Toomer was right to declare that he was of mixed ancestry, and that the opposition between “white” and “black” was too simplistic. But he was wrong to say that he had never lived as a Negro. He lived as a Negro while growing up. And then he decided to live as an ex-Negro almost as soon as the print was dry on Cane.
In part—to his credit—Toomer did so as a rebellion against a racist form of racial classification. But clearly Toomer the artist had other reasons in choosing to reinvent himself precisely when he published his first book: as a tactic to enable his upward social and artistic mobility. It was important to flee his cultural identity when he became a published writer, we believe, because of all of the circumscriptions placed upon Negroes and Negro writers in America in the early 1920s, when he began his career.
Like the protagonist in James Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Toomer probably wanted to live as he pleased outside the strictures of segregation and Jim Crow laws; to be judged as a writer for his talents alone, on their terms; to be free to chase the dreams about which he fantasized; to love the women he loved, without concern about the law—to live freely. And who can blame him? The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah once wrote that “Race disables us.” The more that we, as scholars, understand the full weight of race’s burdens, the more understandable Toomer’s admittedly imaginative denials become. Still . . .
We hope that the documents that we share in our new edition will provoke discussion and debate among students and colleagues about those twin pillars of postmodern studies, the social construction of race and our society’s essentialization of race, born in the pseudoscience of the Enlightenment.
As to interpretations of Cane, the new contextual information takes nothing away from the splendid complexity of this marvelously compelling text, our most sublime rendering of the moment of transition of the first great migration, the migration of the ex-slave from the plantation to the city, from feudalism to modernity, from the South to the North, and of all that was lost and all that was gained in that marvelously complex process.
Toomer, more than any other New Negro writer (from whom he so desperately wished to stand apart), saw and felt that moment, and found lyrical registers of language to record it. Rather than confine his imagination to that of a “Negro writer,” he seized upon the critical success of Cane to attempt to escape the confines of race in America.
Jean Toomer—to draw upon a famous metaphor of W. E. B. Du Bois—did not want to ride in the Jim Crow car of American literary culture or of American social life. But Du Bois’s point in coining the metaphor was that the Negro should be allowed to ride in the proverbial “white” section of the American social train as a Negro, and not as a Negro in whiteface, or as a Negro who had left his sisters and brothers back in the smelly, cinder-covered Jim Crow car at the rear of the train.
Confronting the long history of speculation about Toomer’s race, we confronted again the role of race not just in the construction of identity, but also in the creation of a literary tradition. We felt that it was vital to add clarity to an often ambiguous, contradictory portrait of Toomer. In the process, we grew to appreciate more deeply the tragic pattern of ambivalence and denial that is part of his legacy as one of the most gifted imaginative artists of the 20th century.
Certainly, Toomer’s choices make it clear that we are long past the point of accepting uncritically what a writer says about himself or herself. We should subject all claims to the same critical analysis that we bring to the text itself. They, too, make clear the many issues about race to be confronted in our teaching.
So we come back to our carefully considered judgment, based upon an analysis of genealogical evidence previously overlooked, that Jean Toomer—for all of his pioneering theorizing about what today we might call multicultural or mixed-raced ancestry—was a Negro who decided to pass for white.
The poet Elizabeth Alexander’s “Toomer” evokes her subject’s shifting, complex, contradictory stance on race: “I made up a language in which to exist.” That line captures not only Toomer’s pioneering position on race as a social construction, but also his effort to liberate himself through language from his life-long ambivalence about his black ancestry.
SOURCE: The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 6, 2011.
PART V
READING PEOPLE
GATES HAS BEEN quoted as saying there are 35 million black people in this country, and there are 35 million ways of being black. The individuals profiled in this section, through their work and their words, have pushed us in their own varied ways to understand blackness as multiplicity and singularity, as performance and nature, as imitation and originality. Some have told us what black people should be; some have told us what black people could be; some would rather not tell us anything at all about black people. What they have in common is that they all dispel the myth of authenticity—that there is one “real” black identity—that too often is deployed to conceal limitless variation.
Abby Wolf
BOTH SIDES NOW
W. E. B. Du Bois
ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO last month, a 35-year-old scholar and budding political activist named William Edward Burghardt Du Bois published “The Souls of Black Folk.” Subtitled “Essays and Sketches,” Du Bois’s 265-page book consisted of 13 essays and one short story, addressing a wide range of topics including the story of the freedmen in Reconstruction, the political ascendancy of Booker T. Washington, the sublimity of spirituals, the death of Du Bois’s only son, Burghardt. Hailed as a classic by his contemporaries, the book has been republished in no fewer than 119 editions since 1903.
Despite its fragmentary structure, the book’s disparate parts contribute to a sense of a whole, like movements in a symphony. Each chapter is pointedly “bicultural,” prefaced by both an excerpt from a white poet and a bar of what Du Bois calls the Sorrow Songs (“some echo of haunting melody from the only American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past”).
Du Bois’s subject was, in no small part, the largely unarticulated beliefs and practices of American Negroes, who were impatient to burst out of the cotton fields and take their rightful place as Americans. As he saw it, African-American culture in 1903 was at once vibrant and disjointed, rooted in an almost medieval agrarian past and yet fiercely restive. Born in the chaos of slavery, the culture had begun to generate a richly variegated body of plots, stories, melodies and rhythms. In “The Souls of Black Folk,” Du Bois peered closely at the culture of his kin, and saw the face of black America. Or rather, he saw two faces.
“One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro,” Du Bois wrote. “Two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” He described this condition as “double consciousness,” and his emphasis on a fractured psyche made “The Souls of Black Folk” a harbinger of the modernist movement that would begin to flower a decade or so later in Europe and in America.
Scholars, including Werner Sollors, Dickson Bruce and David Levering Lewis, have debated the origins of Du Bois’s use of the concept of “double consciousness,” but what’s clear is that its roots are multiple, which is appropriate enough. Du Bois had studied in Berlin during a Hegel revival, and Hegel, famously, had written on the relationship between master and bondsman, whereby each defines himself through the recognition of the other. But the concept comes up, too, in Emerson, who wrote in 1842 of the split between our reflective self, which wanders through the realm of ideas, and the active self, which dwells in the here and now. (“The worst feature of this double consciousness is that the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, really show very little relation to each other.”) Even closer to hand was the term’s appearance in late-19th-century psychology. The French psychologist Alfred Binet, writing in his 1896 book “On Double Consciousness,” discusses “bipartition,” or “the duplication of consciousness”: “Eac
h of the consciousnesses occupies a more narrow and more limited field than if there existed one single consciousness containing all the ideas of the subject.” William James, who taught Du Bois at Harvard, talked about a “second personality” that characterized “the hypnotic trance.”
When Du Bois transposed this concept from the realm of the psyche to the social predicament of the American Negro, he did not leave it unchanged. But he shared with the psychologists the notion that double consciousness was essentially an affliction. “This American world,” he complained, yields the Negro “no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Sadly, “the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American,” leads inevitably to “a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence.” The result is “a double life, with double thoughts, double duties and double social classes,” and worse, “double words and double ideas,” which “tempt the mind to pretense or to revolt, hypocrisy or to radicalism.” Accordingly, Du Bois wanted to make the American Negro whole; and he believed that only desegregation and full equality could make this psychic integration possible.
And yet for subsequent generations of writers, what Du Bois cast as a problem was taken to be the defining condition of modernity itself. The diagnosis, you could say, outlasted the disease. Although Du Bois would publish 22 books and thousands of essays and reviews, no work of his has done more to shape an African-American literary tradition than “The Souls of Black Folk,” and no metaphor in this intricately layered book has proved more enduring than that of double consciousness.
Like all powerful metaphors, Du Bois’s came to have a life of its own. For Carl Jung, who visited the United States in the heyday of the “separate but equal” doctrine, the shocking thing wasn’t that black culture was not equal, it was that it was not separate. “The naïve European,” he wrote, “thinks of America as a white nation. It is not wholly white, if you please; it is partly colored,” and this explained “the slightly Negroid mannerisms of the American.” “Since the Negro lives within your cities and even within your houses,” Jung continued, “he also lives within your skin, subconsciously.” It wasn’t just that the Negro was an American, as Du Bois wrote, but that the American was Negro. The bondsman and the slave find their identity in each other’s gaze: “two-ness” wasn’t just a black thing any longer. As James Baldwin would put it, “Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white.”
Today, talk about the fragmentation of culture and consciousness is a commonplace. We know all about the vigorous intermixing of black culture and white, high culture and low—from the Jazz Age freneticism of what Ann Douglas calls “mongrel Manhattan” to hip-hop’s hegemony over American youth. Du Bois yearned to make the American Negro one, and lamented that he was two. Today, the ideal of wholeness has largely been retired. And cultural multiplicity is no longer seen as the problem, but as a solution—a solution to the confines of identity itself. Double consciousness, once a disorder, is now the cure. Indeed, the only complaint we moderns have is that Du Bois was too cautious in his accounting. He’d conjured “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” Just two, Dr. Du Bois? Keep counting.
SOURCE: The New York Times, May, 4, 2003.
THE PRINCE WHO REFUSED THE KINGDOM
John Hope Franklin
WHEN I WAS twenty, I decided to hitchhike across the African continent, more or less following the line of the Equator, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. I packed only one pair of sandals and one pair of jeans to make room for the three hefty books I had decided to read from cover to cover: Don Quixote, Moby Dick, and From Slavery to Freedom, by John Hope Franklin. I read the latter—the black and white bound third edition of the book—while recovering from a severe bout of amoebic dysentery sailing down the Congo River. It became such a valued reference for me that I kept it, for years, in the bookcase at my bedside.
Like just about every Black student at Yale in 1969, I enrolled in the Introduction to Afro-American History survey course, taught quite ably by the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, William McFeely. At the end of each class, someone would find a way to bring up the fact that while our subject matter was Black, McFeely was quite White, and hadn’t he better find a way to remedy that fact? With the patience of Job, McFeely would graciously grant his accuser the point and add that he hoped to put himself out of a job just as soon as a Black historian could be found to take his place. He would then remind us that the textbook around which our course was structured, From Slavery to Freedom, had been written by a Black man—a Black man who had been trained at Harvard.
John Hope Franklin was the last of the great generation of Black historians to graduate from Harvard in the first half of the twentieth century. W. E. B. Du Bois, who graduated in 1895, paved the way for Carter G. Woodson (the father of Black History Month!) in 1912, Charles Wesley in 1925, Rayford W. Logan in 1936, and Franklin in 1941. Both because he was the youngest member of this academic royal family and because he was lean and elegant, poised and cosmopolitan, many of us in the younger generation came to refer to Franklin as “The Prince.”
Despite all of the important work published by his four predecessors at Harvard, Franklin was the first to publish a comprehensive and popular story of the Negro’s place in American life. From Slavery to Freedom was not just the first of its genre, it was canon-forming. It gave to the Black historical tradition a self-contained form through which it could be institutionalized—parsed, divided into fifteen weeks, packaged and taught—from Harlem to Harvard, and even, or especially, in those places where almost no Black people actually lived. Every scholar of my generation studied Franklin’s book; in this sense, we are all his godchildren.
But Franklin’s relationship with Harvard was a complicated and tense one. Because Harvard had trained him as an historian, Franklin aspired to become the college’s first Black history professor. By the late 1960s, that dream certainly seemed to be in his grasp, especially after he had integrated the history department at Brooklyn College in 1956, then moved to the Midwest in 1964 to integrate the history department at the University of Chicago, just a year after Dr. King’s March on Washington.
While my classmates and I down in New Haven were busy busting William McFeely’s chops for being White, Harvard had the good sense to invite John Hope Franklin to become the first chair of its fledgling academic Afro-American studies department, which it started in 1969 along with Yale and most other research universities.
But Franklin had an understandably principled opposition to academic segregation or “ghettoization” of any kind. He was suspicious about the uneven and troubled origins and stated intentions of the nascent field of Afro-American studies. He agreed to hold his breath if the faculty hired to teach in the new department were jointly appointed in the departments in which they had taken their degrees. With Franklin’s pedigree, a joint appointment should have been an obvious move.
But the tenured faculty of history at Harvard, including some of the classmates with whom he had studied while pursuing the Ph.D., refused. His appointment, were he to accept the offer of Chairman, would be solely in the Department of Afro-American Studies. Franklin angrily rejected the offer, calling it the most egregious insult of his academic career. Although he would accept an honorary doctorate from Harvard in 1981, in large part as a snub to the history department, Franklin never forgave his professional colleagues for the insult. In fact, he took a certain perverse pleasure in talking Black scholars out of accepting tenured professorships at Harvard, including most famously William Julius Wilson and Cornel West in the 1980s. When Drew Faust was inaugurated as Harva
rd’s first female president two years ago, one of the few featured speakers was John Hope, who spoke “on behalf of the History profession.” This painful history, of which only a few of us were aware, made President Faust’s gesture all the more poignant.
The experience with Harvard’s history department also deepened his initial skepticism about the entire field of Black Studies, making him, until the 1990s, an ardent foe if it was a subject area set apart from and not integrated with the traditional disciplines. I once heard a Black nationalist assistant professor at Yale in the late 1970s refer to him derogatorily as “John Hopeless Franklin.” But for Franklin, there could be no Black History without “History,” as it were, and on this point he was unequivocal. For most of his career, Franklin saw Black Studies as the unfortunate correlative of Jim Crow segregation, self-imposed by well-meaning but naive Black students and complicit Black professors eager to get lucrative jobs at historically White institutions.
John Hope and I had met at Yale in the early 1980s, over a small dinner attended by the great historians David Brion Davis and John W. Blassingame, following Franklin’s lecture. Davis turned to me during dinner and asked if I had ever discovered how I had been selected in the first group of MacArthur Fellows. As I attempted to say no, John Hope, from the far end of the table, thundered out that he knew precisely how I had been selected, because he had done the selecting! It was a bit like winning the fellowship all over again; I blinked back tears.
I told him how influenced I had been by From Slavery to Freedom, and that I had carried my copy of the third edition, published in 1967, with me across the African continent, reading it from cover to cover. (I didn’t tell him that I felt the third edition was his best, and that subsequent editions, perhaps responding to the pressures from publishers to make textbooks more “readable,” more accessible, seemed dumbed down—a long way in style from the densely rich narrative blend of documented facts with philosophical speculation and musings that characterized the black and white edition.) We stayed in touch after that, mostly by phone. One day he called to ask me to accept an offer that had just been extended by Stanley Fish in Duke’s English Department.
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