by Jean Toomer
Toomer’s matriculation at Garnet Elementary School and Dunbar High School afforded him the opportunity to acquire a very special education in what James Weldon Johnson, describing his years at Atlanta University (both the preparatory school and the university), termed the “arcana of race.”47 For Johnson, who would later correspond with Toomer regarding the possibility of the inclusion of some of his poems in a revised edition of his The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922, 1931), “the initiation into the arcana of race” meant “preparation to meet the tasks and exigencies of life as a Negro, a realization of the peculiar responsibilities due to my own racial group, and a comprehension of the application of American democracy to Negro citizens.”48 Toomer’s initiation into the arcana of race would mean something quite different altogether. As he claims in his autobiography, he “formed and formulated” his racial position in the summer of 1914 just before he left Washington to matriculate at the University of Wisconsin.49 He took this important step toward self-definition because he was keenly aware of his hybrid racial background, the racial ambiguity of his physical appearance, the questions and stares it elicited, the fact that he had lived in both the white and black worlds, and that he could, if he chose, continue to do so, or even choose one over the other.
When Toomer attended the Garnet School, he was living in the home of his grandparents, which was located on Bacon Street in a neighborhood that at the time was composed of wealthy whites. During these years between 1894 and 1906, Toomer’s neighbors and playmates were white, but his classmates at Garnet School were all black. In 1906, Toomer’s mother, Nina Pinchback, remarried and moved to New York with her son and second husband, Archibald Combes, a traveling salesman for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. During this second and relatively brief marriage, Toomer lived and attended schools for three years in the white neighborhoods in Brooklyn and also in New Rochelle. After his mother’s tragic, apparently avoidable death by appendicitis in the summer of 1909, Toomer returned to Washington, D.C. Here, he lived with his Uncle Bismarck and his family on Florida Avenue in a black neighborhood. A year later in 1910 he enrolled at Dunbar High School. Now, for the second time in his life, Toomer found himself attending school in what he described as “the colored world.”50 But in fact, all of Toomer’s primary and secondary education, except for the three years in New York, took place in “the colored world,” under black teachers, surrounded by all-black classmates, in an all-black cultural environment. For Toomer, however, “the initiation into the arcana of race” did not mean preparation for “life as a Negro” and leadership among the race as it would be for Johnson and other members of Du Bois’s talented tenth. Rather, Toomer would have us believe that this initiation would be a means of acquiring an understanding of social relations and the operations of power as a member of what he termed “an aristocracy—such as never existed before and perhaps never will exist again in America—midway between the white and Negro worlds.”51
But Toomer and his family did not live “midway” between these two worlds; rather, they lived, to a greater or lesser degree, as light-skinned black people who, for a time, managed to defy the color line and live in white residential neighborhoods. The Pinchbacks were undoubtedly aristocrats within the black world, but more likely were visitors or voyeurs or interlopers within the white world. The fact that Toomer attended the Garnet School even when his family lived in a white neighborhood underscores how rigid racial boundaries, in fact, were in Washington. By no stretch of the imagination, despite Toomer’s claims to the contrary, did this class of Negroes enjoy equal status with their white class peers, especially in racially stratified Washington, D.C., at the beginning of the twentieth century. Toomer, clearly, is asserting this claim—just as he had done about his grandfather passing as a Negro—to lay the autobiographical and sociological groundwork for his self-fashioning as a pioneering member of a new elite, an upper class of mixed-race individuals who would be points of mediation between white Americans and black Americans.
From 1909 to 1914, Toomer once again was a member of Washington’s fabled colored aristocracy, a world he would analyze and critique to great effect. Toomer is at pains to assure us that the transition into this world involved no hardship for him: “It was not difficult to do so. I accepted this as readily as I had accepted living in Brooklyn and New Rochelle.”52 Writing in an elegiac mode, Toomer reconstructs the character of the world he entered when he took up residence with his Uncle Bismarck after returning from New York, along the way arguing implausibly that this class of Negroes just “happened” arbitrarily to be defined as Negroes, as if the history of their families’ racial identification and the history of their participation in Negro culture had had no relevance on the shaping of their identities: “In the Washington of those days—and those days have gone now—there was a flowering of a natural but transient aristocracy, thrown up by the, for them, creative conditions of the post-war period. These people, whose racial strains were mixed and for the most part unknown, happened to find themselves in the colored group. They had a personal refinement, a certain inward culture and beauty, a warmth of feeling such as I have seldom encountered elsewhere and again…. All were comfortably fixed financially, and they had a social life that satisfied them…. The children of these families became my friends.”53
Because of the similarities in class, the transition from the white world into the colored world was, Toomer is arguing, a seamless one, in spite of the fact that, he would have us believe, he had effectively been “white” in New York and now was “black” in Washington. It is important to emphasize that Toomer is postulating an almost mythic class and racial formation, a “people, whose racial strains were mixed and for the most part unknown, and who happened to find themselves in the colored group,” who have, alas, disappeared (“those days are gone now”). He writes here of a racially and culturally distinct group within the “colored group,” “an aristocracy…midway between the white and Negro worlds,”54 which enjoyed considerable economic privilege, a class of which he and his family were always a part. Toomer’s depiction of this class-within-a-class, as it were, a point of mediation between black and white, is another component in his rhetorical strategy of declaring racial independence as a member of the vanguard of a raceless tertium quid.
In Washington, Toomer most certainly lived among the Negro elite, but it was disingenuous of him to suggest that its members were racially or culturally indeterminate; they were legally defined as Negroes, whether they liked it or not. And this would have been especially the case at the turn of the century following the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling of 1896, which declared “separate but equal” as the law of the land, the ruling itself a desperate attempt to police the boundaries that interracial sexual liaisons had hopelessly blurred. Toomer never tells us, if we but pause to think about it, why his family, living effortlessly as “white” in New York, found itself sending its child to an all-black school in Washington. Surely, no white family would have done that out of choice. But Toomer does this to establish the experiential justification for his subsequent decision to define himself as an “American.”
Toomer assures us that he identified implicitly with this new way of life, and certainly his earlier life on Bacon Street had prepared him for it: “They were my kind, as much as children of my early Washington years had been.”55 Toomer emphasizes their social, racial, and cultural uniqueness: “These youths had their round of activity, parties, interests—and were self-sufficient. In their world they were not called colored by each other. They seldom or never came in contact with members of the white group in any way that would make them racially self-conscious.”56 Occupying this liminal world of a mulatto elite, Toomer is arguing, it is not difficult to understand how he could define himself as “neither white nor black.”57
And yet it is also difficult to understand how Toomer could even suggest that within this period of American racial history that any white American at the time would label him as
anything other than black. Anticipating the curiosity, confusion, and misunderstanding that his body, speech, and appearance would engender, and no doubt seeking to escape the boundaries imposed upon persons of African descent, Toomer tells us he formed his own “racial position” before leaving what he would have us believe was a “special” race world of Washington, D.C., to attend college in 1914. If so, he became one of the earliest proponents of the theory that “race” was socially constructed, even if his motives for doing so were quite mixed. Moreover, he would spend the rest of his life, following the publication of Cane, socially constructing his racial indeterminacy, and simultaneously deconstructing his Negro ancestry.
“By hearsay,” writes Toomer, echoing W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous description, in The Souls of Black Folk, of his own ancestry, “there were in my heredity the following strains: Scotch, Welsh, German, English, French, Dutch, Spanish, with some dark blood. [Let us] assume the dark blood was Negro—or let’s be generous and assume that it was both Negro and Indian. I personally can readily assume this because I cannot feel with certain of my countrymen that all of the others are all right but that Negro is not. Blood is blood…. My body is my body, with an already given and definite racial composition.” 58 After identifying the various racial “strains” in his ethnic heredity, Toomer raises the vital question of genetic ancestry, of race: “Of what race am I? To this question there can be but one true answer—I am of the human race….” Rejecting the one-drop rule (one drop of Negro blood doth forever a Negro make) as well as the reigning preoccupation with racial purity that governed conceptions of race in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, Toomer claimed a social identity that would inevitably place him at odds with the American mainstream and, in retrospect, make him a pioneering theorist of hybridity, perhaps the first in the African American tradition. Nevertheless, he remained indifferent to the consequences of this position, and quite determined to maintain and justify it, returning to the subject seemingly endlessly in his autobiographical writings. Adopting an unorthodox, progressive, and certainly idealistic position on race that would be the source of some suffering even now in the twenty-first century, he defined himself as an “American, neither black nor white, rejecting these divisions, accepting all people as people.”59
Toomer’s “racial position” anticipates by eleven years a complementary theory of race conceptualized by the Mexican writer and political leader Jose Vasconcelos in La raza cosmica (The Cosmic Race), published in 1925. In this treatise, Vasconcelos defines the Mexican people as a new race composed of all the races of the world. The central claim of La raza cosmica is that “the various races of the earth tend to intermix at a gradually increasing pace, and eventually will give rise to a new human type, composed of selections from each of the races already in existence.” 60 According to Vasconcelos, the “new human type” or alternately “the fifth universal race,” the “synthetic race,” “the definitive race,” or the “cosmic race” has its origins in the pre-Mayan legendary civilization of Atlantis.61
In prose that is marked by a mixture of philosophy, poetry, and mysticism, Vasconcelos asserts that this new cosmic race will be “made up of the genius and the blood of all peoples and, for that reason, more capable of true brotherhood and of a truly universal vision.”62 It will emerge from the continent of South America, thus fulfilling, according to Vasconcelos, the historic destiny of Latin American people or the “Hispanic race” to bring the races of the world to an advanced state of spiritual development.63 Based in the “Amazon region,” Vasconcelos calls the capital of this new empire of the spirit “Universopolis,” which will rise on the banks of the Amazon River.64 One of the “fundamental dogmas of the fifth race” is love as it is expressed within the framework of Christianity which, according to Vasconcelos, “frees and engenders life, because it contains universal, not national, revelation.”65 Writing as an idealist and a visionary, Vasconcelos argues that we “have all the races and all the aptitudes. The only thing lacking is for true love to organize and set in march the law of History.”66 Love, then, is the expanding floor upon which will rise “a new race fashioned out of the treasures of all the previous ones: The final race, the cosmic race.”67
While there is no concrete evidence that Toomer was familiar with the writings of Vasconcelos, there are many affinities between their respective views on race.68 But it is quite possible that Toomer knew Vasconcelos’s work, given its wide popularity and given Toomer’s sojourns in New Mexico. Toomer and Vasconcelos emerge as prophets of a new order in which the mixed-race person is a pivotal figure, a metaphor or harbinger of a hybrid culture and a fusion of many ethnic and genetic strands. The claims of both are based upon an appeal to the universal, the positive values associated with hybridity and thus a rejection of racial purity, and the belief that racial mixture or mestizaje possesses the potential to unify humankind. For Toomer and Vasconcelos, the mixed-race person or the mulatto emerges as a symbol of “cosmic” possibility, and the spiritual resolution of all human conflict rather than as a symbol of human conflict and degeneracy. Gilberto Freye would develop a related theory of “racial democracy” as a hallmark of Brazilian culture in his classic work, Casa-Grande e Senzaca,69 published in 1933. Ferdinand Ortiz would elaborate a similar theory for Cuban culture a few years later in his book, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, published in 1940.70 Vasconcelos’s theory (either directly, or through Toomer) influenced Zora Neale Hurston as well. In “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston writes, “At certain times, I am no race, I am me…. The cosmic Zora emerges.”71
Toomer arrived at his definition of his own race when most Americans implicitly accepted a “scientific” or biological definition of race, and believed that the world was composed of several distinct racial groups, each with its own history, each with its own place in a racial hierarchy, each with its own special contribution to make to world civilization. W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay, “The Conservation of Races” (1896), theorizes race as a biological or natural concept, but rejects a racial hierarchy, assigning to the Negro a positive value and function among the world’s races: “We are that people whose subtle sense of song has given America its only American music, its only American fairy tales, its only touch of pathos and humor amid its mad money-getting plutocracy.”72 He would later dismiss “The Conservation of Races” as an instance of “youthful effusion.”73 In Dusk of Dawn (1940), Du Bois revisited the question of race, abandoning the biological or scientific concept of race: “Perhaps it is wrong to speak of it at all as ‘a concept’ rather than as a group of contradictory forces, facts and tendencies.”74 In this final definition, Du Bois theorized race as a social construct. In doing so, he prepared the ground for a subsequent generation of scholars—Kwame Anthony Appiah, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Patricia Williams—who would build upon Du Bois’s insight, and theorize race as a social construction or floating signifier. In Du Bois’s writing, we witness the evolution of race from a biological concept to a discursive concept. But unlike Toomer, Du Bois heartily embraced a Negro social and cultural identity, never using its constructed nature as an excuse to “transcend” it; rather to de-biologize or de-essentialize it.
Toomer observed that “it is even more difficult to determine the nature of a man; so most of us are even more content to have a label for him.”75 In an era when the views of such white supremacists as Lothrop Stoddard and Earnest Cox were in the ascendancy and referenced even in such fictional works as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Toomer proclaimed that in “my body were many bloods, some dark blood, all blended in the fire of six or more generations. I was, then, either a new type of man or the very oldest. In any case I was inescapably myself…. As for myself, I would live my life as far as possible on the basis of what was true for me.” 76 While Toomer’s metaphor of “bloods” recalls a biological conception of race, the direction of his thinking is toward a discursive concept of
race. Toomer developed the following plan for its use in the protean, contested world of social relations: “To my real friends of both groups, I would, at the right time, voluntarily define my position. As for people at large, naturally I would go my way and say nothing unless the question was raised. If raised, I would meet it squarely, going into as much detail as seemed desirable for the occasion. Or again, if it was not the person’s business I would either tell him nothing or the first nonsense that came into my head.”77 It would be left to him, not to others, to define and to determine his location in the social world, or so he imagined. Toomer would soon come to realize the limitations of his own power to shape the manner in which he would be perceived and defined by others, notwithstanding the appeal of his person and personality, and his great confidence in his ability to explain and to rationalize himself.
After graduating from Dunbar High School in January 1914, Toomer matriculated at six colleges and universities between 1914 and 1918, but failed to earn a degree. He attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the Massachusetts College of Agriculture to pursue his interests in scientific agriculture. No longer interested in becoming a farmer, he pursued his new passion for exercise and bodybuilding at the American College of Physical Training in Chicago in January 1916. Toomer remained in Chicago through the fall and enrolled in courses that introduced him to atheism and socialism at the University of Chicago. In the spring of 1917 he decided to travel to New York, and there enrolled in summer school at New York University and the City College of New York where, respectively, he took a course in sociology and history. “Opposed to war but attracted to soldiering,” wrote Kerman and Eldridge, Toomer volunteered for the army, but he was “classified as physically unfit ‘because of bad eyes and a hernia gotten in a basketball game.’”78 As we reveal in “Jean Toomer’s Racial Self-Identifcation,” Toomer registered as a Negro.