Tom Dent was an extremely important New Orleans writer. He was also my dear friend and invaluable mentor. Tom is responsible for inspiring me to choose writing rather than music to make my cultural contribution. I joined the Free Southern Theatre in 1968 when I mustered out of the army. During my army years I had taken up playing drums. And I was pretty good at it. Good enough to gig regularly and had a weekly gig at an El Paso hotel awaiting my return from visiting home. Thanks to James Black, Smokey Johnson, and Zigaboo Modeliste, I realized me being a major drummer was futile, a fool’s errand/error. I would never be even half as good as they were. But I was crazy enough to think I could write as well as anyone else I had met. Of course, I had not yet met many writers.
So anyway, Tom ran FST’s writing workshop, and “Big Daddy” Robert Costly conducted the theatre workshop. They were a serious blessing who taught me so much, so very much. Fast forward to the new millennium and I was given the opportunity to assemble and edit “New Orleans Griot – The Tom Dent Reader”, which was published by the University of New Orleans press.
Now in 2019, Tom’s book is up for consideration for the 2020 selection for “One Book One New Orleans”. Whether or not you knew Tom personally and especially if you know Tom’s writing, please take a moment and vote for “New Orleans Griot – The Tom Dent Reader”. It only takes a hot minute, two clicks and it’s done. Looking forward to your support. And thank you, thank you, thank you very much.
Kalamu ya Salaam
P.S. Here is my short essay of deep appreciation for Tom Dent.
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DREAMS ARE REALLY REAL
Dreams are not just what we imagine at night, nor simply mental movies we passively watch in our sleep. Dreams are really pieces of everything we’ve ever felt, every reaction to every idea that’s ever crossed our mind, not just our sacred ideals but also all the unmentionables our tongues never say, the secrets repeated over and over to no one but ourselves and as such, dreams can be disconcerting.
At night we are a bright forest of feelings clawing at whatever containers cage our desires, hacking away at the behavioral tethers that hold us accountable to social authorities. Dreaming is not only subversive, sometimes dreams also awaken us to our real and deepest feelings.
Dreaming of Tom, I saw myself crying. I was neither shocked nor embarrassed. As we say, quoting or paraphrasing a well known Richard Pryor routine, ‘what had happened was’ I was talking to someone and felt the presence of someone else off to the side. I turned my attention to see who it was.
Though I had never known him in his youth, I was sure. It was Tom, a young Tom. I turned back to the person with whom I had been conversing and started crying. I thought Tom was dead.
I remember just before I embarked to Germany for a second time, I went to Tom’s hospital bedside.
A few days later I was in Munich and found myself visiting Dachau concentration camp.
The austere, wooden buildings were clean. There was no lingering smell of death but hard and horrible memories hung in the air, especially by the barbed-wire fences on the perimeter. I inspected faded photographs, my myopic eyes pressed nearly nose-length away from the glass-enclosed exhibits, squinting to make a closer examination of the gaunt prisoners who were literally the walking dead.
Just a few days earlier I had forced myself not to turn away from looking at my friend laying sick in a hospital bed. I had had the horrible premonition that he was going to die while I was gone.
He did.
I never thought I would have dug Germany, been comfortable there, learned so much there. America had taught me to think of Germans as “whites,” not people. On race and other matters Tom had constantly and sharply interrogated me, albeit with great affection. Rather than say I told you so, when I responded talking about what I learned or how I unexpectedly enjoyed some new or foreign experience, Tom would just pithily reply, “good.”
I loved our conversations. When I visited, if he was hard at work on a piece of writing, he would tell me so and I would ask my question and leave, but usually he paused for me and patiently listened to me babble. After a while he would ask had I considered such and such, or read so and so, or he’d point to the overstuffed book shelves and tell me to check out some guy from Uganda or an old article in Freedomways.
Every dwelling Tom had was open to me, including a couple to which he gave me a key. In my sixth decade, as I turn corners in my life, my life has become one of Tom’s ancestral homes. Concepts he taught or exemplified in his own being are now resurrected in me. Is that what friends are for?
My intellectual and spiritual flesh has grown out of what I learned from him, from people he introduced to me, from ideas he shared with me, places we frequented together, like: driving deserted, country byways in the heat of the Mississippi night on our way to a poetry reading or for me to sit in on one of Tom’s classes in the oxymoronically named town of “West Point,” which was located on the northeast edge of the state; or conducting the business of planning what we wanted to write or get published while we sat in Levatas Seafood House, he with oysters, I with shrimp; or the soirees with Danny Barker on Sere Street, the old musician schooling our young heads—Tom was older than me but we were both youngsters compared to Danny, whose eyes literally twinkled as he dropped witty one-liners and well-polished griot tales of early New Orleans life and the formative years of jazz; or the many beautiful midnight blue nights soaking up the blues moan and being cut to the bone by the razor-sharp guitar of Walter Wolfman Washington; and weekday evenings crowded into The Glass House enjoying not only the buckjump music of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band but also the entire ambiance, dancers, food, casual conversations, the guy at the door collecting dollars, the forty-year-old woman out-shaking the teenagers, all of that. Had Tom not taught me, had he not shared himself with me, given me access to the New Orleans treasures he had intimately mined, would I, could I have ever become who I am?
The old folks always asked: who your people—not just your blood family, but those whom you chose to love, to emulate, to run with and respect. The wise ones knew: your people are who you become, and if not become, they are the human forces that deeply influence your becoming.
Suddenly my emotional fog lifted. At that moment his absence overwhelmed me. I retched. The cathartic urge was irrepressible, except this nausea was not released through my mouth but rather through my eyes.
In my dream I wept, openly.
But crying was not what disturbed me. What really caused unease was a psychic jab that literally shocked open my eyes and propelled me out of bed.
For the first time in over a decade since his death, I recognized a reality I had neither fully realized nor acknowledged. I miss Tom terribly. Given our thirty year friendship and his mentorship, it should have been obvious, especially to me, but then most men are reluctant to publicly admit how much they miss another man.
#30