{"id":152496,"date":"2025-12-26T08:00:03","date_gmt":"2025-12-26T13:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=152496"},"modified":"2025-12-26T11:44:49","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T16:44:49","slug":"happy-birthday-poet-jean-toomer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=152496","title":{"rendered":"“The realization of ignorance is the first act of knowing.” — Jean Toomer"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nPoet\/novelist Jean Toomer was born on this day in 1894. He died in 1967. He saw some shit. <\/p>\n

Toomer’s family tree encompasses the diversity of pre-and-post-Civil War South: slaves, freemen, black, white. His father, Nathan Toomer, was born into slavery. After the war Nathan continued working for his former master, taking the man’s last name. Nathan married multiple times. His third wife – Nina Elizabeth Pinchback – was Jean Toomer’s mother. Nina’s father was mixed race, and raised by his white planter father. This man eventually became governor of Louisiana (the first Black person in the United States to serve as a governor). I’m just listing all this because it shows the cultural faultlines on which Toomer stood. During the Reconstruction era, Democrats made ominous inroads, establishing what would be known as the Jim Crow laws. Toomer’s parents got the hell out of Louisiana and moved to D.C., where they joined the community of wealthy people of color. By this point, Jean had been born. And Nathan promptly 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<\/em> when he started getting published. His pen name was free of inherited baggage. <\/p>\n

There are interesting questions of identity through all of this. Identity is a hundred little tributaries all coming from different sources eventually pouring into the same river. Identity is turmoil. Not everyone is one thing. Add to this inner turmoil the era in which it happened, the events shared by the generation who came of age in and around WWI, who experienced the birth of Modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, etc. <\/p>\n

Toomer attended some all-white schools and some all-black schools. There has been recent commentary about whether or not he could pass as white, and the degree to which he used this “advantage”. He did not want to identify himself either way. He said, over and over again, that he wasn’t black, he wasn’t white. “American” was how he identified. You can see how this wouldn’t fly in certain contemporary circles, but consider the context. He never got a degree, but he studied widely. He worked as a school principal in Georgia, where he witnessed racism to a degree he hadn’t seen before, at the same time he discovered the degree to which he could “pass.” His perspective was always slightly askance and this would inform his writing. While in Georgia, he wrote a series of short impressionistic pieces which would eventually turn into his novel Cane<\/i>, published in 1923. (One of Toomer’s idols was T.S. Eliot, and The Waste Land<\/i> – published in 1922 – had a clear influence on Cane<\/i>.<\/p>\n

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

“Cane<\/em> was a swan-song. It was a song of an end.” — Jean Toomer<\/big><\/p>\n

In Cane<\/i>, America is the Southern farmlands and<\/em> the northern cities, and these geographical areas weren’t separated, there was movement between the two. Industrialization wreaked havoc on the South, putting everything into flux, class, race, sexuality. Cane<\/i> 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. He 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.) <\/p>\n

Toomer found the American focus on race stifling. He moved to France to study with spiritual guru George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, a big influence. In the late 1930s, predating the Beats’ spiritual quests by 20+ years, Toomer traveled to India seeking spiritual enlightenment. In the early 30s, he married Margery Latimer, a well-known novelist and feminist, who happened to be white. Their marriage received a lot of vicious press: 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.” <\/p>\n

His spiritual quest led to him becoming a Quaker. <\/p>\n

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

Harvest Song<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\n

I am a reaper whose muscles set at sun-down. All my oats are cradled.
\nBut I am too chilled, and too fatigued to bind them. And I hunger.<\/p>\n

I crack a grain between my teeth. I do not taste it.
\nI have been in the fields all day. My throat is dry. I hunger.<\/p>\n

My eyes are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time.
\nI am a blind man who stares across the hills, seeking stack\u2019d fields
\n of other harvesters.<\/p>\n

It would be good to see them . . . crook\u2019d, split, and iron-ring\u2019d handles
\n of the scythes . . . It would be good to see them, dust-caked and
\n blind. I hunger.<\/p>\n

(Dusk is a strange fear\u2019d sheath their blades are dull\u2019d in.)
\nMy throat is dry. And should I call, a cracked grain like the oats
\n . . . eoho\u2014<\/p>\n

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

My ears are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time.
\nI am a deaf man who strains to hear the calls of other harvesters whose
\n throats are also dry.<\/p>\n

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

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

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

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

Seventh Street<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\n

Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,<\/p>\n

Bootleggers in silken shirts,
\n Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs,
\n Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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?<\/p>\n

Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,
\n Bootleggers in silken shirts,
\n Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs,
\n Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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<\/p>\n

QUOTES:<\/h2>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

Langston Hughes, from his \u201cThe Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”: <\/strong><\/p>\n

“O, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,” say the Negroes. “Be stereotyped, don\u2019t go too far, don\u2019t shatter our illusions about you, don\u2019t amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,” say the whites. Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write Cane<\/em>. 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<\/em> contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson it is truly racial.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jean Toomer: <\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2014-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<\/em>. Cane<\/em> was a swan-song. It was a song of an end.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn<\/em> on “Georgia Dusk”:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Robert Littell, 1923 review of Cane<\/em>: <\/strong><\/p>\n

“Cane<\/em> 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\u2019s view is unfamiliar and bafflingly subterranean, the vision of a poet far more than the account of things seen by a novelist.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jean Toomer, letter to his brother: <\/strong><\/p>\n

From three angles, Cane<\/em>‘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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn<\/em> on “Georgia Dusk”:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/em> (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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn<\/em> on “Georgia Dusk”:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Poet Kenneth Rexroth: <\/strong><\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gerald Strauss, 2008: <\/strong><\/p>\n

[Cane<\/em>] is similar to James Joyce\u2019s Dubliners<\/em> (1914) and Sherwood Anderson\u2019s Winesburg, Ohio<\/em> (1919), two other thematically related story collections that develop unified and coherent visions of societies. It also echoes Edgar Lee Masters\u2019s poetry collection Spoon River Anthology<\/em> (1915) … Toomer surely was familiar with the Joyce and Masters books, and he knew Anderson personally.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Toomer had corresponded with Sherwood Anderson.) <\/p>\n

W. E. B. Du Bois, 1924 review of Cane<\/i>:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gorham Munson:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Toomer has founded his own speech.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gil Scott-Heron’s “Cane” is based on two of the characters in Toomer’s novel: <\/strong><\/p>\n

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