Compiling and editing Visible Glory
Manuscript ephemera in the Redmond Collection document Eugene Redmond's process of compiling and editing Visible Glory. The images on this page compare selected preliminary notes with corresponding content in the final published book.
The handwriting on the two note sheets below is clearly identifiable as Eugene Redmond's. The top of the first sheet is dated 11-6-95. About halfway down, the names William Lee and Dick Gregory are followed by a quotation, which continues onto the next sheet.
The quotation from the notes above as it appears in Visible Glory.
Redmond cites the source as a phone call he received on November 6, 1995, from Bill Lee. Redmond was jotting the notes down during a telephone conversation: hence the abbreviated words and hasty scrawl.
This early version of the poem "The Hadji: Allah De" by Sherman Fowler exhibits editorial comments in Eugene Redmond's handwriting.
Redmond suggests "play[ing] with [the] form" of the poem, and inserting "songs or sayings from Dumas & popular black culture" between the stanzas.
The published poem as it appears on pages 50 and 51 of Drumvoices Revue is shown below. It is essentially unchanged from the draft, except for the inserted quotations from Henry Dumas' poems in Knees of a Natural Man.
The subtitle added to the poem: "Conversations with an Ancestor/Henry Dumas (1934-1968)" is echoed in a slight revision of the last stanza to reference "our fathers bones."
Many of Redmond's notes didn't make it into the book. Below is an example of an unused idea, preserved on the back of a Chinese restaurant napkin:
Citation information for Visible Glory, with a link to the digitized version:
Redmond, Eugene B., Sherman L. Fowler, and Marcus Atkins. Drumvoices Revue. 7 (1997-1998): Visible Glory: The Million Man March. Online access is unrestricted.