Mixed Race Studies

Jean Toomer: Fugitive

American Literature
Volume 47, Number 1 (March, 1975)
page 84-96

Charles Scruggs, Professor of English
University of Arizona

As a young boy, Jean Toomer attended a dinner party during which someone asked his famous grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback, if he indeed had “colored” blood. The light-skinned former lieutenant governor of Louisiana answered enigmatically, “That is what I have claimed.” According to Toomer in his unpublished autobiography, Pinchback never cleared up the matter for his grandson. Toomer insisted that he never knew for sure whether or not he was part Negro.

If Toomer’s racial identity was a puzzle to himself, his attitudes toward himself as Negro have also puzzled his critics. Before the publication of Cane (1923), he seemed to advertise his dark blood. After 1923 he ambiguously referred to himself as “an American, simply an American”; and around 1930 he refused to be included in several Negro anthologies. In the same year he let it be known that he was actually “white,” blaming the confusion on Waldo Frank, who had given the impression in his introduction to Cane that Toomer was a Negro. What mystifies everyone, as Darwin Turner pointed out, is why in the summer of 1923 Toomer rejected “a racial identification which a few months earlier he had accepted as a matter of slight importance.”

Explanations have been offered for Toomer’s apparent apostasy…

Read or purchase the article here.

An Overview of the Event: Jean Toomer and Politics at the 2012 MLA

Gino Michael Pellegrini: Education, Amalgamation, Race, Class & Solidarity
2012-01-12

Gino Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

This is my general overview of the “Jean Toomer and Politics” special session roundtable at the 2012 MLA Annual Convention. First, I want to thank Professors Barbara Foley, Charles Scruggs, and Belinda Wheeler for their excellent presentations, and a special thanks to Professor George Hutchinson for starting the Q & A. I am very much looking forward to continuing this conversation!

In her presentation, Belinda Wheeler focused on the “documents” (census, marriage, and draft) that Byrd and Gates include in the second Norton Critical Edition of Cane to support their claim that Toomer was a Negro who passed as white. Wheeler discussed how the documents, when examined carefully and in aggregate, weaken their claim. The documents show (and this is a point that Barbara Foley also made) that Toomer sometimes identified as black and sometimes as white at different junctures in his life, and this assumes that it was Toomer who actually authored the documents. In countering their claim, Wheeler also drew upon interviews that she had conducted with Susan Sandberg, the daughter of Marjorie Content, Toomer’s second wife, as well as with Jill Quasha, a friend of Sandberg and Content who knew the family well and authored a book on Content’s photography. Toomer was married to Content from 1934 until his death in 1967, and Wheeler’s important bibliographic research sheds light on how Toomer, post-Cane, identified and lived. Her interviews suggest that Toomer did not waver from his basic position that he was an American, neither black nor white, and that he tried to live his life free from the influence of racial categories and standards…

Read the entire overview here.

Jean Toomer and Politics (Session 465)

Modern Language Association
127th MLA Annual Convention
2012-01-05 through 2012-01-08
Washington State Convention Center
Seattle, Washington

A Special Session
Saturday, 2012-01-07, 12:00-13:15 PST (Local Time)
Room 6A, WSCC

Presiding:

Gino Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

Speakers:

Barbara Clare Foley, Professor of English and American Studies
Rutgers University, Newark

Gino Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

Charles Scruggs, Professor of English
University of Arizona

Belinda Wheeler, Assistant Professor of English
Paine  College, Augusta, Georgia

This roundtable will focus on the 2011 edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane, edited by Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and in particular on the editors’ provocative new thesis that Toomer was a Negro who chose to pass for white. Presenters will confront, examine, and discuss Byrd and Gates’s thesis.

For more information, click here.