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.