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.
Notes
1. Jean Toomer, “The Cane Years,” in The Wayward and The Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer, ed. Darwin T. Turner (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980), 123.
2. Perhaps the earliest scholar to query Toomer’s relationship to the writers of the “Lost Generation” and the New Negro movement or Harlem Renaissance was Robert A. Bone in The Negro Novel in America (1958). Since then Toomer’s relationship to the communities of writers who collectively constitute the various forms of American modernism has been examined by Rudolph P. Byrd, Charles T. Davis, Ann Douglas, Richard Eldridge, Genevieve Fabre, Maria Farland, Michel Feith, Alice P. Fisher, Karen S. Ford, S. P. Fullwinder, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Jane Goldman, Nathan Grant, Leonard Harris, Mark Helbling, George Hutchinson, Robert B. Jones, Cynthia R. Kerman, Catherine G. Kodat, Victor Kramer, Vera Kutzinski, Charles R. Larson, Nellie Y. McKay, Charles Molesworth, Arnold Rampersad, Frederick L. Rusch, Mark A. Sanders, Charles Scruggs, Robert B. Stepto, Alan Trachtenberg, Darwin T. Turner, Mark Whalan, and Jon Woodson, among other scholars.
3. James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., The Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience During the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 73.
4. Ibid., 111.
5. Ibid., 111. As a lawmaker, Pinchback sponsored civil rights legislation that granted blacks equal access in public transportation, business, and places of entertainment. He also introduced legislation in Louisiana’s 1879 constitutional convention that would establish a “university for the education of persons of color.” This legislation would lead to the establishment of Southern University in 1880. From 1883 to 1885, Pinchback served on the board of trustees of Southern University. See pp. 108 and 115 in Hollandsworth’s The Louisiana Native Guards.
6. The Wayward and the Seeking, 23–24.
7. Barbara Foley, “Jean Toomer’s Washington and the Politics of Class: From ‘Blue Veins’ to Seventh-street Rebels,” Modern Fiction Studies 42.2 (1996): 298.
8. Ibid., 313.
9. The Wayward and the Seeking, 24.
10. Ibid., 25.
11. Ibid., 35–36.
12. Ibid., 30.
13. Ibid., 17.
14. Ibid., 124.
15. Ibid., 124.
16. Ibid., 124.
17. Kent Anderson Leslie and Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., “‘This Father of Mine…a Sort of Mystery’: Jean Toomer’s Georgia Heritage,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly LXXVII. 4 (Winter 1993): 793.
18. Ibid., 790.
19. Ibid., 798.
20. Ibid., 794.
21. Ibid., 789.
22. The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 26.
23. The Wayward and the Seeking, 33.
24. The Lives of Jean Toomer, 28.
25. Ibid., 28.
26. Ibid., 28.
27. Ibid., 35.
28. Ibid., 35.
29. Ibid., 101.
30. For Toomer’s portrait of his father Nathan Toomer see The Wayward and the Seeking, 32–33.
31. The Wayward and the Seeking, 34.
32. See Jean Toomer’s Racial Self-Identifcation, lxvi.
33. The Lives of Jean Toomer, 2 7.
34. “‘This Father of Mine…a Sort of Mystery’: Jean Toomer’s Georgia Heritage,” 802–809.
35. The Lives of Jean Toomer, 85.
36. The Wayward and the Seeking, 41–42.
37. Ibid., 42.
38. Ibid., 42.
39. Ibid., 44.
40. Ibid., 45, 48.
41. Ibid., 45.
42. Ibid., 46.
43. Ibid., 45.
44. The Lives of Jean Toomer, 36.
45. The Wayward and the Seeking, 47.
46. Ibid., 47.
47. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way (New York: Penguin Books, 1933; 1990), 66.
48. Ibid., 66.