“Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end.” — poet/novelist Jean Toomer

Jean Toomer was born in 1894 on this day and died in 1967.

Toomer’s family tree encompasses all of pre-and-post-Civil War South: slaves, freemen, black, white. His father, Nathan Toomer, was born into slavery. After the war he continued working for his former master, taking the man’s last name. Nathan Toomer became a farmer and married multiple times. His third wife – Nina Elizabeth Pinchback – was Jean Toomer’s mother. Nina’s father was mixed race, raised by his white planter father, eventually becoming governor of Louisiana (the first Black person in the United States to serve as a governor). During the chaotic Reconstruction era, Democrats made ominous inroads, establishing what would be known as the Jim Crow laws. Toomer’s parents felt which way the wind was blowing in Louisiana and moved to D.C., where they joined the community of wealthy people of color. By this point, Jean had been born. And then Nathan abandoned his wife and child. This event had a huge impact on young Jean, intensified by the issue of his name. Jean Toomer’s birth name was Nathan Pinchback Toomer, but his mother’s family refused to call him “Nathan” (they disapproved of Nathan Senior), and instead called him “Eugene” (his godfather’s name). He only “became” Jean Toomer when he started getting published. He chose a pen name free of all this inherited baggage.

There are interesting questions of identity through all of this. Identity is not solid. Identity is a hundred little tributaries all coming from different sources eventually pouring into the same river. Identity is turmoil, there are rapids, ripples, strong currents, all churning around in one man. Add to this turnoil the era’s timeline, the events and cataclysms shared by the generation who came of age in and around WWI, who experienced the birth of Modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, etc.

Jean Toomer attended some all-white schools and some all-black schools. There has been a lot of recent commentary about whether or not he could pass as white, and the degree to which he used it. He did not want to identify himself either way. He said, over and over and over again, that he wasn’t black, he wasn’t white. “American” was how he identified. He bounced around to different colleges, never got a degree, but studied widely and deeply. He got a job as a school principal in Georgia, where he witnessed racism to a degree he hadn’t seen before, at the very same time he discovered the degree to which he could “pass.” This gave him a slightly askance perspective that would inform his writing. While in Georgia, he wrote a series of short impressionistic pieces which would eventually turn into his novel Cane, published in 1923. One of Toomer’s idols was T.S. Eliot, and The Waste Land (published in 1922) had a clear influence on Cane.

The book was well-received, by black critics and white, although its stature wasn’t immediately recognized. (It’s now regarded as a Modernist classic.) Langston Hughes recognized immediately the Toomer’s accomplishment, and name-checked it in his manifesto “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Hughes theorized that one of the reasons the book was ignored – or at least not embraced – is that it did not present the “Negro” as white Americans imagined him. Toomer’s vision was three-dimensional. Toomer was rural AND he was Jazz Age urban. Critics had a hard time reconciling these two things, they preferred stricter labels (audiences did too).

In Cane, America is the Southern farmlands and the northern cities, and these geographical areas weren’t strictly separated, there was a lot of movement between the two. Industrialization was wreaking havoc on the South and everything was in flux, including class, race, and sexuality. Cane has the fragmentation of High Modernism, with its blend of narrative and documentary, its fluidity of styles: prose and poetry, vignettes, ballads…all of which give a panoramic view of America as seen through the eyes of someone like Toomer who had lived in the deep South, lived up North, experienced the South through Northern eyes, while not really being a part of either. When the publisher asked Toomer to mention his exact racial makeup for the author’s bio, Toomer was outraged. Toomer was conflicted on the American insistence on prioritizing race, even if it was in a complimentary way (“he is the best Negro writer today,” etc.)

Toomer found American focus on race stifling. He traveled widely, moving to France to study with spiritual guru George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, a big influence on him. Predating the Beats’ spiritual quests by 20+ years, Toomer traveled to India in the late 1930s, seeking spiritual enlightenment. In the early 30s, he married Margery Latimer, a white woman who was a well-known novelist and feminist. Their marriage received a lot of vicious press and they took heat from all sides: Black people considered it a betrayal, whites considered it miscegenation. You can kind of see why Toomer’s overall attitude was, “The hell with all of you.”

His spiritual quest led to him becoming a Quaker. He lapsed into “retirement.”

Here’s one of the most famous passages from Cane, a poem called “Harvest Song.” This is from the Southern-rural section, with its rhythm of slave songs and spirituals, thrumming with repetitive gestures from planting, all reflective in the rhyme. After this, I’ll post something from the Northern-urban section so you can see the difference in style. Cane is dazzling.

Harvest Song

I am a reaper whose muscles set at sun-down. All my oats are cradled.
But I am too chilled, and too fatigued to bind them. And I hunger.

I crack a grain between my teeth. I do not taste it.
I have been in the fields all day. My throat is dry. I hunger.

My eyes are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time.
I am a blind man who stares across the hills, seeking stack’d fields
of other harvesters.

It would be good to see them . . . crook’d, split, and iron-ring’d handles
of the scythes . . . It would be good to see them, dust-caked and
blind. I hunger.

(Dusk is a strange fear’d sheath their blades are dull’d in.)
My throat is dry. And should I call, a cracked grain like the oats
. . . eoho—

I fear to call. What should they hear me, and offer me their grain,
oats, or wheat or corn? I have been in the fields all day. I fear
I could not taste it. I fear knowledge of my hunger.

My ears are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time.
I am a deaf man who strains to hear the calls of other harvesters whose
throats are also dry.

It would be good to hear their songs . . . reapers of the sweet-stalked
cane, cutters of the corn . . . even though their throats cracked, and
the strangeness of their voices deafened me.

I hunger. My throat is dry. Now that the sun has set and I am chilled.
I fear to call. (Eoho, my brothers!)

I am a reaper. (Eoho!) All my oats are cradled. But I am too fatigued
to bind them. And I hunger. I crack a grain. It has no taste to
it. My throat is dry . . .

O my brothers, I beat my palms, still soft, against the stubble of my
harvesting. (You beat your soft palms, too.) My pain is sweet.
Sweeter than the oats or wheat or corn. It will not bring me
knowledge of my hunger.

Seventh Street

Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,

Bootleggers in silken shirts,
Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs,
Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks.

Seventh Street is a bastard of Prohibition and the War. A crude-boned, soft-skinned wedge of nigger life breathing its loafer air, jazz songs and love, thrusting unconscious rhythms, black reddish blood into the white and whitewashed wood of Washington. Stale soggy wood of Washington. Wedges rust in soggy wood. . . Split it! In two! Again! Shred it! . . the sun. Wedges are brilliant in the sun; ribbons of wet wood dry and blow away. Black reddish blood. Pouring for crude-boned soft-skinned life, who set you flowing? Blood suckers of the War would spin in a frenzy of dizziness if they drank your blood. Prohibition would put a stop to it. Who set you flowing? White and whitewash disappear in blood. Who set you flowing? Flowing down the smooth asphalt of Seventh Street, in shanties, brick office buildings, theaters, drug stores, restaurants, and cabarets? Eddying on the corners? Swirling like a blood-red smoke up where the buzzards fly in heaven? God would not dare to suck black red blood. A Nigger God! He would duck his head in shame and call for the Judgement Day. Who set you flowing?

Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,
Bootleggers in silken shirts,
Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs,
Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks.

A couple more of his poems, filled with rich imagery, diverse associations from history, fine art, poetry, music, nature.

Portrait in Georgia

Hair–braided chestnut,
coiled like a lyncher’s rope,
Eye–fagots,
Lips–old scars, or the first red blisters,
Breath–the last sweet scent of cane,
And her slim body, white as the ash
of black flesh after flame.

Song of the Son

Pour O pour that parting soul in song,
O pour it in the sawdust glow of night,
Into the velvet pine-smoke air tonight,
And let the valley carry it along.
And let the valley carry it along.

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.
Thy son, I have in time returned to thee.

In time, for though the sun is setting on
A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set;
Though late, O soil, it is not too late yet
To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone,
Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone.

O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums,
Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air,
Passing, before they stripped the old tree bare
One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes

An everlasting song, a singing tree,
Caroling softly souls of slavery,
What they were, and what they are to me,
Caroling softly souls of slavery.

QUOTES:

Langston Hughes, from his “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”:

“O, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,” say the Negroes. “Be stereotyped, don’t go too far, don’t shatter our illusions about you, don’t amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,” say the whites. Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write Cane. The colored people did not praise it. Although the critics gave it good reviews, the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the works of Du Bois) Cane contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson it is truly racial.”

Jean Toomer:

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 was so tragic. Just this seemed to sum life for me. And this was the feeling I put into Cane. Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end.

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn on “Georgia Dusk”:

The scene is the Deep South in the early twentieth century. The Civil War has receded in time, but its painful legacy remains. Black Americans, now emancipated day laborers, are making their way through an uncertain and still dangerous world. The “Georgia dusk” of Toomer’s title is a moral twilight: fantasies and delusions linger from the antebellum Old South with its genteel, chivalric dreams (compare the sun’s “tournament for flashing gold”. But the tranquil rural routine is marred by bursts of brutality and barbarism: “a feast of moon and men and barking hounds.” Dogs once tracking escaped slaves have become jeering mobs who burn and lynch for sport. It’s a holiday “orgy,” a sadistic mass entertainment. But darkness brings terror for those who are not guests but ritual victims, the main course at the “night’s barbecue.”

Robert Littell, 1923 review of Cane:

“Cane does not remotely resemble any of the familiar, superficial views of the South on which we have been brought up. On the contrary, Mr. Toomer’s view is unfamiliar and bafflingly subterranean, the vision of a poet far more than the account of things seen by a novelist.”

Jean Toomer, letter to his brother:

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.

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn on “Georgia Dusk”:

The voice of Toomer’s rueful pastoral is itself a victory over grim reality. After the unsettling opening stanzas, with their hallucinatory assault on the senses, the mood is one of hushed relaxation. The easy, regular rhythms (helped along by the sixth stanzas’s swatches of exapnsive dots) gradually slow our pulse until we attain a meditative serenity. Like Blake’s “London,” “Georgia Dusk” sets anonymous members of the working class against an epic sweep of nature and history. But it exorcises resentment: Toomer will not rage or condemn. As they break for the night, his singers enter an enchanted mental zone where spirit and sensuality commingle. With its strict rhyme scheme and courtly, flowery diction, “Georgia Dusk” more resembles Victorian than modernist poetry. Its style too is enticingly “cane-lipped,” meshing with the spontaneous music making of its stoical, questing characters.

Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Other African American poets drew simultaneously on the techniques of Euro-American modernism and of black “folk” culture. In poems of the loosely knit collection Cane (1923), Jean Toomer pays homage to a disappearing African American way of life in the rural south, drawing on the ritualistic repetitions of black oral culture. Sometimes, Toomer takes up and recasts Imagist technique in free verse poems of metaphoric juxtaposition: “Portrait in Georgia” begins, “Hair–braided chetnut, coiled like a lyncher’s rope,” and continues to oscillate violently between a description of a white woman’s face and the lynching of a black man.

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn on “Georgia Dusk”:

The main body of “Georgia Dusk” is neatly structured in three groups of linked stanzas. In the first pair of stanzas, the panorama of nature “darkens” and contracts to ominous intimations of passion and confusion. The second pair is set at the sawmill; the third, is the swamp. The concluding stanza is a valediction or blessing, like the climax of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.”

Poet Kenneth Rexroth:

“Toomer is the first poet to unite folk culture and the elite culture of the white avant-garde, and he accomplishes this difficult task with considerable success. He is without doubt the most important Black poet.”

Gerald Strauss, 2008:

[Cane] is similar to James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), two other thematically related story collections that develop unified and coherent visions of societies. It also echoes Edgar Lee Masters’s poetry collection Spoon River Anthology (1915) … Toomer surely was familiar with the Joyce and Masters books, and he knew Anderson personally.

(Toomer had corresponded with Sherwood Anderson.)

W. E. B. Du Bois, 1924 review of Cane:

Toomer does not impress me as one who knows his Georgia but he does know human beings…I cannot, for the life of me, for instance, see why Toomer could not have made the tragedy of Carma something that I could understand instead of vaguely guess at.”

Gorham Munson:

Toomer has founded his own speech.

Gil Scott-Heron’s “Cane” is based on two of the characters in Toomer’s novel:

 
 
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