Remembering Writer Tom Dent
Submitted by N.O.V.A. July 2005
Times Picayune	06-10-1998


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Tom Dent, who died on Saturday, meant much to me, and I will miss him in many ways.

Although he'll probably be best remembered for his civil rights book, "Southern
Journey," Tom had a love of music so deep that it influenced the way he put words on
paper. He also had an intuitive wisdom about New Orleans as a collection of cultures. I
will miss the laughter we shared, trading tales about musicians, writers, the sophistry
of New York publishing, banal politicians, the grandeur of Mardi Gras Indians, and then
some about the city-as-human comedy.

Tom enjoyed the rocking humanity of New Orleans, even as he grieved about its poverty
and violence. There was a subtlety in his view of things. The man who followed jazz
funerals and treasured the sounds of Walter "Wolfman" Washington could haunt a reader
with razor-sharp social observations in language that sang.

He wrote an essay in Southern Exposure on New Orleans and Atlanta comparing the big
city's soaring economy to the hometown, lumbering along, half deadened by poverty, yet
with a more buoyant personality. That urban identity, a sense of New Orleans as both
blessed and cursed, was embedded in Tom's writing. It explained, I believe, the
darkness and lyricism that shaped his prism as a writer.

Tom Dent was also a gentleman. He was one of the politest people I have ever known. In
an age drenched with vulgarity and celebrities, Tom Dent was serene, a man of dignity.
He was 66 and looked 50.

He came back from trips to Africa, reflecting on far-off places that reminded him of
New Orleans. I hope someone will find a way to bring his published essays and
unpublished African journals into print.

I will also miss Tom's wonderful way of speaking, the Creole accent with a softness to
the cadences much like the spoken voice of the trumpeter Milton Batiste. Tom would
appreciate the comparison; he loved the Olympia Brass Band in which Milton has played
for years.

Tom's poetry had its own rhythms, drawn from jazz and blues. In "Magnolia Street," his
1976 collection, he explored the city through a series of characters, each of whom
carried an essence of the urban personality, the city as Tom knew it.

Tom retraced the geography of the civil rights movement in "Southern Journey,"
traveling through communities that were flashpoints in the 1960s' freedom struggle. The
most impressive quality of the book is his candor, the often despairing reflections
about the factionalism, drugs, crime and lost educational opportunities in places he
visited.

The book took more than five years to write, and after reading it I realized how hard
it was for Dent, once a youthful activist, to assess the failures of black leadership
alongside racial injustice. It is a brave and honest book.

"Teaching a history of the South to black and white children in the same schools is
going to be an arduous task for a long time to come," he wrote, "unless some sort of
fictional history is invented, maybe a string of lies everyone can agree upon. The oral
history, or histories, are too painful and too recent to be easily digested, especially
given the terribly opposing interpretation of those histories."

In his oral history work, as in his poetry, Tom Dent tried to break the strings of
lies; he did so by giving voice to the poor and marginal folk. Let us remember him as
an agent of history, and a poet who excavated painful truths, while echoing rhythms of
a city he cherished to his soul.