Cane

Afterword

“THE SETTING WAS crude in a way,” Jean Toomer would recall of the rural Georgia landscape that inspired him to write Cane, “but strangely rich and beautiful. I began feeling its effects despite my state, or, perhaps, just because of it. There was a valley, the valley of ‘Cane,’ with smoke-wreaths during the day and mist at night.” And in that valley, Toomer encountered, perhaps for the first time, the spirituals, the traditional music of the African American sacred vernacular: “A family of back-country Negroes had only recently moved into a shack not too far away. They sang. And this was the first time I’d ever heard the folk-songs and spirituals. They were very rich and sad and joyous and beautiful.”¹ In this lyrical remembrance of things all-too-soon to pass, Toomer suggests something of the beauty and poignancy of a landscape, a people, and an art form in transition in the first quarter of the twentieth century, a moment he would render in a loving yet searching experimental form, in the single work that would define his career and his legacy as a writer. Cane, a compelling, haunting amalgam of fiction, poetry, and drama unified formally and thematically and replete with leitmotifs, would elevate Toomer, virtually overnight, to the status of a canonical writer in two branches of American modernism: the writers and critics who compose the New Critics and the “Lost Generation,” and those who compose the New Negro movement or the Harlem Renaissance. Toomer was an important, admired, influential figure in both of these articulations of high American modernism, which reached their zenith in the 1920s and which unfolded downtown and uptown, respectively, in New York City.

The man who would startle his small but enthusiastic readership with the originality of Cane entered the cultural world of the Lost Generation downtown in Greenwich Village primarily through his close friend, the writer and critic, Waldo Frank. Uptown, simultaneously, Toomer was emerging as one of the New Negro writers of the Harlem Renaissance, chiefly through the stewardship of its erstwhile “dean,” Alain Locke, who edited the movement’s signature manifesto, The New Negro, in 1925. In the two or three years preceding the publication of Cane in 1923, Toomer — perhaps more than any other black writer — moved seemingly effortlessly between these two cultural worlds. Both movements were shaped by their own vibrant and defiant theories of language, art, culture, and history, some of which they shared, some of which they did not. But both, in their ways, challenged, to an unprecedented degree, conventional American definitions of race and social strictures defined by the so-called color line. In so very many ways, these two movements were mutually constitutive, Janus faces of a larger, unfolding concept of American modernism, although they have been frequently and mistakenly cast as discrete, isolated formations in American literature and culture.²

Jean Toomer, circa 1932. Jean Toomer Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke and Rare Book Manuscript Library.

Raised as an African American but, to most observers, racially indeterminate, Toomer embodied in his person, in his disposition, and in his art many of the signal elements — hybridity, alienation, fragmentation, dislocation, migration, fluidity, experimentation — that define American modernism, and that he would so imaginatively address in Cane. Throughout his life, Toomer displayed a marked ambivalence toward his Negro ancestry, addressing it — or erasing it — again and again in his posthumously published autobiographical writings. The relation of this deep and abiding ambivalence to the various forms of fragmentation that wind their way through Cane has intrigued critics virtually since Cane was published in 1923. Indeed, one could say that the great theme of Cane is fragmentation itself, rendered through close and careful encounters between blacks and blacks, and blacks and whites, in an almost mythic, transitional, pre-Jazz Age, Jim Crow rural South. Toomer tells us that the impact of the southern agrarian setting upon his northern, urbane sensibility was dramatic, referring to the psychological and emotional “state” created by his first encounters with southern black culture in the town of Sparta, Georgia. Put another way, Toomer is describing the particular structures of feeling and thought generated when he encountered a region of the country that fundamentally shaped his parents and grandparents, a region about which he would grow increasingly ambivalent almost as soon as, if not before, he published Cane.

Jean Toomer was born Nathan Pinchback Toomer on December 26, 1894, in Washington, D.C., the first and only child of Nina Pinchback and Nathan Toomer, both African Americans. Toomer’s name at birth was the source of some controversy in a family that, from the start, seems to have been totally devoted to him. This controversy is, in its way, emblematic of what would become Toomer’s own preoccupation with naming and self-definition, with determining what to call himself and how to define himself ethnically, and with exercising control over his public image in a society that favored the shorthand of labels, especially when defining a person’s color or race.

Toomer’s middle name, Pinchback, linked him directly to his grandfather, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback (1837–1921), the husband of Nina Emily Hethorn, with whom he had four children. P. B. S. Pinchback (as he was known) was the son of Major William Pinchback, a white Virginia planter, and Eliza Stewart, a mulatto slave, and the brother of an undetermined number of siblings, some of whom disappeared into the white world. Born a free Negro in Macon, Georgia, in 1837, Pinchback was a captain in the second regiment of Louisiana’s Native Guard, the black soldiers in the white army who fought on the side of the Union during the Civil War, from October 1862 to September 1863. As the only “cullid officer” at Fort Pike, he served as the spokesman for his fellow black officers who were unrelenting in their protest of the discrimination experienced by the black enlisted men under their command in the Union Army.³ Pinchback would become, during Reconstruction, the first black lieutenant governor of Louisiana. For thirty-five days in December 1872 to January 1873, he even served as the Acting Governor.⁴ Pinchback’s “brief tenure as acting governor was the political high-water mark for Louisiana blacks during the nineteenth century.”⁵ A colorful and imperial figure who was sometimes mistaken for Andrew Carnegie, Pinchback derived his wealth from lucrative investments and political appointments, and derived his influence and standing within the deeply stratified society of Washington, D.C., to which he moved after his political career ended in Louisiana, from his historic achievements in office, and his light-skin privilege, often a visible marker of class.

The grandson would recount with some pride the grandfather’s improbable, dramatic rise to power in the corrupting, byzantine, and multicultural world of the Pelican State, speculating that his motives for becoming a public servant were perhaps not entirely altruistic, even suggesting, incredulously, that Pinchback may have been a white man who only passed for black to facilitate his chances of being elected in Reconstruction Louisiana: “Then, the war ended and the black men freed and enfranchised, came Pinchback’s opportunity in the political arena. He claimed he had Negro blood, linked himself with the cause of the Negro, and rose to power. How much he was an opportunist, how much he was in sincere sympathy with the freedmen, is a matter which need not concern us here…it would be interesting if we knew what Pinchback himself believed about his racial heredity. Did he believe he had some Negro blood? Did he not? I do not know. What I do know is this — his belief or disbelief would have had no necessary relation to the facts — and this holds true as regards his Scotch-Welsh-German and other bloods also.”⁶

Nowhere, to our knowledge, was Pinchback ever ambivalent about being a Negro, even if, as W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote of him, to “all intents and purposes…[he] was an educated well-to-do congenial white man with but a few drops of Negro blood,” as fair as, say, the novelist Charles W. Chesnutt or the civil rights leader Walter White.⁷ In fact, elsewhere in his writings, when discussing why he attended an all-black elementary school, Henry Highland Garnet, in Washington, Toomer contradicts himself about Pinchback’s racial identity: “For Pinckney Benston Stewart Pinchback to send his grandson to a white school, no, that will not do. It might look as if he were going back on his race and wanting me to be white.”⁸ Toomer is being disingenuous here, however; schools in Washington, D.C., were rigorously segregated; Pinchback would have had no choice, even if, as does not appear to be the case, he had sought to educate his grandson across the color line. Clearly the issue of his grandfather’s ethnic ancestry was a vexed one for Toomer, one crucial for him to position and reposition as he sought to redefine his own racial identity.

And a large part of his strategy of strongly implying that his grandfather most probably was “passing for black” was rooted in Toomer’s desire to paint the roots of this branch of his family tree white; to do so, he had to stress that Pinchback was the political opportunist par excellence: “I say he [Pinchback] was an adventurer. I think he was. I doubt that he saw himself bearing a mission to secure and maintain the rights of the freedmen.”⁹ His grandfather, moreover, Toomer reasoned, saw in the Louisiana of Reconstruction a certain fluidity of identity that allowed for an unprecedented amount of social mobility: “More than anything else Pinchback saw himself as a winner of a dangerous game. He liked to play the game. He liked to win. This — the reconstruction situation in Louisiana — was the chance his personal ambition had been waiting for. He was not a reformer. He was not primarily a fighter for a general human cause. He was, or was soon to become, a politician — but far more picturesque, courageous, and able than the majority of the men who bear that name.”¹⁰ If his grandfather had been a white man who passed for black, perhaps his grandson could be a black man who could pass for white. Despite Toomer’s highly dubious claim about his grandfather’s racial identity, his assessment of his grandfather’s career in politics is all the more compelling for being critical and unsentimental. Clearly, P. B. S. Pinchback was a man who inspired a great degree of awe, in Toomer and in just about everyone else: “For myself — I was fascinated by him. His goings and comings were the big events in the house…No one could speak to me and make me laugh and get me excited the way he could. He made me feel I was having a part in everything he did. Sometimes he would take me downtown with him and I might even have lunch with ‘the men,’ who made much to-do over me, giving me the feeling that I was the scion of a great family.”¹¹ This was my grandfather as I knew him,” Toomer writes with fond admiration. “I saw him as a dashing commanding figure, the centre of an unknown but exciting world. He created an atmosphere which thrilled me; and there is no doubt that his image, and the picture and sense of his life, were deeply impressed upon me, later to function as an unconscious ideal for myself, for how I wished to look and be; and also to serve as standards by means of which I measured men and life.”¹²

Toomer’s loving portrait of his grandfather as a bold and questing Victorian patriarch, however, is complicated by the fact that as he grew into adulthood, he was often at war with Pinchback, who grew increasingly bewildered and disappointed by his scion’s seeming lack of purpose and direction. “Not till I was seven could I rule my mother and grandmother,” Toomer tells us; but “Not till I was twenty-seven did I finally conquer my grandfather.”¹³ While his relationship with Pinchback would become increasingly fraught, Toomer, nevertheless, dutifully and lovingly cared for his grandfather in the final weeks of his life, immediately following his pivotal sojourn in Georgia. “Once again in Washington I had my grandfather brought back from the hospital. His condition there was too pitiable for me to bear. He touched my heart so strongly that I resolved to care for him till the very end. And this I did.”¹⁴ Precisely as Pinchback’s health declined, Toomer found his voice as an artist: “He sank very rapidly. All during December I nursed him; and, at the same time, I wrote the materials of Cane. In these last days he seemed to know just what I meant to him. I knew and realized all he had done for me.”¹⁵

In the small apartment he also shared with his resilient, long-suffering grandmother, Toomer and Pinchback reconciled in the days before his death, precisely as he was completing the powerful, final, haunting section of his first book: “Our almost life-long struggle and contest was finished, and all my love and gratitude for the once so forceful and dominant but now so broken and tragic man came to the fore. He died the day after I had finished the first draft of ‘Kabnis,’ the long semi-dramatic closing-piece of Cane.”¹⁶ Toomer would write to Waldo Frank that “Kabnis is Me,” one of his last admissions of his awareness of the primacy of his own Negro ancestry in the shaping of his cultural and ethnic identity. But it is altogether reasonable to speculate that the powerful, quasi-mythic encounter at Kabnis’s conclusion — between the northern, mulatto would-be intellectual and old, black Father John, the haunting figure of the slave past — was informed by this final, intense encounter and reconciliation between Toomer and Pinchback himself.

Toomer’s Christian name and surname tie him to his father, Nathan Toomer. Born in 1839 in Chatham County, North Carolina, Nathan was the slave of Richard Pilkinson, who subsequently sold him to John Toomer.¹⁷ When John Toomer died in 1859, his brother Henry Toomer purchased Nathan, his mother, Kit, and seven of her children from the estate. Nathan became the body servant of Henry Toomer, and adopted the surname of the family who had purchased him and most of his family. In the 1860s, Nathan Toomer married Harriet, a mulatta with whom he had four daughters. After Harriet’s death in 1890, Toomer married Amanda America Dickson, regarded as “the richest colored woman alive.”¹⁸ Dickson, born in 1849, was the daughter of David Dickson, a prosperous planter of Hancock County, Georgia, and Julia Frances Lewis Dickson, a mulatta. Amanda was reared in the Dickson household by Elizabeth Dickson, her paternal grandmother. When David Dickson died in 1885 he left much of his estate, valued at approximately $400,000, including 15,000 acres of land, to Amanda America Dickson. Nathan Toomer and Amanda Dickson married on August 7, 1891, and took up residence in her well-appointed mansion located on Telfair Street among the wealthy white elite in Augusta, Georgia. Almost two years later, on June 11, 1893, Amanda would die, from “complications of disease.”¹⁹ Since Amanda left no will, Nathan found himself in a protracted court battle over the disposition of the estate with his two stepchildren, Julian and Charles, whom Amanda bore in her first marriage to Charles Eubanks, a white Civil War veteran. Adhering to the terms of David Dickson’s will, the court awarded the bulk of Amanda’s estate to her children.²⁰

Nathan Toomer was a handsome widower in search of new sources of income as well as a third wife. Both of these needs were met in the person of Nina Pinchback, whom he met in December 1893. They met at her Bacon Street home during a “housewarming reception” hosted by her parents.²¹ Soon after, Nathan began courting Nina. Three months later on March 24, 1894, they were married by none other than the Reverend Francis J. Grimké, the nephew of the South Carolina abolitionists and suffragettes Angelina Weld and Sarah Moore Grimké, a graduate of Lincoln, Howard, and Princeton universities, co-founder of the American Negro Academy, and the very able and famous pastor of Washington’s 15th Street Presbyterian Church. Grimké was a celebrity himself, as grand and as well known as Pinchback.

Pinchback objected to the marriage volcanically, disapproving of Nathan Toomer for several reasons. First of all, Nathan was twenty-seven years older than Nina (Pinchback himself was only two years older than his son-in-law). Second, he had been previously married. Third, Nathan impressed Pinchback as being “unreliable,”²² perhaps because Nathan engendered a certain disturbing sense of self-recognition of his own adventurous past and temperament. But the Governor was accurate, indeed, prophetic in his identification of this defect in his future son-in-law’s character. Nathan deserted Nina within a year of their marriage. Nevertheless, their only child refused to cast the failed union in a disreputable light: “I have been told and have reason to believe it was a love marriage. This was the one clear affirmation of her [Nina’s] life.”²³ Without an income, she was unable to support herself in the home located on Twelfth Street, which her husband had irresponsibly purchased with $12,000 in cash for his bride and infant son. Converting the bridal nest into rental property, Nina was forced to return, most reluctantly, to the Bacon Street home of her parents.

Predictably, the Governor “set conditions for readmitting his wayward daughter and her infant son. The biggest stumbling block was the boy’s name.”²⁴ Intent upon nothing short of patronymic erasure of the errant Nathan Toomer, Pinchback insisted that “if he was to support the baby,” the surname had to be “legally changed to Pinchback and the first name changed to anything else.”²⁵ According to Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge, “Nina rejected that proposed legal action but accepted the family’s informal adaptation. The first name was soon replaced by Eugene, after Eugene Laval, [Toomer’s] godfather…”²⁶ Throughout his life, Toomer’s grandparents addressed him as Eugene Pinchback, while his mother stubbornly addressed him as Eugene Toomer, though she herself had reverted to her family name, Pinchback. Toomer’s playmates on Bacon Street, he writes, called him “Pinchy — short for Pinchback. To them I was a Pinchback. They knew nothing of Toomer.”²⁷ “In my own home there were still other names,” he confides. “Mother called me Booty [after beauty]. Uncle Bis called me Kid. Uncle Walter — Snootz. And grandfather — the little whippersnapper. I was, then, well-supplied.”²⁸

Jean Toomer as a young boy. Undated. Jean Toomer Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke and Rare Book Manuscript Library.

When he made the commitment to become a writer, Toomer gave himself the androgynous name of Jean, which stemmed from his admiration of Romain Rolland’s novel Jean-Christophe.²⁹ During the 1930s and the 1940s, Toomer published under the name of N. J. Toomer, initials for Nathan Jean, for two reasons: first, to distance himself from Cane and the racial identity of its author, since Cane was the work by which he had come to be known as a Negro writer; and second, to mark a rebirth in his life, following his conversion to Quakerism, a rebirth that marked a certain return. By taking the name Nathan Jean, Toomer himself had come full circle, finally rendering futile his family’s efforts to banish the memory of his father, Nathan.

The memory of the father kindled the imagination of the son. For years, Toomer kept a photograph of his father, from which he constructed a rather fanciful portrait of Nathan as a “handsome stirring,” wealthy planter from Georgia.³⁰ And Toomer, in the drafts of an autobiography that he never published, wistfully re-creates the first and only meeting between the two. It is clear that through this anecdote, Toomer sought to recuperate his father from grandfather Pinchback’s relentless traducing. Nathan Toomer returned to Washington in 1900, six years after Toomer’s birth, and during this visit, according to Jean, he materialized before the Bacon Street house, presumably to see his son. Because he refused to pay alimony of $60 per month and the court costs of his divorce from Nina, the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia on January 20, 1899, declared Nathan in contempt. Nathan’s return to Washington, accordingly, carried with it considerable risk; he could have been arrested and jailed.

One afternoon while playing in his front yard, Toomer tells us that he found himself in the arms of a stranger he intuitively recognized as his father: “I do not know how I knew him. But, soon, I was running up the way a bit towards a large man who was holding out his arms to me. He took me in them, raised me and kissed me, and I liked him very much. He said things to me which I didn’t understand, but I knew he was my father and that he was showing how much he loved me and what a fine little man I had grown to be. He raised me high in the air, and then he saw mother come out. He lowered me, pressed a bright silver half-dollar in my hand, kissed me again, and told me to run back to her. He went off.” ³¹ It was their first and only meeting, and it is clear that Toomer carefully nurtured this memory of his father, which uncannily recalls the first encounter between the mixed-race protagonist and his white father in James Weldon Johnson’s novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), a novel about passing, itself “passing” as autobiography.³²

Though he knew nothing of his father’s marriage to Amanda America Dickson, over time Toomer’s memory of his father acquired a certain luster through his inheritance of artifacts that once belonged to him: “The only worldly possessions that came to me from him were some beautiful large silk handkerchiefs, a set of small diamond shirt studs, and a slender ebony cane with a gold head.”³³ While Nathan Toomer never saw his son again, in correspondence between the elder Toomer and an acquaintance, Whitefield McKinlay, of Washington, D.C., between 1898 and 1905, there is evidence of his father’s continued, genuine interest in a son whom he called in his letters to McKinlay the “Little Colonel.”³⁴ Some years later, in the very Sparta, Georgia, that inspired Cane, the “Little Colonel” would encounter someone who had actually known his father — a barber who claimed to have some knowledge of Nathan Toomer. According to Kerman and Eldridge, Toomer asked the barber “whether his father had been regarded by the community as white or ‘colored,’” and the barber “replied that Nathan stayed at the white hotel, did business with white men, and courted a black woman.”³⁵ Like his grandfather and his father, Jean Toomer would live in both the black and the white worlds over the course of his life, and in both worlds the act of naming and self-definition would remain an obsession with him. There is new evidence that, like the nameless protagonist of James Weldon Johnson’s novel, Toomer did in fact pass for white, as many of his black literary contemporaries assumed or believed he did.

Toomer’s uncle, Bismarck Pinchback, also played a profoundly important role in his development. Bismarck was the second of his grandfather’s three sons, along with Pinckney and Walter. It was Uncle Bis who introduced the “Kid,” as he called him, to the world of literature, science, and the life of the mind, gradually inculcating in him a desire to become a writer. Toomer lovingly acknowledged Bismarck’s role in his larger education, recalling how his relationship with his uncle transformed itself into that of master and apprentice: “Then something happened which swiftly transferred my interests from the world of things to the world of ideas and imagination. Uncle Bis and I suddenly discovered each other. He had been there all along, and his sensitivity and affection had drawn me to him…. All at once the veils of familiarity dropped from our eyes and each in his own way beheld the wonder of the other.”³⁶

Bismarck Pinchback, a civil servant, was an avid reader and possessed some literary ambitions of his own. According to Toomer, his uncle was his Virgil, his first nurturing guide to the far shores of the imagination. Toomer vividly recounts his uncle’s evening ritual of reading and writing in bed: “There he would get in bed with a book, cigarettes, and a saucer of sliced peaches prepared with sugar in a special way, and read far into the night. Sometimes he would write, trying his hand at fiction…. This position — my uncle in bed surrounded by the materials of a literary man — was impressed upon me as one of the desirable positions in life.”³⁷ Bismarck was the father figure that neither Nathan nor his grandfather could ever be, and to him Toomer gives all the credit for the life of thought and feeling that he would pursue: “By nature he was far more the artist and thinker than a man of action; and, as far as possible, he evoked the thinker in me.”³⁸ Bismarck Toomer would be the last black man whom Toomer would acknowledge as a shaping influence on the man of letters he would become.

Bismarck introduced Toomer not only to literature but also to physics and to astronomy, especially the earth’s relation to other planets in the universe. “It was all wonderful,” Toomer so fondly remembers. “And, young though I was, I was growing a sense of and forming an attitude towards my and our position on earth and in the universe. I had a new way of seeing things. This was the beginning of my world view. And for this alone I will be forever grateful to my uncle for having taken such interest in me.” Bismarck would read historical works to his nephew, as well as “myths and fables, folk tales, romances and adventures. Often he would phrase the tale in his own words and himself tell it. He liked to do this…. For myself — I eagerly absorbed them. My imagination took flight and I was thrilled to follow it into those worlds of wonder.”³⁹ Bismarck’s gas-light tutorials in the Bacon Street house constituted Toomer’s first meaningful introduction to the wonders of learning. At a time when he perhaps most needed it, Uncle Bismarck functioned as both teacher and mentor to his nephew, and thus provided him with a means by which to apprehend his potential as an intellectual, and more especially as thinker and writer: “He was, in truth, my real teacher. In comparison with him and with what I learned from him, my formal teachers and schooling were as nothing…. I truly learned with and from Bismarck…. Our evenings together were periods of genuine education…. My mind was born and nurtured during those times with him.” ⁴⁰

As we have seen, Toomer attended the all-black Henry Highland Garnet School (named in honor of the pioneering nineteenth-century black nationalist) for his elementary education, and then the famous Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, previously known as M Street High School, the District’s first public high school for African Americans, named after the famous black poet, from which he graduated in 1914. Dunbar High School was more like a black private school, an Exeter or Andover for African Americans, than a normal public school. Its teachers and students, incredibly, included several members of the Negro intellectual elite, the group that W. E. B. Du Bois would call “the talented tenth,” the “college-bred Negro.” Among its stellar alumni were the poet Sterling A. Brown, the feminist Nannie Helen Burroughs, the physician Charles R. Drew, and the lawyer and civil rights advocate Charles Hamilton Houston. (Both Brown and Houston would take advanced degrees from Harvard.) Dunbar High School’s distinguished faculty included many Ph.D.’s, such as the sociologist Kelly Miller and the Harvard-trained historian, Carter G. Woodson, along with the woman’s rights activist Mary Church Terrell, poet Angelina Weld Grimké (the niece of Reverend Francis J. Grimké, who had married Toomer’s parents), and Anna Julia Cooper, Toomer’s Latin teacher, the first African American to earn a Ph.D. at the Sorbonne. Scholars who should have been professors in the Ivy League found their best job opportunities at this public high school.

Despite these extraordinarily well-trained teachers, however, Toomer’s education at school was apparently not nearly as fulfilling as those evenings spent with his beloved Uncle Bismarck, when he was the center of attention and Bismarck’s mesmerizing pedagogical methods opened his nephew’s mind to facts and mysteries at a pace that suited him best. Toomer found in Bismarck a badly needed father figure, of course; but he also had learning difficulties that even a school as sophisticated as Dunbar would have been ill-prepared to meet: “I had difficulty in learning to read. For some reason or other, try as hard as I would I couldn’t get on the inside of the thing: the letters and characters obstinately withheld their sense from me, and the lines of words behind which meaning lurked were like closed doors which stubbornly refused me entrance. I gazed with hopeless amazement at the older children, the teacher, the grownup members of my family who read so easily and seemed to think nothing of it.” ⁴¹ Whether Toomer was dyslexic or merely a slow reader it is difficult to know, but in due course he overcame this frustration with deciphering the written word: “In time, however, reading had become just an ordinary thing which I was compelled to continue. I found but little to attract me in the various school readers. Some of the stories I liked, but they were not half as wonderful as those told me by Bismarck, and moreover, whatever pleasure or interest they may have had for me was spoiled when they were put through the mill of classroom recitations.” ⁴²

Toomer, like many people with learning disabilities embarrassed by their inability to learn at a pace with other students, created diversions in school: “I was the class-room cut up,” he recalls, “and the teacher’s problem.”⁴³ Kerman and Eldridge speculate that Toomer’s disruptive classroom behavior may have had its roots in his resentment at being separated from his white friends on Bacon Street and the shock of attending a black school: “Surely resentment at being arbitrarily shut out of his group, as well as the inevitable lack of resources at a black school in Washington at the height of the Jim Crow era, would have affected what was offered to him and how Jean would accept it.”⁴⁴ Though highly unlikely, as we shall see, these factors could possibly explain why the “little whippersnapper,” as his grandfather called him, was uncomfortable at the Garnet School, and necessarily at odds with its pedagogy: “I resented and resisted it. I had an almost constant feeling that I was being maltreated.”⁴⁵ Nonetheless, as something of a self-consciously privileged child — a child with an almost mythic grandfather and an absent father whom he would seek to transform into a myth — living in a community in which light skin color could signify upper-class status, Toomer was able to use his class status to his advantage in the classroom: “At the same time, I had a lot of fun in school. Some of this fun was natural to the gay spirit of childhood. Some sprang from an instinctive resistance to authority…. I felt somewhat privileged and immune owing to grandfather’s position and influence…”⁴⁶

Toomer’s matriculation at Garnet Elementary School and Dunbar High School afforded him the opportunity to acquire a very special education in what James Weldon Johnson, describing his years at Atlanta University (both the preparatory school and the university), termed the “arcana of race.”⁴⁷ For Johnson, who would later correspond with Toomer regarding the possibility of the inclusion of some of his poems in a revised edition of his The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922, 1931), “the initiation into the arcana of race” meant “preparation to meet the tasks and exigencies of life as a Negro, a realization of the peculiar responsibilities due to my own racial group, and a comprehension of the application of American democracy to Negro citizens.”⁴⁸ Toomer’s initiation into the arcana of race would mean something quite different altogether. As he claims in his autobiography, he “formed and formulated” his racial position in the summer of 1914 just before he left Washington to matriculate at the University of Wisconsin.⁴⁹ He took this important step toward self-definition because he was keenly aware of his hybrid racial background, the racial ambiguity of his physical appearance, the questions and stares it elicited, the fact that he had lived in both the white and black worlds, and that he could, if he chose, continue to do so, or even choose one over the other.

When Toomer attended the Garnet School, he was living in the home of his grandparents, which was located on Bacon Street in a neighborhood that at the time was composed of wealthy whites. During these years between 1894 and 1906, Toomer’s neighbors and playmates were white, but his classmates at Garnet School were all black. In 1906, Toomer’s mother, Nina Pinchback, remarried and moved to New York with her son and second husband, Archibald Combes, a traveling salesman for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. During this second and relatively brief marriage, Toomer lived and attended schools for three years in the white neighborhoods in Brooklyn and also in New Rochelle. After his mother’s tragic, apparently avoidable death by appendicitis in the summer of 1909, Toomer returned to Washington, D.C. Here, he lived with his Uncle Bismarck and his family on Florida Avenue in a black neighborhood. A year later in 1910 he enrolled at Dunbar High School. Now, for the second time in his life, Toomer found himself attending school in what he described as “the colored world.”⁵⁰ But in fact, all of Toomer’s primary and secondary education, except for the three years in New York, took place in “the colored world,” under black teachers, surrounded by all-black classmates, in an all-black cultural environment. For Toomer, however, “the initiation into the arcana of race” did not mean preparation for “life as a Negro” and leadership among the race as it would be for Johnson and other members of Du Bois’s talented tenth. Rather, Toomer would have us believe that this initiation would be a means of acquiring an understanding of social relations and the operations of power as a member of what he termed “an aristocracy — such as never existed before and perhaps never will exist again in America — midway between the white and Negro worlds.”⁵¹

But Toomer and his family did not live “midway” between these two worlds; rather, they lived, to a greater or lesser degree, as light-skinned black people who, for a time, managed to defy the color line and live in white residential neighborhoods. The Pinchbacks were undoubtedly aristocrats within the black world, but more likely were visitors or voyeurs or interlopers within the white world. The fact that Toomer attended the Garnet School even when his family lived in a white neighborhood underscores how rigid racial boundaries, in fact, were in Washington. By no stretch of the imagination, despite Toomer’s claims to the contrary, did this class of Negroes enjoy equal status with their white class peers, especially in racially stratified Washington, D.C., at the beginning of the twentieth century. Toomer, clearly, is asserting this claim — just as he had done about his grandfather passing as a Negro — to lay the autobiographical and sociological groundwork for his self-fashioning as a pioneering member of a new elite, an upper class of mixed-race individuals who would be points of mediation between white Americans and black Americans.

From 1909 to 1914, Toomer once again was a member of Washington’s fabled colored aristocracy, a world he would analyze and critique to great effect. Toomer is at pains to assure us that the transition into this world involved no hardship for him: “It was not difficult to do so. I accepted this as readily as I had accepted living in Brooklyn and New Rochelle.”⁵² Writing in an elegiac mode, Toomer reconstructs the character of the world he entered when he took up residence with his Uncle Bismarck after returning from New York, along the way arguing implausibly that this class of Negroes just “happened” arbitrarily to be defined as Negroes, as if the history of their families’ racial identification and the history of their participation in Negro culture had had no relevance on the shaping of their identities: “In the Washington of those days — and those days have gone now — there was a flowering of a natural but transient aristocracy, thrown up by the, for them, creative conditions of the post-war period. These people, whose racial strains were mixed and for the most part unknown, happened to find themselves in the colored group. They had a personal refinement, a certain inward culture and beauty, a warmth of feeling such as I have seldom encountered elsewhere and again…. All were comfortably fixed financially, and they had a social life that satisfied them…. The children of these families became my friends.”⁵³

Because of the similarities in class, the transition from the white world into the colored world was, Toomer is arguing, a seamless one, in spite of the fact that, he would have us believe, he had effectively been “white” in New York and now was “black” in Washington. It is important to emphasize that Toomer is postulating an almost mythic class and racial formation, a “people, whose racial strains were mixed and for the most part unknown, and who happened to find themselves in the colored group,” who have, alas, disappeared (“those days are gone now”). He writes here of a racially and culturally distinct group within the “colored group,” “an aristocracy…midway between the white and Negro worlds,”⁵⁴ which enjoyed considerable economic privilege, a class of which he and his family were always a part. Toomer’s depiction of this class-within-a-class, as it were, a point of mediation between black and white, is another component in his rhetorical strategy of declaring racial independence as a member of the vanguard of a raceless tertium quid.

In Washington, Toomer most certainly lived among the Negro elite, but it was disingenuous of him to suggest that its members were racially or culturally indeterminate; they were legally defined as Negroes, whether they liked it or not. And this would have been especially the case at the turn of the century following the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling of 1896, which declared “separate but equal” as the law of the land, the ruling itself a desperate attempt to police the boundaries that interracial sexual liaisons had hopelessly blurred. Toomer never tells us, if we but pause to think about it, why his family, living effortlessly as “white” in New York, found itself sending its child to an all-black school in Washington. Surely, no white family would have done that out of choice. But Toomer does this to establish the experiential justification for his subsequent decision to define himself as an “American.”

Toomer assures us that he identified implicitly with this new way of life, and certainly his earlier life on Bacon Street had prepared him for it: “They were my kind, as much as children of my early Washington years had been.”⁵⁵ Toomer emphasizes their social, racial, and cultural uniqueness: “These youths had their round of activity, parties, interests — and were self-sufficient. In their world they were not called colored by each other. They seldom or never came in contact with members of the white group in any way that would make them racially self-conscious.”⁵⁶ Occupying this liminal world of a mulatto elite, Toomer is arguing, it is not difficult to understand how he could define himself as “neither white nor black.”⁵⁷

And yet it is also difficult to understand how Toomer could even suggest that within this period of American racial history that any white American at the time would label him as anything other than black. Anticipating the curiosity, confusion, and misunderstanding that his body, speech, and appearance would engender, and no doubt seeking to escape the boundaries imposed upon persons of African descent, Toomer tells us he formed his own “racial position” before leaving what he would have us believe was a “special” race world of Washington, D.C., to attend college in 1914. If so, he became one of the earliest proponents of the theory that “race” was socially constructed, even if his motives for doing so were quite mixed. Moreover, he would spend the rest of his life, following the publication of Cane, socially constructing his racial indeterminacy, and simultaneously deconstructing his Negro ancestry.

“By hearsay,” writes Toomer, echoing W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous description, in The Souls of Black Folk, of his own ancestry, “there were in my heredity the following strains: Scotch, Welsh, German, English, French, Dutch, Spanish, with some dark blood. [Let us] assume the dark blood was Negro — or let’s be generous and assume that it was both Negro and Indian. I personally can readily assume this because I cannot feel with certain of my countrymen that all of the others are all right but that Negro is not. Blood is blood…. My body is my body, with an already given and definite racial composition.” ⁵⁸ After identifying the various racial “strains” in his ethnic heredity, Toomer raises the vital question of genetic ancestry, of race: “Of what race am I? To this question there can be but one true answer — I am of the human race….” Rejecting the one-drop rule (one drop of Negro blood doth forever a Negro make) as well as the reigning preoccupation with racial purity that governed conceptions of race in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, Toomer claimed a social identity that would inevitably place him at odds with the American mainstream and, in retrospect, make him a pioneering theorist of hybridity, perhaps the first in the African American tradition. Nevertheless, he remained indifferent to the consequences of this position, and quite determined to maintain and justify it, returning to the subject seemingly endlessly in his autobiographical writings. Adopting an unorthodox, progressive, and certainly idealistic position on race that would be the source of some suffering even now in the twenty-first century, he defined himself as an “American, neither black nor white, rejecting these divisions, accepting all people as people.”⁵⁹

Toomer’s “racial position” anticipates by eleven years a complementary theory of race conceptualized by the Mexican writer and political leader Jose Vasconcelos in La raza cosmica (The Cosmic Race), published in 1925. In this treatise, Vasconcelos defines the Mexican people as a new race composed of all the races of the world. The central claim of La raza cosmica is that “the various races of the earth tend to intermix at a gradually increasing pace, and eventually will give rise to a new human type, composed of selections from each of the races already in existence.” ⁶⁰ According to Vasconcelos, the “new human type” or alternately “the fifth universal race,” the “synthetic race,” “the definitive race,” or the “cosmic race” has its origins in the pre-Mayan legendary civilization of Atlantis.⁶¹

In prose that is marked by a mixture of philosophy, poetry, and mysticism, Vasconcelos asserts that this new cosmic race will be “made up of the genius and the blood of all peoples and, for that reason, more capable of true brotherhood and of a truly universal vision.”⁶² It will emerge from the continent of South America, thus fulfilling, according to Vasconcelos, the historic destiny of Latin American people or the “Hispanic race” to bring the races of the world to an advanced state of spiritual development.⁶³ Based in the “Amazon region,” Vasconcelos calls the capital of this new empire of the spirit “Universopolis,” which will rise on the banks of the Amazon River.⁶⁴ One of the “fundamental dogmas of the fifth race” is love as it is expressed within the framework of Christianity which, according to Vasconcelos, “frees and engenders life, because it contains universal, not national, revelation.”⁶⁵ Writing as an idealist and a visionary, Vasconcelos argues that we “have all the races and all the aptitudes. The only thing lacking is for true love to organize and set in march the law of History.”⁶⁶ Love, then, is the expanding floor upon which will rise “a new race fashioned out of the treasures of all the previous ones: The final race, the cosmic race.”⁶⁷

While there is no concrete evidence that Toomer was familiar with the writings of Vasconcelos, there are many affinities between their respective views on race.⁶⁸ But it is quite possible that Toomer knew Vasconcelos’s work, given its wide popularity and given Toomer’s sojourns in New Mexico. Toomer and Vasconcelos emerge as prophets of a new order in which the mixed-race person is a pivotal figure, a metaphor or harbinger of a hybrid culture and a fusion of many ethnic and genetic strands. The claims of both are based upon an appeal to the universal, the positive values associated with hybridity and thus a rejection of racial purity, and the belief that racial mixture or mestizaje possesses the potential to unify humankind. For Toomer and Vasconcelos, the mixed-race person or the mulatto emerges as a symbol of “cosmic” possibility, and the spiritual resolution of all human conflict rather than as a symbol of human conflict and degeneracy. Gilberto Freye would develop a related theory of “racial democracy” as a hallmark of Brazilian culture in his classic work, Casa-Grande e Senzaca,⁶⁹ published in 1933. Ferdinand Ortiz would elaborate a similar theory for Cuban culture a few years later in his book, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, published in 1940.⁷⁰ Vasconcelos’s theory (either directly, or through Toomer) influenced Zora Neale Hurston as well. In “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston writes, “At certain times, I am no race, I am me…. The cosmic Zora emerges.”⁷¹

Toomer arrived at his definition of his own race when most Americans implicitly accepted a “scientific” or biological definition of race, and believed that the world was composed of several distinct racial groups, each with its own history, each with its own place in a racial hierarchy, each with its own special contribution to make to world civilization. W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay, “The Conservation of Races” (1896), theorizes race as a biological or natural concept, but rejects a racial hierarchy, assigning to the Negro a positive value and function among the world’s races: “We are that people whose subtle sense of song has given America its only American music, its only American fairy tales, its only touch of pathos and humor amid its mad money-getting plutocracy.”⁷² He would later dismiss “The Conservation of Races” as an instance of “youthful effusion.”⁷³ In Dusk of Dawn (1940), Du Bois revisited the question of race, abandoning the biological or scientific concept of race: “Perhaps it is wrong to speak of it at all as ‘a concept’ rather than as a group of contradictory forces, facts and tendencies.”⁷⁴ In this final definition, Du Bois theorized race as a social construct. In doing so, he prepared the ground for a subsequent generation of scholars — Kwame Anthony Appiah, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Patricia Williams — who would build upon Du Bois’s insight, and theorize race as a social construction or floating signifier. In Du Bois’s writing, we witness the evolution of race from a biological concept to a discursive concept. But unlike Toomer, Du Bois heartily embraced a Negro social and cultural identity, never using its constructed nature as an excuse to “transcend” it; rather to de-biologize or de-essentialize it.

Toomer observed that “it is even more difficult to determine the nature of a man; so most of us are even more content to have a label for him.”⁷⁵ In an era when the views of such white supremacists as Lothrop Stoddard and Earnest Cox were in the ascendancy and referenced even in such fictional works as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Toomer proclaimed that in “my body were many bloods, some dark blood, all blended in the fire of six or more generations. I was, then, either a new type of man or the very oldest. In any case I was inescapably myself…. As for myself, I would live my life as far as possible on the basis of what was true for me.” ⁷⁶ While Toomer’s metaphor of “bloods” recalls a biological conception of race, the direction of his thinking is toward a discursive concept of race. Toomer developed the following plan for its use in the protean, contested world of social relations: “To my real friends of both groups, I would, at the right time, voluntarily define my position. As for people at large, naturally I would go my way and say nothing unless the question was raised. If raised, I would meet it squarely, going into as much detail as seemed desirable for the occasion. Or again, if it was not the person’s business I would either tell him nothing or the first nonsense that came into my head.”⁷⁷ It would be left to him, not to others, to define and to determine his location in the social world, or so he imagined. Toomer would soon come to realize the limitations of his own power to shape the manner in which he would be perceived and defined by others, notwithstanding the appeal of his person and personality, and his great confidence in his ability to explain and to rationalize himself.

After graduating from Dunbar High School in January 1914, Toomer matriculated at six colleges and universities between 1914 and 1918, but failed to earn a degree. He attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the Massachusetts College of Agriculture to pursue his interests in scientific agriculture. No longer interested in becoming a farmer, he pursued his new passion for exercise and bodybuilding at the American College of Physical Training in Chicago in January 1916. Toomer remained in Chicago through the fall and enrolled in courses that introduced him to atheism and socialism at the University of Chicago. In the spring of 1917 he decided to travel to New York, and there enrolled in summer school at New York University and the City College of New York where, respectively, he took a course in sociology and history. “Opposed to war but attracted to soldiering,” wrote Kerman and Eldridge, Toomer volunteered for the army, but he was “classified as physically unfit ‘because of bad eyes and a hernia gotten in a basketball game.’”⁷⁸ As we reveal in “Jean Toomer’s Racial Self-Identifcation,” Toomer registered as a Negro.

In 1918, Toomer returned to the Midwest, where he held a series of odd jobs, including becoming a car salesman at a Ford dealership in Chicago. During this second period in Chicago, he wrote “Bona and Paul,” his first short story, in which he explored questions of passing and mixed-race identity, a powerful work that would eventually find its way into the second section of Cane. In February 1918, Toomer accepted an appointment in Milwaukee as a substitute physical education director, and continued his readings in literature, especially the works of George Bernard Shaw.⁷⁹

Returning briefly to Washington, D.C., Toomer set out again for New York where he worked as a clerk with the grocery firm Acker, Merrall, and Condit Company. While in New York, his reading expanded to include Ibsen, Santayana, and Goethe; he attended meetings of radicals and the literati at the Rand School, as well as lectures by Alfred Kreymborg, who, a decade later, would describe Toomer as “one of the finest artists among the dark race, if not the finest.”⁸⁰ In the spring of 1919, he left Manhattan to vacation in the resort town of Ellenville, New York. Indigent though somewhat rested, he then returned to Washington in the fall, where he was confronted by the condemnations of his grandfather who was far from pleased with his grandson’s vagabond existence.

College photograph of Jean Toomer, bare-chested with arms folded, 1916. Jean Toomer Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke and Rare Book Manuscript Library.

Group portrait with Toomer at center (four men in front blindfolded), from the Lunkentus Class of 1917 yearbook (American College of Physical Education). Jean Toomer Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke and Rare Book Manuscript Library.

Unable to endure any longer the aging but vigorous Governor’s harangues on personal responsibility, in December 1919, his twenty-fifth birthday only days away, Toomer was on the road again. With only ten dollars to his name, he walked from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. Winter had arrived, and as Toomer recalled, it was “cold as the mischief.”⁸¹ After an overnight stay in Baltimore, he then walked to Wilmington, Delaware, and from there hitchhiked to Rahway, New Jersey, where he worked for a time as a fitter in the New Jersey shipyards for $22 per week.⁸²This practical experience with the working class disabused him of his romantic notions about socialism. Toomer’s destination was New York, and when he arrived there he once again took a job at Acker, Merrall and Condit. As he made his way from Washington to New York on Walt Whitman’s open road, as it were, Toomer was alone; his only company was the ambitious, yet unrealized desire to become a writer.

In 1920, Pinchback sold the Washington home that Nathan Toomer had purchased as a wedding present for Nina Pinchback. In spite of his disappointment with his grandson, Pinchback sent Toomer $600, the small profit derived from the sale of the rental property after the payment of the mortgage and taxes. With this windfall, Toomer decided to remain in New York to continue what turned out to be the beginning of his apprenticeship as a writer: “I decided that I was at one of the turning points of my life, and that I needed all my time, and that the money would be well spent. I quit Acker Merrall. I devoted myself to music and literature.”⁸³And then, through yet another unexpected turn of events, he once again gained entrée into the rather closed world of New York’s literati. In August 1920 he was invited by Helena DeKay, whose lectures on Romain Rolland and Jean-Christophe he had attended at the Rand School, to a party hosted by Lola Ridge, editor of the new literary magazine Broom. “This was my first literary party,” according to Toomer.⁸⁴ Actually, it would be more accurate for Toomer to claim that Ridge’s soirée was his first “literary party” in New York, for he had attended the literary salons hosted by the black poet Georgia Douglas Johnson in Washington, D.C., as early as 1919.⁸⁵ Known among the cognoscenti of the nation’s capital as Saturday Nighters, these gatherings attracted such luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance as Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, Sterling A. Brown, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Alain Locke.

Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth suggest that it was within the charmed circle of the Saturday Nighters that Toomer came to know Locke, with whom he had a cordial relationship in the years preceding the publication of Cane. In search of a community of writers in his native Washington he found, to a certain extent, such a community among those black writers and artists who attended the Saturday Nighters. According to Kerman and Eldridge, Toomer shared some of his early writing with Johnson.⁸⁶ “Toomer was almost certainly the only writer in America,” as Harris and Molesworth assert, with the possible exception of the Jamaican immigrant Claude McKay, who flowed easily between Harlem and socialist literary circles downtown, “who visited literary groups as diverse as Johnson’s Saturday Nighters and the Seven Arts circle around Lewis Mumford, Sherwood Anderson, and Waldo Frank.” ⁸⁷ They are also correct in asserting that Toomer never conceived of himself as a bridge between these two discrete literary communities, both of which were committed to the project of American modernism.⁸⁸ Rather, he took what was useful from each in his efforts to create a work that expressed his own particular artistic and philosophical vision. Keenly aware of what he regarded as the differences and limitations of both artistic communities, Toomer, however, felt a much greater degree of affinity for those writers and artists whom he came to know through Ridge, chief among them Waldo Frank.

Toomer’s attendance at Johnson’s Saturday Nighters provided him with some preparation for the unmixable mix of banter, bravado, earnestness, narcissism, and posturing he would encounter at Ridge’s “literary party” in Greenwich Village. In the main, he was not impressed by his first encounter with the literati of the Lost Generation which, on this particular occasion, was represented by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Witter Bynner, and Scofield Thayer, among others. Hungry to learn about this new world, Toomer felt “that there was far too much buzz about publishers, magazines, reviews, personalities; not enough talk of life and experience.”⁸⁹ However, one “man stood out…. He had a fine animated face and a pair of lively active eyes…. I didn’t know his name, but I marked him.”⁹⁰ The man in question was none other than Waldo Frank, the celebrated author of Our America, a meditation on race, ethnicity, and spirituality in American culture. A few days after the party, Toomer encountered Frank while walking through Central Park. Both men stopped and introduced themselves, and thus began a friendship in letters that for Toomer would be instrumental in the publication of Cane. At this stage in his apprenticeship as a writer, Toomer had written the poem “The First Americans,” the forerunner of his epic, “The Blue Meridian,” and the short stories “Withered Skin of Berries” and “Bona and Paul.” He shared his work with Frank, and was heartened by the encouragement he received from the older, established writer.

Shortly after this propitious meeting with Frank, Toomer returned to Washington, having spent his inheritance of $600. This was the end of the summer of 1920. Needless to say, Pinchback raged against Toomer’s return. “Grandfather put up a fight but I beat him,” Toomer remembers rather defiantly.⁹¹ Possessing a sense of purpose and direction for the first time in five years, Toomer wrote, “I was wholly convinced that I had found my true direction in life, and no one was going to stop me. On the contrary, everyone, including grandfather, was going to help me…. I had matured considerably. And, I was filled with a purpose that was to keep me working for the next three years. But what terrible years they were!”⁹²

And why would Toomer characterize the three years preceding the publication of Cane as “terrible”? The answer lies in part in the fact that during this period of his apprenticeship he lived in greatly reduced circumstances with his aging grandparents. “I was in the house with two old people whom,” as Toomer wrote in his autobiography, “despite the continual struggle with grandfather — he never gave up completely; he was a game fighting cock to the end — I loved. And they were dying. No, they weren’t dying. Grandfather gradually declined — a tragic sight — and, one day he broke…. I had to take over whatever of his affairs needed attention. And I ran the house, even cooking meals and sweeping and cleaning. In a way, it was a good thing for them that I had returned.”⁹³ Of his grandmother, Nina Emily Hethorn Pinchback, Toomer remembered her as strong, vivid, and humorous even as she declined amid circumstances of near poverty: “Yet she bore up. Not a whimper from her. She was glad to have me there…She would say every now and again that she only lived for me. But this was the miracle — as her body failed her, her spirit began taking on a more and more vivid life. Her mind became sharper — and also her tongue. She showed a vein of humor and satire that was the delight and amazement of all who came in.” ⁹⁴

This was not the first time in his life when Toomer had responsibility for the care of his grandmother. In 1909 when Pinchback held an appointment in New York at the Department of Internal Revenue, Toomer and his grandmother lived with his Uncle Walter and his family. Owing to Pinchback’s absence and the indifference of his uncle and wife, his grandmother, as he wrote, “becomes my responsibility. I look after her, and often, instead of going out at nights to play…I have to stay indoors and keep her company.”⁹⁵ While he admired and loved his grandfather, Toomer also loved his grandmother. He understood her function and value in the household through its rise and decline: “She stood without flinching at Pinchback’s side all through his stormy and dangerous political career. She saw the rise of the family and, outliving her husband and all but one of her children, she endured its rather tragic fall.” Toomer also acknowledged the important fact of his grandmother’s support, when everyone else, in particular his grandfather, had dismissed him as a ne’er-do-well: “She was the one person in my home who sustained her faith in me after I turned black sheep, who supported me through thick and thin….”⁹⁶ Nina Emily Hethorn Pinchback lived to see the publication of Cane, which bears the dedication: “To my grandmother…” She died five years later.

Along with accepting the multiplying responsibilities of caring for his aging grandparents, Toomer also became the caretaker of his beloved Uncle Bismarck: “Bismarck got very sick. I took over the running of his house also, and each day I went over and massaged him. He was over a month recovering. This took it out of me.” ⁹⁷ Plainly, the responsibility of caring for aging relatives sapped Toomer’s energy and strength, yet it also, paradoxically, introduced a certain discipline and structure that advanced his goal of becoming a writer. “My days were divided between attention to the house and my grandparents,” as Toomer wrote of this period, “and my own work. At all possible times I was either writing or reading.”⁹⁸

Toomer inevitably came face to face with his own limitations and deficiencies as a writer. There was the dream, and there was the reality. To realize the potentialities of the one clear affirmation of his life at this juncture, he had to confront and overcome the division between his own aspirations and his abilities: “But what difficulties I had! I had in me so much experience so twisted up that not a thing would come out until by sheer force I had dragged it forth. Only now and again did I experience spontaneous writing. Most of it was will and sweat. And nothing satisfied me…. I wrote and wrote and put each thing aside, regarding it as simply one of the exercises of my apprenticeship. Often I would be depressed and almost despaired over the written thing.” ⁹⁹ These periods of despair were balanced by successes, few and far between though they were at the time. And these successes bolstered his confidence and renewed his faith in his capacity to become a writer: “But, on the other hand, I became more and more convinced that I had the real stuff in me. And slowly but surely I began getting the ‘feeling’ of my medium, a sense of form, of words, of sentences, rhythms, cadences, and rhythmic patterns. And then, after several years work, suddenly, it was as if a door opened and I knew without doubt that I was inside, I knew literature. And what was my joy! But many things happened before that time came!”¹⁰⁰

Before he found his way “inside” literature, Toomer would have to endure another period when the accumulating responsibilities of being the sole caretaker of his aging grandparents would again drain him of his energy and focus. He had arrived at this state in the spring of 1922. “It was during this spring that I began feeling dangerously drained of energy,” Toomer wrote. “I had used so much in my own work. So much had been used on my grandparents and uncles. I seldom went out…. Sometimes for weeks my grandmother would be laid up in bed, and by now my grandfather was almost helpless. The apartment seemed to suck my very life.”¹⁰¹ As the summer approached, Toomer’s situation became even more desperate: “I felt I would die or murder someone if I stayed in that house another day.”¹⁰² Almost out of thin air, he managed to piece together enough funds for a week at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where he had often traveled to vacation. He made arrangements for the care of his grandparents during his absence. The time at Harpers Ferry was restorative, but all too short: “I returned with a small store of force which was soon spent…,” remembered Toomer. “The situation was slowly but steadily getting worse…. It was as if life were a huge snake that had coiled about me — and now it had me at almost my last breath.” ¹⁰³

The much needed relief from this suffocating regimen would eventually come in the form of an invitation from Linton Stephens Ingraham, founder and principal of the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute located in Sparta, Georgia. Ingraham was eager to hire an acting principal while he traveled to Boston to raise funds for his school. Toomer regarded this opportunity as a “God-send.” He accepted Ingraham’s offer to serve as acting principal. Toomer again made arrangements for the care of his grandparents, and prepared for his fateful trip by train to Georgia. Girding himself for what he would encounter on “the southern road,” as his contemporary, Sterling A. Brown, put it, Toomer recalled that “I had always wanted to see the heart of the South. Here was my chance.” ¹⁰⁴ As acting principal of the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute located in Hancock County, Georgia, Toomer provided continuity at an institution with an important history and mission. Ingraham was the institute’s founder and principal. He was born a slave in Hancock County, Georgia, on August 24, 1855, the property of Judge Linton Stephens. He was taught to read and write by Alexander Stephens, the brother of Judge Stephens, and then matriculated at Atlanta University. He established the institute on October 10, 1910, on three acres of land on his former master’s plantation. The institute was located one mile and a half west of Sparta, approximately eighty miles southwest of Atlanta, Georgia, in the county contiguous to Putnam County, Georgia, the birthplace of the writers Flannery O’Connor and Alice Walker.

At the time of Toomer’s arrival in September 1921, the trustees of the institute had secured funding from the Julius Rosenwald Fund to erect a second building. By 1923 the institute was composed of two buildings perched on fifty-three acres with 210 students. A co-educational institution whose curriculum was a mix of industrial education and grade school instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, the institute prepared students for vocations in agriculture and industry. It served the African American community of Sparta, and the communities beyond it.¹⁰⁵ Toomer lived, like the teachers, in a residence provided by the institute. “As the [acting] principal, [he] was required to visit homes, businesses, and churches.” ¹⁰⁶

Toomer was acting principal at the Institute from September to November 1921. This seminal, three-month sojourn in the South provided him with the materials, inspiration, and much of the setting for what became the first and third sections of Cane. Prior to his first visit to the South, Toomer’s writing lacked a specific sense of place that could serve as the setting and foundation for his art. The landscape of Sparta, Georgia, with its history of slavery and an ancestral past that connected Toomer to his father, was precisely what the emerging writer needed at this vital juncture in his apprenticeship. Under the spell of an alien and yet somehow familiar landscape, Toomer eagerly embraced this new body of impressions and sensations and thoughts, immersing himself in a set of experiences that he would interpret with impressive originality, without being nostalgic in any way. He saw it as a world in transition, and a world of transition for himself. In Sparta, as we have noted, he heard for the first time, he claimed, the traditional Negro “folk-songs and spirituals.” Because he was baptized as a Roman Catholic and reared in an upper-middle-class home in Washington, it is feasible that Toomer could have remained ignorant of the secular and sacred traditions in African American music whose origins were in slavery and that reached their maturity in the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow Deep South.

To be sure, these were not traditions often or openly embraced by the black men and women of Toomer’s class or color background, even at the two all-black schools he attended in Washington. As the eponymous hero of his first play, Natalie Mann, written in 1922 following his stay in Georgia, would assert in almost self-righteous fashion: “What has become of the almost obligatory heritage of folk-songs? Jazz on the one hand, and on the other, a respectability which is never so vigorous as when it denounces and rejects the true art of the race’s past. They are ashamed of the past made permanent by the spirituals.”¹⁰⁷ Potentially, Toomer could have come to know the traditions emerging from the “race’s past” in the person of Old Willis, a former slave who “did odd jobs” for the Pinchback family.¹⁰⁸ He writes that “I was very fond of [Old Willis].” But Toomer’s encounters with him apparently did not introduce him to the black cultural past that was now unfolding all around him in Sparta. Toomer discovered the slave and folk traditions of which Old Willis was doubtless a vessel as a young adult, precisely when he was struggling to find his voice as an artist, drawing upon these forms and traditions to illuminate his sense of his own identity and the historical experiences that had shaped that identity. As he went about his duties as acting principal in Sparta, he moved daily through a past that was also present, a past that helped him to understand the physical and cultural landscapes out of which he would shape the most original and seminal work of literature published in the entire Harlem Renaissance.

Like his contemporaries in the broad current of American modernism, Toomer was searching for — and ironically would discover in Sparta, Georgia, of all places — a “useable past,” to summon a phrase much in circulation at the time and attributed to the critic Van Wyck Brooks (a classmate of Alain Locke at Harvard), which would give shape and heft to his art, but also allow him further to define his racial identity. As he observed in a letter to Sherwood Anderson, whose novel Winesburg, Ohio left its imprint upon Cane: “My seed was planted in the cane — and cotton-fields, and in the souls of the black and white people in the small southern town. My seed was planted in myself down there.”¹⁰⁹ The image of the “seed” that Toomer uses to dramatic effect in his letter to Anderson would function as one of the unifying, fecund conceits in his poem “Song of the Son,” in which he celebrates the ancestral past and cultural landscape of Sparta, the fictional community of Sempter in Cane.

In the same letter to Anderson, who asked Toomer’s permission to write the introduction to Cane, Toomer elaborated upon the deep impact that the land, people, and music of Sparta had upon his sensibility and identity: “Here were cabins. Here Negroes and their singing. I had never heard the spirituals and work songs. They were like a part of me. At times, I identified with my whole sense so intensely that I lost my own identity.”^110.Or, perhaps, we might say that here Toomer found his identity, if not his racial or cultural identity, then most certainly his identity as a creative writer, as the first American modernist writer to represent the complex culture of race in America in such a richly resonant and intricate manner. And because of this, Toomer’s book stands as one of the truly great works of American modernism.

Toomer arrived in the South during a period of profound transformation. He witnessed firsthand the ebb and flow of the Great Migration. Beginning in the 1890s and then picking up the pace in 1915, African Americans were leaving rural communities like Sparta for the urban centers of the South, first, and then the North, in search of expanding industrial economic opportunities, and a less repressive racial climate. As they left the southern agrarian way of life for modernity in the cities, some also sought to distance themselves from their slave past and its cultural traditions, which they regarded with a mixture of contempt, shame, and obsolescence. Regarding the “folk-songs and spirituals,” Toomer lamented, “I learned that the Negroes of the town [Sparta] objected to them. They called them ‘shouting.’ They had victrolas and player-pianos. So, I realized with deep regret, that the spirituals, meeting ridicule, would be certain to die out. With Negroes also the trend was towards the small town and then towards the city — and industry and commerce and machines. The folk-spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so beautiful. Its death so tragic.”¹¹¹

The poignancy of the passing of an era and the folk culture that defined it is a central theme of Cane. The speaker of “Song of the Son” exquisitely expresses this fateful sense of timing: “O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree, / So scant of grass, so profligate of pines, / Now just before an epoch’s sun declines / Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee….”¹¹² In a subsequent line, the speaker explains why he has returned to the land of his ancestors: “To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone….” ¹¹³ This was Toomer’s own purpose, too, in writing Cane, to bear witness to the passing of an epoch: “And this was the feeling I put into Cane. Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end. And why no one has seen and felt that, why people have expected me to write a second and a third and a fourth book like Cane, is one of the queer misunderstandings of my life.”¹¹⁴ It is difficult to imagine that Toomer could be unaware that this urging that he write “a second and a third and a fourth book like Cane” stemmed both from that book’s majesty and power and from his repeated failure to create anything that remotely approached it in sophistication throughout the remainder of his life, as he fruitlessly sought to find a language to express what being “neither white nor black” actually meant, without the soul-base of region that the deep black South had provided him in Cane.

At the end of his appointment in Sparta, Toomer wrote that on “the train coming north I began to write the things that later appeared in that book [Cane].”¹¹⁵ As we have mentioned, he completed the first draft of “Kabnis,” the dramatic piece that composes the third section of Cane, in December 1921 in the last weeks of Pinchback’s life. Toomer then wrote “Fern,” which according to Kerman and Eldridge, would be published “almost without revision.”¹¹⁶ By April 1922 he had composed the parts of Cane in which Georgia is predominant. Having written so much, Toomer realized he had much more to write: “But I had not enough for a book. I had at most a hundred typed pages. These were about Georgia. It seemed that I had said all I had to say about it. So what, then? I’d fill out. The middle section of Cane was thus manufactured.”¹¹⁷

The middle section of Cane began with “Bona and Paul,” the story Toomer wrote in 1918 during his second stay in Chicago. He wrote many of the other stories and poems in this section throughout the summer of 1922. In July 1922, Toomer wrote to Waldo Frank and John McClure, editor of the New Orleans — based journal Double Dealer, to share with them his vision of the content and organization of Cane. Even at this early date, he imagined a book with a three-part structure. Toomer wrote that Part 1 would consist of all of the prose works in which Georgia is the setting; this first section he called “Cane Stalks and Choruses.” Part 2 would consist of his poems, and at the time was entitled “Leaves and Syrup Songs.” The third and final section would be prose works that now form the second section of Cane, and this section he entitled “Leaf Traceries in Washington.”¹¹⁸Toomer was eager to assemble the various parts of his book into a unified whole for, as he declared to Frank and McClure, the “concentrated volume will do a good deal more than isolated pieces possibly could.”¹¹⁹

Toomer’s outline constituted a change of strategy. In the spring of 1922, he had sought help with publication of his work from two black writers: Alain Locke, professor of philosophy at Howard, and Claude McKay, the Jamaican immigrant poet who would be cast by Locke as a rising star, along with Toomer, among the younger generation of writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Locke had enormous influence within the black cultural world, and McKay was the associate editor of the white, socialist periodical, the Liberator.¹²⁰ Toomer wrote to them seeking their assistance in publishing the stories and poems that would eventually be published in Cane. As a result, Toomer’s first and second appearances in print were in a black publication; with Locke’s aid, “Song of the Son” was published in April 1922, in Crisis, the national monthly magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, edited by Du Bois. This was followed by the publication of the poem “Banking Coal” in the June issue of Crisis.

The outcome of Toomer’s efforts to promote his work with McKay yielded slightly more in the way of results. McKay accepted “Carma,” “Reapers,” and “Becky” and published these in the September and October issues of the Liberator. Toomer enjoyed similar good fortune with other magazines. By the end of 1922, his growing list of publications included “Storm Ending,” “Calling Jesus,” and “Harvest Song” in Double Dealer; “Face,” “Portrait in Georgia,” and “Conversion” in Modern Review; and “Seventh Street” in Broom. In addition to appealing to Locke for guidance in publishing his writings, Toomer also solicited his assistance in securing a patron to support him as he continued to write Cane. Although a patron never materialized, Locke, who functioned as the midwife to so many young black writers, did exert himself on Toomer’s behalf.¹²¹

As his poems and short stories began to appear, Toomer traveled with Frank back to the South, this time to Spartanburg, South Carolina. Toomer suggested the weeklong visit to Frank, in the fall of 1922, as a means of helping him to solidify his vision of the black world so central to Holiday, his novel-in-progress. Traveling as “blood brothers,” the trip strengthened the friendship between the two writers as well as their shared belief that out of the materials of the black folk experience they were creating a new art that would transform American literature.¹²² At a crucial point in their developing friendship, Toomer expressed just this view to Frank: “I cannot think of myself as being separated from you in the dual task of creating an American literature, and of developing a public, however large or small, capable of responding to our creations. Those who read and know me, should read and know you.”¹²³

When Toomer returned from Spartanburg, he worked for two weeks as an assistant to the manager of Washington’s all-black Howard Theater. Out of this experience he wrote “Theater” and “Box Seat,”¹²⁴ and these beautifully written but nevertheless searching critiques of black middle-class Washington would appear in the middle section of Cane. Toomer sent these stories to Frank for his comments. Encouraged by his response, he sent Frank the complete manuscript of Cane in December 1922. He enclosed the now famous, widely quoted letter that reveals the latent design and theme of Cane: “My brother! CANE is on its way to you! For two weeks I have worked steadily at it. The book is done. From three angles, CANE’s design is a circle. Aesthetically, from simple forms to complex ones, and back to simple forms. Regionally, from the South up into the North, and back into the South again. Or, from the North down into the South, and then a return North. From the point of view of the spiritual entity behind the work, the curve really starts with Bona and Paul (awakening), plunges into Kabnis, emerges in Karintha etc. swings upward into Theatre and Boxseat, and ends (pauses) in Harvest Song. Whew!”¹²⁵ Elated and expectant that the book he had carried so long in his head would soon be in the world because of the support of his best friend, Toomer provided Frank with clues as to the structure of a work that would generate debates among scholars about its formal identity for decades: “You will understand the inscriptions, brother mine: the book to grandma; Kabnis, the spirit and the soil, to you…. Between each of the three sections, a curve. These, to vaguely indicate the design. I’m wide open to you for criticism and suggestion. Just these few lines now…. love Jean.”¹²⁶

At the height of their friendship and doubtless appreciative of Toomer’s dedication of “Kabnis” to him, Frank shepherded the manuscript to Horace Liveright, the co-founder of Boni and Liveright Publishers along with Albert Boni. On January 2, 1923, Frank sent Toomer a telegram informing him that Liveright had accepted Cane for publication. With Liveright as his publisher, Toomer would make his literary debut in splendid modernist company: just a year before, Liveright had published T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In years to come, they would publish the first books of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Hart Crane, Dorothy Parker, and other bright stars in the firmament of American modernism.

In the months following Frank’s excellent news, Toomer made preparations for his departure from Washington to New York: “I saw that it was very important for me to be in New York.” He would never again live in his native Washington. For the last time, Toomer dutifully made arrangements for the care of his beloved grandmother, who spent her last years with her son Walter and his family. He then boarded a train to New York, and “thus ended the three-year period of death and birth in Washington.” ¹²⁷ Having left New York in the summer of 1920 as an aspiring, unpublished writer, Toomer returned to the nation’s literary capital in the summer of 1923 as a published, respected, and admired author through the sheer force of “will and sweat,” and through the support of McKay and especially Locke, though chiefly through the influence, counsel, and friendship of Frank.

In his recollection of this crucial period in his development as an artist, Toomer conveyed the excitement of his encounters with the major figures of white American modernism that summer: “In New York, I stepped into the literary world. Frank, Gorham Munson, Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, Matthew Josephson, Mal-com Cowley, Paul Rosenfield, Van Wyck Brooks, Robert Littell— Broom, the Dial, the New Republic and many more. I lived on Gay Street and entered into the swing of it. It was an extraordinary summer…. I met and talked with Alfred Stieglitz and saw his photographs. I was invited here and there.”¹²⁸ In this recollection, Toomer is describing his pleasure at being introduced into a world populated by the key writers of the Lost Generation and the small, but influential magazines through which they shaped the mainstream of American modernism.

The sometimes overlapping, sometimes separate, other world of writers who contributed to the shape and direction of Afro-American modernism included most influentially Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Sterling A. Brown, among two dozen others, coalescing around the slight, though formidable figure of Locke in his pied-à-terre in Harlem. But Toomer is largely silent about his encounters with them. These writers published in two magazines primarily: Opportunity, the monthly magazine of the Urban League, edited by the enterprising sociologist, Charles S. Johnson, who along with Locke, was one of the two midwives of the Harlem Renaissance; and in Du Bois’s Crisis. Locke’s The New Negro anthology, as we have seen, gave the nascent movement a form and a manifesto. A few other periodicals, such as Fire, the short-lived magazine founded by Hughes, Hurston, and Wallace Thurman, also played a role in shaping the course of the Renaissance, but none had the canonical presence of Crisis and Opportunity.

Perhaps a sign of Toomer’s evolving thoughts about how he would identify himself racially, when he arrived in New York in that heady summer of 1923, is the fact that he did not seek lodging in Harlem but rather in Greenwich Village, sharing an apartment on Grove Street with Gorham Munson after the departure of his roommate Hart Crane. Munson’s hospitality prepared the ground for a lifelong friendship with Toomer. Sometime later, he moved to the black section of the Village, renting a “small row-house apartment on Gay Street…distinctive then as being a predominantly black settlement in an otherwise white part of town.” According to his biographers, “Toomer spent his days in the backyard reading or in the apartment writing. During that summer he was trying to establish himself as a free-lance writer for various New York journals and little magazines.”¹²⁹ At the end of that summer, Toomer’s long-cherished dream of publishing a book—“I wanted a published book as I wanted nothing else”—became a reality. Liveright brought out Cane in September 1923.¹³⁰ Much to Toomer’s delight, the reviews were uniformly positive. High praise came from the members of the two literary worlds who regarded him as a member. Comparing Toomer’s debut work with the Frank’s fiction, Robert Littell offered this assessment of Cane in the New Republic: “Toomer’s view is unfamiliar and bafflingly subterranean, the vision of a poet far more than the account of things seen by a novelist — lyric, symbolic, oblique, seldom actual.” ¹³¹ Allen Tate, a member of the Fugitive Poets, also praised Cane in the pages of Nashville’s Tennessean. Countee Cullen sent Toomer a congratulatory note in which he described Cane as a “classical portrayal of things as they are.”¹³² A month after the publication of Cane, the critic Edward O’Brien wrote from England requesting permission to reprint “Blood-Burning Moon” in the anthology The Best Short Stories of 1923.¹³³Du Bois and Locke expressed their admiration for Toomer’s achievement in an essay entitled “The Younger Literary Movement” in 1924 in Crisis. The influential African American critic William Stanley Braithwaite offered high praise of Cane in the pages of The New Negro: “Cane is a book of gold and bronze, of dusk and fame, of ecstasy and pain, and Jean Toomer is a bright morning star of a new day of the race in literature.” ¹³⁴ Two years later in the summer of 1927, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston paid homage to Toomer’s artistic achievement by visiting Sparta, the inspiration for Cane, on their return North from a road trip through the South.¹³⁵

Reflecting upon Cane’s reception and impact almost forty years after its publication, Arna Bontemps, a member of the younger generation of writers of the Harlem Renaissance, said this of Toomer’s shaping influence on the forms his black contemporaries and literary heirs would craft: “Cane’s influence was by no means limited to the joyous band that included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Eric Walrond, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Rudolph Fisher and their contemporaries of the Twenties. Subsequent writing by Negroes in the United States, as well as in the West Indies and Africa, has continued to reflect its mood and often its method and, one feels, it has also influenced the writing about Negroes by others. Certainly, no earlier volume of poetry or fiction or both had come close to expressing the ethos of the Negro in the Southern setting as Cane did.”¹³⁶ While acknowledging his broad influence, Darwin T. Turner maintained that Toomer’s signal contribution to American letters was to reverse years of stereotypical portrayals of rural, southern black language and life: “No matter how he influenced others, it cannot be denied that Jean Toomer was the first writer of the twenties to delineate southern black peasant life perceptively.”¹³⁷

Toomer’s deft portrayal of southern black peasantry, his sensitive portrayal of black women, his power as a lyric poet, the manner in which he combined philosophy with fiction, and his exploration of the relationship between region and race directly influenced the shape of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and through her, the theme of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. What’s more, Cane has profoundly influenced both the fictions and the poetry of key African American writers who came of age since its republication in the late 1960s, including Alice Walker, Michael S. Harper, Rita Dove, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, Elizabeth Alexander, and Natasha Trethewey. Though Ernest J. Gaines discovered Cane after he had developed his particular style of writing, he regards Toomer as a fellow artist with whom he shares a commitment to portray realistically the experiences of southern black farmers. Despite his desire to fee it, Toomer’s literary legacy survives primarily because of Cane’s canonization in the black literary tradition.

While Cane was clearly an artistic success, sales were disappointing. It sold only one thousand copies, but it was printed in a second edition. As Toomer himself remarked: “The reviews were splendid. It didn’t sell well, but it made its literary mark — that was all I asked.”¹³⁸ The strength of the reviews was doubtless a factor in Liveright’s decision to reissue the second, smaller edition in 1927. While scholars would continue to praise Cane, it would remain out of print until the appearance of the third edition in 1967, followed by editions in 1969 and 1975. Doubtless, the renewed interest in the Harlem Renaissance by the writers of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s, the institutionalization of the field of African American Studies in 1969, and the dramatic growth of African American literary studies through the 1980s led to the first Norton Critical Edition in 1988, splendidly edited by Darwin T. Turner.

Though Cane had “made its literary mark,” Toomer’s relationship to the book he so much desired to be published began to shift as early as the fall of 1923. This shift, which would eventually result in his rejection of the book he once regarded as the “passport” that “would lead [him] from the cramped conditions of Washington which [he] had outgrown, into the world of writers and literature,” would be catalyzed by his friend Waldo Frank and his publisher, George Liveright,¹³⁹ involving the launch of Cane itself and the efforts by Liveright to promote it. Frank had written, by all accounts, a beautiful foreword to Cane. He lavished praise upon his friend and protégé’s debut book: “A poet has arisen among our American youth who has known how to turn the essences and materials of his Southland into the essences and materials of literature.” ¹⁴⁰ Quite perceptively, the ever-supportive Frank described Cane as “an aesthetic equivalent of the land.” So far, so good.

However, the language that disturbed Toomer, was this: “A poet has arisen in that land who writes, not as a Southerner, not as a rebel against Southerners, not as a Negro, not apologist or priest or critic: who writes as a poet.” ¹⁴¹ Moreover Frank’s references to Toomer as “the gifted Negro” and “an American Negro” inadvertently only made matters worse so far as Toomer was concerned, undermining his desire to position himself publicly as a writer “neither white nor black.” Frank’s straightforward description of Toomer as a Negro, notwithstanding Toomer’s belabored efforts to explain his racial sense of himself to his friend privately, felt first like disappointment, and then betrayal: “One day in the mail his [Frank’s] preface [sic] to my book came. I read it and had as many mixed feelings as I have ever had. On the one hand, it was a tribute and a send-of as only Waldo Frank could have written it, and my gratitude for his having gotten the book accepted rose to the surface and increased my gratitude for the present piece of work in so far as it affirmed me as a literary artist of great promise. On the other hand, in so far as the racial thing went, it was evasive, or, in any case, indefinite.” ¹⁴²

For reasons that are not clear to us, Toomer obsessed and fretted about Frank’s references to his race in the foreword, as if Frank had either invented his black ancestry or publicly unmasked him as a Negro writer, leading him inevitably to question Frank’s motives: “Well, I asked myself, why should the reader know? Why should any such thing be incorporated in a foreword to this book? Why should Waldo Frank or any other be my spokesman in this matter? All of this was true enough, and I was more or less reconciled to let the preface [sic] stand as it was, inasmuch as it was so splendid that I could not take issue with it on this, after all, minor point, inasmuch as my need to have the book published was so great, but my suspicions as to Waldo Frank’s lack of understanding of, or failure to accept, my actuality became active again.”¹⁴³Toomer would also claim that he learned from mutual friends that it was Frank who had constructed a portrait of him as a Negro in the literary circles of New York, a portrait that, he felt, misrepresented the “actuality” of his race, or his racelessness. Toomer, no doubt unfairly given his extensive contacts with other black writers in Washington and New York and his grandfather’s historical status as the highest ranking black elected official in the whole of Reconstruction, claimed to believe that it was “through Frank’s agency that an erroneous picture of me was put in the minds of certain people in New York before my book came out. Thus was started a misunderstanding in the very world, namely the literary art world, in which I expected to be really understood. I knew none of this at the time….”¹⁴⁴ While Kerman and Eldridge write that Toomer and Margaret Naumburg, Frank’s wife, “were entranced with each other from the first time they met,” the unhappy poet of Cane may have ended his friendship with Frank by seeking his revenge, in part, by seducing his mentor’s wife.¹⁴⁵

While Toomer was still reeling from Frank’s “betrayal,” Liveright requested that Toomer capitalize upon his African American ancestry in the publicity for Cane, and this, as it turned out, would further complicate his relationship to his publisher and his first book. It is clear that Toomer wanted to write about the Negro, but not be regarded as a Negro. In fact, it is also clear that Toomer wanted to break out of the race itself through art, transcending the Negro world in a manner, say, that never would have occurred to Irish writers such as William Butler Yeats or James Joyce. Toomer objected to the oversimplification of what he seems, at times, genuinely to have believed was a truly complex, new racial identity, one too subtle, hybrid, or nuanced to be classified by those gross signifiers “black” and “white,” especially to be exploited for the commercial purpose of selling the very book that he hoped would be his transport out of blackness. Accordingly, he refused to cooperate with Liveright, notwithstanding the risk that his refusal might jeopardize his book’s publication. Toomer defiantly declared his position on race and marketing in a well-known letter to Liveright, dated September 23, 1923: “First, I want to make a general statement from which detailed statements will follow. My racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine…. As a unit in the social milieu, I expect and demand acceptance of myself on their basis. I do not expect to be told what I should consider myself to be.”¹⁴⁶ But Toomer did not stop there: “As a Boni and Liveright author, I make the distinction between my fundamental position, and the position which your publicity department may wish to establish for me in order that Cane reach as large a public as possible. In this connection I have told you…to make use of whatever racial factors you wish. Feature Negro if you wish, but do not expect me to feature it in advertisements for you. I have sufficiently featured Negro in Cane.”¹⁴⁷ Toomer’s dispute with Liveright over his book’s marketing, following close upon his reaction to Frank’s foreword, only added insult to injury, further alienating him from Cane.

It should not surprise us, then, that Alain Locke’s decision to reprint excerpts from Cane in The New Negro without Toomer’s permission just about drove Toomer to distraction: “But when Locke’s book, The New Negro, came out, there was the [Winold] Reiss portrait, and there was a story from Cane[Locke reprinted the stories “Carma” and “Fern,” as well as the poems “Georgia Dusk” and “Song of the Son”], and there in the introduction, were words about me which have caused as much or more misunderstanding than Waldo Frank’s.”¹⁴⁸ Toomer felt betrayed by the two major figures at the center of the literary worlds that claimed him, and by both he felt completely misunderstood. But between the two, Toomer reserved his greater scorn for Locke: “However, there was and is, among others, this great difference between Frank and Locke. Frank helped me at a time when I most needed help. I will never forget it. Locke tricked and misused me.”¹⁴⁹ Toomer seriously considered contesting Locke’s representation of him as a black writer, ultimately deciding against doing so because he was convinced that he probably could never correct the record, and fearing that his efforts at any sort of clarification would only contribute to the confusion. So Jean Toomer — despite his vehement objections — came to be known as a black writer through Cane, the book that ironically brought him the fame and acceptance in the literary world he had been seeking for so long.

Toomer’s decision, just a few months after Cane’ s publication, to become a student of Georges I. Gurdjief, the Russian mystic and psychologist, and originator of the Gurdjief system or method, also contributed to his estrangement from the book. Throughout much of his adult life, Toomer had been in search of what he called an “intelligible scheme, a sort of whole into which everything ft,” and toward the end of 1923 he believed he had at last found this grand and unifying pattern in Gurdjief’s teachings. Toomer’s introduction to Gurdjief’s philosphy came through P. D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum, which he read in December 1923. Ouspensky’s writings were the object of some fascination among the members of his literary community in Greenwich Village, particularly to Hart Crane, Gorham Munson, and Waldo Frank. After reading Ouspensky, Toomer acquired a pamphlet describing the history and mission of Gurdjief’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France. “In it I found expressed,” he wrote, “more completely and with more authority than with anything possible from me, just the conditions of man which I myself realized. Moreover, a method, a means of doing something about it was promised. It was no wonder that I went heart and soul into the Gurdjief work.” ¹⁵⁰

It should be emphasized that in Cane we find ample evidence of an orientation toward spiritual and philosophical concerns that would assume a larger, more marked significance in Toomer’s later writings. These concerns help to explain why he went “heart and soul into the Gurdjief work.” Even in his 1923 letter to Frank, Toomer had written of what he called the “spiritual entity behind the work.” A few years before his introduction to Gurdjief’s theories, Toomer, an autodidact who early on saw himself as a philosopher-poet, found as his great theme modernity’s attendant fragmentation and alienation. Cane is his most successful treatment of this theme, as it juxtaposes fragmentation with intense spirituality. Kerman and Eldridge describe the “spiritual entity” in the writing and in the writer thusly: “While others may have read Cane to see how a man could ft his human view into his blackness, Jean was trying to ft the blackness that was a part of him into a more comprehensive human view. Nor was he trying to ‘pass’ in a racial sense; rather, he was passing from preoccupations with external, visible reality to concentration on internal, invisible reality.”¹⁵¹ Perhaps. But Toomer did find a most original and compelling way to render the relation among fragmentation, alienation, and spirituality in the tripartite, lyrical form of Cane.

In fact, the grand achievement of Toomer is this: Cane is, perhaps, the first work of fiction by a black writer to take the historical experiences and social conditions of the Negro, and make them the metaphor for the human condition, in this case, the metaphor for modernity itself. Du Bois had, famously and brilliantly, redefined the concept of “double consciousness” as a metaphor for the Negro’s duality, a duality created by racial segregation. For Du Bois, double consciousness was a malady, a malady that could be cured only by the end of segregation. For Toomer, however, fragmentation, or duality, is the very condition of modernity. It cannot be “cured,” any more than the gap between the conscious mind and the unconscious can be obliterated. Cane is a book about nothing if not fragmentation; it is a book about dualities, unreconciled dualities, and this theme is repeated in each of its sections, whether in the South or the North, whether in the country or the city, whether in the book’s black characters or its white characters. Everybody and everything is hopelessly, inescapably fragmented. And nowhere is this better expressed than in the “Kabnis” section of Cane, in this exchange between Lewis and Kabnis, each other’s alter egos, through Lewis’s list of binaries:

Kabnis:…My ancestors were Southern blue-bloods.

Lewis: And black.

Kabnis: Aint much difference between blue and black.

Lewis: Enough to draw a denial from you. Cant hold them, can you? Master; slave. Soil; and the overarching heavens. Dusk; dawn. They fight and bastardize you. The sun tint of your cheeks, fame of the great season’s multi-colored leaves, tarnished, burned. Split, shredded; easily burned. No use…

The use of binary oppositions has a long history in African American literature, going back at least to Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). Du Bois transformed these in The Souls of Black Folk into the duality of the Negro citizen, a necessary and problematic by-product of anti-black racism and segregation. Toomer, however, takes Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, and boldly declares that this fragmentation is, ultimately, the sign of the Negro’s modernity, first, and that the Negro, therefore, is America’s harbinger of and metaphor for modernity itself. It is a stunningly brilliant claim, this rendering by Toomer of the American Negro as the First Modern Person. There is no end to the manifestations of fragmentation in Cane and no false gestures to the unity of opposites at the text’s end. No, in Cane, fragmentation is here to stay, for such is the stuff of modern life. When Kabnis ascends the stairs from his encounter with Father John in the basement at the end of the text, he carries a bucket of dead coals, undermining what would be the false nod to hope through reconciliation possibly suggested by the text’s image of a rising sun. Zora Neale Hurston revises this very scene at the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God, having depicted her protagonist’s coming to voice not as the result of reconciling binaries, but of developing the capacity to negotiate back and forth between them, acutely mindful of the fragmentation that Toomer defined as the necessary precondition for finding one’s identity, an identity always split, or doubled, or divided. In Cane, Jean Toomer became a lyrical prophet of modernism. And then, abruptly, he decided to pursue other passages.

In January 1924, Toomer marked his passing from “external, visible reality” to “internal, invisible reality” by attending lectures by Gurdjief and demonstrations of his method at Manhattan’s Leslie Hall and the Neighborhood Playhouse. He writes about how deeply moved he was by his first encounter with Gurdjief’s teachings. Gurdjief claimed that human beings are mechanical beings, and that they lack unity, and thus true consciousness. In the Gurdjief system there are four levels of consciousness: the sleeping state, waking consciousness, self-consciousness, and objective or cosmic consciousness. Advanced levels of consciousness can only be attained through the practice of such exercises as self-remembering or self-observation as well as non-identification. Practiced in one’s daily life, these exercises possessed the potential to liberate one from mechanical modes of thought and behavior, and to move one toward the attainment of higher levels of consciousness.

Toomer, to say the least, was captivated by the promise of Gurdjief’s teachings. By the summer of 1924 he had left New York to study at Gurdjief’s institute in France. Put another way, in less than a year after the publication of Cane and when the Harlem Renaissance and other expressions of high cultural modernism were approaching their apex, Toomer had passed into a vastly different cultural orbit. When he returned to New York in early 1925, he set about in almost priestly fashion to promote the Gurdjief method through public lectures. It was as a Gurdjief lecturer that Hughes and Hurston first met Toomer in Harlem in 1925.

Neither as a writer nor as a lecturer did Toomer earn an income substantial enough to support himself. Like his father Nathan Toomer, he was fortunate that he married well. In 1931, Toomer married the writer Margery Latimer, who died in 1932 after giving birth to their daughter, Margery Toomer. Two years later, Toomer married Marjorie Content, the daughter of a wealthy stockbroker, and the former wife of Harold Loeb, the founder of the magazine Broom. Marjorie Content and Toomer came close to meeting one another in 1923 at her East Ninth Street townhouse, in the basement of which were the offices of Broom. Lola Ridge attempted to introduce Content to Toomer, whose work she admired, but she shyly demurred. Toomer married her in Taos, New Mexico, on September 1, 1934, with his former lover Georgia O’Keefe in attendance as witness. He would be her fourth and last husband.

Prior to his marriage to Content, however, Toomer had developed a reputation as the inamorato of two of the women who played central roles in the cultural world of American modernism. Its center of gravity shifted between Seven Arts, presided over to a very large degree by Waldo Frank, and the Photo-Secession Group, perhaps an even more exalted stratum of the arts, whose headquarters was Manhattan’s 291 Gallery, of which the photographer Alfred Stieglitz was the imperious head. Shortly after the publication of Cane in the fall of 1923, Toomer had an affair with Margaret Naumburg, an educator who also happened to be Waldo Frank’s wife, which not surprisingly led to the dissolution of their friendship.¹⁵² Sometime later in 1933, Toomer also had an affair with the artist Georgia O’Keefe during one of his visits to The Hill, Stieglitz and O’Keefe’s retreat on Lake George, New York.¹⁵³ Toomer was extraordinarily handsome and beguiling, and no doubt cut a striking figure, often finding himself one of the very few swarthy men in the inner sanctums of white American modernism.

As a result of his marriage to Marjorie Content, Toomer could continue with his work as a Gurdjief lecturer without fear of impoverishment. He would lecture on the Gurdjief method most intensely for the next two decades, not only in New York but in Chicago; Portage, Wisconsin; Taos, New Mexico; and Doylestown, Pennsylvania, his final home. Toomer continued to write novels, short stories, plays, aphorisms, and poems, but most of these bear the unmistakable imprint of Gurdjief’s philosophy and teachings, stimuli not nearly as fecund as the rural Georgian landscape. Except for autobiographical excerpts edited by Darwin T. Turner, including the poem “The Blue Meridian,” and Essentials, edited by Rudolph P. Byrd, a collection of aphorisms, Toomer’s post-Cane writings remain largely unpublished. Lacking Cane’s lyrical originality, Toomer’s philosophical and psychological writings often read like sophomoric, prosaic, bloodless translations of Gurdjief’s philosophy and method.

As Toomer passed into Gurdjief’s world, he passed into literary obscurity. While his search for enlightenment or the “intelligible scheme” took him to India, through Jungian analysis, and to his conversion to the Society of Friends, Toomer’s commitment to Gurdjief, while fluctuating in its intensity, nevertheless remained the organizing principle of his life. He recommitted himself to this work in 1953, and remained a disciple until he passed away on March 30, 1967—the year in which the third edition of Cane was published.

Jean Toomer’s Racial Self-Identifcation:

A Note on the Newly Found Documents

Of course, we are still confronted with the vital question that has arisen in various ways throughout this introduction: Was Jean Toomer a Negro who passed for white?

Thanks to pioneering research conducted at the editors’ request by the genealogist Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, we can now understand more fully than ever before Jean Toomer’s conflicted thinking about his racial identification, as he expressed them in public documents, including the federal census, two draft registrations, and on his marriage license to Margery Latimer. In addition, we also now know how Toomer’s grandfather and grandmother, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback and Nina Emily Hethorn, his mother, Nina Pinchback, and his father, Nathan Toomer, are all identified in federal census records.

In every census taken between 1850 and 1920, P. B. S. Pinchback and Nina Emily Hethorn are identified either as black or as mulattos. Between 1870 and her death in 1909, Nina Pinchback is identified as a mulatto or black. Likewise, Nathan Toomer is identified between 1870 and 1900 as either mulatto or black. (Nathan’s previous wife, Amanda America Dixon, is also identifed as a mulatto in the 1870 and 1880 censuses and as black on her marriage license with Nathan. Amanda’s mother, Julia Frances Lewis Dixon, is also identified in the censuses taken between 1870 and 1910 as a mulatto or black.) In other words, Jean Toomer’s mother, father, grandfather, and grandmother all self-identified as Negroes.

In the 1900 federal census, Eugene Toomer is listed as black. In the 1910 federal census he is listed as mulatto. In June 1917, Eugene Pinchback Toomer registered for the draft in Washington, D.C. He is recorded to be an unemployed student, single, as having an unspecified disability, and as being a “Negro.” According to Kernan and Eldridge, the “unspecified disability” was actually “bad eyes and a hernia gotten in a basketball game.”¹⁵⁴

The 1920 United States Federal Census shows Toomer boarding with other lodgers in the home of an Italian couple on East Ninth Street in Manhattan. He is assigned New York as a birthplace, suggesting that someone else responded on his behalf, in his absence. His race is listed as “white.”

In the 1930 United States Federal Census, Toomer is listed as a resident, with many others, at 11 Fifth Avenue, in Manhattan. Because of the accuracy of the other data contained in this document — including his birthplace, his parents’ states of birth, and his occupation as a freelance writer — it is likely that he furnished these details himself. His race is listed as white.

A year later Toomer married “Marjery” or Margery Latimer on October 30, 1931, in Portage, Wisconsin. Both the bride and the groom are identified as “white” on the marriage license. According to Kerman and Eldridge, Margery Latimer was aware of what she terms “the racial thing,” that is, that Toomer was black.¹⁵⁵Though this is true and though she shared Toomer’s vision of a new race in America, she was nevertheless unprepared for headlines such as this one published in the national press regarding her marriage to Toomer: “Negro Who Wed White Writer Sees New Race.”¹⁵⁶ While Toomer proclaimed that his marriage to Margery Latimer was evidence of a “new race in America…, neither white nor black nor in-between,” and that their marriage was simply one between “two Americans,” the white press chose to focus upon only the most sensational aspects of their nuptials.¹⁵⁷

In 1942, Toomer registered once again for the draft, as part of the World War II Draft Registration. He identified himself as Nathan Jean Toomer, and he was living with his second wife, Marjorie C. Toomer, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He is described as 5’10” tall, weighing 178 pounds, with black hair and eyes, and a “dark brown complexion.” He identified himself as a “Negro.”

These documents reveal that Jean Toomer self-identified as Negro in 1917, when he first registered for the draft. Then either he or a roommate decided to identify him as “white” in the federal census of 1920. Similarly, Toomer self-identified as “white” in the 1930 census and a year later on his marriage license with Margery Latimer. He then self-identified again as a Negro in 1942 on his second draft registration. Given the fact that draft boards at the time were local, Toomer’s decision to identify himself as a black man is quite surprising. Since the draft board would have been unaware of Toomer’s previous identification of himself as a Negro in 1917, we are left wondering why he did this after he had decided to pass as a white man.

In the course of the twenty-five years between his 1917 and 1942 army registrations, Toomer was endlessly deconstructing his Negro ancestry. We recall that during his childhood and adolescence in Washington, D.C., and New York, Toomer lived in both the white and the black worlds, and here we must emphasize the fact that during his adolescence he was educated and lived in the world occupied by Washington’s black and mulatto elite. Based upon his experiences in this special world “midway between the white and Negro worlds,”¹⁵⁸ Toomer claimed that he developed his famous “racial position” in 1914, when he says he first defined himself as an “American, neither white nor black,” just a year after declaring himself to be a Negro in his first draft registration. But given the fact that his parents and grandparents identified themselves and Toomer (in the 1900 and 1910 federal censuses) as black, it is apparent that Toomer’s feelings about his racial identity were anomalous within his own family.”¹⁵⁹ It is important to stress that the first short story Toomer ever wrote, “Bona and Paul,” composed in 1918, takes passing as its central theme, and that this deeply autobiographical story reflects Toomer’s early preoccupation with his racial identity.

Equally important, Toomer’s assertion that “Kabnis is me,” in his well-known December 1922 letter to Waldo Frank concerning his relationship to a character of mixed-race ancestry who is deeply conflicted about his Negro ancestry, is further evidence of his ambivalence regarding his racial identity. This ambivalence about his black ancestry is also reflected in the controversial launch of Cane, specifically his conflicted, indeed angry reaction to Waldo Frank’s introduction, and later his refusal to cooperate with Horace Liveright, his publisher, in “featuring Negro” in the marketing of Cane in the fall of 1923. Indeed, he all but said to Liveright: “I was not a Negro.”¹⁶⁰ According to Darwin Turner, Toomer, in his correspondence with the writer Sherwood Anderson just a year before the publication of Cane, “never opposed Anderson’s obvious assumption that he was ‘Negro.’ In fact, Anderson began the correspondence because Toomer had been identified to him as a ‘Negro.’”¹⁶¹ Toomer’s contradictory stance vis-à-vis Liveright and Anderson reveals the depth of his anguish about his race in the weeks before the publication of the work that would link him to a literary tradition from which he would fee.

We also must recall Toomer’s anger with Alain Locke for reprinting excerpts of Cane in The New Negro in 1925 (he was silent regarding Locke’s decision to reprint “Song of the Son” in the 1925 Harlem issue of The Survey Graphic), a reaction that smacks of denial and ingratitude, given Locke’s early and consistent support of Toomer while he was still living in Washington, D.C. And then in 1934, almost ten years after the publication of The New Negro, Toomer, most improbably, observes to the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper that “I have not lived as [a Negro] nor do I really know whether there is colored blood in me or not.”¹⁶² During this same period, Toomer refuses to contribute to Nancy Cunard’s anthology The Negro (1934) stating that “though I am interested in and deeply value the Negro, I am not a Negro.”¹⁶³ This claim stands out as particularly disingenuous when we recall Toomer’s week-long trip with Waldo Frank in the fall of 1922 in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where they masqueraded as “blood brothers,” that is, as Negroes.¹⁶⁴ After serving as Frank’s “host in a black world,”¹⁶⁵ Toomer returned to Washington, and for two weeks worked as an assistant to the manager of the Howard Theater, a theater that served the capital’s African American community, and where he gathered material for such stories as “Box Seat” and “Theater.” These shaping experiences in the black world, among many others, call into question Toomer’s odd claim in the Baltimore Afro-American and to the anthologist Nancy Cunard that he was not, and had not been, black.

At this juncture, it is useful to return to Elizabeth Alexander’s “Toomer,” the splendid poem that opens our introduction and that also evokes Toomer’s shifting, complex, contradictory stance on race: “I wished / to contemplate who I was beyond / my body, this container of flesh. / I made up a language in which to exist. /…Oh, / to be a Negro is — is? / to be a Negro, is. To be.”¹⁶⁶ Alexander’s key line is this: “I made up a language in which to exist.” In this insightful line, Alexander captures not only Toomer’s definition of race as a social construction, but also his anguished effort to liberate himself from his apparent anxiety and ambivalence about his black ancestry.

Not withstanding Toomer’s definition of himself as an “American, neither white nor black,”¹⁶⁷ at crucial stages in his life he self-identified as Negro: as a young adult in 1917 at the age of 23, Toomer self-identified as Negro; again in 1942 as a mature adult at the age of 48, Toomer self-identified as Negro. While the registration cards, the census data, and marriage certificate are contradictory, there is, nevertheless, a pattern. It is our carefully considered judgment, based upon an analysis of archival evidence previously overlooked by other scholars, that Jean Toomer — for all of his pioneering theorizing about what today we might call a multicultural or mixed-raced ancestry — was a Negro who decided to pass for white. Here we respectfully disagree with Toomer’s biographers Kerman and Eldridge, who claim that Toomer never attempted “to ‘pass’ in a racial sense.” ¹⁶⁸

And what is Toomer’s relationship to American modernism and the African American literary tradition? Without question, Cane is a classic work of timeless significance in American and African American letters. In its pages we encounter again and again the arresting vision of an astonishingly original writer. And what shall be our generation’s relationship to this great artist of the Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation, who rejected the very book by which he is destined to be remembered? Alice Walker expressed a perspective we would do well to reflect upon. Shortly after the publication of Meridian, her magisterial fictional meditation on the civil rights movement, and her own formal response to Toomer’s call in Cane, Walker concluded: “I think Jean Toomer would want us to keep [Cane’s] beauty, but let him go.”¹⁶⁹ Walker is probably correct in her assessment of Toomer’s own wishes. However, since Toomer’s Cane is arguably the most sophisticated work of literature created over the course of the Harlem Renaissance, we imagine that future generations of scholars will find his struggle with his racial identity as endlessly fascinating as we have.

Toomer’s draft registration, June 5, 1917.

1930 census

Detail of 1930 census.

1931 marriage certificate.

Draft registration, April 24, 1942.