Jean Toomer and the Politics and Poetics of National Identity
Contributions in Black Studies
A Journal of African and Afro-American Studies
Volume 7, Number 1 (1985-01-01)
Article 3
24 pages
Onita Estes-Hicks
State University of New York, Old Westbury
Jean Toomer’s place in thew world of letters rests on Cane, the author’s profound statement on the quest for African-American identity. Published in 1923, Cane was composed during a year of intense creativity which followed Toomer’s three-month stay in Sparta, Georgia in 1921, during which time he served as Acting Principal in an industrial and agricultural school. As had happened to Du Bois in rural Tennessee, in backwards, poverty-ridden, oppressive Georgia, Toomer touched base with the deep roots of Black culture under conditions which recalled the slave past. The writer celebrated that return to the foundations of Black life in Cane, charting his own adventures on southern soil, contrasting the conditions of Blacks in the North, and positing cultural/geographical tradeoffs in search of a whole, healthy Black identity. Compressed yet exhaustive, Cane would be the author’s main creative statement on African American identity. That splendid work justly merits the acclaim it received at the time of its publication and the place it now occupies in the literary canon. An experimenter in life and in letters, Cane’s author realized that Cane need not and could not be duplicated; he next focused his energies on mastering the poetics of national identity, a project which had captivated his imagination during his apprentice years. Little attention has been given to this aspect of Jean Toomer’s literary and personal life, although the author’s earliest excursions into writing centered on the challenges of national identity or what he called “the new world soul.” Additionally, Toomer intermittently wrestled with the composition of a work on national identity for over fifteen years, ultimately achieving a sterling measure of success in his magnum opus, “Blue Meridian,” published in 1936.
Even before he began composing Cane, the Washingtonian explored the poetics of national identity in a poem entitled “The First American.” This Whitmanesque fragment assayed the possibility and process of constructing an inclusive national character by merging the best racial characteristics of America’s three racial groupings-Black, Red, White. This achievement would eventuate in “The First American”-a being free of the conditions of class and color, moving American nationality from theory to fact, from ideality to actuality.
Toomer’s deep interest in the question of national identity stemmed not only from his own multi-racial heritage, but also from his early life in turn-of-the century Washington, D.C., where he was reared among a significant mulatto population, some of whom-such as the Grimkes-maintained family ties across the color line. Toomer’s grandfather, Reconstruction politician, P. B. S. Pinchback, was himself the offspring of a long and stable Black-White relationship between a wealthy southern planter, Major William Pinchback, and his emancipated slave-mistress, Eliza Benton Stewart, a woman of Indian, Caucasian, and African descent. The Pinchbacks maintained ties for over eighteen years in two different states. They had eight children, two of whom, P. B. S. Pinchback and Napoleon, were sent by the father to Gilmore Academy, a private school in Cincinnati, famed for educating the mixed children of wealthy white men and African-American women. In addition to the Pinchbacks, Jean Toomer’s racial lineage consisted of other Black-White families, a condition which prompted his concern with national identity. Caucasian in appearance, Nathan Toomer, the writer’s father, lived on both sides of the color line, while listed alternately as Black and mulatto in census data. Prior to marrying Nina Pinchback, Jean’s mother, Nathan had been married to Amanda Dickson of Augusta, Georgia. The latter was the “natural” daughter of one of the wealthiest white men in the South, David Dickson, who claimed Amanda as his child in a deathbed confession, leaving her the major portion of his considerable wealth. Following the breakup of the Nathan Toomer-Nina Pinchback marriage, Nina’s second husband was Archibald Combes, of New Jersey’s famed and historic mulatto colony, Gouldtown, which had been settled by the descendants of a seventeenth-century African named Gold or Gould and the granddaughter of the Englishman Walt Fenwick, founder of southwestern New Jersey and friend of William Penn. Either by the clerk’s perception or by their own statements, both Archibald and Nina were listed as “white” on their marriage certificate.
Toomer’s complex racial background left him sceptical of racial labels and suspicious of a social system which designated people who were palpably “white” as “black.” Like Richard Wright, who similarly could not understand why a woman of his grandmother’s “white” complexion was labeled “colored,” Toomer early in his life began seeing through the social construction of reality. Race, Toomer was convinced, was a cultural, not a biological issue. Like many light-skinned Washingtonians of his time, Jean Toomer lived on both sides of the color line, as he so chose, exploiting his own biology to subvert the caprices of color. In Washington “functional passing“-to obtain jobs, to attend educational institutions, to secure entrance to entertainment facilities-had been raised to a fine art. Jean knew many Washingtonians who passed during the day to maintain jobs and who rode “uptown to the respite of a Negro home” at the end of the day, the situation faced by Vera, the central character in the author’s short story “Withered Skin of Berries.” Mary Church Terrell, a friend of the Pinchbacks, whose daughters grew up with young Jean, reported that her daughters often utilized their white skin to purchase tickets for their “darker brothers.” Questions about race and nationality never came up at the University of Wisconsin. But before going off to college, the student had prepared himself to adopt the strategy of “functional passing,” a resource which Gunnar Myrdal noted was historically called upon by numerous light-skinned students in pre-integration America to avoid the added tensions of racial problems in university life. In New York in the twenties, Toomer, Gorham Munson recalled, gained luncheon accommodations for Charles Johnson and Alain Locke by a functional pass. Moving easily across the color line, the writer, like Lear and Cordelia, regarded himself as one of “God’s spies,” garnering data on the human condition as race distorted it. Like another famous Shakesperian character, Jean Toomer often felt “what fools these mortals be.” Seeing beyond race, he felt the nation and saw it off balance and off guard and culled his own sense of nation and national identity from hardcore experience…
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