Contemporary critics tend to read Jean Toomer's Cane as the odyssey of the black writer in search of racial heritage. Consequently, since “Box Seat,” one of Cane's short stories, is set in the city, it is treated as part of the urban leg of the odyssey.¹ In numerous letters and journal entries, Toomer encourages this approach by citing a 1921 trip to Georgia as the impetus for Cane. Admittedly, Toomer's leaving the amenities of Washington, D.C., for the privations of the rural South does indeed ring of odyssey. Nellie McKay, however, reveals that the teaching position which took Toomer to Georgia was but one in a series of jobs Toomer's grandfather secured for him. McKay concludes that Toomer's trip “actually occurred without any planning on his part, and [that] he went [to Georgia] not in search of his roots but in quest of temporary release from the drudgery of the domestic activities [of caring for his grandparents].”²

Though in criticizing Cane McKay ultimately succumbs to the odyssey siren, her disclosure regarding the Georgia trip invites new readings consistent with recurring themes in Toomer's canon. In this regard, I would argue that “Box Seat” is a prose counterpart to Toomer's Natalie Mann, an expressionist drama denouncing black middle-class values. Toomer's disdain for these values, evident in characterization and themes throughout his published and unpublished writings, may be his response to his own family's sliding through the middle class on its way from affluence to poverty. Whatever the case, Toomer, in “Box Seat,” effectively uses enclosure, locking, and positioning imagery to criticize class division among Afro-Americans during the early 1920s. The coalescence of this imagery, however, escapes one when “Box Seat” is read as the urban correlative to a rural journey.

Afro-American class division originated in the occupational differences and racial mixture of slave populations and antebellum freedmen. However, since “Box Seat” is set in 1920s Washington, D.C., E. Franklin Frazier's description is a fitting prelude to analysis:

Washington became … the center of Negro “society” and retained this distinction until after the first World War. … Because of its relatively large Negro professional class … Negroes in the nation's capital had incomes far above those in other parts of the country. This enabled Washington's “colored society” to engage in forms of consumption and entertainment that established its preeminence among American Negroes.³

“Box Seat” condemns the values Toomer perceives in Frazier's Washington. Part I unfolds as Dan walks through a middle-class neighborhood of shuttered houses. Dan, unemployed and without social standing, is too intimidated even to whistle or sing to himself “tones in keeping with the houses' loveliness.”⁴ Ushered into a side-street house by the landlady, Mrs. Pribby, Dan pays court to Muriel, a teacher aspiring to a position among Washington's black elite. Muriel, though, is distant and chiding. Ambivalently, she rejects Dan's advances, reflecting that she could love him if Mrs. Pribby and the town would let her—that, indeed, she does love him but must not let him know.

Part II begins a short while later as Muriel and her friend Bernice arrive at the Lincoln Theater. Dan enters and follows an usher to a seat near Muriel. Erotic fantasies and angry thoughts distract Dan during the evening's main event—a boxing match between dwarfs. The audience revels in the savagery the dwarfs inflict upon one another. After the match, the victor serenades the women in the audience. Dan's fantasy changes to a vision of himself as Samson, pulling the theater down upon the decadent audience. At the end of the song, the dwarf offers Muriel a blood-stained white rose. As Muriel reaches for the rose, Dan leaps up, shouting, “‘JESUS WAS ONCE A LEPER!’” (66). The story ends with Dan's walking away from an angry theater patron who, accompanied by a cheering mob, waits in an alley to trounce him.

Aside from its utility as a transitional device, Toomer's two-part structure enables him to exact parallel meanings from recurring imagery. Part I, for instance, establishes socio-economic distinctions by using houses, seating arrangements, and movement to demarcate the social classes. Part II modifies this imagery to parody the nascent middle class's pretensions. Here, for example, theater boxes—the box seat of the title—serve the same function as do the houses and furnishings of Part I. In Part II, Toomer amplifies the house symbolism by bestowing upon the middle-class audience the appellation “the house.”

Toomer's enclosure-locking-positioning imagery begins as soon as the story itself does. Dan, for instance, first appears as an interloper who would “woo the virginal houses” (56), that is, threaten the equilibrium of the emerging black middle class. Passing through an iron gate—the house's figurative chastity belt—Dan fumbles for the doorbell, fearful that “Some one passing by might see him, and not understand. Might think that he is trying to sneak, to break in” (56). Muriel reinforces Dan's status as outsider when she greets him: “‘Hello, Dan, stranger, what brought you here?’” (58).

Within the confines of the house, Mrs. Pribby snugly “fits into her chair” (57). Similarly, “Muriel's chair is close and stiff about her.” The sight repels Dan, who “feels the pressure of the house … shift to Muriel” (58) and imagines “The house, the rows of houses locked about her chair” (60). By contrast, Dan “[sinks] into a soft couch” (57), the very softness of which both bespeaks middle-class comforts and underscores Dan's unsubstantial foundation. These distinctions follow Dan and Muriel to the theater. Where Muriel sits, “The seats are bolted houses” (61). Dan, lacking a comparable haven, “has to squeeze past the knees of seated people to reach his own seat” (62).

A profusion of locking imagery fortifies the enclosures. Toomer omits the sounds of the locks and keys that presumably would precede Mrs. Pribby's opening the door. Dan, however, perceives the house as being “Bolted to the endless rows of metal houses” (57). And when Mrs. Pribby seats herself, “There is a sharp click as she fits into her chair. … like the sound of a bolt being shot into place” (57). Similarly, Muriel, upon joining Dan in the parlor, “clicks into a high-armed seat” (58), around which are locked the rows of houses. At the theater, “Each [person] is a bolt that shoots into a slot and is locked there” (61). The new middle class, then, is not only encased in protective enclosures, but also riveted against the possibility of dislodgement.

Equally suggestive of class division is the imagery of position and vertical movement. As a teacher, Muriel is a certified member of the middle class. It matters little that she is on the periphery of this class—Dan “turns into a side-street” (56) to reach her house; she still outranks Dan socially. This socio-economic distinction is portrayed metaphorically when Dan “Mounts the steps” (56) to reach Mrs. Pribby's house and when, after rejecting Dan's overtures, Muriel “retreats before him till she reaches the landing of the steps that lead upstairs” and, at his continued advance, “steps backward up one step” (61).

Complementary position imagery pervades the theater scenes, where—in addition to the separation between box seat patrons and the multitudes—Muriel's box seat is adjacent to “the right [that is, correct] aisle,” though in the “lower,” that is, bottom tier (61). Thus Muriel's position on the most vulnerable rung of the middle-class ladder is subtly reiterated. As though to counteract the precariousness of her position, “She takes the first chair, and indicates that Bernice is to take the one directly behind her” (61).

The position of Bernice's seat has further implications. Throughout the evening, Dan entertains notions of an underground race whose rumblings are audible above ground. At the Lincoln, Dan sits next to the personification of this race, a woman exuding a “soil-soaked fragrance,” sending her roots through the cement floor into the river where they “disappear in blood-lines that waver south” (62). Considering the story's other imagery and the recurrence of the word “masses” in this segment, this woman's description suggests that Dan's underground race is the masses of Afro-Americans, an inescapable underclass whose specter invades the havens of the middle class. Muriel's friend Bernice, “a cross between a washerwoman and a blue-blood lady” (61), is a first-generation fugitive from the underclass. That she is Muriel's companion suggests Muriel's own proximity to that underclass. Hence Muriel's putting Bernice behind her is tantamount to her trying to outdistance her immediate, damning past.

Finally, the dwarf boxing match offers an especially rich metaphor of positioning. A scant lifetime removed from slavery, Afro-Americans of the 1920s were themselves a politically and economically dwarfed race. In “Box Seat,” however, the minuscule middle class, like the story's literal dwarfs, jockey among themselves for position. Toomer parodies the excesses of this jockeying through a “heavyweight championship” bout between dwarfs, whose size is analogous to that of jockeys.

The significance of the dwarf fight and its aftermath—particularly Dan's cry that “‘JESUS WAS ONCE A LEPER!’”—lies in the coalescing of the story's imagery in the final scenes. During the dwarf fight, Dan directs scathing thoughts at Muriel: “Muriel—bored. Must be. But she'll smile and she'll clap. Do what youre [sic] bid, you she-slave. … Drag me in with you. Dirty me. Prop me in your brass box. I'm there, am I not? because of you. He-slave. Slave of a woman who is a slave” (63). These thoughts are a distillate of the story's recurring imagery. Mention of Muriel's brass box revives the enclosure imagery; Dan's labeling Muriel and himself as slaves recalls the locking imagery; and Muriel's figurative dragging of Dan into the box seat mirrors the positioning imagery.

Further, this passage emphasizes the inevitability of Muriel's capitulation to the values Dan abhors. Muriel ultimately will “do what [she's] bid,” whatever is required for social acceptance. Dan, too, is perilously close to capitulation, as suggested by the double entendre, “Dirty me.” On the one hand, this is part of Dan's triple imperative to Muriel—drag me, dirty me, prop me. At the same time, “dirty me” is a self-descriptive adjective, indicative of both Dan's lowered self-esteem (brought on by his willingness to compromise his values) and the perception “the house” has of people like him.

After uniting the story's imagery through Dan's reverie, Toomer further prepares the reader for the story's ending. First, he restores the reader's sense of Dan's strength through the Samson fantasy, complete with partial blinding via the singing dwarf's mirror. While Dan dodges the blinding light, “the house” mocks him as it had ridiculed the dwarfs during the boxing match. Upon regaining his sight, Dan views the dwarf compassionately—“identifies with him,” in the language of popular psychology. Thereafter, Dan and the dwarf are symbolically interchangeable, since neither is socially acceptable to “the house.” Thus Dan is aghast when, at the urging of “the house,” Muriel accepts the bloodied rose, the proffering of which is the dwarf's final demeaning act. In accepting the rose, Muriel becomes an instrument of the dwarf's humiliation and, necessarily, of Dan's.

Through her action, Muriel endorses the debased values underlying the evening's travesty; Dan, by contrast, experiences an epiphany which enables him to salvage his besmirched integrity. Seen in this light, Dan's declaration that Jesus was once a leper becomes an allusive judgment of, and an elliptic message to “the house.” Jesus once walked among lepers, Dan signifies, an act which, for the time, made Jesus a leper by association. Yet the black middle class, fearful of contamination, disdains to walk among the poor. Rejecting these impoverished values, “Dan steps down” from the seat where he stood to shout his message (66), figuratively assuming the social position to which he is both consigned and resigned.

Clearly “Box Seat” occupies a more significant place within the canon of Toomer's work than has generally been recognized. Rather than simply balancing the rural portions of Cane, this story strongly depicts Toomer's preoccupation with the social and psychological pettiness of the black middle class of his era. Unfortunately, in none of Toomer's later writings does he succeed in handling this sensitive subject as adroitly as in “Box Seat.”

Notes

1. Representative of this approach are S. P. Fullwinder, “Jean Toomer: Lost Generation, or Negro Renaissance?” Phylon (Winter 1966), 396-403; William J. Goede, “Jean Toomer's Ralph Kabnis: Portrait of the Negro Artist as a Young Man,” Phylon (Spring 1969), 73-85; Darwin T. Turner, “Jean Toomer: Exile,” in his In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1971); Charles W. Scruggs, “The Mark of Cain and the Redemption of Art: A Study in Theme and Structure of Jean Toomer's Cane,” American Literature 44 (May 1972), 276-91; and George C. Matthews, “Toomer's Cane: The Artist and His World,” CLA Journal (June 1974), 543-59.

2. Nellie McKay, Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894-1936 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of Chapel Hill Press, 1984), pp. 45-46.

3. E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Negro Middle Class in the United States (London: Collier Books, 1962), p. 164.

4. Jean Toomer, “Box Seat,” Cane (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923; rpt. 1975), p. 56. All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.