The culture which will transcend, and thus unite, East and West, or the Earthlings and the Galactics, is not likely to be one which does equal justice to each, but one which looks back on both with the amused condescension typical of later generations looking back at their ancestors.¹

Knowledge of what cannot be said … signals the rock-bottom shape, the boundaries, of our situation in the world; it is the ethical, in the classical sense of the term.²

An undated poem kept in a tin box that no one but the author ever saw in his lifetime bears haunting witness to the great lack of Jean Toomer's existence:

Above my sleep
Tortured in deprival
Stripped of the warmth of a name
My life breaks madly. …
Breaks against world
Like a pale moth breaking
Against sun.(3)

In their biography of the poet, The Lives of Jean Toomer, Cynthia Kerman and Richard Eldridge discuss the relationship of this poem to Toomer's sense of lacking a permanent and certain name, deriving from the fact that his name had changed during his childhood and that different family members called him by different names. His grandfather, for example (the patriarch with whom he lived to young adulthood and who died, Toomer claimed, the day after he completed the first draft of “Kabnis”), would not acknowledge the name he had been given at birth.⁴ “Jean Toomer” itself is a later fabrication of the author.

No doubt it is a fact of the first importance that Toomer was a self-named man. He was also a man who devoted an extraordinary amount of energy to defining himself, authoring some seven autobiographies that never found publishers in his lifetime.⁵ In all of his self-definitions, Toomer dwells intensely on his racial identity, which he specifically differentiates from the races now acknowledged and named in the public discourse of the United States. He names his own race, the “American” race, striving to claim the central term of our national discourse to signify an identity which few “Americans” have been willing to acknowledge. If Toomer's family could not agree with each other upon what exactly to call him, thus stripping him of the “warmth” of a name, so far most of those who read his works have equally “de-nominated” and renamed him, conferring on him the denominations “Negro,” “Afro-American,” “black.” The naming has curiously and ironically empowered his voice by fitting it anew within the very “American” racial discourse whose authority he radically, incessantly disputed. Only recently have a very few critics begun to take his racial self-identification seriously. Donald B. Gibson, for example, has argued that Cane is “an index of the orientation of its author”: “It is difficult to believe that critics who have seen Cane as in some sense a revelation of the essential black soul are not talking about something other than Toomer's book.”⁶ But it is precisely the orientation of the author that comes under Gibson's attack, as an “escapist” philosophical idealism: “Rather than a depiction of black life as it really is, Cane turns out instead to be the response of one for whom black life in its social, political, and historical dimension was too much to bear.”⁷ If Cane is not a “black” text, the argument goes, then it is escapist and “inauthentic.” The vast majority of teachers and critics, however, have disagreed with Gibson's conclusions and have insisted instead upon the “blackness” of Cane, in part by differentiating it from the rest of Toomer's published and unpublished texts. Hence, it has entered the anthologies and literary histories as a seminal work of African American literature. Contrary to this conventional wisdom, I believe that Cane is of a piece with the other texts Toomer wrote in the early to mid-1920s. The difficulty of speaking or writing from outside the dominant discourse of race is a pervasive motif throughout Cane, and it has been matched by the difficulty of reading the text against the boundaries of that discourse.

Toomer's career, the reception of his published texts, and his texts themselves (including Cane and contemporaneous works) indicate how the belief in unified, coherent “black” and “white” American “racial” identities depends formally and ethically upon the sacrifice of the identity that is both “black” and “white,” just as American racial discourse depends upon maintaining the emphatic silence of the interracial subject at the heart of Toomer's project. Moreover, the very acts of discursive violence that banish the forbidden terms and thus enable the social fictions by which we live must remain unacknowledged, virtually unconscious gestures—in the case of Toomer scholarship, typically North American “racial” gestures with undertones of the rituals of scapegoating.

1

Most critics who recognize the nature of Toomer's insistence upon a new “American” racial identity nonetheless perceive Cane either as falling into a brief period when the author considered himself a “Negro” or as affirming (regardless of the author's identity) an African American vision, as well as revealing African American expressivity as the “true source” of Toomer's creativity.⁸ In the most interesting and sophisticated recent interpretation of Cane, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., while seeming to accept Toomer's self-identification, tries ingeniously to evade the problem this identification poses not only by separating intentionality and biographical context from textuality but by defining the “multiracial” text as “black.” Hence, because of its “double-voiced discourse,” Cane is “the blackest text of all.”⁹ Even if we accept the necessity of separating textuality from biography, however, the trap remains the same: a discourse that allows no room for a “biracial” text (except by defining it as “black”) is part of the same discursive system that denies the identity of the person who defines himself or herself as both black and white (or, in Langston Hughes's phrase, as “neither white nor black”). Critics routinely ignore Toomer's idea that, as “black” is to “white” identity, the “American” identity (in Toomer's sense) is to “black/white” identity. The “American” race in his view “differ[ed] as much from white and black as white and black differ from each other.”¹⁰ Toomer dramatizes, that is, another threshold of “racial” difference that he considers to be of a “higher level” than the threshold between black and white, and his “multi-voiced” language aims to bring us to that threshold, to give us a glimpse of what lies beyond.

In fending off the disturbing implications of Toomer's racial thought, readers often fall into the yet more disturbing rhetorical gestures of traditional American racial discourse, despite their own avowed resistance to that discourse. For example, Gates charges, “In a curious and perhaps perverse sense, Toomer's was a gesture of racial castration, which, if not silencing his voice literally, then at least transformed his deep black bass into a false soprano.”¹¹ Here, as so often in discussions of the “mulatto,” the signifier of interracial mediation is replaced by the trope of a sexual lack (a fact all the more ironic in that Gates himself is often attacked for betraying the “authentic” voice of the “black bas[e]” and too intimately embracing seductive “white” theory).¹² It is not Toomer who is doing the castrating. Deeply revealing, Gates's metaphors connect with an old racialist tradition that held male “mulattoes” to be more effeminate, less potent sexually, than either blacks or whites. “Highly ephemeral persons,” according to this self-serving white fantasy, mulattoes were “effete … both biologically and, ultimately, culturally.”¹³ Indeed, “mulatto” sexual unions purportedly produced fewer offspring than any other combination, and if black-white unions would only cease, according to many authorities “mulattoes” would entirely die out. Male “mulattoes” were, like mules, effectively castratos unless they “back-crossed” with one of the “purer” races—and Southern custom, of course, determined with which of the races “mulattoes” would fuse.¹⁴ This white Southern “muleology” has been curiously transmuted from biological theories of racial inheritance to the analysis of Toomer's texts and to interpretations of Cane's relation to “racial” tradition. Ultimately, it seems that the division between “biographical” and “textual” criticism evaporates when we turn our attention to the positions of both “racial self” and “racial text” in American discourse.

Other revealing metaphors from the critical tradition suggest that Toomer “disappeared” into “white obscurity” or became “invisible.”¹⁵ His “visibility,” like his potency, is directly connected to his status as a “black” author. One may well ask whether Cane would enjoy whatever canonical status it does today—whether, indeed, it would even be in print—had it not been “rediscovered” and valorized in the late 1960s as a “seminal” “black” text, comfortably fitting within the North American racial archive. Perhaps the greatest irony of Toomer's career is that at the time modern American racial discourse was taking its most definite shape, “mulattoes”—because they threatened the racial bifurcation—“disappeared” as a group into either the white “race” (through passing) or the black “race” while the “one-drop rule” was defined in increasingly definite terms. The 1920 U.S. census, coinciding with the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, was the last to count “mulattoes.”¹⁶ At the same time, “interracial” mating, and particularly “interracial” marriage, rare as it already was, drastically declined.¹⁷ By 1990 the census forms, despite objections, explicitly instructed that all persons who considered themselves both black and white, or biracial, must designate themselves “black.”¹⁸

The mutely “tragic,” “ghostly” figure of the “mulatto” haunts our racial ideology as its absent center, the scapegoat whose sacrifice both signifies the origin of racialist discourse and sustains it. As René Girard has emphasized, scapegoating purges a community of the threat of “strange mixtures,” first instituting and then maintaining the system of differences upon which signification itself depends. Every discursive system, indeed, depends upon some such sacrifice.¹⁹ Thus, as Simone Vauthier has written, the biracial character in the literature of the United States, “designates the moment of origins,” exposing and undermining “the myth of two discrete races separated by an impassable gulf.”²⁰ The maintenance of racial boundaries demands the sacrifice of the “mulatto” either through tragedy or by his or her incorporation into one of the “fixed” racial groups.²¹ Kenneth Burke's meditations on the relationship between tragedy and scapegoating are relevant here. Viewing tragedy as a secular extension of the “therapeutics” of scapegoating, Burke argues that tragedy reduces to a specific conflict a pervasive, unresolved tension typical of a given social order and, by doing away with the “marked” hero, purges fears of basic ideological contradictions.²² Little wonder, then, that the “mulatto” is America's most distinctive tragic figure. As Werner Sollors has argued, it is the story of the mulatto that, “against all odds, continued the tragic tradition in the New World” by confronting racial fictions with kinship lines.²³ With Nella Larsen, Toomer has come to be regarded as one of the chief “tragic mulattoes” of American literary history because—like increasing numbers of biracial youths today—he insisted upon a self-naming that threatened racialist discourse, along with the rich structures of knowledge, identity, and power to which that discourse is inextricably bound.²⁴

In a preface to one of his unpublished autobiographies—appropriately called “Book X”—Toomer regrets that he will have to resort to conventional and distorting terms to get his racial message across, as our very language allows no other means of expressing his sense of identity; he has considered the problem for years and cannot find any adequate solution. “If I have to say ‘colored,’ ‘white,’ ‘jew,’ ‘gentile,’ and so forth, I will unwittingly do my bit toward reinforcing the limited views of mankind which dismember mankind into mutually repellant factions.”²⁵ Toomer's attempts to explain himself led to a very precise awareness of the connection between language and ideology, the impossibility of developing an entirely “new” discourse that would be independent of the inherited one.²⁶

The problem was so severe that for a period he stopped writing, convinced that the more he wrote, the more he reinforced the very ideology he was trying to escape.

This dilemma of the writer happens to strike me with peculiar force. It impresses and sometimes depresses me and makes me beat my brains almost to the point that I voluntarily seal my lips and stop writing. Indeed in the past there was a time when I did become mute, owing to a realization of this very matter which, as I saw then as I see now, involved the entire use of words with reference to any and all aspects of life.²⁷

The sense of entrapment in a racialist language founded specifically upon the denial of his own “racial” name precipitated an intense realization of the general inadequacy of language to express “truth.” Language, always shaped by oppressive social conventions and more profoundly by what Michel Foucault would later call the “archive” of the “cultural unconscious,” was a hindrance to spiritual development and self-redescription. This rather remarkable insight of Toomer's helps us understand why, when he, as most readers would have it, “turned his back on his race”—seeking what countless critics have termed a “raceless” identity but which he considered the only self-consciously “American” one—he simultaneously turned to mysticism, a route to knowledge “beyond words.”

The years of silence to which Toomer refers in the autobiography are in fact basically the years following Cane, a work that, he wrote in a letter to the editors of The Liberator, was “a spiritual fusion analogous to the fact of racial intermingling.”²⁸ The general audience's interpretation of this book, he once said, was “one of the queer misunderstandings” of his life. He later thought it ironic that his writing, which should have made his racial position understood, “was being so presented and interpreted that I was now much more misunderstood in this respect than at any time of my life.”²⁹ Discounting or ignoring such attestations, most critics see Cane as falling into a brief period of the author's strong identification with his “true” racial heritage and lament his turn away from “racial” writing toward mysticism, but Cane and the works written along with it—the story “Withered Skin of Berries” and the play Natalie Mann—show, upon close reading, a strong impetus toward the deconstruction of a traditional American racial ideology and the “birth-pangs” of a new one. To Toomer, the “old” racialism, for whites and blacks alike, had reached a dead end. Together with his contemporaneous works, Cane exemplifies the frustrations attendant upon a transformation from one field of “racial” existence to another. The works of the early 1920s are attempts to initiate a new American tradition, to provoke a new “racial” consciousness that would displace the dualistic racial consciousness of “white” and “black” Americans. Although all of Cane can be read as initiating such a tradition, in “Kabnis”—the climax of the volume—Toomer achieves the most concentrated and complex articulation of his theme. He dramatizes the tortured “dusk-before-dawn” of a new kind of ethnic subject, the possibility of whose existence was disallowed by both “white” and “black” definitions of “racial” subjectivity.³⁰

2

A few comments about significant elements in the first two sections of Cane will help to show how the concluding story/play relates to the volume as a whole. The first section of the book, which Toomer called a “swan song” for the dying African American folk culture of the South, shows the enormous contradictions inherent in Southern “racial” culture. Behind all the tragedies of the South lies the repression of “natural” desires, repression of life itself by conventions governing all human relations. A chief contradiction (which Toomer's friend and mentor Waldo Frank would also make the basis of his novel Holiday) is the desire certain members of each “race” feel for members of the other—and by extension, for incorporation into the “new race”—despite a brutally enforced, “unnatural” segregation. The sexual and racial codes of the South turn this desire into various perverted, stunted, and oppressive manifestations, but interracial desire remains an ineluctable fact.

The text is full of people of “mixed race,” episodes revolving around or emanating from interracial liaisons. The “biracial” Fern (Jewish and African American)³¹ is an erotic-mystical magnet to black and white alike, for example; but one whom, like a vestal priestess, both black and white men leave alone, sensing something “taboo” about her: “She was not to be approached by anyone.”³² The narrator, indeed, draws male readers of both “races” into her spell: “([I]t makes no difference if you sit in the Pullman or the Jim Crow as the train crosses her road,” 18). The reference to her “weird,” mystical eyes as a “common delta,” into which both God and the Southern landscape flow, evokes Toomer's consistent trope (from the 1910s through the 1930s) of a river signifying the dissolution of the “old” races into the “New World soul.” Moreover, Fern's spiritual “hunger” and frustration as well as her muteness match Toomer's sense of the frustration and inarticulateness of the yet “unawakened” people of his new race.

Interracial desire is denied, thwarted, made a tool of oppression (as in “Blood-Burning Moon”), driven underground, or violently purged throughout section 1 of Cane. Manifestations of this desire and denial—this burial, this violence—become sacred, taboo in such pieces as “Becky,” “Fern,” “Esther,” “Blood-Burning Moon,” and “Portrait in Georgia.” Since women are the objects of a dominating male desire, they often bear the “cross” of this contradiction.

In “Becky,” for example, the title character—who has given birth to “mulatto” sons—is ostracized by both black and white communities, each of which “prayed secretly to God who'd put His cross upon her and cast her out” (7). Toomer emphasizes a parallelism in white and black responses to Becky and her unknown lover: “Damn buck nigger, said the white folks' mouths. She wouldnt tell, Common, God-forsaken, insane white shameless wench, said the white folks' mouths. … Low-down nigger with no self-respect, said the black folks' mouths. She wouldnt tell. Poor Catholic poor-white crazy woman, said the black folks' mouths” (7). Blacks and whites together have built her a cabin precisely on an “eye-shaped piece of ground” between a road and the railroad tracks, and she—who has become “invisible”—lives at this boundary line between the white and black sections of town. No one ever sees Becky, and she is utterly silent. Yet people scribble prayers on scraps of paper and throw them toward her house as they pass it, until one day the chimney of her disintegrating cabin caves in and buries her. Returning from church on a Sunday, the narrator and his friend Barlo hear the chimney fall and even enter the home. The narrator thinks he hears a groan, but instead of investigating further and possibly saving her, the two men quickly leave, Barlo throwing his Bible on the mound. Like a true scapegoat, Becky is invested with the sacred aura of the taboo; the food and other objects people leave near her home are distinctly presented as propitiatory offerings for the sign of “pollution,” the sacrifice of which sustains racial identities. Even her boys disappear, shouting, “Godam the white folks; Godam the niggers” (8). The mutual decision by blacks and whites to ostracize Becky gives them a commonality: “We, who had cast out their mother because of them, could we take them in?” asks the narrator. “They answered black and white folks by shooting up two men and leaving town” (8; emphasis added).

The poem “Portrait in Georgia” is another haunting evocation of the racial boundary, curiously merging the image of a white woman and of a lynched black person—implied to be a man burned to death for “despoiling white womanhood.”

Hair—braided chestnut,
                    coiled like a lyncher's rope,
Eyes—fagots,
Lips—old scars, or the first red blisters,
Breath—the last sweet scent of cane,
And her slim body, white as the ash
                    of black flesh after flame.

(29)

On one level, the white woman becomes a sinister figure, rather like the seductive “White Witch” of a James Weldon Johnson poem of that name, or like Lula in Amiri Baraka's Dutchman. But Toomer goes beyond these writers in suggesting an identity between the figures joined in his poem. By superimposing the images of the white woman, the apparatus of lynching, and the burning flesh of the black man, Toomer graphically embodies both a union of black male and white female and the terrifying method of exorcising that union to maintain a racial difference the poem linguistically defies.

Other pieces suggest the terrible price to be paid for transgression of the racial divide, or indeed for literally embodying the transgression of that divide as a person of “mixed race” such as Fern and Esther. Edward Waldron has aptly written of the latter: “Caught between two worlds, one which she denies herself—a world of mixed-color reality—and one which is denied her—the world of total blackness/Purity, a dream world which can only exist in her desperate mind—Esther finds nothing. She is left in Limbo, with not even a Hell in sight.”³³ She attempts in vain, by seeking Barlo, to embrace a “pure” blackness that will ensure her a sharply defined identity. The story suggests that this proposed solution to her problem of selfhood is delusional.

Toomer's vision of a coming merging of the races makes perfect sense within the framework of the first section of Cane: the dystopia of the contemporary South implies a corresponding utopia. Alain Solard's comment on “Blood-Burning Moon” is apt: “To the artist, Bob, Tom, Louisa belong to ‘another country’ which they feel, but do not know is their own.”³⁴ When desire is freed (as segregation is dismantled), it will cross racial boundaries without violence, embarrassment, or perversion. Those “mixed-race” persons now left in “limbo” will ultimately find home; indeed, the entire country will be transformed in their image. The United States will be a “colored” nation. But at the same time, many elements contributing to the beauty of the South—specifically of the African American folk spirit—will be lost as the conditions of its emergence disappear. “America needs these elements,” Toomer wrote in a well-known passage the year he composed Cane.

They are passing. Let us grab and hold them while there is still time. Segregation and laws may retard this solution. But in the end, segregation will either give way, or it will kill. Natural preservations do not come from unnatural laws. … A few generations from now, the negro will still be dark, and a portion of his psychology will spring from this fact, but in all else he will be a conformist to the general outlines of American civilization, or of American chaos.³⁵

“Race-mixing,” in Toomer's view, follows natural laws. If Toomer would hasten the end of racial division and oppression, he would also have to accept the end of that specific sort of folk culture engendered by slavery, a largely preindustrial economy, Jim Crow, and post-Reconstruction peonage. Hence, he is called, in this swan song, to memorialize. “The Negro is in solution,” he wrote Waldo Frank.

As an entity, the race is loosing [sic] its body, and its soul is approaching a common soul. … In my own stuff, in those places that come nearest to the old Negro, to the spirit saturate with folk-song: Karintha and Fern, the dominant emotion is a sadness derived from a sense of fading, from a knowledge of my futility to check solution. There is nothing about these pieces of the bouyant expression of a new race. The folk-songs themselves are of the same order.³⁶

Toomer implies that if there is nothing in these pieces about the “buoyant expression of a new race,” the “sense of fading” of the “old races” will be followed by such expression. Indeed, Cane presupposes such expression.

Precisely because of the deep “roots” of black culture in Southern soil, because of what Toomer considered the settled, non-“pioneer” nature of black folk culture, in the South many indispensable elements of a truly aboriginal—though hybrid—American culture could be found. This is exactly what Toomer's friend Waldo Frank had failed to consider in his influential book, Our America (1919).³⁷ Moreover, important elements of the folk culture (those developed in urban centers, via jazz, e.g.) were powerful antidotes to “Puritanism” and Anglophilia, as well as to the acquisitive “pioneer” mentality that had outlived its usefulness. All of these concerns find their distilled expression in the second section of Cane.

In “Seventh Street,” Toomer sets the tone for the entire section by opposing the spirit of “black reddish blood” and the “crude-boned, soft-skinned wedge of nigger life” to the “white and whitewashed wood of Washington.” The wedge of folk-descended black life (presented in partially phallic sexual images) will “split” the stale “wood” of the city, scandalizing social conformists. “Blood suckers of the War would spin in a frenzy of dizziness if they drank your blood. Prohibition would put a stop to it” (41).³⁸ The intoxication of its “loafer air, jazz songs and love, thrusting unconscious rhythms” threatens the sexual as well as racial mores of proper Washington, black and white. It is even pitted against the authority of established religion, “Swirling like a blood-red smoke up where the buzzards fly in heaven.” “God would not dare to suck black red blood. A Nigger God! He would duck his head in shame and call for the Judgment Day” (41). An ungovernable bodily force threatens at once sexual mores, racial purity, and the religious divisions of “spirit” and “body,” heaven and earth.

The lyric opening and closing of the piece also indicates the opposition of the strident jazz spirit to “Puritan” mores embodied in thrift, sexual continence, Prohibition, and taming of modern exuberance:

Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,
Bootleggers in silken shirts,
Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs,
Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks.

(41)

Throughout the second section of Cane, one has the impression of bottled-up desire finding brief expression in jazz or dance, occasionally a sort of uncontrolled rage intent on breaking the inhibitions to erotic/“spiritual” satisfaction. (For Toomer, as for his prophet Whitman, the erotic and the spiritual are properly one.)

The section includes a series of vignettes suggesting hunger, thirst, unsatisfied or unacknowledged desires. Characters repeatedly fail to achieve the “fusion” of several important dualities: body and soul, intellect and emotion, blackness and whiteness, manhood and womanhood. The “powerful underground races” (as they are called in “Box Seat”) hold the key to breaking the repression that inhibits American self-realization. From deep below ground, a “new world Christ” is coming up. Instinctive desires, the urges of life, however, are far in advance of mental and social conditioning. Hence, even whites can be moved by jazz to overcome, provisionally, sexual and racial restraints; but as soon as the music stops, so to speak, they stop dancing and go back to their old ways, as Bona does in “Bona and Paul.” Moreover, as “Box Seat” and “Calling Jesus” indicate, the “black bourgeoisie” itself is as adamant as the white in repressing desire and self-knowledge. They have adopted the “pioneer” and “Puritan” mentalities with a vengeance, in self-defensive reaction against white stereotypes of black people.

In the terms of “Harvest Song,” people “fear knowledge of [their] hunger” (71). The poem, which Toomer once suggested was the culmination of the “spiritual entity” behind Cane, epitomizes the sense of the ending of a cycle that we find throughout the book—whether signified by dusk, autumn, “blood-burning” harvest moon, or fallen leaves. Toomer depicts the ending of one cycle of American history, a “dusk” that must be followed by a dawn—the birthing of his “American” race. In “Bona and Paul,” the final piece of the second section (and also set at dusk), the fear of interracial hunger is dramatically evident in Bona's fear of her “hunger” for the mulatto Paul, who tells the black doorman at a nightclub as he leaves with her: “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 with me to these Gardens which are purple like a bed of roses would be at dusk” (80). Predictably, when Paul turns to rejoin Bona, she has been overcome by her sexual/racial fear and deserted him. So ends the final story in section 2 of Cane, which Toomer associated with his “spiritual awakening.” The importance of the interracial taboo in this story carries over to the intensely autobiographical drama that follows, “Kabnis.”

3

It is instructive to read “Kabnis” in relation to the other texts Toomer was working on between 1921 and 1923. In notes for a book he apparently intended to publish just after Cane, for example, he outlines the concept of a hero whose consciousness, at the beginning of the novel, is “shredded by surfaces which it cannot relate” and by glimpses of a “scattered humanity” of segregated ethnic groups. The intellect of the hero, like Lewis's and Kabnis's in Cane, is not yet related to his “spiritual” and “emotional” “heave.” He is, like Kabnis, “tortured for synthesis.” This hero has “touched” but not yet “absorbed” the work of the writers associated with Seven Arts magazine, such as Waldo Frank's Our America (which had had a tremendous impact upon Toomer before he wrote Cane). After a psychic breakdown, he leaves New York City for mountain country where he convalesces (as Toomer had done at Harper's Ferry), then returns to New York. “Again shredded. Forces converge and drive the character down South: Washington, first, Georgia.”³⁹ The outline closely follows Jean Toomer's own development up until his trip to Sparta and also connects with the title character of “Kabnis,” whose consciousness is similarly “shredded” and “tortured for synthesis,” whose intellect is unrelated to his spiritual and emotional energies (Cane, 108-09). In the second book, however, Toomer apparently envisioned the hero as emerging from his underworld experience, an articulate embodiment of the “new race”—like Toomer himself—expressing himself in a “classic American prose,” a fusion of diversely appropriated idioms.⁴⁰

I argue that Kabnis is a man struggling to create the words adequate to a new ethos, a new and, in Toomer's terms, “inclusive” consciousness—the sort of consciousness exemplified in the works that were at one time intended to appear in yet another volume that was to follow Cane, “Withered Skin of Berries” and Natalie Mann, the heroes of which would be articulate exemplars of the new American race.⁴¹ In each of these works, significantly, the prophet/hero has written a piece that Toomer would insert in the first section of Cane—“Conversion” and “Karintha,” respectively.

Most scholars interpret “Kabnis” as if the failure of the hero is caused by his rejection of his “true” African American identity. This interpretation hinges upon particular views of Lewis, Carrie Kate, and Father John, as well as the title character—upon the idea that the black Christian/folk tradition embodied in Father John and carried on by those such as Carrie Kate will herald a new dawn of African American peoplehood. Too weak to accept the pain of the African American past, Kabnis, so the argument goes, rejects his “true” “black” identity, and this explains his failure to become “whole.” Moreover, because of its strong autobiographical echoes, the story is thought to represent Toomer's brief identification of himself as a “black” author. Indeed, just after finishing the manuscript, he wrote Waldo Frank in an intense letter, “Kabnis is me.”⁴²

The story opens with the haunting lyrics of a song the “night-winds” whisper through cracks in the walls of Kabnis's cabin:

White-man's land.
Niggers, sing.
Burn, bear black children
Till poor rivers bring
Rest, and sweet glory
In Camp Ground

(83)

The lines, of course, bring to mind the African American heritage, specifically the spirituals. But Toomer puts a strange spin on familiar phrases. In a letter to Waldo Frank counseling the latter on how to write the introduction to Cane, Toomer wrote that such lines as “I want to cross over into camp ground” (from the spiritual “Deep River”) not only signified the desire for salvation but could be translated in social terms as meaning, “my position here is transient. I'm going to die, or be absorbed.”⁴³ Indeed, preposterous as it sounds, Toomer interpreted the lines as prophetically anticipating the merging of the “Negro” into the new American race. In “Withered Skin of Berries,” the “mulatta” Vera longs to plunge into a river, signifying the merging of black and white races in the “new world soul,” intoning, “Lord, I want to cross over into camp ground.”⁴⁴ She longs for the river to “sweep her under” as she “crosses” over into the “American” identity. Indeed, Toomer frequently uses images of rivers in his work written at this time and later to suggest the current that would dissolve past racial and cultural identities into a new one.⁴⁵ He adapted this motif in part from Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe, in which the Rhine acts as a prophetic solvent of French and German identities—the identities Jean-Christophe blends in his music of a new pan-European culture.⁴⁶ Jean-Christophe was a modern John the Baptist and Christ figure, whose first name Toomer had taken for himself, altering his given name “Eugene” at the time he turned seriously to writing as a vocation.

Kabnis suffers inner conflict in great part because of his denial of the pain of the black past and his connection to it. However, the conflict is exacerbated by his “mixed” racial identity. Like Toomer, Kabnis has straight, thin hair, a “lemon” face, brown eyes, and a mustache of “slim silk” (83). He longs to become “the face of the South.” Like Toomer's, his ancestors were “southern blue bloods” as well as the black slaves Lewis will not let him deny. The conflict between these identities is precisely the key to Kabnis's difficulty. Lewis charges: “Can't hold them, can you? Master; slave. Soil; and the overarching heavens. Dusk; dawn. They fight and bastardize you. The sun tint of your cheeks, flame of the great season's multi-colored leaves, tarnished, burned. Split, shredded: easily burned. No use” (108-09).

Whereas, in the work planned to follow Cane, the protagonist's consciousness is initially “shredded by surfaces it cannot relate,” the metaphor of “multi-colored leaves” also appears prominently in the pre-Cane story “Withered Skin of Berries,” in which David Teyy (the hero) is the “man of multi-colored leaves”—white, black, and American Indian. Significantly, part of a poem attributed to him shows up in the first section of Cane as “Conversion.” An “American” prophet, he is obviously a projection of Toomer's ideal image of himself, a reborn Kabnis. The female character, Vera—also of “mixed” race but still thinking of herself as “Negro”—needs him to “fill” her with “dreams”: “Dreams of dead leaves, multi-colored leaves. Dreams of leaves decaying for a vernal stalk, phosphorescent in the dusk, flaming in dawn.”⁴⁷ Each of the main characters in this story—white, black, and “mixed”—has “choked with the sum” of racial identities contributing to the new race. Some instinct toward “amalgamation” has stirred them in a spiritual experience they scarcely dare to credit; all but the hero have repressed the memory. In speaking of her dreams to Art, her black suitor, Vera asks, “[I]n that South from which you come, under its hates and lynchings, have you no lake, no river, no falls to sit beside and dream … dream?”⁴⁸ (He replies that rather than rivers he has red dust roads—a primary image in Cane.)

Ralph Kabnis calls himself a “dream” and regrets that a dream is soft, easily smashed by the “fist” of “square faces.” He lacks the “bull-neck” and “heaving body,” the strength, to bring his dream to reality. “If I, the dream (not what is weak and afraid in me),” he wonders, “could become the face of the South” (83-84). Lewis, perceiving the difficulty of “holding” the “sum” of his conflicting “racial” origins, precisely indicates the source of Kabnis's problem in achieving an identity and its adequate expression, an expression that would make him “the face of the [white/black] South” that would realize his dream.⁴⁹ In fact, Kabnis longs to achieve an identity by means of verbal expression and is frustrated by his inability to shape the right words, to name his reality adequately. Speaking of people of the “expanding type” (i.e., the “new” people), Toomer once wrote, “often they have been so compelled and are now so accustomed to use the dominant, which is to them an alien, language, that they can find no words for even talking to themselves, much less to others.”⁵⁰

In striving for an integration of his personality and an adequate expression of his sense of the world, Kabnis is caught between violently antagonistic racial identities, victimized by a history of racial oppression and hatred, a world divided. As a person who physically and culturally embodies the transgression of that division, he is the signifier of “sin,” taboo, that which cannot be spoken except in curses—and Kabnis curses profusely. The achievement of “Kabnis,” its very language, derives from the sort of tension Kabnis feels—not merely the tension between black and white but, most important, the tension between “black/white” discourse and the dream of an alternative one, a new “American” discourse that would be completely divorced from the old. Toomer came to realize, however, that he would have to borrow terms from the “old” language of race even as he strived to destroy it. This realization is anticipated by the way that Kabnis's violent verbalizations betray the frustrations of a man who hates the very words he speaks.

The most common reading of the story assumes that Father John—a representative of the slave past and African American Christianity—holds the secret that could “cure” Kabnis, but a number of details in the story make this assumption problematic. First of all, it is unclear whether the old preacher is, in Lewis's terms, “a mute John the Baptist of a new religion—or a tongue-tied shadow of an old.” Given the close relationship between Kabnis and the old man, it makes sense to interpret the former as a Toomer-like mute prophet of a new religion (unable to shape the words to fit his soul), and the latter as a “tongue-tied shadow of an old.” While Kabnis clearly must face the pain of the past and accept his African American heritage, one cannot infer that this acceptance precludes the prophecy of a “new” race that will arise as the older racial identities fade away. Quite the contrary, Toomer associated the rising of the new race with a recognition of the contributions of all past races and of the great suffering endured in the “birthing” of the new race. “Black” culture would be a powerful force in transforming “white” culture, even as both were “absorbed.”

The narrator, who rarely speaks, interrupts the dialogue just after Lewis names the old black preacher “Father John”: “Slave boy whom some Christian mistress taught to read the Bible. Black man who saw Jesus in the ricefields, and began preaching to his people. Moses- and Christ-words used for songs. Dead blind father of a muted folk who feel their way upward to a life that crushes or absorbs them” (106). The narrator here gives explicit voice to Toomer's own conception of the future of the black folk culture that Father John represents. In the same letter in which he told Waldo Frank that “Kabnis is me” as he finished the manuscript, Toomer wrote, “Don't let us fool ourselves, brother: the Negro of the folk-song has all but passed away: the Negro of the emotional church is fading.”⁵¹

Father John's “banal” emphasis upon the “sin” of the white folks in making the Bible lie, as Darwin Turner has suggested, is presented without any clear indication of how it will help lead toward the future.⁵² Even Lewis, who perceives Father John's importance as a link to the past, finds the Christian attitude wanting. He parodies Christianity: “Get ready, ye sinners, for the advent of Our Lord. Interesting, eh, Kabnis? but not exactly what we want” (101). Moreover, earlier in the story, the narrator pointedly undercuts the adequacy of a Christian vision for the reality that confronts Kabnis. As the black community gathers for worship, “[t]he church bell tolls. Above its squat tower, a great spiral of buzzards reaches far into the heavens. An ironic comment upon the path that leads into the Christian land” (88).

If Kabnis both resists Father John and fails to achieve self-integration, it is not at all clear that embracing what Father John represents would alone solve his problem. Throughout Cane the Christian attack on “sin” is undermined—which is not to say that oppression is accepted or that white America can escape responsibility for its history. The sins of the white masters and the “skeleton stone walls” that survive them as racist custom (as in “Blood-Burning Moon”) are precisely what make so difficult a “synthesis” of the past racial identities—even though those sins, in the form of rape and concubinage, for example, have played a part in producing the “germ,” so to speak, of the new race. I think we can credit Kabnis's statement that the main sin was not making the Bible lie, but something more far-reaching, the violation of a sacred relation (indeed, a family relationship, a relationship of the soul and the flesh) between blacks and whites:

It was only a preacher's sin they knew in those old days, an that wasn't sin at all. Mind me, th only sin is whats done against the soul. Th whole world is a conspiracy t sin, especially in America, an against me. I'm th victim of their sin. I'm what sin is. Does he [Father John] look like me? Have you ever heard him say th things you've heard me say? He couldn't if he had th Holy Ghost t help him.

(116)

Significantly, Carrie Kate has been taught to “hate” sin. In attempting to identify the nature of “sin” in contradistinction to Father John's conception, Kabnis—whose very name is an abbreviated inversion of “sin ba[c]k[wards]”—expresses his racial difference from Father John and his need for a new language to express his soul (which is, in effect, the repressed soul of the nation itself). That transgressive, “miscegenationist” soul is “sin” in America (from the conventional point of view), and at the same time the soul sinned against (in Toomer's view) the tabooed, denied, nearly unspoken spirit of a new conception.

The reality of this conception is cruel; Toomer expresses it in natural images both serene and harsh: “White faces, pain-pollen, settle downward through a cane-sweet mist and touch the ovaries of yellow flowers. Cotton bolls bloom, droop. Black roots twist in a parched red soil beneath a blazing sky” (107). White pollen, black roots, red soil—the associations are consistent with Toomer's system of racial metaphors in contemporaneous works. Whites are mobile, spread across the land like seed (just as white men, often by rape and concubinage, spread their “pain-pollen” and thus, despite their racist beliefs, helped conceive the new race); the Native Americans, aboriginal, are the spirit of the land, red soil; black people, in Toomer's view kept in “place” by slavery, the only American “peasant” group, have struck roots deep in the red southern soil of aboriginal America.

Kabnis, the very embodiment of this harsh and pained new growth, struggles for the words to express his “soul”—that soul that is “what sin is,” impure, polluted, an abominable and “tortured” mixture.

The form thats burned int my soul is some twisted awful thing that crept in from a dream, a godam nightmare, an won't stay still unless I feed it. An it lives on words. Not beautiful words. God Almighty no. Misshapen, split-gut, tortured, twisted words. … White folks feed it cause their looks are words. Niggers, black niggars feed it cause theyre evil an their looks are words. Yaller niggers feed it. This whole damn bloated purple country feeds it cause its goin down t hell in a holy avalanche of words. I want t feed the soul—I know what that is; the preachers dont—but I've got t feed it.

(111)

“Kabnis,” the action of which occurs almost entirely at night, ends before its central character achieves what Toomer would call “fusion.” Indeed, nowhere in Cane do we find fulfillment. Apparently Toomer intended Cane as an embodiment of a phase that both he and the United States were about to pass out of, while his projected next book would indicate the future.⁵³ The controversial closing scene of Cane has Kabnis ascending the stairs from “the Hole” with a bucket of dead coals while Carrie Kate, who relies on Christianity and keeps telling Kabnis to go to church to find the answer to his problems, kneels before Father John murmuring, “Jesus, come.” “Light streaks through the iron-barred cellar window. Within its soft circle, the figures of Carrie and Father John” (117). It is a serene scene, but, I would argue, one representing the past, a confinement in an oppressive racial (and religious) discourse from which Kabnis has collected his dead coals.⁵⁴ Given the attitude to Christianity (even African American Christianity) throughout the story, how can we now believe that Carrie and Father John represent the future?⁵⁵ “Outside, the sun arises from its cradle in the tree-tops of the forest. Shadows of pines are dreams [Kabnis's “nightmares”?] the sun shakes from its eyes. The sun arises. Gold-glowing child, it steps into the sky and sends a birth-song slanting down gray dust streets and sleepy windows of the southern town” (117; emphasis added). The “gold-glowing child” substitutes for the “golden words” Kabnis would like to utter but cannot because the form burned into his soul is “a twisted awful thing that crept in from a dream, a godam nightmare” (111). Caught in that nightmare, dissipating his energies, as Toomer would later comment, Kabnis does not have the strength to win “a clear way through life” and ends frustrated and defeated, driven to a “passive acceptance” of “white dominance and its implications”—including, most importantly in Toomer's mind, the pervasive racialist discourse of the United States.⁵⁶

4

Many scholars have charged that Toomer, like Kabnis, finally accepted white dominance and its implications. This conclusion follows from the perception that he denied his African ancestry.⁵⁷ But, as David Bradley has suggested, he could be charged more accurately with refusing to deny the rest of his ancestry. His growing frustration with the insistence that he be either “black” or “white” forced him to a tactic of denying association with any race except the “American” race. Thus, ironically, the demand that he accept a “black” identity drove him away from connection with African American culture, a fundamental source of his art.⁵⁸

Toomer once wrote, in reference to the period of his apprenticeship to writing, “I began feeling that I had in my hands the tools for my own creation”—the tools, we might say, to name himself with “golden words.”⁵⁹ This brief faith in the power of self-naming, however, was shattered by the reception of Cane and Toomer's growing awareness of the impossibility of making himself understood. In the context of the dominant racial discourse, the “American” race could have no name; in the vision which that discourse bespoke, no visible place. Its invisibility, after all, made possible the defining light and shade of the vision. Hence, Henry Louis Gates's revealing accusation: “To be a human being … Toomer felt that he had to efface his mask of blackness, the cultural or racial trace of difference, and embrace the utter invisibility of being an American.”⁶⁰ Such a statement precisely misses Toomer's point, in a predictable way. It is representative of a pervasive repression of Toomer's idea that, rather than erasing all racial “traces of difference,” he envisioned a new difference as fundamental—as, indeed, the only (and the inevitable) route out of America's continuing racial nightmare. Toomer felt that his “race” was invisible to other Americans because they had yet to cross the divide in which “black” and “white” could be perceived as elements of the same spiritual, discursive, and social field, a field in which his ideas could only be considered mad, his “race” invisible.

“New Negro” and not at the same time—North American in the specific conflicts that produce it and in its idiomatic language, its clash of “racial” forms—as we read it Cane can, however, make visible the nature of our assumptions about “race” and American identity. In its silences—in Kabnis's failure to find the words to name his soul—it reveals the significant silences of our own deeply racialized social text, the gaps and absences which critics, in turn, have failed to make speak.⁶¹ The rules and structures of our racial “archive”—shaped both for and in reaction against white hegemony, while leaving its foundational discursive violence intact—operate against any acknowledgment of sanity in Toomer's speech. There are certain things that we are ideologically forbidden to say. Toomer's struggle, like Kabnis's, was to break the silence as he brought his “fragments” to “fusion,” as he liked to say, a struggle in which he did not, could not, publicly succeed. He became a “mystical irrationalist”; according to the prevailing view he “disappeared.” Terry Eagleton has well expressed the sort of conundrum Toomer found himself up against:

[T]he languages and devices a writer finds to hand are already saturated with certain ideological modes of perception, certain codified ways of interpreting reality; and the extent to which he can modify or remake those languages depends on more than personal genius. It depends on whether at that point in history, “ideology” is such that they must and can be changed.⁶²

By illuminating what, racially speaking, “cannot be said,” Toomer's Cane, as the second epigraph to this article would suggest, poses an ethical challenge. It dramatizes in its own thematic focus and form, enacts in its relation to the crisis of Toomer's literary career, and exemplifies in its interpretive history—its “racial” place in the “canon”—the suppression of the “invisible,” “transcendental” signifier upon whose sacrifice our racial discourse ultimately depends. Through his “failure” (to create a language, to be called by his own name) and his subsequent “disappearance” from the literary scene, Toomer revealed the shared contradictions in “black” and “white” American racial ideologies, the violate and tabooed space of miscegenation that, like the black and white citizens who at least can agree to ostracize white Becky for her mulatto sons, we mutually repress and unwittingly sanctify to preserve our racial selves.

Notes

1. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982), xxx.

2. Bruce W. Wilshire, Introduction, William James: The Essential Writings, ed. Bruce W. Wilshire (Stony Brook: State U of New York P, 1984), lxiii.

3. Margorie Content Toomer Papers, in the possession of Margery Toomer Latimer, Pineville, PA; qtd. in Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987), 29.

4. “Outline of an Autobiography,” 59, box 20, folder 515, Jean Toomer Papers, American Literature Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Kerman and Eldridge, 28-30.

5. Kerman and Eldridge, 393-94.

6. Donald B. Gibson, “Jean Toomer: The Politics of Denial,” The Politics of Literary Expression: A Study of Major Black Writers, ed. Donald B. Gibson (Westport: Greenwood, 1981), 155.

7. Gibson, 179.

8. Two important exceptions are David Bradley, “Looking Behind Cane,” Southern Review 21 (1985): 682-95; and Alain Solard, “The Impossible Unity: Jean Toomer's ‘Kabnis,’” Myth and Ideology in American Culture, ed. Regis Durand (Villeneuve d'Ascq: U de Lille III, 1976), 175-94. For the more traditional view, see, for example, Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America (1958; rev. ed., New Haven: Yale UP, 1965), 56, 60, 80-89; S. P. Fullinwider, “Jean Toomer: Lost Generation, or Negro Renaissance?” Phylon 27 (1966): 396-403; Clifford Mason, “Jean Toomer's Black Authenticity,” Black World 20 (1970): 70-76; Darwin T. Turner, In A Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1971), 1-59; George W. Kent, Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture (Chicago: Third World, 1972), 26; Bowie Duncan, “Jean Toomer's Cane: A Modern Black Oracle,” CLA Journal 15 (1972): 323-33; Mabel M. Dillard, “Jean Toomer—the Veil Replaced,” CLA Journal 17 (1974): 468-73; Michael J. Krasny, “Jean Toomer's Life prior to Cane: A Brief Sketch of the Emergence of a Black Writer,” Negro American Literature Forum 9 (1975): 40-41; and Nellie Y. McKay, Jean Toomer, Artist (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984).

9. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford UP, 1987), 206.

10. Toomer, “Autobiographical Sketches,” unpaginated, box 11, folder 343, Jean Toomer Papers.

11. Gates, 208.

12. See, for example, Joyce A. Joyce, “The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 18 (Winter 1986): 335-44, and “‘Who the Cap Fit’: Unconsciousness and Unconscionableness in the Literary Criticism of Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,” New Literary History 18 (Autumn 1986): 371-84; Harold Fromm, “Real Life, Literary Criticism, and the Perils of Bourgeoisification,” New Literary History 20 (Autumn 1988): 49-64; Diana Fuss, “‘Race’ under Erasure? Poststructuralist Afro-American Literary Theory,” Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1989), 73-96; and R. Baxter Miller, “Forum,” PMLA 105 (Oct. 1990): 1124-25.

13. Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free P, 1980), 73, 95.

14. Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1963), 48-59; and Williamson, 114, 73, 95-96.

15. See, for example, Arna Bontemps, “The Negro Renaissance: Jean Toomer and the Harlem of the 1920's,” Anger and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States, ed. Herbert Hill (1966; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 24; Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 (Westport: Greenwood, 1980), 48; and Gates, 202.

16. Williamson, 114.

17. Williamson, 188-90.

18. The instruction was necessary because a rising number of “biracial” persons objected to being identified as strictly “black” or even “African American.” A movement then arose to ignore the census instructions and use a new identifying term in common, but it seems that people failed to agree on what name to use! Avowedly, the reluctance to be counted as only black derives not (as in an earlier era, perhaps) from shame or “racial self-hatred” but rather from a reluctance to accept a sacrifice of identity written into the racial discourse, and to the fact that many of these people's closest family members (mothers or fathers) are white. The debate was partially carried on in the new magazine, Interrace, which is aimed at interracial families. The editor of the magazine, interestingly, finally suggested a non-English word, melange—to put the identification entirely outside of the dominant discourse—but responses to this suggestion apparently have been mostly negative, precisely because it is not “American” enough.

19. On the relation of scapegoating to the origins of communal discourse, see especially René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977); and Eric Gans, The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (Berkeley: U of California P, 1981). In a gloss on Girard, Julia Kristeva writes: “Sacrifice designates, precisely, the watershed on the basis of which the social and the symbolic are instituted: the thetic that confines violence to a single place, making it a signifier” (Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, New York: Columbia UP, 1984, 75).

20. Qtd. in Werner Sollors, “‘Never Was Born’: The Mulatto, an American Tragedy?” Massachusetts Review 27 (1986): 305.

21. According to Judith Berzon, the options open to fictional “mulattoes” in American literature are limited to their becoming African American race leaders, “‘passing,’ adopting a white middle-class image and value system, or succumbing to despair” (Neither White Nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction, New York: New York UP, 1978, 14). Even in African American fiction since the Harlem Renaissance, typically the mulatto character either is destroyed (or spiritually diminished) by inner conflicts caused by his or her alienated condition in a racially bifurcated society, or he or she becomes “whole” by becoming wholly “black.” The idea of biracial people achieving healthy identities by embracing their multiple ancestry has been virtually unthinkable to writers and critics alike.

22. Kenneth Burke, “Coriolanus—and the Delights of Faction,” Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: U of California P, 1968), 81-97.

23. Sollors, 296, 309.

24. Larsen, writes Adelaide Cromwell Hill in her 1971 introduction to Quicksand, “always wishing to seem apart from her race, to be accepted as a writer, not as a Negro, was permanently weakened as a writer in 1930” before she went to Europe to write a never-finished novel. She returned from Europe, divorced her black husband, and “sank into oblivion by becoming just another nurse. So far as one can ascertain, she neither passed as White nor identified with Blacks—she merely existed” (in Nella Larsen, Quicksand, New York: Macmillan, 1971, 16; emphasis added). Barbara Christian assents to Hill's view: “Larsen, like Jean Toomer, … disappeared into the wide world, to be neither black nor white, but merely apart” (48; my emphasis). “Mere” “existence” and “apartness” are here explicitly differentiated from “strong” selfhood and positive identity, which would require submission to the dominant discourse. The “disappearances” of Toomer and Larsen—more accurately, their “silences”—seem to be intimately related. Moreover, the history of the reception of their books reveals many parallels.

25. “Preface no. 3” of “Book X,” 10, box 11, folder 359, Jean Toomer Papers.

26. See also “Race Problems and Modern Society,” 31-32, box 51, folder 1120, Jean Toomer Papers.

27. “Preface no. 3,” 12.

28. Toomer to The Liberator 9 Aug. 1922, Jean Toomer Papers. This was in the same letter in which Toomer said that the black folk culture of the South had awakened his artistic impulses, a statement that has been used repeatedly as evidence that he identified himself as “black” while writing Cane.

29. “On Being an American,” 51, box 20, folder 513, Jean Toomer Papers.

30. Both white and black readers (including Toomer's publisher and some of his closest friends) insisted upon viewing Toomer as “Negro” and considered his objection to this designation a denial of his race. On the other hand, a close black friend, upon hearing him read and explain his poem “The First American,” responded disparagingly, “You're white” (see Toomer, “On Being an American,” 42, 50, 36).

31. Fern has a “semitic” nose, a common Jewish surname, and “cream-colored” skin. On first seeing her, the narrator is reminded of a Jewish cantor's singing. See also Hargis Westerfield, “Jean Toomer's ‘Fern’: A Mythical Dimension,” CLA Journal 14 (1971): 274-76, which makes much of Fern's German Jewish surname.

32. Jean Toomer, Cane, ed. Darwin T. Turner (New York: Norton, 1988), 16-17; hereafter cited in the text.

33. Edward Waldron, “The Search for Identity in Jean Toomer's ‘Esther,’” Jean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation, ed. Therman B. O'Daniel (Washington, DC: Howard UP, 1988), 275.

34. Alain Solard, “Myth and Narrative Fiction in Cane: ‘Blood-Burning Moon,’” Callaloo 8 (Fall 1985): 558.

35. Toomer to Waldo Frank, box 3, folder 84, Jean Toomer Papers. The letter is undated but internal evidence indicates it was written after the fall of 1922 and before the publication of Cane, thus placing it sometime in the winter or spring of 1922-1923.

36. Jean Toomer to Waldo Frank (winter or spring 1922-23), box 3, folder 84, Jean Toomer Papers. Contrary to McKay's assertion in Jean Toomer, Artist (91), that Toomer attributed the dissipation of the folk culture to racist oppression, Toomer believed that such oppression was a necessary condition of that culture (a position that matches Waldo Frank's idea that oppression had fostered the depth and beauty of European and Russian peasant cultures). Writing of Harper's Ferry to Frank, he notes that “[r]acial attitudes, on both sides, are ever so much more tolerant [than in ‘Middle Georgia’], even friendly. Oppression and ugly emotions seem nowhere in evidence. And there are no folk songs. A more stringent grip, I guess, is necessary to force them through” (letter of Aug. 1922, Jean Toomer Papers).

37. See Toomer's unpublished typescript, “The South in Literature”: “The South has a peasantry, rooted in its soil, such as neither the North nor West possess. Therefore it has a basic adjustment to its physical environment (in sharp contrast to the restless mal-adjustment of the northern pioneer) the expression of which the general cultural body stands in sore need of” (1, box 48, folder 1008, Jean Toomer Papers). In “General Ideas and States to Be Developed,” Toomer points out that writers concerned with the American scene have so far ignored “the peasant-adjustment rhythm of the Southern Negro. The non-pioneer rhythm of the South” (4, box 48, folder 1002, Jean Toomer Papers). This was certainly true of Our America, which lamented that North America had no peasantry like Russia's and Europe's; such a peasantry in the Old World carried the deep potential energy, religious and aesthetic, that feeds great art and empowers movements of revolt. After his contact with Toomer, while working on Holiday, Frank expressed the intention to revise and expand Our America in order to include the Negro. See Toomer to Frank, 25 July 1922, box 3, folder 83, Jean Toomer Papers.

38. Toomer's point here fits with the concepts of the one-time Seven Arts group to which he was so close, connecting fervor for war and false “patriotism” with prohibition, “Puritanism,” “Anglophilia,” American hypocrisy, and racism.

39. Toomer, “Book I,” leaf 2, box 48, folder 1002, Jean Toomer Papers.

40. “Esthetic,” 2, box 48, folder 1002. These are notes on the form and prose for the work outlined in “General Ideas and States to Be Developed.”

41. See Kerman and Eldridge, 100; and Toomer, letter to Waldo Frank, undated (probably summer 1923), box 3, folder 84, Jean Toomer Papers. Nathan Merilh, the hero of Natalie Mann, is commonly considered “black” by scholars today, but Toomer pointedly contrasts him with his “New Negro” friend, Brown, who considers him “inimical to the race.” Similarly, Merilh's homes in both Washington and New York suggest a fusion of “white” and “black” identities into a new “racial” ideal in which we well know Toomer believed. See Natalie Mann, in The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer, ed. Darwin Turner (Washington, DC: Howard UP, 1980), 243-325.

42. Toomer to Frank, undated (winter or spring 1922-23), box 3, folder 84, Jean Toomer Papers. Significantly, this is the same letter in which he wrote, “[T]he Negro is in solution. … As an entity, the race is loosing [sic] its body, and its soul is approaching a common soul.”

43. Toomer to Frank, undated (winter or spring 1922-23), box 3, folder 84, Jean Toomer Papers.

44. Toomer, “Withered Skin of Berries,” The Wayward and the Seeking, 157.

45. The same motif shows up in a Georgia Douglas Johnson poem of this period, “Fusion,” which seems to have been inspired by discussions Toomer led at her home, shortly before he went to Georgia in 1921, concerning the “place and condition of the mixed-race group” in the United States. See George B. Hutchinson, “Jean Toomer and the New Negroes of Washington,” American Literature 63 (1991): 683-92.

46. Toomer's initial ambition as an artist (modeled after Jean-Christophe) was to be a musician—an interest that contributed significantly to his later writing. In Natalie Mann, for example, the hero Nathan Merilh is a musician combining European and African American forms in his inspired pieces. In a letter to Mae Wright of 15 Aug. 1922 (when Cane was still being composed out of scattered pieces), Toomer says Jean-Christophe is “true to me. Many of his trials and problems are or have been or will be mine. To know him is to know the more difficult side of Jean Toomer” (Waldo Frank Correspondence, Special Collections, Van Pelt Library, U of Pennsylvania). See also Charles Scruggs, “Jean Toomer: Fugitive,” American Literature 47 (Mar. 1975): 84-96.

47. Toomer, “Withered Skin of Berries” 151.

48. Toomer, “Withered Skin of Berries” 151.

49. Notably, Toomer was convinced at this time that the South would be the origin of a new, truly “American” literature. He apparently thought that he and Waldo Frank together were its harbingers.

50. “Race Problems in Modern Society,” 31-32, box 51, folder 1120, Jean Toomer Papers.

51. Toomer to Frank, undated (winter or spring 1922-23), box 3, folder 84, Jean Toomer Papers.

52. Turner, In a Minor Chord, 25.

53. While arranging and polishing Cane, Toomer had plans for a second book composed of short pieces (including “Withered Skin of Berries,” Natalie Mann, and another story or play, perhaps Balo), which was to be completed by fall of 1923. Liveright had even taken an option on publishing it before the appearance of Cane. Toomer also had in mind a novel about which he was particularly excited. “This whole brown and black world heaving upward against, here and there mixing with the white world. But the mixture being insufficient to absorb the heaving, it but accelerates and fires it. This upward heaving to be symbolic of the proletariat or world upheaval. To be likewise symbolic of the subconscious penetration of the conscious mind” (Letter to Waldo Frank, undated, probably summer 1923, Jean Toomer Papers). Based on other statements in the letter, it is evident that Toomer wrote it when he was preparing “Kabnis” for its initial publication in Broom. Kerman and Eldridge (100) mention the proposed novel but mistakenly identify it with the collection Toomer had in mind and which he had already largely completed even as he worked on Cane.

54. See Turner, Minor Chord, 25: “The virgin child prays before a deaf, blind, and senile savior. Meanwhile, Kabnis, who is unfit to be a laborer, carries the ashes of dreams into his apprenticeship for a trade which is soon to be obsolete.”

55. Toomer wrote to Frank concerning the religion of the “peasant Negro”: “Their theology is a farce (Christ is so immediate); their religious emotion, elemental, and for that reason, very near sublime” (letter of 21 Aug. 1922, Waldo Frank Correspondence). The vision of Carrie Kate and her words, “Jesus come,” exemplify such a combination of sublime emotion and (in Toomer's view) an imprisoning religious dogma that Cane consistently discredits.

56. Toomer, “The South in Literature,” 6.

57. It is true that Toomer finally began implying that he did not know positively of any “Negro blood” in his background, but this was long after Cane and after continued frustration in making his racial position understood.

58. Bradley, 692-93.

59. Toomer, “Outline of the Story of an Autobiography,” 55, box 20, folder 515, Jean Toomer Papers.

60. Gates, 202.

61. My point here is adapted from Pierre Macherey's argument about the ways in which a text is tied to ideology less by what it says than by what it does not and cannot say (see A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).

62. Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: Verso, 1976), 26-27.