by Jean Toomer
In the small apartment he also shared with his resilient, long-suffering grandmother, Toomer and Pinchback reconciled in the days before his death, precisely as he was completing the powerful, final, haunting section of his first book: “Our almost life-long struggle and contest was finished, and all my love and gratitude for the once so forceful and dominant but now so broken and tragic man came to the fore. He died the day after I had finished the first draft of ‘Kabnis,’ the long semi-dramatic closing-piece of Cane.”16 Toomer would write to Waldo Frank that “Kabnis is Me,” one of his last admissions of his awareness of the primacy of his own Negro ancestry in the shaping of his cultural and ethnic identity. But it is altogether reasonable to speculate that the powerful, quasi-mythic encounter at Kabnis’s conclusion—between the northern, mulatto would-be intellectual and old, black Father John, the haunting figure of the slave past—was informed by this final, intense encounter and reconciliation between Toomer and Pinchback himself.
Toomer’s Christian name and surname tie him to his father, Nathan Toomer. Born in 1839 in Chatham County, North Carolina, Nathan was the slave of Richard Pilkinson, who subsequently sold him to John Toomer.17 When John Toomer died in 1859, his brother Henry Toomer purchased Nathan, his mother, Kit, and seven of her children from the estate. Nathan became the body servant of Henry Toomer, and adopted the surname of the family who had purchased him and most of his family. In the 1860s, Nathan Toomer married Harriet, a mulatta with whom he had four daughters. After Harriet’s death in 1890, Toomer married Amanda America Dickson, regarded as “the richest colored woman alive.”18 Dickson, born in 1849, was the daughter of David Dickson, a prosperous planter of Hancock County, Georgia, and Julia Frances Lewis Dickson, a mulatta. Amanda was reared in the Dickson household by Elizabeth Dickson, her paternal grandmother. When David Dickson died in 1885 he left much of his estate, valued at approximately $400,000, including 15,000 acres of land, to Amanda America Dickson. Nathan Toomer and Amanda Dickson married on August 7, 1891, and took up residence in her well-appointed mansion located on Telfair Street among the wealthy white elite in Augusta, Georgia. Almost two years later, on June 11, 1893, Amanda would die, from “complications of disease.”19 Since Amanda left no will, Nathan found himself in a protracted court battle over the disposition of the estate with his two stepchildren, Julian and Charles, whom Amanda bore in her first marriage to Charles Eubanks, a white Civil War veteran. Adhering to the terms of David Dickson’s will, the court awarded the bulk of Amanda’s estate to her children.20
Nathan Toomer was a handsome widower in search of new sources of income as well as a third wife. Both of these needs were met in the person of Nina Pinchback, whom he met in December 1893. They met at her Bacon Street home during a “housewarming reception” hosted by her parents.21 Soon after, Nathan began courting Nina. Three months later on March 24, 1894, they were married by none other than the Reverend Francis J. Grimké, the nephew of the South Carolina abolitionists and suffragettes Angelina Weld and Sarah Moore Grimké, a graduate of Lincoln, Howard, and Princeton universities, co-founder of the American Negro Academy, and the very able and famous pastor of Washington’s 15th Street Presbyterian Church. Grimké was a celebrity himself, as grand and as well known as Pinchback.
Pinchback objected to the marriage volcanically, disapproving of Nathan Toomer for several reasons. First of all, Nathan was twenty-seven years older than Nina (Pinchback himself was only two years older than his son-in-law). Second, he had been previously married. Third, Nathan impressed Pinchback as being “unreliable,”22 perhaps because Nathan engendered a certain disturbing sense of self-recognition of his own adventurous past and temperament. But the Governor was accurate, indeed, prophetic in his identification of this defect in his future son-in-law’s character. Nathan deserted Nina within a year of their marriage. Nevertheless, their only child refused to cast the failed union in a disreputable light: “I have been told and have reason to believe it was a love marriage. This was the one clear affirmation of her [Nina’s] life.”23 Without an income, she was unable to support herself in the home located on Twelfth Street, which her husband had irresponsibly purchased with $12,000 in cash for his bride and infant son. Converting the bridal nest into rental property, Nina was forced to return, most reluctantly, to the Bacon Street home of her parents.
Predictably, the Governor “set conditions for readmitting his wayward daughter and her infant son. The biggest stumbling block was the boy’s name.”24 Intent upon nothing short of patronymic erasure of the errant Nathan Toomer, Pinchback insisted that “if he was to support the baby,” the surname had to be “legally changed to Pinchback and the first name changed to anything else.”25 According to Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge, “Nina rejected that proposed legal action but accepted the family’s informal adaptation. The first name was soon replaced by Eugene, after Eugene Laval, [Toomer’s] godfather…”26 Throughout his life, Toomer’s grandparents addressed him as Eugene Pinchback, while his mother stubbornly addressed him as Eugene Toomer, though she herself had reverted to her family name, Pinchback. Toomer’s playmates on Bacon Street, he writes, called him “Pinchy—short for Pinchback. To them I was a Pinchback. They knew nothing of Toomer.”27 “In my own home there were still other names,” he confides. “Mother called me Booty [after beauty]. Uncle Bis called me Kid. Uncle Walter—Snootz. And grandfather—the little whippersnapper. I was, then, well-supplied.”28
Jean Toomer as a young boy. Undated. Jean Toomer Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke and Rare Book Manuscript Library.
When he made the commitment to become a writer, Toomer gave himself the androgynous name of Jean, which stemmed from his admiration of Romain Rolland’s novel Jean-Christophe.29 During the 1930s and the 1940s, Toomer published under the name of N. J. Toomer, initials for Nathan Jean, for two reasons: first, to distance himself from Cane and the racial identity of its author, since Cane was the work by which he had come to be known as a Negro writer; and second, to mark a rebirth in his life, following his conversion to Quakerism, a rebirth that marked a certain return. By taking the name Nathan Jean, Toomer himself had come full circle, finally rendering futile his family’s efforts to banish the memory of his father, Nathan.
The memory of the father kindled the imagination of the son. For years, Toomer kept a photograph of his father, from which he constructed a rather fanciful portrait of Nathan as a “handsome stirring,” wealthy planter from Georgia.30 And Toomer, in the drafts of an autobiography that he never published, wistfully re-creates the first and only meeting between the two. It is clear that through this anecdote, Toomer sought to recuperate his father from grandfather Pinchback’s relentless traducing. Nathan Toomer returned to Washington in 1900, six years after Toomer’s birth, and during this visit, according to Jean, he materialized before the Bacon Street house, presumably to see his son. Because he refused to pay alimony of $60 per month and the court costs of his divorce from Nina, the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia on January 20, 1899, declared Nathan in contempt. Nathan’s return to Washington, accordingly, carried with it considerable risk; he could have been arrested and jailed.
One afternoon while playing in his front yard, Toomer tells us that he found himself in the arms of a stranger he intuitively recognized as his father: “I do not know how I knew him. But, soon, I was running up the way a bit towards a large man who was holding out his arms to me. He took me in them, raised me and kissed me, and I liked him very much. He said things to me which I didn’t understand, but I knew he was my father and that he was showing how much he loved me and what a fine little man I had grown to be. He raised me high in the air, and then he saw mother come out. He lowered me, pressed a bright silver half-dollar in my hand, kissed me again, and told me to run back to her. He went off.” 31 It was their first and only meeting, and it is clear that Toomer carefully nurtured this memory of his father, which uncannily recalls the first encounter between the mixed-race protagonist and his white
father in James Weldon Johnson’s novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), a novel about passing, itself “passing” as autobiography.32
Though he knew nothing of his father’s marriage to Amanda America Dickson, over time Toomer’s memory of his father acquired a certain luster through his inheritance of artifacts that once belonged to him: “The only worldly possessions that came to me from him were some beautiful large silk handkerchiefs, a set of small diamond shirt studs, and a slender ebony cane with a gold head.”33 While Nathan Toomer never saw his son again, in correspondence between the elder Toomer and an acquaintance, Whitefield McKinlay, of Washington, D.C., between 1898 and 1905, there is evidence of his father’s continued, genuine interest in a son whom he called in his letters to McKinlay the “Little Colonel.”34 Some years later, in the very Sparta, Georgia, that inspired Cane, the “Little Colonel” would encounter someone who had actually known his father—a barber who claimed to have some knowledge of Nathan Toomer. According to Kerman and Eldridge, Toomer asked the barber “whether his father had been regarded by the community as white or ‘colored,’” and the barber “replied that Nathan stayed at the white hotel, did business with white men, and courted a black woman.”35 Like his grandfather and his father, Jean Toomer would live in both the black and the white worlds over the course of his life, and in both worlds the act of naming and self-definition would remain an obsession with him. There is new evidence that, like the nameless protagonist of James Weldon Johnson’s novel, Toomer did in fact pass for white, as many of his black literary contemporaries assumed or believed he did.
Toomer’s uncle, Bismarck Pinchback, also played a profoundly important role in his development. Bismarck was the second of his grandfather’s three sons, along with Pinckney and Walter. It was Uncle Bis who introduced the “Kid,” as he called him, to the world of literature, science, and the life of the mind, gradually inculcating in him a desire to become a writer. Toomer lovingly acknowledged Bismarck’s role in his larger education, recalling how his relationship with his uncle transformed itself into that of master and apprentice: “Then something happened which swiftly transferred my interests from the world of things to the world of ideas and imagination. Uncle Bis and I suddenly discovered each other. He had been there all along, and his sensitivity and affection had drawn me to him…. All at once the veils of familiarity dropped from our eyes and each in his own way beheld the wonder of the other.”36
Bismarck Pinchback, a civil servant, was an avid reader and possessed some literary ambitions of his own. According to Toomer, his uncle was his Virgil, his first nurturing guide to the far shores of the imagination. Toomer vividly recounts his uncle’s evening ritual of reading and writing in bed: “There he would get in bed with a book, cigarettes, and a saucer of sliced peaches prepared with sugar in a special way, and read far into the night. Sometimes he would write, trying his hand at fiction…. This position—my uncle in bed surrounded by the materials of a literary man—was impressed upon me as one of the desirable positions in life.”37 Bismarck was the father figure that neither Nathan nor his grandfather could ever be, and to him Toomer gives all the credit for the life of thought and feeling that he would pursue: “By nature he was far more the artist and thinker than a man of action; and, as far as possible, he evoked the thinker in me.”38 Bismarck Toomer would be the last black man whom Toomer would acknowledge as a shaping influence on the man of letters he would become.
Bismarck introduced Toomer not only to literature but also to physics and to astronomy, especially the earth’s relation to other planets in the universe. “It was all wonderful,” Toomer so fondly remembers. “And, young though I was, I was growing a sense of and forming an attitude towards my and our position on earth and in the universe. I had a new way of seeing things. This was the beginning of my world view. And for this alone I will be forever grateful to my uncle for having taken such interest in me.” Bismarck would read historical works to his nephew, as well as “myths and fables, folk tales, romances and adventures. Often he would phrase the tale in his own words and himself tell it. He liked to do this…. For myself—I eagerly absorbed them. My imagination took flight and I was thrilled to follow it into those worlds of wonder.”39 Bismarck’s gas-light tutorials in the Bacon Street house constituted Toomer’s first meaningful introduction to the wonders of learning. At a time when he perhaps most needed it, Uncle Bismarck functioned as both teacher and mentor to his nephew, and thus provided him with a means by which to apprehend his potential as an intellectual, and more especially as thinker and writer: “He was, in truth, my real teacher. In comparison with him and with what I learned from him, my formal teachers and schooling were as nothing…. I truly learned with and from Bismarck…. Our evenings together were periods of genuine education…. My mind was born and nurtured during those times with him.” 40
As we have seen, Toomer attended the all-black Henry Highland Garnet School (named in honor of the pioneering nineteenth-century black nationalist) for his elementary education, and then the famous Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, previously known as M Street High School, the District’s first public high school for African Americans, named after the famous black poet, from which he graduated in 1914. Dunbar High School was more like a black private school, an Exeter or Andover for African Americans, than a normal public school. Its teachers and students, incredibly, included several members of the Negro intellectual elite, the group that W. E. B. Du Bois would call “the talented tenth,” the “college-bred Negro.” Among its stellar alumni were the poet Sterling A. Brown, the feminist Nannie Helen Burroughs, the physician Charles R. Drew, and the lawyer and civil rights advocate Charles Hamilton Houston. (Both Brown and Houston would take advanced degrees from Harvard.) Dunbar High School’s distinguished faculty included many Ph.D.’s, such as the sociologist Kelly Miller and the Harvard-trained historian, Carter G. Woodson, along with the woman’s rights activist Mary Church Terrell, poet Angelina Weld Grimké (the niece of Reverend Francis J. Grimké, who had married Toomer’s parents), and Anna Julia Cooper, Toomer’s Latin teacher, the first African American to earn a Ph.D. at the Sorbonne. Scholars who should have been professors in the Ivy League found their best job opportunities at this public high school.
Despite these extraordinarily well-trained teachers, however, Toomer’s education at school was apparently not nearly as fulfilling as those evenings spent with his beloved Uncle Bismarck, when he was the center of attention and Bismarck’s mesmerizing pedagogical methods opened his nephew’s mind to facts and mysteries at a pace that suited him best. Toomer found in Bismarck a badly needed father figure, of course; but he also had learning difficulties that even a school as sophisticated as Dunbar would have been ill-prepared to meet: “I had difficulty in learning to read. For some reason or other, try as hard as I would I couldn’t get on the inside of the thing: the letters and characters obstinately withheld their sense from me, and the lines of words behind which meaning lurked were like closed doors which stubbornly refused me entrance. I gazed with hopeless amazement at the older children, the teacher, the grownup members of my family who read so easily and seemed to think nothing of it.” 41 Whether Toomer was dyslexic or merely a slow reader it is difficult to know, but in due course he overcame this frustration with deciphering the written word: “In time, however, reading had become just an ordinary thing which I was compelled to continue. I found but little to attract me in the various school readers. Some of the stories I liked, but they were not half as wonderful as those told me by Bismarck, and moreover, whatever pleasure or interest they may have had for me was spoiled when they were put through the mill of classroom recitations.” 42
Toomer, like many people with learning disabilities embarrassed by their inability to learn at a pace with other students, created diversions in school: “I was the class-room cut up,” he recalls, “and the teacher’s problem.”43 Kerman and Eldridge speculate that Toomer’s disruptive classroom behavior may have had its roots in h
is resentment at being separated from his white friends on Bacon Street and the shock of attending a black school: “Surely resentment at being arbitrarily shut out of his group, as well as the inevitable lack of resources at a black school in Washington at the height of the Jim Crow era, would have affected what was offered to him and how Jean would accept it.”44 Though highly unlikely, as we shall see, these factors could possibly explain why the “little whippersnapper,” as his grandfather called him, was uncomfortable at the Garnet School, and necessarily at odds with its pedagogy: “I resented and resisted it. I had an almost constant feeling that I was being maltreated.”45 Nonetheless, as something of a self-consciously privileged child—a child with an almost mythic grandfather and an absent father whom he would seek to transform into a myth—living in a community in which light skin color could signify upper-class status, Toomer was able to use his class status to his advantage in the classroom: “At the same time, I had a lot of fun in school. Some of this fun was natural to the gay spirit of childhood. Some sprang from an instinctive resistance to authority…. I felt somewhat privileged and immune owing to grandfather’s position and influence…”46