SOURCE: “Jean Toomer,” in Down Home: Origins of the Afro-American Short Story, Columbia University Press, 1988, pp. 222–28.

[In the following excerpt, Bone discusses “Fern,” “Theater,” and “Bona and Paul” as prime examples of Toomer's narrative technique.]

The genre of Cane has been the subject of considerable speculation and debate. Some critics have viewed the book as an experimental novel; others as a miscellany, composed of poetic, dramatic, and narrative elements; still others as a work sui generis, which deliberately violates the standard categories. The problem is complicated by the fact that parts of Cane were published independently as poems, sketches, and stories.¹ This would suggest that Toomer thought of them as separate entities, whatever their subsequent function in the overall design. Without attempting to resolve the larger issue, let us reduce the book to its constituent parts, in order to determine which may be legitimately classified as short stories.

Of the twenty-nine units of which Cane is composed, fifteen are plainly poems, written for the most part in free verse. “Kabnis” is a free-form play, complete with stage directions. Six of the less substantial pieces are sketches, or vignettes, or prose poems, too slender to afford much narrative development.² The seven that remain may reasonably be regarded as short stories.³ Of these seven stories, we have chosen to discuss three: “Fern,” “Theater,” and “Bona and Paul.” They will serve to illustrate the tendency of Toomer's art to move beyond mere surfaces to a realm of transcendent reality.

“Fern,” which first appeared in the Little Review of Autumn 1922, has been as widely anthologized as it has been misconstrued. Restricting their vision to the psychological plane, critics have variously regarded Fern as a victim of sexual repression, a promiscuous, castrating female, and an emblem of the mystery of Negro womanhood. The bafflement of the young narrator, in short, has been shared by most commentators, who have failed to perceive that the story functions primarily on a philosophical or religious plane. The heroine's sexual passivity is evoked merely to accentuate her otherworldly qualities. The story's theme, which may be traced to Vachel Lindsay's poem, “The Congo,” is the spirituality of the Negro race.

Fern spiritualizes everything and everyone with whom she comes in contact. The story opens with the sentence: “Face flowed into her eyes.” The eyes, in Toomer, are windows to the soul, and in Fern's countenance they dominate, and even obliterate, the surrounding flesh. They seem to focus on some vague spot above the horizon, seeking always to transcend, or rise above, the Georgia landscape. The movement of the imagery is upward, and it defines Fern's relation to the world. Her domain is the unseen and intangible: the noumenal world that exists beyond the senses. The men that she encounters, including the narrator, are uplifted and ennobled by the contact, and struggle subsequently to transcend their selfishness.

Fern's spiritual force is redoubled by virtue of her mixed ancestry. The daughter of a Jewish father and a Negro mother, she is the inheritor of two sets of sorrow songs. At his first sight of her, the narrator recalls, “I felt as if I heard a Jewish cantor sing. As if his singing rose above the unheard chorus of a folk-song (28).”⁴ Fernie May Rosen possesses the Jewish genius for suffering. She takes upon herself the agony of others, including the sexual torment of her lovers. She is the eternal scapegoat who must suffer in order that others (specifically the narrator) may be born. That is why, in the minds of the townspeople, she remains a virgin, and why she is associated, in Toomer's iconography, with the Virgin Mary.⁵

Fern embodies not only the Negro of the folksongs, but also of the revival meeting and the emotional church. That is the point of the climactic episode in which the narrator—half curious concerning Fern, and half in love with her—escorts her through a canebrake. Vaguely conscious of her spiritual power, but acting from force of habit, he takes her in his arms. She responds by running off, sinking to her knees, swaying back and forth, and uttering convulsive sounds, “mingled with calls to Christ Jesus.” She thus performs a priestly, if not a sexual office. Her body, although he doesn't recognize the gift, has been offered as the instrument of his salvation.

Fern is a symbol, in short, of the Negro folk-spirit. As such, she is the repository of a doomed spirituality. The quality of soul that she embodies, and whose cultural expression is folksong and revivalist religion, is about to disappear. It will not survive the Great Migration: “Besides, picture if you can, this cream-colored solitary girl sitting at a tenement window and looking down on the indifferent throngs of Harlem (28).” Fern could not exist apart from her pastoral milieu, and yet this rural folk-culture is fading into memory. The elegiac note is unmistakable. It is in the Georgia dusk that Fern weaves her most potent spell. Images of evening suffuse the story, producing that peculiar blend of sadness and tranquillity which is the hallmark of pastoral elegy.

“Theater” was inspired by a two-week stint that Toomer served as assistant manager of the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C. It was long enough to absorb the atmosphere of a Negro vaudeville house and to fashion out of this milieu a complex symbol. In the opening paragraph, the walls of the theater are described as a kind of semipermeable membrane through which a complicated process of osmosis takes place. The “nigger life” of alleys, poolrooms, restaurants, and cabarets nourishes the shows that are presented within these walls, and conversely, the shows exert a shaping influence on the life-style that gave them birth. The theater thus emerges as an emblem of the two-way, reciprocal relationship of life and art.

The walls of the theater press in upon the human world until they become symbolic of the prison of the flesh, from which imagination alone can offer an escape. In the translucent glow of the lighted theater, human flesh seems to dissolve: “Stage lights, soft, as if they shine through clear pink fingers (92).” The theater is a place of shadowy forms, of artificial contrivances, of elaborate mirrorings of life. Throughout the story, Toomer never lets us forget the paraphernalia of illusion: the scenery and costumes and lighting effects that function to transform reality. His theme is precisely the relationship between the image and the life it represents, or, in Ralph Ellison's illuminating phrase, between the shadow and the act.

Toomer's theater is a place where magical transformations occur. The throbbing life of Washington's black belt is translated by the black musicians into jazz forms. The raw sexuality of brown and beige chorus girls is converted before our very eyes into dance forms. Dorris, the most talented among them, is transfigured into a woman of surpassing loveliness by the writer-hero's dream. The instrument of all these metamorphoses is the human imagination, symbolized by the shaft of light that streaks down from a window to illuminate the afternoon rehearsal.

On this symbolic stage the plot unfolds. John, the manager's brother, and a writer, watches Dorris dance. He entertains erotic fantasies, but finally dismisses them, not because of the obvious barrier of background and education, but rather on complicated philosophic grounds. While he is dedicated, in a priestly vein, to contemplation of the noumenal, she represents precisely the attractions of the phenomenal world. Putting it another way, John is torn between the higher and lower functions of his being. Dorris, on her part, does her best to win him through the only art at her command: the dance. Failing to ignite his passion, she mistakenly concludes that he has rejected her on the grounds of social class.

Momentarily the philosophic gulf between them is bridged in the imagery of John's dream. This climactic episode, where daydream shades off into fiction, is emblematic of the transforming power of imagination. In it the raw materials of John's experience are transfigured by the writer's art. Dorris becomes a woman of surpassing beauty; their imagined union, disembodied and ideal: “But his feet feel as though they step on autumn leaves whose rustle has been pressed out of them by the passing of a million satin slippers (98).” In this image of nature dematerialized by art, Toomer reveals the heart of his esthetic. John's dream is a vision of the union of flesh and spirit, of the phenomenal and noumenal worlds.

Art-as-transfiguration is Toomer's theme. He is concerned in “Theater” with the death of experience and its rebirth as art. Thus John's renunciation of a love affair with Dorris, and his distillation of their encounter into poetry. John is to Dorris as an artist to his material: she represents untransformed experience. But the artist, by definition, is a man who cannot tolerate the untransformed world. Through his imagination, he must remove the rustle from the autumn leaves. Paradoxically, the artist must renounce the phenomenal world, even as he celebrates it. The result is a tragic alienation, whose subjective mood is melancholy.

“Bona and Paul” derives from Toomer's undergraduate experience at the American College of Physical Training in Chicago. The hero of the story is a near-white college boy, studying to be a gym director. He becomes romantically involved with Bona, a Southern girl who is attracted not so much to Paul as to the idea of a Negro lover. Bona has the courage to defy convention to a point, but only by inverting, rather than transcending racial categories. Paul, who wishes to be loved for himself alone, struggles to escape the burden of exoticism. Ironically, he loses the girl by being overly intellectual: that is, by refusing to conform to Bona's preconceived idea of blackness.

The kernel of the story is contained in the opening tableau. On the floor of a gymnasium, students are engaged in precision drilling. Paul, out of step with the rest, is dressed in nonregulation blue trousers. It is precisely this nonconformity that Bona finds appealing. The precision drilling is symbolic of a regimented society that not only marches, but thinks in rigid line formation. Paul's white companions, as the story unfolds, are alternately fascinated and repelled by his ambiguous exoticism. Tormented by uncertainty, and desirous of reassuring absolutes, they press him to declare his race. They remain, in short, unawakened to the possibilities of life, to the individual reality that lies beyond the social category.

The theme of the story is epistemological. Verbs of cognition predominate, as Paul and Bona grope across the color line for a deeper knowledge of each other. Toomer's central metaphor, which compares the lovers to opaque windows, is drawn from St. Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians: “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known.”⁶ The color line, symbolized by the South-Side L track that divides the city, constitutes an artificial barrier to human understanding. Based on a priori rather than a posteriori knowledge, it serves to blind rather than illuminate.

The story moves to a climax in the episode of the Crimson Gardens. As he enters the nightclub with Bona, Paul feels inclined to cheer, for the Crimson Gardens represents a yea-saying, an affirmation of life. With its white patrons and Negro music, the club is a symbol of cultural amalgamation. It is also the Garden of Eden, where Paul loses Bona by eating of the Tree of Knowledge. As the young couple whirl around the floor, “The dance takes blood from their minds and packs it, tingling, in the torsos of their swaying bodies (151).” Intoxicated with passion, they head for the exit, but their progress is interrupted by a leering Negro doorman. Paul steps back to assure the man that something beautiful is about to happen, but when he returns for his companion, Bona has disappeared.

The resolution of the story is conveyed entirely through the imagery. The style becomes intensely lyrical, as it attempts to shape the moment of epiphany: “I came back to tell you, brother, that white faces are petals of roses. That dark faces are petals of dusk. That I am going out and gather petals. That I am going out and know her whom I brought here with me to these Gardens which are purple like a bed of roses would be at dusk (153).” Reality, in other words, is not categorical, but contingent. A flower that is red in daylight is purple in the dusk. And dusk is the point in time when day and night mingle and become one.

What Paul has mastered, in short, is a new epistemology, a new way of knowing. He has discovered the imagination as a mode of knowledge. He has learned that while thought divides (categorizes), imagination synthesizes. Through metaphor, the language of poetry, the imagination transcends categories and frees the human mind for a genuine encounter with reality. At the same time, Toomer's hero pays an awesome price for his new knowledge. Intent on philosophic clarity, he loses the girl. It is Toomer's characteristic gesture of renunciation: the eternal paradox of earthly values lost, even as transcendent aims are realized.

“Bona and Paul” is a model of artistic economy and symbolic compression. In its density of texture and profundity of theme, it is one of Toomer's richest stories. On the face of it, the story seems to undermine the central thrust of Cane. Once we take account of its strategic position at the end of Part II, however, this difficulty is resolved. The urbanization of the Negro, Toomer feels, will lead inexorably to his assimilation. In the process, America will be transformed. Like Toomer's hero, we will one day discover within ourselves the courage to transcend our racial categories. Then we will see not through a glass darkly, but face to face at last.

Notes

1. “Karintha,” for example, was published in Broom, January 1922; “Calling Jesus” (then entitled “Nora”), in the Double Dealer, September 1922; “Fern,” in the Little Review, Autumn 1922; and “Kabnis” in Broom, September 1923.

2. Among the sketches and vignettes are “Karintha,” “Becky,” “Carma,” “Seventh Street,” “Rhobert,” and “Calling Jesus.”

3. Among the short stories are “Fern,” “Esther,” “Blood-Burning Moon,” “Avey,” “Theater,” “Box Seat,” and “Bona and Paul.”

4. Page numbers in parentheses refer to the Harper and Row edition of Cane.

5. For references to the Black Madonna, see Cane, pp. 31 and 40.

6. First Corinthians, 13:12.