Cane

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.