:08 So usually people are like, I love him. But I will say that he shared with me that after Dumas died and he got some of the work published and then Morrison said, is there anything else he has? And my dad said, well, he does have this unfinished experimental novel, but he never finished it. And Morrison was like, well, why don't you finish it? And he says that he had a total breakdown about it.

26:38 Yeah.

26:38 It just caused a schism. It just, the weight of that. And then he really wanted permission from Henry. But that was not possible.

26:52 Yeah.

26:52 So he talks about, you know, the sort of spiritual work that he had to do to be able to bring that novel to fruition.

27:02 But did he end up finishing it?

27:04 He did. Genoa and the Greenstone. It is not in print now, but let me tell you, it's a weird trip, man. You should check it out.

27:14 I mean, I want to read more by Henry Dumas. This is amazing work. So I like, I understand, you know?

27:22 Yes, yes, yes. So Stuart and Dumas' work has not been without its tensions for my father because you know there has been survivor's guilt you know there was that moment I write about it in the article that you referenced it's like a 36 month period where everybody got killed it was insane they killed the president on camera they killed his brother on camera they killed king I mean you know what I'm saying it was like yeah it's just I know it had to be A feeling of, okay, well, the world's just ending. So I try to remind myself of that if I ever feel my revolutionary optimism waning.

28:09 That there are people who have been through terrible times before. Yeah.

28:16 Well, we've been through ads before. I got nothing. But here they are anyway. And we're back. I want to hear about revolutionary optimism.

28:39 Come on, revolutionary optimism. One of the things that this story points to is a world of Black people past the incredible violence that they are experiencing. And in my personal practice, that is what I am always pointing to as well. A world past violence. this one that we're being shown, a new world is possible. We know that it's possible because indigenous people have already endured their world being destroyed.

29:14 Yeah.

29:15 And yet they are still here. So when I talk about revolutionary optimism, of course, I am, you know, using the terms of socialists and communist activists who believe that This current capitalist system is a death cult and that unless we you know, take control of the resources, institute total regime change, that we will be in this cycle of a few people hoarding all the resources and the rest of us being told to vote our way out of it. I don't dismiss voting as harm reduction.

29:59 Yeah.

30:00 But I do think that the world that this story points toward and the world that most of us envision is going to take more than voting.

30:12 When I strike, you strike. My eyes shall see only thee. I shall set my brother free. That's not when I vote, you vote, you know?

30:19 That's right. That is right. Yeah. Dr.

30:25 Treasurer. You touched on this a little bit, but I'm wondering if you could talk about how sort of stewarding this legacy has impacted your own work, how, you know, sort of the work of community memory and keeping our ancestors' legacies tending to that. You know, how that's impacted your writing, your community work.

30:50 Yes, I love that question. You know, I keep saying it's all ancestors all the time with me. You know, some years ago in 2015, a book of poems of mine was chosen to be published in a contest. And it's called Chop, a collection of cuansabas for Fannie Lou Hamer. And it's a collection of poems that are all in the voice of this incredible activist and proto-feminist Fannie Lou Hamer.

31:19 Incredible Mississippian and, you know, standard bearer. But even before that, I got the form because my dad had a writer's club in East St. Louis for almost 30 years. And in that writer's club, they came up with the form called the Kwanzaa. It's made from mixing the words Kwanzaa, which is a harvest festival, and Saba, which means seven.

31:52 So it's the It's a holy little form that's seven lines, seven words per line, and no word is more than seven letters unless it is a proper noun. And it's a praise poem form. So there are lots of Kwanzaabas out there that are about ancestors. I feel like I was raised up, even in the deep South, with a deep homage to ancestors. If you go to Black people's homes, there's always an area where all the obituaries are. And there's a picture of that one uncle who died in Vietnam.

32:33 And there's the big picture of the matriarch or the matriarch and the patriarch. And people maybe even bring their high school diplomas and put them in grandma's house. But it's all in this one place kind of to celebrate those who've gone on and achievements. So You know, my work continues that. My poetry continues that. My teaching continues that.

33:02 And my commitment to revolutionary change continues that.

33:06 I remember, it wasn't the first time I heard about Fannie Lou Hamer, but the first time I like really read a lot about her was about, sorry, that's not the only thing that you said, but just that I know that the book was dedicated to that. And I was thinking about She was such an important woman in this movement, an important person in this movement, and is not talked about quite as much, specifically some of the men, which I actually don't think is necessarily the men's fault.

33:37 And I had read about her because I was doing research about the fight for birth control, but also the fight to be able to control one's own reproductive system. And then learning about how Hamer was forcibly sterilized by the government adds Like, how much... Oh, I don't know if I have anything to say about that. I was just like, it's fucking horrible. And how much work she did despite... Because of, I don't know, being so incredibly mistreated by, like, such a fucked up thing. I don't know where I'm going with this.

34:13 I just.

34:13 It's a story that I think about a lot as just, like, what it means to actually fight to control your own body. I don't know.

34:21 Yeah, I mean, her... fingerprint is in so much revolutionary thought in the Deep South and throughout the U.S. You know, as you were saying, she's not talked about as much as some of the male activists, organizers, revolutionaries. And I do think that we have a story that we've been given. You know, we've been given a story of how revolutionary change is supposed to look. And specifically, I'm talking about with Black folks. And it has truly become a story that we retell ourselves despite evidence to the contrary.

35:05 Yeah.

35:06 So we're like, yeah, it's going to happen when this guy with a suit who has a Ph.D. from Boston University and great annunciation stands up and leads us. And even when you look at the history of King, you realize it's all these women making sandwiches and it's all these queer people running mimeograph flyers. And it's all kinds of things happening. And he was the person that they checked his mustache and straightened his coat and then put him out there because- people could hear him better than they might hear a Bayard Rustin or a Fannie Lou Hamer.

35:55 But I think that we've definitely outlived that, especially when the people in power show us that their standards are not those standards. Yeah.

36:08 Yeah. Everybody wants a revolution, but no one wants to do the dishes.

36:12 Right.

36:12 Well, like the other thing that she did that, has ended up impacting so much. Sorry, I just get excited about her sometimes. The cooperative work that she did about building workers cooperatives and farm cooperatives. And like, I used to work for an organization that funds workers cooperatives. And it was so beautiful because the two primary inputs into that was Argentinian workers who had taken over their factories and and the history of black farming cooperatives and black cooperativism in America that gets like left out of the story of cooperativism, but has like really direct impacts. And, and this is, I don't know. And, And she wasn't even like the start of it. She's like 70 years into the history of all this. Sorry, I get really

37:01 excited about history. This is not what we're talking about today.

37:03 I apologize.

37:04 No, that cooperative. And it went on for almost a decade.

37:08 Yeah.

37:09 Like it wasn't a fly by. It wasn't like, oh, for 24 months, people claimed they were paying into something.

37:16 No.

37:17 For like eight years, seven, eight years. You had a pig bank. Yeah, the pig bank. Yes, the pig bank. You were growing food. And it was so affordable. And people just bartered labor. It was just a dream.

37:33 Yeah.

37:34 It was really a dream.

37:36 Yeah.

37:37 Anyway, sorry. I got really excited about some of that stuff. I apologize.

37:42 No, you and me both.

37:44 Well, okay, so. I want to ask a bit more about your own work outside of, I really appreciate what you talk about, about how a lot of your work is holding on to and continuing narratives of people who've come before. But I also am curious about your own work as well. And I know you talked a little bit about that with poetry, but if there's anything that you want to talk about, the stuff that you do.

38:06 Yes. So I am someone who is quietly being tortured by the publishing industry. I finished a novel. And, you know, every few weeks, my agent sends me a nice little rejection note and I weep and scream into the void. But I wrote this novel that I'm really proud of. It's about three queer Black boys from Meridian, Mississippi, set in 1989. It's a coming of age story about these kind of like new adults and all of the craziness that goes on when Your community's foundation is the homophobic Black church. So it's loving and cruel. So it's about all of the mixtures of that. I'm also working on a series of poems about water and how water is representative, which is why I even knew that about the Mississippi

39:08 River and Chow Tzu weekly queue. So I write poems about about the Mississippi and about the Niger River and about indigenous communities that were flooded over and turned into reservoirs and about lynching victims being dragged out of rivers in Mississippi. like what is referenced in our wonderful Duma story.

39:36 I even wrote a poem about the amniotic water that exists in women who are carrying children. So That's been a wonderful journey. It's something that has been fun to return to. And I would say that I'm about 80% of the way with that collection. I also have a public banishing practice on Instagram. So if you go to The Dr. Treasure on Instagram, every Sunday I get up and cast a hoodoo banishing. It's a spell. It's a poem.

40:13 And People have been so receptive and so complimentary. I've banished homophobia. I've banished capitalism. I've banished the U.S. state. I've banished white feminism. I've just banished everything. I keep thinking, should I banish Trump? But I feel like, and I feel like you all agree with me, I don't want to make him the problem. even though he is totally the problem. But if we focus on, oh, we need a better president, then we stop critiquing the system in which we have presidents. So he keeps doing things, though, and I'm like, what? So we'll see.

41:01 It could be like the system and him are the problem.

41:04 Right, that's what I'm thinking. It's going to have to be a combination. It's combo platter. But yeah, I talk about hoodoo. I give hoodoo story times. This month is Hoodoo Heritage Month. So every day I'm posting a fact about Hoodoo. It's a lot of fun. So you guys should check me out there.

41:24 Hell yeah.

41:25 Join me. All right.

41:27 Well, people should check out more of your work. People should check out more of Henry Dumas' work. And yeah, I don't know. I'm so honored that you came on to talk to us about this story. I love it. Well, people have already caught on. I really like this. This is just my shit. Like, it's like when I write weird horror, I want it to be spooky and meaningful and about cults of people who try to make the world better rather than about, like, just people being flayed alive or whatever. And so this is just like, it's just so my shit. And I feel this, like, incredible loss, like, selfishly that when– Like every single person who is killed by the police is like someone who had something to offer our society other than killing people, which is what

42:16 the police do. Whatever.

42:17 Anyway.

42:19 Yes.

42:20 But, yeah. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, Paisel, for making all this happen. And we will be back next week with more stories in spooky months. Thanks for listening.