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 schooclass="underline" “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 schooclass="underline" “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.