Alexandre Dumas and the #BlackHistoryMonthChallenge
Black History Month: Day 1
Today is the first day of Black History month, and I’ve decided that in 2024 I’m going to embark on a small personal journey of reflection: while the whole world celebrates Black history as a whole, I just wanted to ask dig a bit deeper and think about my own personal “Black History”—basically, all of the ways that Blackness has impacted my life, my work, and my soul.
My goal is to write just a little something each day about the ways that Black literature, music, art, history or prehistory have been important to me. Subjectively, all these experiences and thoughts are deeply personal, and I don’t always expect others to understand them. But if you take the larger view, I’m just one of millions or billions of people whose lives have been enriched by the contributions of Black people to our world.
I’m hoping that people who stumble across these essays may recognize a little of themselves in me. Maybe others will be inspired to take up my #BlackHistoryMonthChallenge, and write 28-29 short personal essays that makes this public celebration of Blackness a little more personal.
Who was Alexandre Dumas?
1. A famous historical French writer, novelist and playwright. He was born in 1802 and died in 1870, around 99 years before I was born.
2. The author of The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Corsican Brothers, and The Man in the Iron Mask, along with many other novels which would come to define adventure fiction for the next 150 years. His works have inspired over 200 cinematic versions since the medium was invented.
3. Arguably the James Patterson of his day, a prolific literary superstar who not only published over 100,000 pages of fiction, plays, articles and travel books in his lifetime, but also the center of a publishing empire which employed many other writers.
4. The author of one of the first vampire novels of the modern age, The Pale Lady.
5. The author of one of the first werewolf novels ever written, The Wolf Leader.
6. The author of Prince of Thieves and Robin Hood the Outlaw, novels which inspired the film version of the hero in Hollywoood.
7. The publisher of Celebrated Crimes, an eight-volume series of essays on famous criminals and crimes in European history. This series established a winning formula that True Crime books still follow to this day.
8. A man of large appetites and enormous debts, notorious for keeping forty mistresses as well as enjoying other pleasures.
9. A member of the Club des Hashischins, a group that included several other French luminaries and literary titans who were his contemporaries: Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval, Honoré de Balzac, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud, the artist Eugène Delacroix. Apparently all of them would get together to have séances and consume a sticky concoction of hashish resin, fat, honey and pistachios in a Paris hotel. (Notably, this strange secret society would produce the first book written by a scientist about a specific drug: Hashish and mental alienation by Jacques-Joseph Moreau.)
10. One of my father’s favorite writers as a young man, and the first Black author I can recall finding on a family bookshelf.
There are many images of Dumas available of the web, including a famous photograph, but this is the way I see him in my mind: a Black rockstar at age 27, kicking back and looking confident, comfortable, and fabulous. He’s about to spend a lifetime absolutely KILLING it.
Like many other writers, I have been inspired for life by Alexandre Dumas. There is never a time when I pick up something he wrote, even in translation, and fail to find some little nugget of gold. There is never a time when I pull on even a thread of his biography and fail to find that his history, his friends, his lovers and travels fascinate me.
In my heart and my imagination, Dumas lives on. In my head there will always be three older knights in service to a desperate queen, and a younger knight who longs to be one of their number.
There will always be a powerful, evil cleric scheming to rule the land.
There will always be a prince of thieves in the forest.
And somewhere in the depths of a dark dungeon…there will always be a secret prince in an iron mask.
Alexandre Dumas on Wikipedia