by Jean Toomer
Like his contemporaries in the broad current of American modernism, Toomer was searching for—and ironically would discover in Sparta, Georgia, of all places—a “useable past,” to summon a phrase much in circulation at the time and attributed to the critic Van Wyck Brooks (a classmate of Alain Locke at Harvard), which would give shape and heft to his art, but also allow him further to define his racial identity. As he observed in a letter to Sherwood Anderson, whose novel Winesburg, Ohio left its imprint upon Cane: “My seed was planted in the cane—and cotton-fields, and in the souls of the black and white people in the small southern town. My seed was planted in myself down there.”109 The image of the “seed” that Toomer uses to dramatic effect in his letter to Anderson would function as one of the unifying, fecund conceits in his poem “Song of the Son,” in which he celebrates the ancestral past and cultural landscape of Sparta, the fictional community of Sempter in Cane.
In the same letter to Anderson, who asked Toomer’s permission to write the introduction to Cane, Toomer elaborated upon the deep impact that the land, people, and music of Sparta had upon his sensibility and identity: “Here were cabins. Here Negroes and their singing. I had never heard the spirituals and work songs. They were like a part of me. At times, I identified with my whole sense so intensely that I lost my own identity.”110.Or, perhaps, we might say that here Toomer found his identity, if not his racial or cultural identity, then most certainly his identity as a creative writer, as the first American modernist writer to represent the complex culture of race in America in such a richly resonant and intricate manner. And because of this, Toomer’s book stands as one of the truly great works of American modernism.
Toomer arrived in the South during a period of profound transformation. He witnessed firsthand the ebb and flow of the Great Migration. Beginning in the 1890s and then picking up the pace in 1915, African Americans were leaving rural communities like Sparta for the urban centers of the South, first, and then the North, in search of expanding industrial economic opportunities, and a less repressive racial climate. As they left the southern agrarian way of life for modernity in the cities, some also sought to distance themselves from their slave past and its cultural traditions, which they regarded with a mixture of contempt, shame, and obsolescence. Regarding the “folk-songs and spirituals,” Toomer lamented, “I learned that the Negroes of the town [Sparta] objected to them. They called them ‘shouting.’ They had victrolas and player-pianos. So, 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—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 so tragic.”111
The poignancy of the passing of an era and the folk culture that defined it is a central theme of Cane. The speaker of “Song of the Son” exquisitely expresses this fateful sense of timing: “O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree, / So scant of grass, so profligate of pines, / Now just before an epoch’s sun declines / Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee….”112 In a subsequent line, the speaker explains why he has returned to the land of his ancestors: “To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone….” 113 This was Toomer’s own purpose, too, in writing Cane, to bear witness to the passing of an epoch: “And this was the feeling I put into Cane. Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end. And why no one has seen and felt that, why people have expected me to write a second and a third and a fourth book like Cane, is one of the queer misunderstandings of my life.”114 It is difficult to imagine that Toomer could be unaware that this urging that he write “a second and a third and a fourth book like Cane” stemmed both from that book’s majesty and power and from his repeated failure to create anything that remotely approached it in sophistication throughout the remainder of his life, as he fruitlessly sought to find a language to express what being “neither white nor black” actually meant, without the soul-base of region that the deep black South had provided him in Cane.
At the end of his appointment in Sparta, Toomer wrote that on “the train coming north I began to write the things that later appeared in that book [Cane].”115 As we have mentioned, he completed the first draft of “Kabnis,” the dramatic piece that composes the third section of Cane, in December 1921 in the last weeks of Pinchback’s life. Toomer then wrote “Fern,” which according to Kerman and Eldridge, would be published “almost without revision.”116 By April 1922 he had composed the parts of Cane in which Georgia is predominant. Having written so much, Toomer realized he had much more to write: “But I had not enough for a book. I had at most a hundred typed pages. These were about Georgia. It seemed that I had said all I had to say about it. So what, then? I’d fill out. The middle section of Cane was thus manufactured.”117
The middle section of Cane began with “Bona and Paul,” the story Toomer wrote in 1918 during his second stay in Chicago. He wrote many of the other stories and poems in this section throughout the summer of 1922. In July 1922, Toomer wrote to Waldo Frank and John McClure, editor of the New Orleans–based journal Double Dealer, to share with them his vision of the content and organization of Cane. Even at this early date, he imagined a book with a three-part structure. Toomer wrote that Part 1 would consist of all of the prose works in which Georgia is the setting; this first section he called “Cane Stalks and Choruses.” Part 2 would consist of his poems, and at the time was entitled “Leaves and Syrup Songs.” The third and final section would be prose works that now form the second section of Cane, and this section he entitled “Leaf Traceries in Washington.”118Toomer was eager to assemble the various parts of his book into a unified whole for, as he declared to Frank and McClure, the “concentrated volume will do a good deal more than isolated pieces possibly could.”119
Toomer’s outline constituted a change of strategy. In the spring of 1922, he had sought help with publication of his work from two black writers: Alain Locke, professor of philosophy at Howard, and Claude McKay, the Jamaican immigrant poet who would be cast by Locke as a rising star, along with Toomer, among the younger generation of writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Locke had enormous influence within the black cultural world, and McKay was the associate editor of the white, socialist periodical, the Liberator.120 Toomer wrote to them seeking their assistance in publishing the stories and poems that would eventually be published in Cane. As a result, Toomer’s first and second appearances in print were in a black publication; with Locke’s aid, “Song of the Son” was published in April 1922, in Crisis, the national monthly magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, edited by Du Bois. This was followed by the publication of the poem “Banking Coal” in the June issue of Crisis.
The outcome of Toomer’s efforts to promote his work with McKay yielded slightly more in the way of results. McKay accepted “Carma,” “Reapers,” and “Becky” and published these in the September and October issues of the Liberator. Toomer enjoyed similar good fortune with other magazines. By the end of 1922, his growing list of publications included “Storm Ending,” “Calling Jesus,” and “Harvest Song” in Double Dealer; “Face,” “Portrait in Georgia,” and “Conversion” in Modern Review; and “Seventh Street” in Broom. In addition to appealing to Locke for guidance in publishing his writings, Toomer also solicited his assistance in securing a patron to support him as he continued to write Cane. Although a patron never materialized, Locke, who functioned as the midwife to so many young black writers, did exert himself on Toomer’s behalf.121
As his poems and short stories began to appear, Toomer traveled with Frank back to the South, this time to Spartanburg, South Carolina. Toomer suggested the weeklong visit to Frank, in the fall of 1922, as a means of helping him to solidify his vision of the black world so central to Holiday, his novel-in-progress. Traveling as “blood brothers,” the trip strengthened the friendship between the two writers as well as their shared belief that out of the
materials of the black folk experience they were creating a new art that would transform American literature.122 At a crucial point in their developing friendship, Toomer expressed just this view to Frank: “I cannot think of myself as being separated from you in the dual task of creating an American literature, and of developing a public, however large or small, capable of responding to our creations. Those who read and know me, should read and know you.”123
When Toomer returned from Spartanburg, he worked for two weeks as an assistant to the manager of Washington’s all-black Howard Theater. Out of this experience he wrote “Theater” and “Box Seat,”124 and these beautifully written but nevertheless searching critiques of black middle-class Washington would appear in the middle section of Cane. Toomer sent these stories to Frank for his comments. Encouraged by his response, he sent Frank the complete manuscript of Cane in December 1922. He enclosed the now famous, widely quoted letter that reveals the latent design and theme of Cane: “My brother! CANE is on its way to you! For two weeks I have worked steadily at it. The book is done. From three angles, CANE’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. Or, from the North down into the South, and then a return North. From the point of view of the spiritual entity behind the work, the curve really starts with Bona and Paul (awakening), plunges into Kabnis, emerges in Karintha etc. swings upward into Theatre and Boxseat, and ends (pauses) in Harvest Song. Whew!”125 Elated and expectant that the book he had carried so long in his head would soon be in the world because of the support of his best friend, Toomer provided Frank with clues as to the structure of a work that would generate debates among scholars about its formal identity for decades: “You will understand the inscriptions, brother mine: the book to grandma; Kabnis, the spirit and the soil, to you…. Between each of the three sections, a curve. These, to vaguely indicate the design. I’m wide open to you for criticism and suggestion. Just these few lines now…. love Jean.”126
At the height of their friendship and doubtless appreciative of Toomer’s dedication of “Kabnis” to him, Frank shepherded the manuscript to Horace Liveright, the co-founder of Boni and Liveright Publishers along with Albert Boni. On January 2, 1923, Frank sent Toomer a telegram informing him that Liveright had accepted Cane for publication. With Liveright as his publisher, Toomer would make his literary debut in splendid modernist company: just a year before, Liveright had published T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In years to come, they would publish the first books of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Hart Crane, Dorothy Parker, and other bright stars in the firmament of American modernism.
In the months following Frank’s excellent news, Toomer made preparations for his departure from Washington to New York: “I saw that it was very important for me to be in New York.” He would never again live in his native Washington. For the last time, Toomer dutifully made arrangements for the care of his beloved grandmother, who spent her last years with her son Walter and his family. He then boarded a train to New York, and “thus ended the three-year period of death and birth in Washington.” 127 Having left New York in the summer of 1920 as an aspiring, unpublished writer, Toomer returned to the nation’s literary capital in the summer of 1923 as a published, respected, and admired author through the sheer force of “will and sweat,” and through the support of McKay and especially Locke, though chiefly through the influence, counsel, and friendship of Frank.
In his recollection of this crucial period in his development as an artist, Toomer conveyed the excitement of his encounters with the major figures of white American modernism that summer: “In New York, I stepped into the literary world. Frank, Gorham Munson, Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, Matthew Josephson, Mal-com Cowley, Paul Rosenfield, Van Wyck Brooks, Robert Littell— Broom, the Dial, the New Republic and many more. I lived on Gay Street and entered into the swing of it. It was an extraordinary summer…. I met and talked with Alfred Stieglitz and saw his photographs. I was invited here and there.”128 In this recollection, Toomer is describing his pleasure at being introduced into a world populated by the key writers of the Lost Generation and the small, but influential magazines through which they shaped the mainstream of American modernism.
The sometimes overlapping, sometimes separate, other world of writers who contributed to the shape and direction of Afro-American modernism included most influentially Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Sterling A. Brown, among two dozen others, coalescing around the slight, though formidable figure of Locke in his pied-à-terre in Harlem. But Toomer is largely silent about his encounters with them. These writers published in two magazines primarily: Opportunity, the monthly magazine of the Urban League, edited by the enterprising sociologist, Charles S. Johnson, who along with Locke, was one of the two midwives of the Harlem Renaissance; and in Du Bois’s Crisis. Locke’s The New Negro anthology, as we have seen, gave the nascent movement a form and a manifesto. A few other periodicals, such as Fire, the short-lived magazine founded by Hughes, Hurston, and Wallace Thurman, also played a role in shaping the course of the Renaissance, but none had the canonical presence of Crisis and Opportunity.
Perhaps a sign of Toomer’s evolving thoughts about how he would identify himself racially, when he arrived in New York in that heady summer of 1923, is the fact that he did not seek lodging in Harlem but rather in Greenwich Village, sharing an apartment on Grove Street with Gorham Munson after the departure of his roommate Hart Crane. Munson’s hospitality prepared the ground for a lifelong friendship with Toomer. Sometime later, he moved to the black section of the Village, renting a “small row-house apartment on Gay Street…distinctive then as being a predominantly black settlement in an otherwise white part of town.” According to his biographers, “Toomer spent his days in the backyard reading or in the apartment writing. During that summer he was trying to establish himself as a free-lance writer for various New York journals and little magazines.”129 At the end of that summer, Toomer’s long-cherished dream of publishing a book—“I wanted a published book as I wanted nothing else”—became a reality. Liveright brought out Cane in September 1923.130 Much to Toomer’s delight, the reviews were uniformly positive. High praise came from the members of the two literary worlds who regarded him as a member. Comparing Toomer’s debut work with the Frank’s fiction, Robert Littell offered this assessment of Cane in the New Republic: “Toomer’s view is unfamiliar and bafflingly subterranean, the vision of a poet far more than the account of things seen by a novelist—lyric, symbolic, oblique, seldom actual.” 131 Allen Tate, a member of the Fugitive Poets, also praised Cane in the pages of Nashville’s Tennessean. Countee Cullen sent Toomer a congratulatory note in which he described Cane as a “classical portrayal of things as they are.”132 A month after the publication of Cane, the critic Edward O’Brien wrote from England requesting permission to reprint “Blood-Burning Moon” in the anthology The Best Short Stories of 1923.133Du Bois and Locke expressed their admiration for Toomer’s achievement in an essay entitled “The Younger Literary Movement” in 1924 in Crisis. The influential African American critic William Stanley Braithwaite offered high praise of Cane in the pages of The New Negro: “Cane is a book of gold and bronze, of dusk and fame, of ecstasy and pain, and Jean Toomer is a bright morning star of a new day of the race in literature.” 134 Two years later in the summer of 1927, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston paid homage to Toomer’s artistic achievement by visiting Sparta, the inspiration for Cane, on their return North from a road trip through the South.135
Reflecting upon Cane’s reception and impact almost forty years after its publication, Arna Bontemps, a member of the younger generation of writers of the Harlem Renaissance, said this of Toomer’s shaping influence on the forms his black contemporaries and literary heirs would craft: “Cane’s influence was by no means limited to the joyous band that included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Eric Walrond, Zora Neale
Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Rudolph Fisher and their contemporaries of the Twenties. Subsequent writing by Negroes in the United States, as well as in the West Indies and Africa, has continued to reflect its mood and often its method and, one feels, it has also influenced the writing about Negroes by others. Certainly, no earlier volume of poetry or fiction or both had come close to expressing the ethos of the Negro in the Southern setting as Cane did.”136 While acknowledging his broad influence, Darwin T. Turner maintained that Toomer’s signal contribution to American letters was to reverse years of stereotypical portrayals of rural, southern black language and life: “No matter how he influenced others, it cannot be denied that Jean Toomer was the first writer of the twenties to delineate southern black peasant life perceptively.”137
Toomer’s deft portrayal of southern black peasantry, his sensitive portrayal of black women, his power as a lyric poet, the manner in which he combined philosophy with fiction, and his exploration of the relationship between region and race directly influenced the shape of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and through her, the theme of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. What’s more, Cane has profoundly influenced both the fictions and the poetry of key African American writers who came of age since its republication in the late 1960s, including Alice Walker, Michael S. Harper, Rita Dove, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, Elizabeth Alexander, and Natasha Trethewey. Though Ernest J. Gaines discovered Cane after he had developed his particular style of writing, he regards Toomer as a fellow artist with whom he shares a commitment to portray realistically the experiences of southern black farmers. Despite his desire to fee it, Toomer’s literary legacy survives primarily because of Cane’s canonization in the black literary tradition.