The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  As Griffin and Smith (and a host of geneticists and social scientists who serve as consultants on the films) have recognized, African American Lives introduces the received categories of four or five races, inherited from the Enlightenment, but does so to deconstruct them. This is how deconstruction must work; this is the irony, the trap, of language use. For this reason, I am not sure that we had a choice, for example, but to place scare quotes around the word “race” in the title of the volume. And this process of deconstructing the typological categories of racial purity occurs ideally through the results of the genetic-admixture tests that we administer to the subjects in the series, even if these tests are in their infancy and even if their precision may only increase after more individual genomes are sequenced. As the molecular anthropologist Mark Shriver puts it, “Then, of course, there is also the possibility that with many more markers from many more of the world’s populations considered, individuals from all continental groups would seem to bleed genetically into each other to varying degrees.” Today the model is fashioned to reflect—and to project—realities of America’s history by focusing on the encounter of Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans.

  Lott mistakenly contends that these documentary film series only explore “black celebrities’ racial genealogies,” whatever a “racial genealogy” is supposed to be. The series explore the family trees of subjects from various professions, on this side of the Atlantic, and then use highly reliable y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA tests to trace the haplotypes of the subjects’ fathers’ fathers’ fathers and mothers’ mothers’ mothers. If the database reveals an exact match with a person of, let’s say, Yoruba descent, then the subject—indisputably—shares a common ancestor with that person. This is not an opinion; it is a fact.

  What this means is enormously fascinating and complicated, since multiple exact matches are often found in different parts of the world. We explore these relations, raising questions of identity and identity formation just as surely as the contributors to “Race,” Writing, and Difference tried to do, but in another way. My roots films use genetic types much like fingerprints or fossil records, enabling us to trace the movements of our indomitable ancestors beyond the veil of our literate past. It is an archeology that is inscribed—and is now increasingly legible—within the individual human genome itself. Let’s consider just one example: in twenty-five percent of the tests administered to African American males, their y-DNA (again, their fathers’ fathers’ fathers’ line) traces to Europe. According to Shriver, no less than fifty-eight percent of the African American people have a significant amount of European ancestry, the equivalent of one great-grandparent. In the series, we use the admixture tests to potentially deconstruct the series’s own four or five received categories of so-called races, showing how fluid they are and have always been. My own admixture test revealed a fifty-fifty split between European ancestral markers and African ancestral markers. It is astonishing that none of the nineteen subjects studied in my documentary films has tested one hundred percent of anything. Large numbers of marker loci or alleles differ in frequency among source populations. When you average over a large number of loci and compare the frequency of one of these alleles among populations, you estimate admixture with some accuracy. And the reason for these differences in ancestral markers in the gene is an important question.

  What African American Lives has tried to show is that genetic ancestry must be measured on a continuous scale, not divided up according to the typological race categories that we sought to deconstruct in “Race,” Writing and Difference. If anything, instead of reifying the racist categories received from the Enlightenment, ancestry tracing can show the fuzziness, the arbitrariness, the social constructedness, of what have appeared to be clear “racial” divides. The problem arises when someone associates individual genetic differences (which, of course, exist) with ethnic variation (which is sociocultural and malleable). But recognizing the arbitrariness of typological categories of “race” does not mean that genetic differences are not real; to paraphrase Cornel West, biology matters. The question that confronts us in the academy today (in an era of the new genetics, the sequencing of the genome, and the recuperation of biology for identity mapping, health-disparities research, and increasingly forensics) is how biology matters, and to whom? Neither essentialist sinners nor social-constructionist saints will have a monopoly on how these differences will be parsed. Humanists need to engage these questions. Accordingly, perhaps the most fitting sequel to “Race,” Writing, and Difference would be a special issue of Critical Inquiry entitled “Race,” Science, and Difference. Given all the developments in cultural studies and genetics over the past two decades, what could be more timely?

  WORK CITED

  Shriver, Mark. Letter to the author. 5 Apr. 2008.

  SOURCE: PMLA 124, no. 5 (October 2008).

  JEAN TOOMER’S CONFLICTED RACIAL IDENTITY

  WITH RUDOLPH P. BYRD

  ON AUGUST 4, 1922, about a year before he published his first book, Cane, Jean Toomer, age 27, wrote to his first love, a black teenager named Mae Wright, confessing his ambivalence about the dogged pursuit by African-Americans of Anglo-American cultural ideals: “We who have Negro blood in our veins, who are culturally and emotionally the most removed from Puritan tradition, are its most tenacious supporters.” That would be one of the last times he admitted his own Negro ancestry, either publicly or privately. Six years later, Georgia O’Keeffe—Toomer’s friend and later lover—wrote to her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, describing the way Toomer, then living in Chicago, was identifying himself: “It seems that in Chicago they do not know that he has Negro blood—he seems to claim French extraction.”

  When we were working on a new Norton critical edition of Cane, a masterpiece of modernism composed of fiction, poetry, and drama, we confronted the question of Toomer’s race. Literary critics and biographers have long speculated about how he identified himself, but too often they have chosen not to conduct research into public documents about the topic. Was Toomer—a central figure in two faces of American modernism, the New Negro (or Harlem Renaissance) Movement and the Lost Generation—a Negro who, following the publication of Cane, passed for white?

  Toomer is known for proclaiming a new, mixed racial identity, which he called “American.” In an era of de jure segregation, such a claim was defiantly transgressive. But he may have been far more conflicted about his identity than his noble attempt to question American received categories of “race” might suggest.

  Given the importance of the subject, we commissioned some original biographical research by the genealogist Megan Smolenyak. We can now understand more fully than ever conflicts within Toomer’s thinking about his race, as he expressed them in public documents, including the federal census, two draft registrations, his marriage license to the white writer Margery Latimer, and in statements to the news media.

  In June 1917, Nathan Eugene Pinchback Toomer registered for the draft in Washington. He is recorded as an unemployed student, single, having an unspecified disability (two of his biographers have suggested “bad eyes and a hernia gotten in a basketball game”). He is listed as a “Negro.” The 1920 census shows Toomer boarding with other lodgers in the home of an Italian couple on East Ninth Street in Manhattan. The census enumerator inaccurately listed his birthplace as New York, suggesting that Toomer may not have provided the information himself. His race is listed as “white.”

  In the 1930 census, Toomer is listed as a resident, with many others, at 11 Fifth Avenue. Because of the accuracy of the other data contained in the document—including his birthplace, his parents’ states of birth, and his occupation as a freelance writer—it is likely that he furnished the details himself. The enumerator listed him as “white.” At the very least, if we are right, Toomer did not correct the designation.

  A year later, on October 30, 1931, Toomer married Latimer in Portage, Wis. Both the bride and groom are identified as “white” on the marriage licen
se. According to Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Elridge, Toomer biographers, Latimer was aware of what she termed “the racial thing”: that is, that Toomer was a Negro. Though she shared Toomer’s vision of a new race in America, probably neither she nor he was prepared for headlines like the one published regarding the marriage: “Negro Who Wed White Writer Sees New Race.” While Toomer proclaimed that his union was evidence of a “new race in America, . . . neither white nor black nor in-between,” and that it was simply one between “two Americans,” the news media chose to focus upon only the most sensational aspects of the nuptials.

  In 1942, Toomer registered once again for the draft. He identified himself as Nathan Jean Toomer, married to Marjorie C. Toomer. She was his second wife, the white daughter of a wealthy stockbroker whom he had married in Taos, N.M., after his first wife died in childbirth. He is described as 5-foot-10, 178 pounds, with black hair and eyes, and a “dark brown complexion.” He is identified as a “Negro.”

  It is clear from these documents that Toomer self-identified as Negro in 1917, when he first registered for the draft. Then either he or a roommate decided to give his identity as “white” on the census of 1920. Similarly, Toomer either self-identified as “white” to the enumerator of the 1930 census or failed to say that he was, in fact, born a Negro (at that time, enumerators had the sole authority to determine the race of a resident). A year later, on his marriage license, he self-identified as “white.” He is identified as a “Negro” again, however, on his World War II draft registration—perhaps because the registrar, Edith Rider, who was black, according to the 1930 census, would have known from news-media accounts of his two interracial marriages.

  In the course of the 25 years between his 1917 and 1942 draft registrations, it seems that Toomer was endlessly deconstructing his Negro ancestry. During his childhood and adolescence in Washington, as a member of the mulatto elite, he lived in both the white and the black worlds. At times he resided in white neighborhoods, but he was educated in all-black schools. Toomer would write that it was his experience in that special world, “midway between the white and Negro worlds,” that led him to develop his novel “racial position” as early as 1914, at the age of 20, when he defined himself as an “American, neither white nor black.”

  Toomer may, indeed, have arrived at that definition as a young man, but as a young artist, he wrestled with the question of racial identity through various protagonists bearing uncanny resemblances to himself. The first short story he wrote, the autobiographical “Bona and Paul,” composed in 1918, takes passing for white as its central theme. Equally important, his assertion that “Kabnis is me”—in his December 1922 letter to the novelist and social critic Waldo Frank, concerning his relationship to a character of mixed-race ancestry deeply conflicted about his Negro past—is another salient example of how Toomer’s ambivalence about race manifested itself in Cane. Further, in a comment to a reporter in 1934 and in the manuscript of his unpublished autobiography, Toomer made the highly unlikely suggestion (given all extant documentation) that his grandfather P.B.S. Pinchback, the most famous black politician in the Reconstruction era, opportunistically passed for black to gain political advantage from the freedmen in New Orleans.

  Toomer’s deeply conflicted position on his black ancestry is also reflected in the publication of Cane. Indeed, his angry reaction to Frank’s introduction, with its matter-of-fact identification of the author as a Negro, and later his refusal to cooperate with Horace Liveright, the publisher, in “featuring Negro” in the marketing of Cane in fall 1923, reflect that conflict. He all but said to Liveright: “I was not a Negro.” However, according to the pioneering literary critic Darwin Turner, Toomer, in his correspondence with the writer Sherwood Anderson just a year before the publication of Cane, “never opposed Anderson’s obvious assumption that he was ‘Negro.’ In fact, Anderson began the correspondence because Toomer had been identified to him as a ‘Negro.’” Toomer’s contradictory stances vis-à-vis Liveright and Anderson reveal the depth of his ambivalence in the weeks before the publication of the work that would link him to a literary tradition from which he would spend the rest of his life attempting to flee.

  Toomer became angry with Alain Locke, one of the architects of the Harlem Renaissance, for reprinting excerpts of Cane in the The New Negro in 1925 (he was silent regarding Locke’s decision to reprint the poem “Song of the Son” in the 1925 issue of the white magazine Survey Graphic). Toomer’s attitude smacks of denial and ingratitude, given Locke’s early and consistent support.

  And then in 1934, almost 10 years after the publication of The New Negro, Toomer refused to contribute to Nancy Cunard’s 1934 anthology The Negro, stating that “though I am interested in and deeply value the Negro, I am not a Negro.” In that same year, following the announcement of his marriage to Marjorie Content, Toomer, most improbably, observed to the newspaper the Baltimore Afro-American that “I would not consider it libelous for anyone to refer to me as a colored man, but I have not lived as one, nor do I really know whether there is colored blood in me or not.” Toomer then went on to make his claim that his grandfather was a white man who passed for black, saying that “my maternal grandfather . . . referred to himself as having Negro blood in order to get Negro votes.” But note, the death certificate of Toomer’s grandfather, including details provided by his son, Toomer’s “beloved uncle Bismarck,” lists Pinchback’s race as “colored.”

  By that time, Walter Pinchback, Toomer’s uncle, was the only living relative who could challenge Toomer’s public denials of his Negro ancestry. In a conciliatory gesture toward his nephew (who was the only member of his family to pass), Walter (whom the Baltimore Afro-American carefully says identified himself his entire life as “colored,” adding that his mother, father, and grandfather did as well) said that “Toomer had a right to belong to either race he desired.” In a series of three articles about Toomer and his race, the newspaper, after repeatedly underscoring Toomer’s Negro identity and pointing out that he graduated from all-black Dunbar High School and “has always been referred to as a colored writer and was known in colored circles here and in New York some years ago,” said it supported Toomer’s decision, but as a blow against segregation and anti-miscegenation laws: “Every time the races are scrambled, by legal marriage, we set an example for thousands of white residents in Dixie who believe in social equality only after dark.”

  Toomer’s claims stand out as particularly disingenuous in light of facts like his weeklong sojourn with Frank in 1922 in Spartanburg, S.C., where they masqueraded as (in Toomer’s words) “blood brothers,” that is, as Negroes. After serving as Frank’s “host in a black world,” Toomer returned to Washington, and for two weeks worked as an assistant to the manager of the Howard Theatre, which served the capital’s African-American community, and where he gathered material for such stories as “Box Seat” and “Theater,” published in Cane.

  Why is it so important, as we read Cane, to understand Toomer’s conflicts over his racial identity? What light does it shine on scholarship about his work, about African-American literature, and the way our society has dealt with race? The first reason is the simple, or rather complicated, fact that Toomer himself thought it was important. Important? Toomer obsessed over it, endlessly circling back upon it in the comfortable isolation of his upper-middle-class home in Bucks County, Pa.

  In our effort to map the genealogy of both academic and popular conceptions of race, Toomer’s conflicts also help us distinguish between what we might think of as one’s biological or genetic identity and one’s cultural or ethnic identity. Biological identity is registered in one’s genes and measured today through alleles and haplogroups, but cultural identity is, to a large degree, what scholars call socially constructed—arbitrary, fluid, contingent, and socially specific. Genetically, Jean Toomer was a light-complexioned Negro, descended from a long line of mulattoes. He was raised as a Negro American, in a family that identified as black. Like many Africa
n-Americans (one of us, for example, happens to be 50 percent European and 50 percent African, genetically), he had a significant amount of European ancestry. But not culturally. None of Toomer’s direct ancestors chose to live or self-identify as white.

  That is a matter about which there is a tremendous amount of confusion. Does it mean much to discover, as a mature adult, that one is as white as she or he is black, genetically? That would be to presuppose that genetic ancestry, or biology, has some inherently determining characteristics of personality formation. It does not.

  The fact that Toomer’s family tree consisted of a lot of light-skinned mulattoes who, for whatever reasons, married one another, is not exceptional. Many African-Americans’ family trees are shaded in the very same way. Toomer was very much like the novelist Charles W. Chesnutt or the civil-rights leader Walter White or the many people who most certainly had to self-identify to a census enumerator to set the social or cultural record straight. (How else would a hapless census taker even begin to comprehend the nuances of Negritude that have so markedly defined the complex “black” identity in the United States?)